Wilbur Smith - C11 Blue Horizon

by C11 Blue Horizon(Lit)

  "Minna, you and I are brothers of the warrior blood," Koots placed his arm around the man's shoulders, 'so it grieves me sorely that we must part. However, I need a good man and true to carry a message back to Colonel Keyser at the castle. I have to let him know of the success of our expedition. You, my dear and stalwart Minna, are the man for that job. I shall ask the colonel to reward you handsomely. Who knows? You may have some gold braid upon your sleeve, and gold in your pocket from this day's work."

  Koots hunched over his grubby notebook for almost an hour as he composed the message. He knew that Minna was illiterate. After extolling his own achievements in the conduct of the expedition the final paragraph of his report to Colonel Keyser read, "The trooper who carries this message, Johannes Minna, lacks any soldierly virtues. It is my respectful recommendation that he be stripped of rank and privilege and discharged from the Company service without benefit of pension."

  And that, he thought, with satisfaction, when he folded the message, takes care of any obligation I might have to share the bounty with Minna when I bring Jim Courtney's head back to the colony. "You have only to follow the wagon tracks, and they will lead you back to the Cape of Good Hope," he told Minna. "Xhia says it is less than ten days' ride." He handed the message and the broken wagon spoke to Minna. "Give these both to Colonel Keyser in person."

  Minna leered and went with alacrity to saddle his horse. He could hardly believe his good fortune in escaping this dreadful journey, and being offered a reward for doing so.

  The days sped by much faster than the slow turning of the wagon wheels. It seemed that the hours were too short for them to enjoy in full measure all the wonders they saw, or to savour the adventures, great and small, that they encountered each day. Were it not for the journal that Louisa kept with such dedication they would soon have lost track of those golden days. She had to nag at Jim to keep his promise to his father. He made the solar observations of their position only when she insisted that he do so, and she recorded the results.

  Jim was more reliable with the gold pans and he tested the sands of every river they crossed for the precious metal. On many occasions he found a bright yellow tail of metallic dust around the rim of the pan, but his excitement was short-lived when he tested it with hydrochloric acid from the gold-finder's chest, and the yellow metal bubbled and dissolved. "Iron pyrites! Fool's gold!" he told Louisa bitterly. "How old Humbert would laugh at me as a dupe." But the disappointment and bitterness did not last long, and within hours Jim's enthusiasm would have fully regenerated. His boyish optimism was one of the things Louisa found endearing about him.

  Jim looked for signs of other human presence, but there was little evidence of this. Once they found the tracks of wagon wheels preserved in the sterile crust of a salt pan, but Bakkat declared them to be very old indeed. Bakkat's concept of the passage of time was different from that of the European mind, so Jim pressed him further. "How old is very old, Bakkat?"

  "These tracks were made before you were born, Somoya," he told Jim. "The man whose wagon made them is probably dead of old age."

  There were other, fresher signs of human existence. These were of Bakkat's own people. Wherever they found a rock shelter or cave in the side of a hill or kopje, there were usually whimsical, vividly coloured paintings decorating the rock walls, and fairly recent hearths on which charcoal fragments showed how the little people had cooked their quarry, and discarded the bones on the midden piles nearby. Bakkat was able to recognize which clans of the tribe had passed this way by the symbols and styles of the paintings. Often when they were examining these artistic tributes to strange gods and quaint custom, Louisa sensed the deep longing and nostalgia that Bakkat felt for his people, who were living the free, careless existence that nature had decreed for them.

  me land changed as they travelled across it, the plains giving way to

  forests and hills with rivers running through wide green valleys and straths. In places, the bush was so dense and thorny that they could not force a way through it. Even attempts to cut a roadway for the wagons failed. The tangled branches were iron hard and defied the sharpest axes. They were obliged to make detours of many days to pass around these jungles. In other places the veld was like English parkland, open and fertile, with great trees as tall as cathedral columns and widespread canopies of green leaf. Birds and monkeys shrieked and chattered in the treetops as they competed for fruit.

  It seemed that there were animals and birds wherever they cast their eyes. The numbers and varieties never palled. They ranged in size from tiny sunbirds to ostriches taller than a mounted man with white plumes in their wings and tail tufts, from shrews not much bigger than Jim's thumb to hippopotamus as heavy as their largest oxen. These behemoths seemed to inhabit every pool and river, their huge bodies crowded so close together that they formed massive rafts on which the white egrets perched as though they were rocks.

  Jim sent a hardened ball between the eyes of one old bull. Although he plunged below the surface in his death throes and disappeared from their sight, on the second day the gases in his belly brought him to the surface and he floated like a balloon with his stubby legs sticking into the air. With a span of oxen they dragged the carcass to the bank. The pure white fat that filled his body cavity filled a fifty-gallon water keg when rendered down. It was perfect for cooking and sausage-making, for the manufacture of soap, for lubricating the wheel hubs of the wagons, or for greasing the rifle patches.

