Wilbur Smith - C11 Blue Horizon

by C11 Blue Horizon(Lit)

  She was wearing the dressing-robe Sarah Courtney had given her. It reached from her chin to her ankles, and down to her wrists.

  "Is there aught I can do to ease your discomfort?" he asked.

  "I have rubbed your aunt Yasmini's sovereign balm and ointment upon my ankle and on most of my other afflictions." She lifted the hem of the robe a few inches to show her ankle tightly wrapped in bandages. Dorian Courtney's wife was an adept of Arabian and Oriental medicine. Her famous ointment was the family cure-all. Sarah had packed a dozen large jars of it into the medical chest she had given them. There was an open jar beside Louisa's car dell bed, and the strong but pleasant herbal smell permeated the interior of the tent.

  Jim was not sure where these remarks were leading, but he nodded wisely. Then she blushed again, and, without looking at him, murmured, However, I have thorns in places that I cannot reach. And bruises sufficient for two persons to share."

  It did not occur to him that she was asking for his help, and she had

  to make it more apparent. She reached over one shoulder and touched her back as far down as she could reach. "It feels as though I have an entire forest of thorns embedded down there." Still he stared at her, and she had to eschew all attempts at subtlety and modesty.

  "In the chest you will find a pair of tweezers and a selection of needles you can use," she said, turned her back to him and slipped the robe off her shoulder. "There is one particular thorn here, just below my shoulder blade." She touched the spot. "It feels like a crucifixion nail."

  He gulped as he grasped her meaning, and reached for the tweezers. "I shall try not to hurt you, but cry out if I do," he said, but he was well practised in caring for sick and wounded animals, and his touch was firm but gentle.

  She stretched out face down upon the sheepskin mattress, and gave herself over to his ministrations. Although her back was scratched and punctured in many places, and pale lymph and watery blood wept from the injuries, her skin was marble smooth and lustrously pale where it was undamaged. Although when he had first met her she had been a skinny waif, since then an abundance of good food and months of riding and walking had firmed and shaped her muscles. Even in her present straits, her body was the loveliest thing he had ever laid eyes on. He worked in silence, not trusting his voice, and except for the occasional gasp or small whimper Louisa said nothing.

  When he folded back the hem of her robe to reach another hidden thorn, she moved slightly to make it easier for him. When he peeled back the silk a little further it revealed the beginning of the delicate cleft that separated her buttocks and down so fine and pale that it was invisible until the light fell upon it from a certain angle. Jim stood back and averted his eyes, although the effort required to do so was almost beyond him. "I cannot go further," he blurted.

  Tray, why not?" she asked, without lifting her face from the pillow. "I can feel there are thorns that still demand your attention."

  "Modesty forbids it."

  "So you will not care if my injuries mortify, and I die of blood poisoning to save your precious modesty?"

  "Do not jest so," he exclaimed. The thought of her death struck deep into his soul. She had come so close to it this very morning.

  "I jest not, James Archibald." She raised her head from the pillow and regarded him frostily. "I have no one else to whom I may turn. Think of yourself as a surgeon, and me as your patient."

  The lines of her naked bottom were pure and symmetrical beyond any geometrical or navigational diagram he had studied. Under his

  fingers her skin was warm and silken. When he had removed the thorns and anointed her various wounds with the balm, he measured a dose of laudanum to ease her discomfort. Then, at last, he was free to leave her wagon tent. But his legs seemed almost too weak to carry him.

  Jim ate dinner alone at the campfire. Zama had roasted a large slice of the elephant's trunk, considered by his father and other connoisseurs to be one of the great delicacies of the African bush. But Jim's jaw ached from the effort of chewing it and it had all the flavour of boiled wood chips When the flames of the campfire died down, exhaustion overtook him. He had just sufficient energy to peep through the chink in the afterclap of Louisa's wagon tent. She was stretched out, face down under the kaross, and sleeping so soundly that he had to listen intently for the faint sound of her breathing. Then he left her and tottered to his own bed. He stripped off his clothing and dropped it on the floor, then collapsed on the sheepskin.

  He woke in confusion not sure if what he was hearing was a dream or reality. It was Louisa's voice, shrill with terror: "Jim, Jim! Help me!"

  He sprang from his bed to go to her, then remembered he was naked. While he groped for his breeches she cried out again. He did not have time to don his breeches, but holding them before him, he went to her rescue. He skinned his knee on the tailboard of the wagon as he jumped down, then ran to hers and dived through the curtains of the afterclap. "Louisa! Are you safe? What troubles you?"

  "Ride! Oh, ride with all haste! Don't let it catch me!" she screamed. He realized that she was locked in a nightmare. This time it was difficult to wake her. He had to seize both of her shoulders and shake her.

  "Jim, is it you?" At last she came back from the land of shadows. "Oh, I had such a terrible dream. It was the elephant again."

