by Wilbur Smith
‘Cherche, H’ani!’ Centaine laughed at her, and H’ani laughed back as she started to dig, and then she dropped to her knees and lifted something from the shallow excavation.
‘This is the first one you have seen, Nam Child. Smell it. It tastes very good.’
She handed the lumpy, dirt-crusted, potato-like tuber to Centaine, and Centaine sniffed it gingerly, and her eyes flew wide open at the well-remembered aroma. Quickly she wiped the clinging dirt from the lumpy surface and bit into it.
‘H’ani, you old darling,’ she cried. ‘It’s a truffle! A real truffle. It’s not the same shape or colour, but it smells and tastes just like the truffles from our own land!’
O’wa had found his ostrich nests and Centaine whipped one of the eggs in its own half-shell and mixed in the chopped truffles and cooked an enormous omelette aux truffes on a flat stone heated in the camp fire.
Despite the dirt from Centaine’s fingers, which gave it a faintly greyish colour, and the grains of sand and egg-shell chips that crunched under their teeth, they ate it with relish.
It was only afterwards as she lay under the primitive roof of twigs and leaves, that Centaine gave in to the homesickness which the taste of truffles had invoked, and she buried her face in the crook of her arm to muffle her sobs.
‘Oh, Anna – I would give anything, anything at all just to see your lovely ugly old face again.’
As they followed the dry river bed, and the weeks turned into months, so Centaine’s unborn child grew strongly.
With her sparse but healthy diet and the daily exercise of walking and digging and carrying and reaching, the child never grew big and she carried it high, but her breasts filled out and sometimes when she was alone, scrubbing her body with the juicy pith of the bi tuber, she looked down at them proudly and admired the jaunty upward tilt of the rosy tips.
‘I wish you could see them now, Anna,’ she murmured. ‘You couldn’t tell me I still look like a boy. But as always you’d complain about my legs, too long and thin and with hard muscles – oh, Anna, I wonder where you are.’
One morning at sunrise when they had already been travelling for many hours, Centaine stopped on the top of a low rise and looked around her slowly.
The air was still cool from the night and so clear that she could see to the horizon. Later, with the heat, it would thicken to an opaline translucence and the sun would drain all colour from the landscape. The heat mirage would close in around her, and shapes would be weirdly deformed, the most mundane groups of rocks or clump of vegetation transformed into quivering monsters.
Now they were sharp-edged and rich with their true colours. The undulating plains were hazed with pale silver grasses, and there were trees, real, living trees, not those heat-struck ancient mummies that had stood upon the plains below the dunes.
These stately camel-thorn acacias grew well separated. Their massive trunks, clad in rough crocodile-skin bark, were at odds with the wide umbrella-shaped crown of airy and delicate silvery-green foliage. In the nearest of them a colony of sociable weavers had built a communal nest the size of a haystack, each generation of these insignificant, dun-coloured little birds adding to it, until one day the weight would be too much and would split the great tree. Centaine had seen others lying on the earth beneath the shattered acacia, still attached to the supporting branches and stinking with carcasses of hundreds of fledglings and broken eggs.
Beyond this open forest there were steep hills rising abruptly out of the plain, the kopjes of Africa, riven by wind and split by the sun’s heat into geometrical shapes as hard-edged as dragons’ teeth. The soft light of the early sun struck hues of sepia and red and bronze from their rocky walls, and the antediluvian kokerboom trees with their fleshy trunks and palm-like heads crowned their summits.
Centaine paused and leaned upon her digging stick, awed by the harsh grandeur of the scene. Upon the dust-coloured plain grazed herds of dainty antelope. They were pale as smoke and as insubstantial, graceful little animals with lyre-shaped horns, the lovely bright cinnamon-brown of their backs divided from the snow white lower parts by a lateral band of chocolate red.
As Centaine watched, the nearest antelopes took fright at the human presence, and began stotting, the characteristic alarm behaviour that gave them their name of springbok. They lowered their heads until their muzzles almost touched their four bunched hooves and shot stiff-legged straight into the air, at the same time opening the long folded pouch of skin that ran down their backs and flashing the feather mane of white hair that it concealed.