  There were so many kinds of antelope, each with flesh of different taste and texture: Louisa was able to order her favourites from Jim's rifle, like a housewife from her butcher. Herds of dun-coloured reedbuck lived on the grassland under the tall trees. Fantastically striped zebra galloped together in herds. They came across other horse-like antelope, with backs and limbs of ebony black, bellies of frosty white, and huge backswept scimitar-shaped horns. In every thicket and thorn forest they found nervous kudu with spiral horns, and herds of bovine black buffalo, so numerous that they flattened the tangled bush when they stampeded.

  Always Jim longed for his first sighting of elephant, and at night spoke of them with almost religious awe. He had never laid eyes on a living beast, but their tusks were piled high in the Company go down at High Weald. In his youth Jim's father had hunted the elephant in the eastern lands of Africa, a thousand miles and more from where Louisa and he now found themselves. Jim had been reared on tales of his father's chases after these legendary animals, and the thought of his first

  encounter with them became an obsession to him. "We have travelled almost a thousand leagues since we left the Gariep," he told Louisa. "Surely no other man has travelled further from the colony. We must come up with the elephant herds very soon."

  Then his dreams had something to feed upon. They came upon a whole forest whose trunks had been thrown to earth as though by a hurricane of wind, and shattered to splinters. Those trees left standing had been stripped of their bark by the mighty pachyderms.

  "See how they have chewed the juice out of the bark." Bakkat showed Jim the huge balls of desiccated bark the animals had spat out. "See how they have torn down this tree, which once stood higher than the mainmast of your father's ship and they ate only the tender top leaves. Haul They are truly wondrous beasts."

  "Follow them, Bakkat!" Jim pleaded. "Show these beasts to me."

  "These signs were made a full season ago. See how the marks of the pads that they left in the mud of the last rains have dried hard as stone."

  "When will we find them?" Jim demanded. "Will we ever find them?"

  "We will find them," Bakkat promised. "And when we do, perchance you will wish we had not." With a thrust of his chin he indicated one of the fallen trees: "If they can do that to such a tree, what might they do to a man?"

  Each day they rode out to explore the land ahead, to look for fresher elephant sign, and blaze a road for Smallboy and the wagons to follow. Always they had to make certain of sources of potable water and good fodder for
the oxen and other domestic animals, and to refill the fagies against the times when their search for fresh water-holes might prove unsuccessful. Bakkat showed Jim how to watch the flight of flocks of sand grouse and other birds, and the direction of travel of the thirsty game herds to the nearest water-holes. The horses were also good guides they could smell it on the wind from many miles off.

  Often they reached so far ahead of the wagon train that they were unable to return to its security and comfort before the setting of the sun, and they were forced to pitch a fly-camp wherever darkness and exhaustion overtook them. However, on those nights that they returned to the wagons it was always with a sense of joyous homecoming when they saw the campfires from a distance, or heard the lowing of the oxen. Then the dogs rushed out, barking with excitement, and Smallboy and the other drivers shouted greetings.

  Louisa marked the calendar religiously, and she never missed the Sabbath. She insisted that she and Jim stay in camp for that day. They slept late on Sunday mornings, hearing each other wake as the sun shone through the chinks in the afterclap. Then they lay on their own

  car dell beds and chatted drowsily through the canvas of the wagon tents, until Louisa argued with Jim that it was time to be up and about. The smell of Zama brewing coffee at the campfire would convince him that she was right.

  Louisa always cooked a special Sunday dinner, usually with some new recipe from the cookbook Sarah had given to her. In the meantime Jim saw to the small jobs around the camp that had been neglected during the week, from shoeing a horse to repairing a tear in the wagon tent or greasing the wheel hubs.

  After lunch they often slung hammocks in the shade of the trees and read to each other from their small library of books. Then they discussed the events of the past week, and made plans for the week ahead. As a surprise for Jim on the first of his birthdays they spent together, Louisa secretly carved a set of chessmen and a board, using woods of different colours. Although he tried to look enthusiastic, Jim was not entirely enchanted by the gift for he had never played the game before. But she read him the rules from the back pages of the almanac, then set up the board under the spreading branches of a mighty camel-thorn tree.

  "You can play white," she told him magnanimously, 'which means you move first."

  "Is that good?" he demanded.

  "It is of the utmost advantage," she assured him. With a laugh he advanced a rook's pawn three squares. She made him correct this, then proceeded to give him a thorough and merciless drubbing. "Checkmate!" she said and he looked startled.

  Humiliated by the ease with which she had accomplished this feat, he examined the board minutely and argued the legitimacy of each move that had led to his defeat. When it became apparent that she had not cheated, he sat back and stared morosely at the board. Then, slowly, the light of battle dawned in his eyes, and he squared his shoulders. "We will play again," he announced ominously. But the result of their second game was no less humiliating. Perhaps for this reason Jim became captivated by it, and it soon became a major, binding force in their shared existence. With Louisa's tactful tuition he made such rapid progress that soon they were almost evenly matched. They fought many memorable, epic battles across the chequered board but, strangely, these encounters brought them closer together.

