Once, the jeep stopped. The engine was cut. He could hear the noises of the African night, rising and falling and swarming giddily about. He tried to pick out the individual voices . . . the shrill of cicadas . . . the tok tok of the nightjar . . . the skreak of a bat . . . but they all got mixed up. They were melted down by his brain. He could hear people speaking, but he couldn’t tell what they were saying. The tailgate opened. He saw the tip of a cigarette glowing like the eye of a crocodile in the night. The cow’s meat was pulled out. The door slammed again . . . then laughter and snatches of conversation . . . then a pause that lasted for what might have been minutes but could equally well have gone on for several hours.
When the door opened again, a hand shoved him. They were checking that he was still there and alive, he supposed. He writhed against the knots, but the shooting pains in his arms soon made him give up. A hard smell of alcohol mixed with the fumes of diesel and cigarette smoke. Then the tailgate was slammed and locked. He felt the hot uproar of the engine through the metal. Once more, they were off.
They were still driving as the day dawned. Light filtered in through the hood of the jeep which Bat could now see had been made from bent branches with a sheet of brown tarpaulin stretched over the top. He wasn’t facing Muka, but he could feel her behind him. They had been thrown together by the vehicle’s jolts. And she was still alive: he could tell from her warmth.
And then they were climbing a steep slope, the jeep bouncing and sliding, its gears grinding laboriously. The side of Bat’s head hurt so much each time it banged against metal that for a while he tried to stiffen his neck. It only made the pain worse. And then they were back on the flat. Clouds of dust filled the jeep, puffing up through the floor. Bat struggled to breathe. The heat was now growing. Every fibre in his body felt as if it was on fire. The blood in his veins was starting to simmer. His tongue was parched. The thirst was terrible. It throbbed through his mind, driving all but this one desperate craving from his head.
At one point they crossed a river. The swishing of water was cruel as a torture. Thoughts of its freshness flowed and splashed through his brain. The torment was so terrible he wanted to scream. He tugged at the knots that bound him but he couldn’t loosen them. Only his mind could float free of this trap. It drifted away into the land of his dreams and he imagined for a moment that he was among the elephants, following the slow herd of huge swaying creatures, marching unstoppably across vast open spaces, set free to wander across an entire continent.
There was another halt. A voice called out. Bat strained his ears for the answer but it came in a tongue that he didn’t understand. Voices drew closer. Footsteps scuffed about and he heard the harsh scrape of laughter. Again, he smelled alcohol and cigarette smoke. Another vehicle was approaching. It sounded like a lorry. Perhaps the driver would help. Surely he would do something if he found two children tied up? Drawing in all the breath he could muster, Bat let his lungs swell, and prepared to give a great shout. But the sound broke like a puffball of spores in his cheeks. All that could be heard of the hoped-for explosion was a faint sighing whimper. Soon the big rolling wheels were rumbling slowly off.
And then they were travelling uphill again. It was cooler now; but Bat’s thirst was so dreadful that he thought it would kill him. Branches slapped the tarpaulin. Thorns squealed as they scraped against metal sides. The vehicle laboured slowly on, sometimes lurching through potholes, occasionally bumping over what felt like a fallen log. Bat’s head smashed onto metal again and again.
When they next came to a stop, the boy had given up hope. He just lay there. At least he wouldn’t be hit against the floor for a while. Maybe he could even sleep for a bit. He was so horribly tired. He longed now for unconsciousness, but the tailgate was opening and the next thing he knew he was being dragged out.
There was a moment of stabbing brightness when he couldn’t see anything. The pain of blood returning bolted through his cramped limbs. The soaring trunks of forest trees were reeling all about him, and then he was looking into a pair of red eyes. They were set in the middle of a round dark face, with cheeks so full that it looked as if their muscles were clenched. Though the short, thick mouth in the middle wasn’t saying anything, Bat seemed for a moment to hear the words that it spoke in his head. ‘I could kill you if I liked,’ it was saying, ‘and nothing would come of it. I will kill you whenever I like, and nothing will happen at all.’ Bat had never seen an expression like that before. He tried to confront it, fear giving him courage, but though his eyes didn’t move, his body was swaying. He couldn’t find his balance on his tightly bound feet.