‘Oh, look at them, H’ani!’ Centaine cried. ‘They are so beautiful.’
The alarm stotting was wildly infectious, and across the plain hundreds of springbok bounced on high, with white manes flashing.
O’wa dropped his burden, lowered his head and imitated them perfectly, prancing stiff-legged, flicking his fingers over his back, so that he seemed transformed into one of the fleet little antelope, and the two women were so overcome with laughter that they had to sit down and hug each other. The joy of it lasted long after the mountains had receded into the heat mists, and it alleviated the crushing misery of the noonday sun.
During those long halts in the middle of the day, O’wa took to separating himself from the women, and Centaine became accustomed to seeing his tiny figure sitting crosslegged in the shade of an adjacent camel-thorn tree, scraping with the clasp knife at the gemsbok skin that was spread across his lap. He carried the skin carefully folded and rolled into a bundle on his head during the day’s march, and once when Centaine had begun to examine it casually, O’wa had become so agitated that she quickly placated him.
‘I meant no harm, old grandfather.’
But her curiosity had been piqued. The old man was a craftsman, and usually he was delighted to show off his handiwork. He had not protested when Centaine watched as he split the pliable yellow bark off the trunk of a kokerboom tree, rolled it into a quiver to hold his spare arrows and decorated it with designs of birds and animals burned into the bark with a coal from the campfire.
He showed her how to shape arrowheads from hard white bone by patiently grinding them against a flat stone, and Centaine was surprised at the keenness of the cutting edges and the points. He even took Centaine with him when he went out to hunt for the grubs from which he made the arrow poisons which had brought down the great gemsbok bull, and which could kill a man within hours. She helped him dig beneath a particular type of scrub and pick out of the dirt the brown pellet-like capsules which were the chrysalis in which the fat white grubs of the embryo diamphidia beetle were enclosed.
Handling the insects with elaborate caution, for the minutest quantity of their body juice entering through a scratch would mean lingering but certain death, O’wa pounded them to paste which he thickened with the juice of the wild sansevieria plant before dressing his arrowheads with the sticky mixture. From the sansevieria he separated the fibres from which he braided the twine to bind the arrowhead to the shaft.
He even allowed Centaine to watch while he whittled a primitive pen-like flute on which he accompanied himself with piercing blasts when he danced, or while he carved the decorations into the heavy throwing stick which he used to knock the rocketing coqui francolin out of the air in a puff of pretty feathers or the blue-headed lizards from the uppermost branches of the camel-thorn trees – but when he worked on the gemsbok skin he went off to a discreet distance and he worked alone.
The river of sand which they had followed for so long finally contorted into a series of tight bends, like the convulsions of a dying adder, and then abruptly ended in a dry pan, so wide that the trees on the far side were merely a dark wavering line on the horizon. The surface of the pan was white with crystals of evaporated salts. The reflection of the noon sun from this surface was painful to look at directly, and it turned the sky above it to pale silver. The Bushmen’s name for it was ‘the big white place’.
On the steep bank of the pan they built shelters stur
dier and better thatched than any of the others had been, giving an air of permanence to the camp, and the two little San settled down to an undemanding routine, albeit with an underlying air of expectancy which Centaine detected and queried.
‘Why do we stop here, H’ani?’ Each uneventful day made her more impatient and restless.
‘We wait to make the crossing,’ was all that the old woman would tell her.
‘Crossing to where? Where are we going?’ Centaine insisted, but H’ani became vague and pointed in a wide arc into the east, and answered with a name that Centaine could only translate as ‘a place were nothing must die’.
Centaine’s child grew strongly within her pouting belly. Sometimes it was difficult to breathe, and almost impossible to be comfortable on the bare ground. She made herself a nest of soft desert grass in her little sun shelter, which amused the two old people. For them the bare earth was bed enough, and they used their own shoulders as pillows.
