by Wilbur Smith
O’wa, his belly ballooning with good water, grinned and was about to concede, when his eye dropped to the knife that lay between his feet, and the grin faded.
‘Silly old woman, you chatter like the brainless spotted guinea fowl, while the meat spoils.’ He snatched up the knife. Envy was an emotion so alien to his nature that O’wa was deeply unhappy and not really certain of the reason why, but the thought of handing the knife back to the girl filled him with a corrosive anger that he had never known before. He frowned and muttered as he dressed out the viscera of the bull, cutting thin slices of the rubbery white tripes and chewing them raw as he worked.
It was mid-morning before they had festooned the branches of one of the dead trees with long ribbons of bright scarlet gemsbok meat, and the heat built up so swiftly that the meat darkened and dried out almost immediately.
It was too hot to eat. Between them H’ani and Centaine spread the wet gemsbok skin over a framework of dead branches and they huddled under this tent-like structure, taking refuge from the sun, cooling their bodies with the evaporating fluids of the gemsbok’s secondary stomach.
At sundown O’wa took out his fire sticks and began the laborious process of coaxing a spark from them, but impatiently Centaine took the ball of dry kindling from him. Up to that time she had always been too intimidated by the little San and her own feeling of total inadequacy to make any show of initiative. Now, somehow, the crossing of the dunes and her part in the gemsbok hunt emboldened her, and she laid out the kindling and the knife and flint with the San looking on curiously.
She struck a shower of sparks into the kindling and stooped quickly to blow it into the flame. The San shrieked in amazement and consternation, and backed away in superstitious awe. Only once the fire was burning steadily could Centaine reassure them, and they crept back and marvelled over the steel and the flint. Under Centaine’s tutelage, O’wa at last succeeded in striking sparks, and his joy was spontaneous and childlike.
As soon as the night brought relief from the heat of the sun, they prepared a feast of broiled liver and tripes and kidneys wrapped in the lacework of white fat that had enclosed the intestines. While the women worked at the fire, O’wa danced for the spirit of the gemsbok, and as he had promised, he leaped as high as he had done when he was a young man, and he sang until his voice cracked and failed. Then he squatted down at the fire and began to eat.
The two San ate with the fat greasing their chins and running down on to their cheeks; they ate until their stomachs were distended and bulged out like balloons, hanging down on their laps; they went on eating long after Centaine was gorged and satiated.
Every once in a while Centaine was sure they were faltering, as their jaws slowed and they blinked at each other like sleepy owls in the firelight. Then O’wa would place both hands on his bulging stomach and roll on to one buttock, his wrinkled face contorted, and he would grunt and strain until he was able to clap off a resounding fart. Across the fire, H’ani would answer him with a squealing blast every bit as ear-splitting, and they both hooted with laughter and crammed more meat into their mouths.
As Centaine drifted off into sleep with her own stomach stuffed with meat, she realized this orgy was a natural reaction of a people accustomed to privation faced suddenly with a mountain of food and no means of preserving it. When she woke at dawn they were still feasting.
With the sun the two San lay under the tent of gemsbok hide, their bellies distended, and snored through the heat, but at sunset they blew up the fire and began feasting again. By this time what remained of the gemsbok was smelling high and strong, but this seemed if anything to stimulate their appetite.
When O’wa rose to stagger out of the firelight on private business, Centaine saw that his buttocks, which had been slack and sagging and wrinkled when they came down from the dunes, were now tight and round and polished.
‘Just like a camel’s hump,’ Centaine giggled, and H’ani giggled with her and offered her a slice of the belly fat, cooked brown and crisp.
Once again they slept through the day like a nest of pythons digesting the gargantuan banquet, but at sunset with the carrying bags packed with the hard black strips of dried gemsbok meat, O’wa led them eastwards across the moonlit plain. He carried the folded gemsbok skin balanced on his head.