A gun was slung over the man’s shoulder. Yes, he is going to kill me, Bat thought. He felt suddenly calm. He thought of his father. It was funny that he was going to die just like him . . . shot by strangers who didn’t know him but would end his life anyway. He tried to clench his fists behind his back, but his fingers were too swollen. He would be brave for the moment. He felt the back of his head growing hot. That was where the bullet was going to go in.
‘Don’t worry . . . he isn’t going to kill you. We don’t want you to die . . . not yet. You’ll be no use to us dead.’ The voice that spoke sounded horribly familiar. Bat was sure that he recognized the jeer of the man who was now standing behind him, unknotting his gag, dragging it from his mouth. Bat’s numbed face slewed round at the wrench. He inhaled through a throat that was so clogged with dust that even the thin stream of air made him choke. He longed to swallow but no moisture came. His lips hung in a gape.
‘Lobo?’ he mouthed, but it was no more than a whisper. His tongue was too dry to twist itself round the letters.
‘Sergeant Lobo to you,’ the voice said, and suddenly, there was the boy, standing right in front of him, a wide grin on his face. His deep-set eyes narrowed to slits as he drew on the stub of a cigarette. ‘Quite a haul,’ he announced. ‘Like a caracal: two plovers with one pounce!’
He glanced over to the jeep from which a man was now hauling Muka. The look in her eyes was half fear, half fury as she fought to stay upright. Lobo stepped closer to her and ran a hand down her cheek. He would never have dared touch her like that back in the village; but she didn’t flinch. Her face was bruised, Bat noticed, and dried blood clotted her temples. One of her eyes was half closing. Her braids were tangled and dusty and her crumpled blue wrap was stained a dark rusty purple. Bat hoped it was blood from the butchered cow.
‘Leave her!’ barked the man with red eyes. ‘Get on with your work!’
The boy shrugged and, walking off, began hacking at trees with his panga, dragging back branches to throw over the jeep. They were trying to hide it. Bat wondered why. Might people be looking for him and Muka? Might help have already been sent?
The man with the bloodshot eyes drew a knife from a sheath and sliced carelessly through the ropes that bound Bat’s legs. The blade drew blood. Bat gasped. But he couldn’t have cried out for help even if he had tried to; even if there had been anyone about to hear. His mouth was too dry.
‘Now walk,’ he commanded, ‘and don’t even think about escaping. If you so much as breathe without my permission, you are dead.’ Prodding Bat in the back with the stock of his rifle, he set him stumbling across the clearing. The pain of the blood rushing back into his numbed limbs was excruciating and it was hard not to trip with his hands still tied; but ahead of him, a third person – he looked no more than a child, Bat now noticed – was already leading the way down a narrow forest track.
The path seemed endless to Bat. He wondered how Muka was managing. He could hear the smack and swish of the bushes as she stumbled behind him, and Lobo’s casual whistling as he sauntered along at the back. What was the boy doing here? Bat was too bewildered to think much about it. In fact, oddly, he realized, he almost welcomed his presence. At least he and Muka were not quite among strangers.
Thorns tore at Bat’s clothing; insects clung to his skin; branches slapped him across the face. His feet were so swollen that ev
ery step hurt him. Sometimes he was forced to scramble over a fallen tree-trunk. The sun slammed down through the hole that had been ripped in the high canopy. Dense thickets of new plants clambered for the light.
After a while they reached a pool of water. Pushed to their knees, he and Muka were allowed to drink. They lapped like animals in a drought, neither looking at the other as they quenched their first searing thirst; but with water inside them, they began to recover a little. They flashed one another a quick reassuring glance as, dragged once more to their feet, they were set roughly back on their path again.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Almost at a step, the two children passed from the gloom of the trees to the glare of the sun. They were at the edge of a small forest clearing. For a moment they stood blinking, half blinded by the light.
