The Burning Shore

by Wilbur Smith

  ‘Africa,’ she murmured. ‘So what was all the fuss about? I wonder what Centaine—’

  At the thought of the girl, all else was banished from her mind; although she still stared towards the shore, she saw nothing and heard nothing, until a light touch on her shoulder pulled her back to the present.

  One of the ship’s midshipmen, callow as a schoolboy even in his smart tropical whites, saluted her diffidently.

  ‘There is a visitor for you in the wardroom, ma’am.’

  When it was obvious that Anna did not understand, he beckoned her to follow him.

  At the door of the wardroom, the midshipman stood aside and ushered her through. Anna stood in the entrance and glowered around her suspiciously, holding the carpet bag protectively in front of her hips. Visitors and officers were already doing full justice to the ship’s store of gin and tonic, but the cruiser’s flag lieutenant saw Anna.

  ‘Ah, here we are. This is the woman,’ and he drew one of the civilians from the group of men and led him to meet Anna.

  Anna looked him over carefully. He was a slim, boyish figure dressed in a dove-grey three-piece suit of expensive material and superior cut.

  ‘Mevrou Stok?’ he asked, almost diffidently, and with surprise Anna realized that, far from being a boy, he was probably twenty years or so her senior.

  ‘Anna Stok?’ he repeated. His hair had receded in deep bays on each side of the smooth scholarly forehead, but had been allowed to grow feathery wisps down his neck and on to his shoulders.

  ‘We should take the scissors to you,’ she thought, and said ‘Ja, I am Anna Stok,’ and he replied in Afrikaans that she understood readily.

  ‘A pleasant meeting – aangename kennis – I am Colonel Garrick Courtney, but I am saddened, as you must be, by the terrible loss we have experienced.’

  For a few moments Anna did not understand what he was talking about. Instead she studied him more closely, and now she saw that his unbarbered hair had sprinkled the shoulder of his expensive suit with flakes of white dandruff. There was a button missing from his waistcoat and the thread dangled loosely. There was a grease spot on his silk cravat and the toe of one of his boots was scuffed.

  ‘A bachelor,’ Anna decided. Despite his intelligent eyes and the sensitive gentle mouth, there was something childlike and vulnerable about him, and Anna felt her maternal instincts stir.

  He stepped closer to her, and the clumsy movement reminded Anna of what General Courtney had told Centaine and her, that Garrick Courtney had lost one of his legs in a hunting accident when he was a boy.

  ‘Coming on top of the death in action of my only son,’ Garrick lowered his voice and the look in his eyes was enough to soften Anna’s reserves, ‘this new loss is almost too much to bear. I have not only lost my son, but my daughter and my grandson before even I had a chance to know them.’

  Now at last Anna understood what he was talking about, and her face flushed with such fury that Garry recoiled instinctively.

  ‘Never say that again!’ She followed him as he retreated, thrusting her face so close to his that their noses almost touched. ‘Don’t you dare ever to say that again!’

  ‘Madam,’ Garry faltered, ‘I am sorry, I don’t understand – have I given you offence?’

  ‘Centaine is not dead and don’t you ever dare again to speak as though she is! Do you understand?’

  ‘You mean Michael’s wife is alive?’

  ‘Yes, Centaine is alive. Of course, she is alive.’

  ‘Where is she?’ Slow delight dawned in Garry’s faded blue eyes.

  ‘That is what we have got to find out,’ Anna told him firmly. ‘We have got to find her again – you and I.’

  Garry Courtney had a suite at the Mount Nelson Hotel above the centre of Cape Town.

  There was, of course, no real alternative lodging for a gentleman traveller visiting the Cape of Good Hope. Its guest book read like a roll of honour: statesmen and explorers, diamond magnates and big game hunters, gallant soldiers and illustrious peers of the realm, princes and admirals had all made it their temporary home.

  The Courtney brothers, Garry and Sean, always had the same suite on the corner of the top floor with a view on one side over the gardens laid out by the governors of the Dutch East India Company, across the waters of Table Bay to the smoky blue mountains on the far side; on the other side the grey rock ramparts of the mountain were so close that they blotted out half the sky.