Gradually the plain over which they travelled altered in character. Amongst the fine desert grasses there appeared scraggy little scrubs, not as high as Centaine’s knee, and once O’wa stopped and pointed ahead at a tall ghostly shape that crossed with a high-stepping trot ahead of them in the night, a dark body fringed with fluffy white, and only as it disappeared into the shadows did Centaine realize that it was a wild ostrich.
At dawn O’wa spread the gemsbok hide as a sun shelter and they waited out the day. At sunset they drank the last drops of water from the egg-bottles, and the San were quiet and serious as they set out again. Without water, death was only hours away.
At dawn, instead of going into camp immediately, O’wa stood for a long time examining the sky, and then he ranged in a half-circle ahead of their track, like a gundog quartering for the bird, lifting his head, turning it slowly from side to side, his nostrils sucking at the air.
‘What is O’wa doing?’ Centaine asked.
‘Smell.’ H’ani snuffled to show her. ‘Smell water.’
Centaine was incredulous. ‘No smell water, H’ani.’
‘Yes! Yes! Wait, you see.’
O’wa reached a decision. ‘Come!’ he beckoned, and the women snatched up their satchels and hurried after him. Within an hour Centaine realized that if O’wa was mistaken, then she was dead. The egg-bottles were empty, the heat and the sun were sucking the moisture out of her, and she would be finished before the real burning heat of noon fell upon them.
O’wa broke into a full run, the gait that the San called ‘the horns’, the run of the hunter when he sees the horns of his quarry on the skyline ahead, and the women under their burdens could not try to match him.
An hour later they made out his tiny form far ahead, and when they at last came up with him, he smiled a broad welcome and with a sweep of his arm announced grandly, ‘O’wa has led you unerringly to the sip-wells of the elephant with one tusk.’ The origins of the name were lost far back in the oral history of the San. O’wa swaggered shamelessly as he led them down the gentle slope of the river bed.
It was a wide water-course, but Centaine saw immediately that it was completely dry, filled with sand as loose and friable as that of the dune country, and she felt her spirits drop sharply as she looked about her.
The winding serpentine water-course was about a hundred paces wide, cutting through the gravel beds of the plain, and although there was no water, both banks were dark with much denser plant growth than the arid flats beyond. The scrub was almost waist-high, with an occasional dull green bush rising above the rest. The San were chattering brightly, and H’ani followed closely behind her husband as he strutted about importantly in the sand of the river bed.
Centaine sank down, picked up a handful of the bright orange-coloured sand and let it trickle through her fingers disconsolately. Then for the first time she noticed that the river bed was widely trampled by the hooves of the gemsbok, and that in places the sand had been heaped as though children had been digging sandcastles. O’wa was now examining one of these piles critically, and Centaine dragged herself up and went to see what he had found. The gemsbok must have been digging in the river bed, but sand had trickled into the hole, almost filling it. O’wa nodded sagely, and he turned to H’ani.
‘This is a good place. Here we will make our sip-well. Take the child and show her how to build a shelter.’
Centaine was so thirsty and heat-lashed that she felt dizzy and sick, but she slipped off the strap of her bag and wearily climbed the river bank after H’ani to help her cut whippy saplings and thorny branches from the scrub.
In the river bed they quickly erected two rudimentary shelters, sticking th
e saplings into the sand in a circle, bending them over to meet on top and roofing one of them with branches and the other with the stiff, stinking gemsbok skin. They were the most primitive shelters, without sides and floored with river sand, but Centaine flopped gratefully into the shade and watched O’wa.
Firstly he removed the poisoned heads from his arrows, handling them with elaborate care, for a single scratch would be fatal. He wrapped each arrowhead in a scrap of rawhide and packed them into one of the pouches on his belt.
Then he began to fit the reed arrows together, sealing the joints with a ball of acacia gum, until he had a single length of hollow reeds longer than he was tall.