A few huts were scattered about the fringes where the overhang of the trees would have all but hidden them even from an eagle flying above. They looked makeshift, Bat thought, cobbled together from hacked branches and pieces of corrugated metal and bits of old sacking. A fire smouldered unattended just in front of him. Rusting tins, scraps of plastic, bones that had been smashed open and sucked of their marrow, and gnawed maize husks lay littered about it. Nobody had swept the trampled red dust. There was nobody to do so, he thought. And then he saw a young boy, standing alone at the far side of the clearing holding a gun that looked almost as tall as he did. He was leaning against the door of one of the shelters, a low circular construction with no windows and a flat corrugated-iron roof. And it was towards this shack that Bat, pulled away from Muka with a barely stifled cry of panic, was suddenly pushed.
A door scraped open and he was shoved inside. At first he could see nothing. He stood swaying and befuddled while someone fumbled at the ropes around his wrists. The blood gushing in his veins hurt so much that he wanted to run about, but the door was dragged shut behind him. All was darkness, except for those pinprick spots where the sun, streaming down through nail holes in the roof, inserted shafts of pure brightness like shining wires through the black. He heard branches being propped against the entrance.
Bat was too exhausted and frightened to know what to do next. He just stood there while slowly his eyes adjusted to the gloom. And it was only then that he realized, with a start, that there was someone else with him. A boy was huddled in the corner. His thin legs were drawn up to his shoulder-blades and his hands clung about them, but his head was dropped down so that Bat couldn’t see his face. ‘Who are you?’ Bat whispered. But the boy didn’t answer. Bat looked at the cuts on his close-shaven scalp. Then, slumping down miserably against a wall opposite, he sat and waited. He didn’t know for what.
A while later, the door opened and the child with the gun came in. He was clearly Bat’s guard. But now his weapon was slung by its strap over his left shoulder and in his hands he was carrying two plastic bowls instead. One contained water, the other food. It was just a millet flour paste but the boy in the corner scuttled over, took a fistful and, retreating, started gulping it down as if he was starving. Bat only drank. The boy eyed him warily as a hyena that shares the kill of a lion.
‘Take it,’ said Bat, pushing the rest of the food over. ‘Take it if you’re hungry.’
The boy scuttled over again and then back to his corner. He had a strange crab-like shuffle. He crammed the paste into his mouth before Bat could change his mind.
Bat studied him. He was wearing nothing but a pair of ragged green shorts and he was thin: so thin that his shoulder-blades stuck out in knobbles and his ribcage protruded like a basket’s wicker struts. A pair of heavy black boots made his feet look far too big. His legs were like the bits of charred bone that you find when you clean the ash from a cook-fire. There was no flesh on them. But when Bat looked again he could see that they were corded with muscle. It was impossible to tell what colour his skin really was. Layer after layer, the dirt had baked onto his body. But it was not this dead blackness that made Bat shrink: it was the darkness in his eyes. They were completely blank.
Time passed. Bat must have slept because the next thing he knew it was night. The moonlight shone down through the chinks in the roof. Outside in the forest, insects chirped, sawed and hacked. Bat heard the gobbling whoops of a troupe of mangabey monkeys crashing through the leaves as some predator roused them. He imagined the babies clutched tight to their mothers’ shaggy backs. He felt a terrible loneliness. He had never slept beside a stranger. There had always been Meya or his grandmother or Muka. The worst thing about loneliness, Bat thought, was that it left too much space to think.
Where was Muka? he wondered. Was she hurt? Was she as frightened as him? The questions crowded about him, closing in like a quagmire. They were sucking him down. He was helpless to resist. His thoughts drifted to that day when Meya had sunk in the swamp. How desperate he had felt! He clamped his hands to his ears as her squeals rang down the tunnels of memory, rising more and more frantically as he ran further away. He had not wanted to forsake her, he thought, as he tried to stifle the sound of them. But there had been nothing else at the time he could do.
The wild elephants had saved Meya. But who would come for him? Who would come for him and Muka? His grandmother didn’t even know where he was. What was she doing now? he wondered. She would be hopelessly searching, he thought, shouting their names out across the savannah, eyes glued to the ground as she cast about for their tracks. She would have found the scattered cattle; perhaps even the very spot where Kila had been slaughtered. She would have seen the trail of the jeep vanishing into the dust. She would have guessed what had happened.