  These legendary views did not distract Anna for a moment. She glanced quickly around the sitting-room, then placed the carpet bag on the centre table and rummaged in it. She brought out the silver picture frame and showed it to Garry, who was hovering behind her indecisively.

  ‘Good Lord – that’s Michael—’ He took the frame from her and stared hungrily at the photograph of No. 21 Squadron, taken only a few months previously. ‘It’s so hard to believe—’ Garry broke off and gulped before going on. ‘Could I please have a copy of this made for myself?’

  Anna nodded, and Garry transferred his attention to the two photographs in the second leaf. ‘This is Centaine?’ He pronounced it in the English way.

  ‘Her mother.’ Anna touched the other. ‘This is Centaine.’ She corrected his pronunciation.

  ‘They are so much alike,’ Garry turned the photographs to catch the light. ‘Yet the mother is prettier, but the daughter – Centaine – has more force of character.’

  Anna nodded again. ‘Now you know why she cannot be dead, she does not give up easily.’ Her manner became brusque. ‘But we are wasting time. We need a map.’

  The hotel porter knocked on the door within minutes of Garry’s call, and they spread the chart he brought between them.

  ‘I do not understand these things,’ Anna told him. ‘Show me where the ship was torpedoed.’

  Garry had the position from the Inflexible’s navigating officer, and he marked it for her.

  ‘Do you see?’ Anna was triumphant. ‘It is only a few centimetres from the land.’ She stroked the outline of Africa with her finger. ‘So close, so very close—’

  ‘It’s a hundred miles – even further perhaps.’

  ‘Are you always so miserable?’ Anna snapped. ‘They told me that the tide runs towards the land, and the wind also was blowing so strongly towards the land – anyway, I know my little girl.’

  ‘The current runs at four knots and the wind,’ Garry made a quick calculation. ‘It’s possible. But it would have taken days.’

  Already Garry was enjoying himself. He liked this woman’s absolute assurance. All his life he had been a victim of his own doubts and indecision, he could not remember even once being as certain of a single thing as she seemed certain of everything.

  ‘So, with the wind and water pushing her, where has she come ashore?’ Anna demanded. ‘Show me.’

  Garry pencilled in his estimates. ‘I would say – about here!’

  ‘Ah!’ Anna placed a thick powerful finger on the map and smiled. When she smiled, she looked less like Chaka, Garry’s huge fierce mastiff, and Garry grinned with her. ‘Ah, so! Do you know this place?’

  ‘Well, I know a bit about it. I went with Botha and Smuts in 1914, as a special correspondent for The Times. We landed here, at Walvis Bay, the Bay of Whales.’

  ‘Good! Good!’ Anna cut him short. ‘So there is no problem. We will go there and find Centaine, yes? When can we leave, tomorrow?’

  ‘It isn’t quite that easy.’ Garry was taken aback. ‘You see, that is one of the fiercest deserts in the world.’

  Anna’s smile disappeared. ‘Always you find problems,’ she told him ominously. ‘Always you want to talk instead of doing things, and while you talk, what is happening to Centaine, hey? We must go quickly!’

  Garry stared at her in awe. Already she seemed to know him intimately. She had recognized that he was a dreamer and a romantic, content to live in his imagination, to live through the characters of his writings rather than in the real harsh world which frigh
tened him so.

  ‘Now there is no more time for your talking. There are things to be done. First, we will make a list of these things – and then we will do them. Now begin. What is the first thing?’

  Nobody had ever spoken to Garry like this, not at least since his childhood. With his military rank and his Victoria Cross, with his inherited wealth, his scholarly works of history and his reputation as a philosopher, the world treated him with the respect accorded to a sage. He knew he did not truly merit any of these considerations, so they terrified and confused Garry, and his defence was to withdraw further into this imaginary world.

  ‘While you make the list, take off your waistcoat.’

  ‘Madam?’ Garry looked shocked.

  ‘I am not madam, I am Anna. Now give me your waistcoat – there is a button missing.’

  He obeyed quietly.