‘Help me, little flower of my life,’ he sweetened H’ani blatantly, and with their hands they began to dig together in the sand. To prevent the sand running back into the hole, they made it funnel-shaped – wide at the top and gradually narrowing until O’wa’s head and shoulders disappeared into it, and at last he started throwing up handfuls of darker, damp sand. Deeper still he dug, until H’ani had to hold him by the ankles while his entire body was jammed in the hole. At last, in response to muffled cries from the depths, she passed the long hollow reed down to him.
Upside down in the well, O’wa placed the open end of the reed carefully and then fitted a filter of twigs and leaves around the open end of it to prevent it becoming clogged. With both the women hauling on his ankles, they drew him out of the narrow well, and he emerged coated with orange sand. H’ani had to clean out his ears and brush it from the corms of his grey hair, and from his eyelashes.
Carefully, a handful at a time, O’wa refilled the well, leaving the filter and reed undisturbed, and when he was finished, he patted the sand down firmly, leaving a short length of the end of the reed pipe sticking out above the surface.
While O’wa put the finishing touches to his well, H’ani chose a green twig, stripped off the thorns and peeled it. Then she helped Centaine unplug the egg-bottles and set them out in a neat row beside the well.
O’wa stretched himself out, belly down on the sand, and placed his lips over the end of the reed tube. H’ani squatted beside him attentively, the row of egg-bottles within reach and the peeled green twig in her hand.
‘I am ready, hunter of my heart!’ she told him, and O’wa began to suck.
From under her shelter Centaine watched as O’wa turned himself into a human bellows; his chest swelled and subsided, seeming to double in size with each hissing intake of air, and then Centaine could sense the impediment of a heavy load in the tube. O’wa’s eyes closed tightly, disappearing behind a network of baggy wrinkles, and his face darkened with effort to the colour of toffee. His body pumped and pulsated, he swelled like a bull frog and shrank and swelled again, straining to draw a heavy weight up the long thin reed tube.
Suddenly he made a mewing sound in his throat without breaking the rhythm of his powerful suctions, and H’ani leaned forward and gently fitted the peeled twig into the corner of his mouth. A diamond-bright drop of water bubbled out between O’wa’s lips and slid down the twig; it quivered on the tip for an instant and then dropped into the egg-bottles that H’ani held below it.
‘Good water, singer of my soul,’ H’ani encouraged him. ‘Good sweet water!’ And the flow from the old man’s mouth became a steady silver dribble, as he sucked it in and let it run on the exhale.
The effort required was enormous, for O’wa was lifting the water over six feet, and Centaine watched in awe as he filled one egg-bottle, then another, and still a third without pause.
H’ani squatted over him, tending him, encouraging him, adjusting the twig and the bottles, cooing to him softly, and suddenly Centaine was struck with a strange feeling of empathy for this pair of little old people. She realized how they had been forged by joy and tragedy and unremitting hardship into a union so fast and strong that they were almost a single entity. She saw how the hard years had gifted them with humour and sensitivity and simple wisdom and fortitude, but most of all with love, and she envied them without rancour.
‘If only,’ she thought, ‘if only I could be bound to another human being as these two are bound to each other!’ And in that moment she realized that she had come to love them.
At last O’wa rolled away from the tube and lay gasping and panting and shaking like a marathon runner when the race is run, and H’ani brought one of the egg-bottles to Centaine.
‘Drink, Nam Child,’ she offered it to Centaine.
Almost reluctantly, achingly aware of the effort that had gone into reaping each priceless drop, Centaine drank.
She drank sparingly, piously, and then handed the bottle back.
‘Good water, H’ani,’ she said. Though it was brackish and mingled with the old man’s saliva, Centaine now understood completely that the San definition of ‘good water’ was any fluid which would sustain life in the desert.
She rose and went to where O’wa lay in the sand.
‘Good water, O’wa.’ She knelt beside him, and she saw how the effort had drained him, but he grinned up at her and bobbed his head, still too tired to rise.
‘Good water, Nam Child,’ he agreed.
Centaine unfastened the lanyard from around her waist and held the knife in both hands. It had saved her life already. It might do so again in the hard days ahead, if she kept it.