In his mind’s eye he saw her sitting alone by her cook-fire. Who would look after her without him there to help? Or had his kidnappers gone on to the village? Was it even now laid waste: huts burned to the ground, shambas trampled and raided? Had there been something more that these people had wanted?
His whole body flinched as he remembered once more the moment of the ambush. Why hadn’t he been watching? Why had he been such a fool? It was his fault that Muka had been taken. He should have looked out for her, not led her into a trap. He hoped that she wouldn’t fight. She could be so ferocious. He prayed that they wouldn’t hurt her. He prayed that she wouldn’t struggle and lash out.
Before he had even begun to try and answer one question, another was rising. He tried to stop them from coming, but they kept piling up, an impossible muddle that towered higher and higher and then toppled and fell crashing down through his head. In a shaft of moonlight, he saw a chameleon. It watched him, eyes swivelling in their baggy sockets. Old Kaaka said it was bad luck to disturb one of these lizards. Their colours, as they changed, were the spirits of the ancestors passing over. Bat reached out and picked it up gently. He found solace in the feel of its dry fingers plucking at his flesh. The questions whined in his head, like the mosquitoes around him. They bit at his thoughts. There was no point brushing them away. They would always come back. Where was Muka? What was his grandmother doing? Who were these people? When would he know what was going to happen to him?
Dawn broke. Every bone in Bat’s body ached. He was tired and hungry and he was also very cold. He must be high in the mountains, he thought. Bundling his legs up into his arms, he shivered. Outside he could hear people stirring. Voices were speaking. There must have been several people. An order was barked. Someone turned on a radio and tinny music floated out.
Bat looked at the boy opposite him. He was awake, though it was quite hard to tell if he had ever been asleep. He was staring blank-eyed at the wall. He looked even younger than Bat had at first guessed. He couldn’t be more than ten years old. And yet already he seemed completely broken. He still didn’t speak; and even if he had done, Bat wasn’t sure that he would understand anyway. There were so many languages spoken in his country: more than fifty, his grandmother had told him; and besides, Bat didn’t even know if he was in his own country any more.
‘My name is Gulu,’ the boy suddenly said. It was a shock
to Bat: not just to hear him talking, but speaking with the familiar glittery sounds of Bat’s own tongue.
‘My name’s Nakisisa,’ he answered. ‘But everybody calls me Bat. I come from Jambula. Do you know where we are now?’
The boy shook his head.
‘Don’t you know?’
The boy shrugged as if it didn’t much matter.
‘But who are these people?’ Bat asked.
‘These people?’
‘Yes, who are these people who have put us in this hut?’
‘You don’t know?’
Bat shook his head.
‘They’re the army,’ said the boy. ‘You are in the army now.’
‘Yes, you’re in the army now.’ A voice made Bat jump. He turned. Lobo had dragged the door open. Now he towered above the two boys, his broad shape blocking the abrupt flood of light. ‘You are in the army now and I am your officer.’ He grinned. ‘From now on you do as I say.’
He didn’t explain further, only, taking a step forward, he prodded Bat to his feet with the stock of a rifle. Then, pushing the muzzle into the small of his back, he shoved him out of the hut.
Bat glanced, bewildered, about the forest clearing. The trees rose up on all sides. They looked impenetrable as a wall. But he could see several other children now, gathered in groups around the edges. A few turned to look. Some of them could not have been more than seven or eight years old. They were as small as the little boys who peeped and played in his village, their eyes dancing with mischief, their noses running with snot, and yet these children seemed more like adults already. Most of them had close-shaven heads, though a few of the taller ones had matted dreadlocks. Some had boots, some didn’t; one wore a dented tin helmet and several had strips of green cloth knotted around their brows; but all of them looked ragged and tattered and hungry as they turned to examine him with indifferent faces, as if all curiosity had long ago been blunted, all expectation long since fallen flat.
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