  ‘The first thing,’ Garry, in his shirtsleeves, wrote on a sheet of hotel notepaper, ‘is to cable the military governor in Windhoek. We will need permits, this is all a closed military area. We will need his co-operation, he will be able to arrange provisions and water points.’

  Now that Garry had been prodded into taking action, he was working quickly. Anna sat opposite him, stitching on the button with those strong, capable fingers.

  ‘What provisions? You will need a second list for those.’

  ‘Of course—’ Garry pulled another sheet towards him.

  ‘There!’ Anna bit off the thread and handed him back his waistcoat. ‘You can put it on now.’

  ‘Yes, Mevrou,’ said Garry meekly, but he could not remember when last he had felt so good.

  It was after midnight when Garry went out on to the small balcony of his bedroom in his dressing-gown to take a last breath of night air, and while he reviewed the events of the day, the buoyant feeling of well-being remained with him.

  Between them, he and Anna had performed prodigies of labour. They already had a reply from the military governor in Windhoek. As always, the Courtney name had opened the door to wholehearted co-operation. Their reservations had been made on the passenger train that would leave tomorrow afternoon, and take them over the Orange river and across the wastes of Namaqualand and Bushmanland, four days’ travel to Windhoek.

  They had even completed the major part of outfitting the expedition. Garry had spoken on the telephone, an instrument which he usually viewed with grave misgivings, to the owner of Stuttafords General Dealer Stores. The stores he required would be packed in wooden cases, the contents of each clearly labelled on it, and delivered to the railway station the following afternoon. Mr Stuttaford had given Garry his personal assurance that it would all be ready in time, and had sent one of his green motor vans up to the Mount Nelson Hotel with a selection of safari clothing for both Garry and Anna.

  Anna had rejected most of Mr Stuttaford’s offerings as being either too expensive or too frivolous – ‘I am not a poule’ – and she chose long thick calico skirts and heavy lace-up boots with hob-nailed soles, flannel underwear and only at Garry’s insistence – ‘the African sun is a killer’ – a cork solar topee with a green neck-flap.

  Garry had also arranged a transfer of £3,000 to the Standard Bank in Windhoek to cover the expedition’s final outfitting. It had all been done swiftly, decisively and efficiently.

  Garry took a long draw on his cigar and flicked the butt over the edge of the balcony, then turned back into his bedroom. He dropped his dressing-gown over the chair and climbed in between white sheets as crisp as lettuce leaves, and switched out the bedside light. Instantly all his old misgivings and self-doubts came crowding out of the darkness.

  ‘It’s madness,’ he whispered, and in his mind’s eye saw again those terrible deserts, shimmering endlessly in the blinding heat. A thousand miles of coastline, swept by a cruel current so cold that even a strong man could survive in those waters for only a few hours before hypothermia sucked the life out of him.

  They were setting out to look for a young girl of delicate breeding, a pregnant girl, who had last been seen plunging from the high deck of a stricken liner into the icy dark sea a hundred miles from this savage coast. What were their chances of finding her? He flinched from even trying to estimate them.

  ‘Madness,’ he repeated miserably, and suddenly he wished that Anna was there to bolster him. He was still trying to find an excuse to summon her from her single bedroom at the end of the corridor when he fell asleep.

  Centaine knew that she was drowning. She had been sucked so deeply beneath the surface that her lungs were crushing under the weight of the dark waters. Her head was full of the monstrous roaring of the sinking ship, and of the crackle and squeal of the pressure in her own eardrums.

  She knew she was doomed, but she fought with all her strength and determination, kicking and clawing for life against the cold leaden drag of waters, fighting against the burning agony of her lungs and the need to breathe; the turbulence swirled her into vertigo so that she lost any sense of upward and downward movement, but still she fought on and she knew that she would die fighting for her baby’s life.

  Then suddenly she felt the cracking weight of water on her ribs releasing, felt her lungs swelling in her chest, and an updraught of air and bubbles from the ruptured hull picked her up like a spark from a campfire and hurled her towards the surface with the pressure pain burning in her eardrums, and the drag of the lifejacket cutting into her armpits.