  In one endeavour she could not match him, although she tried with all her determination and often came close to doing so. This was in shooting. On Sunday afternoons after dinner, Jim set up targets at fifty, a hundred and a hundred and fifty paces. Louisa shot with her little French rifle, while he used one of the pair of heavier London guns. The

  trophy was the bushy tail of a giraffe, and the winner of this weekly competition was entitled to hang the tail on the front of his or her wagon for the rest of the week. During the rare weeks that Louisa had that honour, Smallboy, the driver of her wagon, strutted, preened and fired his great whip more often, and with more force, than was necessary for the encouragement of the ox team.

  Gradually Louisa developed such a sense of pride and fulfilment in the running of the camp and the ordering of their existence, and came to derive so much pleasure from Jim's companionship, that the dark memories of her old life began to recede. The nightmares became less frequent and terrifying. Slowly she regained the sense of fun and the enjoyment of life that more suited her age than defensiveness and suspicion.

  Riding out together one afternoon they came upon a tsama vine in full fruit. The green and yellow striped melons were the size of a man's head. Jim filled his saddlebags with them, and when they returned to the wagons he cut one into thick wedges. "One of the delicacies of the wilderness." He handed her a piece, and she tasted it gingerly. It was running with juice, but the flavour was bland and only slightly sugary. To please him, Louisa pretended to enjoy it.

  "My father says that one of these saved his life. He had been lost for days in the desert, and would have died of thirst had he not chanced upon a tsama vine like this one. Isn't it tasty?"

  She looked at the pale yellow pith that filled the shell, then up at him. Unexpectedly she was filled with a girlish mischief she had not known since before the death of her parents.

  "What are you grinning at?" Jim demanded.

  "This!" she said, leaned across the camp table and mashed the soft wet fruit into his face. He gaped at her in astonishment as juice and the yellow flesh dripped off his nose and chin. "Isn't it tasty?" she asked, and dissolved into peals of laughter. "You look so silly!"

  "We shall see who looks even more silly." Jim recovered, and snatched up the remains of the melon. She squealed with alarm, leaped up from the table and ran. Jim pursued her through the camp brandishing the melon, with pips in his hair and juice down his shirt.

  The servants were astounded as Louisa dodged and ducked around the wagons. But she was weak with laughter and at last Jim caught her, pinned her against the side of a wagon with one hand and took aim with the other.

  "I am mortally sorry," she gasped. "Please forgive me. I am abject. It will not happen again."

  No! It will never happen again," he agreed. Till show you what will

  happen if it does." He gave her the same treatment, and by the time he had finished she had yellow melon in her hair and eyelashes, and in her ears.

  "You are a beast, James Archibald!" She knew how he hated that name. "I hate you." She tried to glare at him, but burst into laughter again. She raised one hand to strike him, but he caught her wrist and she stumbled against him.

  Suddenly neither of them was laughing. Their mouths were so close that their breath mingled and there was something in her eyes that he had not seen before. Then she began to tremble and her lips quivered. The emotion he had seen faded and was replaced with terror. He knew that all the servants were watching them.

  With an effort he released her wrist and stepped back, but now his laughter was breathless. "Beware, wench. Next time it will be a cold slimy lump of melon down the back of your neck."

  The moment hung precariously, for she was on the edge of tears. Bakkat saved them by breaking into a pantomime of their contest. He picked up the remains of the melon and hurled it at Zama. The drivers and voarlopers joined in, and melon rind flew in all directions. In the uproar Louisa slipped away to her wagon. When she emerged later she was demure in a fresh frock, her hair in long plaits. "Would you like a game of chess?" she asked, not looking into his eyes.

  He checkmated her in twenty moves, then doubted the merit of his victory. He wondered if she had purposely allowed him to win, or whether she had merely been distracted.

  The next morning Jim and Louisa, with Bakkat, rode out before dawn, taking their breakfast with them tied in the canteens behind their saddles. Only an hour ahead of the wagons, they stopped to water the horses and eat their breakfast beside a small stream that meandered down from the line of lightly forested hills that lay across their path.

  They sat opposite each other on fallen logs. They were shy and subdued, unable to meet each other's eyes. The memory of the
moment from the previous day was still vivid in their minds, and their conversation was stilted and overly polite. After they had eaten Louisa took the canteens down to the stream to wash them while Jim resaddled the horses. When she came back he hesitated before helping her to step up into Trueheart's saddle. She thanked him more profusely than the small act called for.

  They rode up the hill, Bakkat leading the way on Frost. As he reached the crest he wheeled Frost back off the skyline, and raced towards them, his face contorted with some strong emotion, his voice reduced to an unintelligible squeak.

  "What is it?" Jim shouted at him. "What have you seen?" He seized Bakkar's arm and almost yanked him out of the saddle.

  Bakkat found his voice at last. "Dhlovul' he cried, as though in pain. "Many, many."

  Jim threw his reins to Bakkat, jerked the small-bore rifle from its sheath and sprang out of the saddle. He knew better than to show himself on the skyline and stopped below the crest to gather himself. Excitement had clamped down on his chest and he could hardly breathe. His heart seemed on the point of leaping out of his mouth. Yet he still had the good sense to check the direction of the breeze: he picked a few blades of dry grass, shredded them between his fingers, and studied the drift of the tiny fragments. It was favourable.