‘Take, O’wa,’ she offered it to him. ‘Knife for O’wa.’
He stared at the knife, and the dark, blood-suffused tones of his wrinkled face paled, and a great devastation seemed to empty all expression from his eyes.
‘Take, O’wa,’ Centaine urged him.
‘It is too much,’ he whispered, staring at the knife with stricken eyes. It was a gift without price.
Centaine reached out, took his wrist and turned his hand upwards. She placed the knife in his hand and folded his fingers over it. Sitting in the harsh sunlight with the knife in his hand, O’wa’s chest heaved as powerfully as it had as he drew water from the sip-well, and a tear welled out of the corner of one eye and ran down the deep groove alongside his nose.
‘Why are you weeping, you silly old man?’ H’ani demanded.
‘I weep for joy of this gift.’ O’wa tried to maintain dignity, but his voice choked.
‘That is a stupid reason to weep,’ H’ani told him, and twinkled mischievously as she covered her laughter with one slim, graceful old hand.
They followed the dry river bed into the east, but now the urgency that had accompanied their night marches through the dune country was left behind them, for there was good water under the sand.
They travelled from before sunrise until the heat drove them into shelter, and then from late afternoon until after dark; the pace was leisurely for they foraged and hunted on the march.
H’ani cut a special digging stick for Centaine, peeled it and hardened the point in the fire, and showed her how to use it. Within a few short days Centaine was recognizing the surface indications of many of the edible and useful tubers and plants. It soon became evident that though O’wa was so adept in the bushcraft and lore of the desert and that although his hunting and tracking skills were almost supernatural, it was the foraging and gathering of the women that provided their little clan with the staples of life. In the days and weeks when game was scarce or simply non-existent, they lived on the plants which the two of them brought into camp.
Although Centaine learned swiftly and her young eyes were hawk-sharp, she knew that she would never be able to match the innate knowledge and gifts of perception of the old woman. H’ani could find the plants and insects that gave no sign on the surface of their hiding-place deep down in the earth, and when she dug the hard dirt flew in all directions.
‘How do you do it?’ Centaine could at last demand, for her command of the San language increased every day she spent listening and responding to the old woman’s chatter.
‘Like O’wa found the sip-wells from afar,’ H’ani explained. ‘I smell it, Nam Child. Smell! Use your nose!�
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‘You tease me, revered old grandmother!’ Centaine protested, but she watched H’ani carefully after that, and she saw that she indeed gave every indication of smelling out the deep nests of termites to raid them of the crumbling white ant ‘bread’ which she made into a foul-tasting but nutritious porridge.
‘Just like Kaiser Wilhelm,’ Centaine marvelled, and she called to H’ani ‘Cherche!’ the way that she and Anna had called to the gross boar when they had hunted truffles in the forest at Mort Homme.
‘Cherche, H’ani!’ and the old woman laughed and hugged herself with glee at the joke she did not understand, and then quite casually produced a miracle.
She and Centaine had fallen behind O’wa on the evening stage of the journey, for the old man had gone ahead to search for an ostrich nesting ground that he remembered from his last visit many years before.
The two of them were arguing amiably.
‘No, no! Nam Child, you must not dig two roots from the same place. You must always walk past one before you dig again – I have told you that before!’ H’ani scolded.
‘Why?’ Centaine straightened up and pushed the thick bushy curls off her forehead, leaving a sweaty smear of mud on her face.
‘You must leave one for the children.’
‘Silly old woman, there are no children.’
‘There will be—’ H’ani pointed at Centaine’s belly significantly. ‘There will be. And if we leave nothing for them, what will they say of us when they are starving?’
‘But there are so many plants!’ Centaine was exasperated.
‘When O’wa finds the nest of the ostrich, he will leave some of the eggs. When you find two tubers, you will leave one of them, and your son will grow strong and smile when he repeats your name to his children.’
H’ani broke off from her lecture and scurried forward to a bare, stony patch on the bank of the dry river bed, her nose twitching as she stooped to examine the earth.