  She broke through the surface and was thrown high on the seething fountain of escaping air. She tried to breathe but took water into her straining lungs and coughed and wheezed in agonized paroxysms until she cleared her air passages, and then it was almost as though the sweet sea air was too strong and rich for her, it burned like fire and she gasped and laboured like an asthmatic.

  Slowly she managed to control her breathing, but the waves came at her unexpectedly out of the darkness, breaking over her head, smothering her again so she had to train herself to regulate each breath to the rhythm of the ocean. Between the breaking swells, she tried to assess her own condition and found herself undamaged. No bones seemed broken or cracked, despite that terrible gut-swooping drop from the ship’s rail and the stunning impact on water as hard as a cobbled street. She still had full control of her limbs and her senses, but then she felt the first stealthy invasion of the cold through her clothing, into her body and her blood.

  ‘I have to get out of the water,’ she realized. ‘One of the lifeboats.’

  Now for the first time she listened for sounds and at first there was only the wind and the rushing break of white caps. Then she heard faintly, very faintly, a gabble of human voices, a magpie chorus of croaks and cries, and she opened her mouth and called for help, but a wave broke in her face and she took more water and gasped and choked.

  It took her minutes to recover, but as soon as her lungs were clear, she struck out grimly towards where she thought the voices were, no longer wasting strength on vainly beseeching the aid of others. The heavy lifejacket dragged and the crests broke over her, she was lifted on the swells and dropped into the troughs, but she kept swimming.

  ‘I have to get out of the water,’ she kept telling herself. ‘The cold is the killer – I have to reach one of the boats.’

  She reached out for the next stroke and hit something solid with a force that broke the skin of her knuckles, but instantly she grasped for it. It was something large that floated higher than her head, but she could find no secure handholds upon it and in panic realized that already she was too far gone to drag herself up by main strength. She began to grope her way around the piece of floating wreckage, searching for a handhold.

  ‘Not big—’ In the darkness she judged it to be not more than twelve feet long, and half as broad, made of timber but coated with smooth oil paint, one edge of it torn and splintered so that she scratched her hand on it. She felt the sting of the tearing skin, but the cold numbed the pain.

  One end of the wreckage floated high, the other end dipped
below the surface, and she pulled herself on to it, belly down.

  Immediately she felt how precariously balanced the structure was. Although she had only dragged her upper body on to it, and her legs from the waist down were still hanging in the water, the wreckage tipped dangerously towards her, and there was a hoarse cry of protest.

  ‘Be careful, you bloody fool – you’ll have us over.’

  Somebody else had found the raft before her.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she gasped, ‘I didn’t realize—’

  ‘All right, lad. Just be careful.’ The man on the raft had mistaken her voice for that of one of the ship’s boys. ‘Here, give me a hand.’

  Centaine groped frantically and touched outstretched fingers. She seized the offered hand.

  ‘Easy does it.’ She kicked as the man pulled her up the sloping angle of slippery painted wreckage, and then with her free hand she found a hold. She lay belly down on the tossing, unstable deck, and felt suddenly too weak and trembling to lift her head.

  She was out of the deadly water.

  ‘Are you all right, son?’ Her rescuer was lying beside her, his head close to hers.

  ‘I’m all right.’ She felt the touch of his hand on her back.

  ‘You’ve got a lifejacket, good boy. Use the tapes to tie yourself to this strut – here, let me show you.’

  He lashed Centaine to the strut in front of her.

  ‘I’ve tied a slippery knot. If we capsize, just pull this end, savvy?’

  ‘Yes – thank you. Thank you very much.’

  ‘Save it for later, lad.’ The man beside her lowered his head on to his arms and they lay shivering and sodden and rode the headlong rush of waves out of the night on their frail, unstable vessel.

  Without speaking again, without even being able to see more than each other’s vague shapes in the darkness, they quickly learned to balance the raft between them with coordinated, subtle movements of their bodies. The wind increased in viciousness, but although the sea rose with it, they managed to keep the higher side of the raft headed into it, and only an occasional burst of spray splattered over them.