  She clung to him, and he waited for her to calm. She was hot and flushed, but after a while he laid her back and pulled the fur kaross over her. "Sleep now, little hedgehog," he whispered. "I will not be far away."

  "Don't leave me, Jim. Stay with me for a while."

  "Until you sleep," he agreed.

  But he fell asleep before she did. She felt him topple over slowly and lie full length beside her. Then his breathing became slow and even. He was not touching her, but his presence was reassuring and she let herself slip back into sleep. This time there were no dark fantasies to haunt her rest.

  When she awoke in the dawn to the sounds of the camp stirring around her she reached out to touch him, but he was gone. She felt a sharp sense of loss.

  She dressed and climbed painfully down from the wagon. Jim and Bakkat were busy at the horse lines washing the scratches and small injuries that Drumfire and Trueheart had received in yesterday's battle with the elephant, and feeding them a little of the precious oats and bran moistened with black molasses as a reward for their courage. When he looked up and saw Louisa struggling down from her wagon, Jim exclaimed with alarm and ran to her. "You should keep to your bed. What are you doing here?"

  "I am going to see to breakfast."

  "What madness is this? Zama can do without your instruction for a day. You must rest."

  "Do not treat me like a child," she told him, but the reprimand lacked fire and she smiled at him as she limped to the cooking fire. He did not argue. It was a gorgeous morning, bright and cool, and this put them both in a sunny mood. They ate under the trees to the sound of birdsong from the branches above them, and the meal became a small celebration of the previous day's events. With animation they discussed every detail of the hunt and relived all the excitement and terror, but neither mentioned the events of the night, although they were uppermost in their minds.

  "Now I must go back to the carcass to remove the tusks. It is not a task I can leave to others. A careless slip of the axe will damage the ivory irrevocably," he told her, as he mopped his plate with a piece of unleavened pot bread. "I will rest Drumfire today, he worked hard yesterday, and I will take Crow. Trueheart will stay in camp, for she is as lame as you are."

  Then I shall ride Stag," she said. "It will not take me long to don my boots." Stag was a strong but gentle gelding they had taken from Colonel Keyser.

  "You should stay in camp to recuperate fully."

  "I must go with you to retrieve my rifle, which I dropped in the thorn thickets."

  "That is a feeble pretext. I can do that for you."

  "You do not truly believe that I shall not attend the removal of the tusks for which we risked our
very lives?"

  He opened his mouth to protest, but saw from her expression that it would be wasted effort. "I shall tell Bakkat to saddle Stag."

  There were two traditional methods of withdrawing the tusks. The carcass could be left to decompose, and when the cartilage that held the tusks in their sockets had softened and disintegrated they could be pulled forcibly from the skull. This was a lengthy and malodorous business, and Jim was impatient to see his trophies revealed in all their magnificence. So was Louisa.

  When they rode back they found a canopy of circling carrion birds darkening the sky above the body of the dead bull. In this vast assembly there was every species of vulture and eagle, as well as the undertaker storks with their monstrous beaks and bald pink heads, which seemed to have been parboiled. The branches of the trees around the dead bull groaned under the weight of this feathered horde. As Jim and Louisa rode up to the carcass, packs of hyena slunk away, and little red jackals peered at them from the cover of the thorn bushes with pricked ears and bright eyes. These scavengers had picked out the eyes of the bull and burrowed in through his anus, but they had not been able to tear open the tough grey hide to reach the flesh. Where the vultures had perched upon the carcass their excrement had left white stains down its sides. Jim felt a sense of outrage at this desecration of such a noble beast. Angrily he drew his rifle from its sheath and fired at one of the black vultures on the top branches of the nearest tree. Struck squarely by the leaden ball, the hideous bird came tumbling down in a welter of feathers and flapping wings. The rest of the roosting flock rose and climbed to join their peers in the sky above.

  When Louisa retrieved her rifle, she found that the woodwork was only lightly scratched. She came back and selected a vantage-point in the shade. Seated on a saddle blanket she sketched the proceedings, and made notes in the margins of the page.

  Jim's first task was to sever the bull's immense head from the neck. This had to be done to make it easier to handle it would have taken fifty men or more to roll the massive carcass from one side to the other. As it was, the decapitation took half the morning. Stripped to the waist the men were sweating in the noonday sun before it was accomplished.

  Then came the painstaking work of removing the skin and chipping away the bone from around the roots of the tusks, with meticulous axe strokes. Jim, Bakkat and Zama took turns, not trusting the clumsy touch or the wagon drivers and servants on the precious ivory. First one and then the other tusk was lifted out of its bony canal and laid upon a mattress of cut grass. With quick strokes of her brush Louisa recorded

  the moment when Jim stooped over the tusks and, with the point of his knife, freed the long cone-shaped nerve from the hollow butt end of each one. They slithered out, white and glutinous as jelly.