Centaine lay in her nest and tried to count the days and months since she and Michael had been together, but time was blurred and telescoped so that all she could be sure of was that her time would be upon her soon. H’ani confirmed her estimate, probing her belly with gentle, knowing fingers.
‘The baby rides high and fights to be free. It will be a boy, Nam Child,’ she promised, and took Centaine off into the desert to gather special herbs that they would need for the birthing.
Unlike many Stone Age peoples, the San were fully aware of the processes of procreation and saw sexual intercourse not as an isolated and random act, but as the first step in the long voyage to birth.
‘Where is the father of your growing infant, Nam Child?’
H’ani asked, and when she saw the tears in Centaine’s eyes she answered herself softly. ‘He is dead in the north lands at the ends of the earth. Is that not so?’
‘How did you know that I came from the north?’ Centaine asked, glad to turn away from the pain of Michael’s memory.
‘You are big – bigger than any of the San of the desert,’ H’ani explained. ‘Therefore you must come from a rich land where living is easy, a land of good rains and plentiful food.’ To the old woman water was all of life. ‘The rain winds come from the north, so you also must come from the north.’
Intrigued by her logic, Centaine smiled. ‘And how did you know I was from far away?’
‘Your skin is pale, not darkened like the skin of the San. Here in the centre of the world the sun stands overhead, but it never goes north or south, and in the east and west it is low and wasting, so you must come from far away where the sun lacks the warmth and strength to darken your skin.’
‘Do you know of other people like me, H’ani, big people with pale skins? Have you ever before seen people like me?’ Centaine asked eagerly, and when she saw the shift in the old woman’s gaze, she seized her arm. ‘Tell me, wise old grandmother, where have you seen my people? In what direction, and how far away? Would I be able to reach them? Please tell me.’
H’ani’s eyes clouded with a film of incomprehension and she picked a grain of dried mucus from her nostril and examined it with minute attention.
‘Tell me, H’ani.’ Centaine shook her arm gently.
‘I have heard the old people talk of such things,’ H’ani grudgingly admitted, ‘but I have never seen these people, and I do not know where they could be found.’ And Centaine knew she was lying. Then, in a sudden vehement gabble, H’ani went on. ‘They are fierce as lions and poisonous as the scorpion, the San hide from them—’ She jumped up in agitation, seized her satchel and digging stick and hurried from the camp and did not return until sunset.
That night after Centaine had curled in her grass bed, H’ani whispered to O’wa. ‘The child yearns for her own people.’
‘I have seen her look southwards with sadness in her eyes,’ O’wa admitted.
‘How many days’ travel to reach the land of the pale giants?’ H’ani asked reluctantly. ‘How far to travel to her own clan?’
‘Less than a moon,’ O’wa grunted, and they were both silent for a long time, staring into the hot bluish flames of the camel-thorn log fire.
‘I want to hear a baby cry once more before I die,’ H’ani said at last and O’wa nodded. And both their little heart-shaped faces turned towards the east. They stared out into the darkness, towards the Place of All Life.
Once when H’ani found Centaine kneeling alone and praying in the wilderness, she asked, ‘Who are you speaking to, Nam Child?’ and Centaine was at a loss, for though the San language was rich and complex in its descriptive powers of the material aspects of the desert world, it was extremely difficult to use it to convey abstract ideas.
However, after long discussion spread over many days while they foraged in the desert or worked over the cooking fire, Centaine managed to describe her concept of the Godhead, and H’ani nodded dubiously and mumbled and frowned as she considered it.
‘You are talking to the spirits?’ she asked. ‘But most of the spirits live in the stars, and if you speak so softly, how will they hear you? It is necessary to dance and sing and whistle loudly to attract their attention.’ She lowered her voice. ‘And it is even then not certain they will listen to you, for I have found the star spirits to be fickle and forgetful.’ H’ani glanced around her like a conspirator. ‘It is my experience, Nam Child, that Mantis and Eland are much more reliable.’
‘Mantis and Eland?’ Centaine tried not to show her amusement.