  They wrapped the tusks in cushions of cut grass, loaded them on to the backs of the pack-horses and bore them back to the wagons in triumph. Jim unpacked the scale his father had given him for this purpose and suspended it from the branch of a tree. Then, surrounded by everyone, he weighed the tusks one at a time. The right-hand shaft of ivory, the bull's working tusk, was more worn and weighed 143 pounds. The larger tusk weighed 150 pounds precisely. Both were stained brown by vegetable juices where they had been exposed, but the butts were a lovely cream colour, glossy as precious porcelain where they had been protected in the sheath of bone and cartilage. "In all the hundreds of traded tusks I have seen pass through the go down at High Weald I have never seen one larger," he told Louisa proudly.

  They sat late beside the campfire that night for there seemed so much still to say. Bakkat, Zama and the other servants had all rolled themselves in their blankets and were sleeping beside their fires when Jim walked Louisa back to her wagon.

  Afterwards he lay on his own bed, naked in the balmy night. As he drifted off he listened to the weird sobbing and laughter of the hyena patrolling the outskirts of the camp, attracted by the scent of the raw elephant meat curing on the smoking racks. His last thought was to wonder if Smallboy and the other drivers had placed the leather ropes and tackle of the wagon harness out of reach of those scavengers. With their formidable jaws the hyena could chew and swallow the toughest tanned leather as easily as he could devour a luscious oyster. But he knew that the safety and condition of the wagon harness was always Smallboy's first concern, and let himself drop into a sound sleep.

  He woke suddenly, aware that the wagon had rocked lightly under him. His first thought was a continuation of the last: perhaps a hyena was raiding the camp. He sat up and reached for the loaded musket that always lay beside his bed, but before his hand could fall upon the stock he froze and stared towards the afterclap.

  The moon still lacked two nights of full, and he could tell by its angle that it must be after midnight. Its light threw a soft glow through the canvas curtain of the afterclap. Louisa was silhouetted against it, an ethereal fairy figure. He could not see her face, for it was in shadow, but her hair came down in a pale cascade around her shoulders.

  She took a hesitant pace towards his bed. Then she stopped again. He could see by the way in which she held her head that she was shy or afraid, maybe both. "Louisa? What ails you?"

  "I could not sleep," she whispered.

  "Is there anything I can do?"

  She did not reply at once, but instead she came forward slowly and lay down at his side. "Please, Jim, be kind to me. Be patient with me."

  They lay in silence, without touching, their bodies rigid. Neither knew what to do next.

  Louisa broke the silence. "Speak to me, Jim. Do you want me to go back to my own wagon?" It irked her that he who was usually so bold was timid now.

  "No. Oh, please, no," he blurted out.

  "Then speak to me."

  I'm not sure what you want me to say, but I will tell you all that is in my mind and heart," he said. He thought for a while, and his voice sank to a whisper. "When first I saw you on the deck of the ship, it seemed that I had been waiting all my life for that moment."

  She sighed softly, and he felt her relax beside him, like a cat spreading herself out in the warmth of the sun. Encouraged, he went on, "I have often thought when I watch my father and mother together that for every man born God fashions a woman."

  "Adam's rib," she murmured.

  "I believe that you are my rib," he said. "I cannot find happiness and fulfilment without you."

  "Go on, Jim. Please don't stop."

  "I believe that all the terrible things that happened to you before we met, and all the hardships and dangers we have endured since then, have had but one purpose. That is to test and temper us, like steel in the furnace."

  "I had not thought of that," she said, 'but now I see it is true."

  He reached out and touched her hand. It seemed to him that a spark passed between their fingertips like the crackling discharge of gunpowder in the pan. She jerked away her hand. He sensed that their moment, although close, had not yet arrived. He took back his own hand and she relaxed again.

  His uncle Dorian had once given him a filly that no one else could break to the bit and saddle. It had been very much like this, weeks and months of slow progress, of advance and retreat, but in the end she had become his, as beautiful and wondrous a creature as it was possible to imagine. He had called her Windsong and had held her head as she died of the horse-sickness.

  On an inspiration he told Louisa about Windsong, how he had loved her and how she had died. She lay beside him in the darkness and listened, captivated. When he came to the end of the story she wept

  like a child, but they were good tears, not the bitter hurting tears that had so often gone before.

  Then she slept at last, still lying beside him, still not quite touching. He listened to her gentle breathing, and at last slept also.

  They followed the elephant herds northwards for almost another month. It was as his father had warned him: when disturbed by man the great beasts moved hundreds of leagues to new country. They travelled at that long, striding walk th
at even a good horse could not match over a long distance. The entire southern continent was their domain, and the old matriarchs of the herds knew every mountain pass and every lake, river and water-hole along the way; they knew how to avoid the deserts and the desolate lands. They knew the forests that were rich in fruits and luxuriant growth, and they knew the fastness where they were safe from attack.

  However, they left tracks that were clear to Bakkat's eye, and he followed them into wilderness where even he had never ventured. The tracks led them to good water, and to the easy passes through the mountains.