‘Mantis is an insect with huge eyes that see all and with arms like a little man. Eland is an animal – oh, yes, much larger than the gemsbok, with a dewlap so full of rich fat that it sweeps the earth.’ The San’s love of fat was almost equal to their love of wild honey. ‘And twisted horns that sweep the sky. If we are fortunate we will find both Mantis and Eland at the place to which we are going. In the meantime, talk to the stars, Nam Child, for they are beautiful, but put your trust in Mantis and Eland.’
Thus simply H’ani explained the religion of the San, and that night she and Centaine sat under a brilliant sky and she pointed out Orion’s glittering train.
‘That is the herd of celestial zebras, Nam Child – and there is the inept huntsman,’ she picked out the star Aldebaran, ‘sent by his seven wives,’ she stabbed a gnarled finger at the Pleiades, ‘to find meat. See how he has shot his arrow, and it has flown high and wide to fall at the feet of Lion Star.’ Sirius, the brightest of all the fixed stars, seemed truly lionlike. ‘And now the huntsman is afraid to retrieve his arrow and afraid to return to his seven wives, and he sits there for ever twinkling with fear, which is just like a man, Nam Child.’ H’ani hooted with laughter, and dug her bony thumb into her husband’s scrawny ribs.
Because the San were also star-lovers, Centaine’s bond of affection for them was so strengthened that she pointed out Michael’s star and her own in the far south.
‘But, Nam Child,’ O’wa protested, ‘how can that star belong to you? It belongs to no one and to everybody, like the shade of the camel-thorn, and the water in the desert pool, or the land on which we tread – to nobody and yet to everybody. Nobody owns the eland, but we may take of his fat if we have need. Nobody owns the big plants but we may gather them on condition that we leave some for the children. How can you say that a star belongs to you alone?’ It was an expression of the philosophy which was the tragedy of his people, a denial of the existence of property which had doomed them to merciless persecution, to massacre and slavery or to exile in the far reaches of the desert where no other people could exist.
So the monotonous days of waiting were passed in discussion and the leisurely routine of hunting and foraging, and then one evening both the San were galvanized by excitement and they faced into the north with their little amber faces turned up to a sky that was the flawless blue of a heron’s egg.
It took Centaine a few minutes to discover what had excited them, and then she saw the cloud. It groped up over the rim of the northern horizon like
the finger of a gargantuan hand, and it grew as she watched it, the top of it flattened into an anvil shape, and the distant thunder growled like a hunting lion. Soon the cloud stood tall and heaven-high, burning with the colours of the sunset and lit with its own wondrous internal lightnings.
That night O’wa danced and whistled and sang the praises of the cloud spirits until at last he collapsed with exhaustion, but in the morning the thunderhead had dispersed.
However, the sky had changed from unsullied blue, and there were streaks of high mare’s-tails cirrus smeared across it. The air itself seemed also to have changed. It was charged with static that made Centaine’s skin prickle, and the heat was heavy and languorous, even harder to bear than the dry harsh noons had been, and the thunderheads climbed above the northern horizon and tossed their monstrous billowing heads to the sky.
Each day they grew taller and more numerous, and they massed in the north like a legion of giants and marched southward, while an enervating blanket of humid air lay upon the earth and smothered it and everything upon it.
‘Please let it rain,’ Centaine whispered each day, while the sweat snaked down her cheeks and the child weighted her womb like an ironstone boulder.
In the night O’wa danced and sang.
‘Spirit of Cloud, see how the earth waits for you the way that a great cow eland in heat trembles for the bull. Come down from on high, Spirit of Cloud whom we venerate, and spill your generative fluids upon your earth wife. Mount your lover and from your seed she will bring forth new life in abundance.’ And when H’ani trilled and piped the chorus, Centaine cried out just as fervently.
One morning there was no sun, the clouds stretched in a solid grey mass from horizon to horizon. Low to begin with, they sank lower still, and a stupendous bolt of lightning tore from their great grey sowlike belly and clanged upon the earth so that it seemed to jump beneath their feet. A single raindrop struck Centaine in the centre of her forehead, and it was as heavy as a stone, so that she reeled back at the shock of it and cried out in astonishment.
