by Wilbur Smith
How long she remained in the pool she did not know, but gradually the fantasies and the phantoms faded, and then she felt H’ani’s hands leading her to the rocky lip. The scalding waters seemed to have drained all the strength from her. Her body glowed a bright brick colour, and the ingrained dirt of the desert was scoured from the pores of her skin. Her knees were weak and rubbery.
H’ani draped the gemsbok skin over her wet body and helped her up the rocky passage to the surface. Night had fallen already, and the moon shone bright enough to cast shadows at their feet. H’ani led her to the rude shelter and wrapped her in the gemsbok skin.
‘The Spirits have forgiven,’ she whispered. ‘They are pleased that we have made the journey. They sent my babies to greet me and tell me so. You can sleep well, Nam Child, there is no more offence. We are welcome in this place.’
Centaine woke in confusion, not sure what was happening to her, not even certain where she was, imagining for the first few seconds that she was back in her chamber at Mort Homme and that Anna was standing beside her bed. Then she became aware of the coarse grass and hard earth beneath her and the smell of the rawhide that covered her, and immediately following that the pain came again. It was as though a claw had closed on her lower body, a cruel taloned claw, cramping and crushing her, and she cried out involuntarily and doubled over, clutching her stomach.
With the pain, reality rushed back upon her. Her mind was clear and sharp after the hallucinations of the previous day. She knew what was happening, she knew instinctively that the immersion in the heated waters of the pool and the drugged smoke she had breathed must have precipitated it.
‘H’ani!’ she called, and the old woman materialized out of the grey half-light. ‘It has begun!’
H’ani helped her to her feet, then gathered up the gemsbok skin.
‘Come,’ she whispered. ‘We must go where we can be alone.’
H’ani must have already chosen the place, for she led Centaine directly to a hollow a short way beyond the camp, but screened from it by the mongongo grove. She spread the gemsbok skin at the base of a large mongongo tree and settled Centaine upon it. She knelt over her and removed her ragged canvas skirt, then with quick, strong fingers, she made a brief but thorough examination and then rocked back on her heels.
‘Soon, Nam Child – very soon now,’ she smiled happily, but Centaine’s reply choked off as another spasm caught her.
‘Ah, the child is impatient!’ H’ani nodded.
The spasm passed and Centaine lay and panted, but she had barely caught her breath before she stiffened again.
‘Oh, H’ani, hold my hand – please! Please!’
Something burst deep within Centaine’s body and hot liquid poured from her, and sprayed down her legs.
‘Close – very close now,’ H’ani assured her, and Centaine gave a little hunted cry.
‘Now—’ H’ani pulled her into a sitting position, but she slumped back.
‘It’s coming, H’ani.’
‘Get up!’ H’ani snapped at her. ‘You must help it now. Get up. You cannot help the baby if you lie on your back!’ She forced Centaine into a squatting position, with her feet and knees splayed apart, the natural position for voiding.
‘Hold the tree to steady yourself,’ she instructed her urgently. ‘There!’ She guided Centaine’s hands on to the rough bark and Centaine moaned and pressed her forehead hard against the trunk.
‘Now!’ H’ani knelt behind her, and encircled Centaine’s body with her thin wiry arms.
‘Oh, H’ani—’ Centaine’s cry rose sharply.
‘Yes! I will help you push him out.’ And she tightened her grip as Centaine bore down instinctively. ‘Push, Nam Child – hard! Hard! Push!’ H’ani entreated her as she felt the girl’s stomach muscles bunch up and harden into bands of iron.
There was a great blockade within her and Centaine clung to the tree and strained and moaned – and then she felt the obstruction move a little, then jam hard again.
‘H’ani!’ she cried, and the thin arms locked around her and the old woman moaned with her as they strained together. H’ani’s naked body was pressed to Centaine’s arched back, and she felt strength flowing out of the old wizened flesh like an electrical current.
‘Again, Nam Child,’ H’ani grunted in her ear. ‘He is close – so close. Now! Nam Child, push hard.’
Centaine bore down with all her strength and will. Her jaws were clenched so that she thought her teeth would crack, and her eyes swelled in their sockets. Then she felt something tear, a stinging burning pain, but despite the pain she found strength for another rigorous convulsion. It moved again, then there was a rush, a release and something enormous and impossibly heavy slid out of her at the same moment H’ani’s hand reached under her buttocks to guide and welcome and protect.
Like a benediction, the pain wilted away, and left her shaking as though in high fever and running with her own sweat – but empty, blessedly empty, as though her viscera had been drawn out of her.
H’ani released her grip, and Centaine clutched at the tree trunk for support, and drew long ragged breaths.
Then she felt something hot and wet and slippery squirming between her feet, and she pushed herself wearily away from the tree trunk and looked down. A tangle of fleshy glistening tubes still dangled out of her, and joined to them, enmeshed in their coils, the infant lay in a pool of blood-speckled fluid on the gemsbok-skin mat.
It was small, she was surprised at how small, but its limbs were stretching in spasmodic clutching and kicking gestures. The face was turned away from her but the small neat head was covered with a dense cap of sodden black curls, plastered to the skull.
H’ani’s hands reached down between her legs from behind and lifted the baby out of her sight. Instantly Centaine felt a devastating sense of deprivation – but she was too weak to protest. She felt a gentle twitching and tugging on the umbilical cord as H’ani handled the child, and then suddenly there was a furious squalling howl. It struck Centaine to the heart.
Then H’ani’s laughter joined in chorus with the angry bawls. Centaine had never heard a sound of such unequivocal joy.
‘Oh, listen to him, Nam Child. He roars like a lion cub!’
Centaine waddled around awkwardly, hampered by the fleshy ropes dangling from her own body and still linking her to the infant. He was struggling in H’ani’s hands, all wet and defiant, his face red with anger and his bee-stung eyes tight closed, but his toothless pink mouth wide as he howled his outrage.
‘A boy, H’ani?’ Centaine panted wildly.
‘Oh yes,’ H’ani laughed, ‘by all means, a boy,’ and with the tip of her forefinger she tickled his tiny penis. It stuck out stiffly as though to endorse his anger, and at H’ani’s touch released a powerful arcing jet of urine.
‘Look! Look!’ H’ani choked with laughter. ‘He pisses on the world. Bear witness, all the Spirits of this place, a veritable lion cub has been birthed this day.’
She offered the squirming red-faced infant to Centaine.
‘Clean his eyes and nose,’ she ordered, and, like a mother cat, Centaine did not need further instruction. She licked the mucus from the tiny swollen eyelids, from his nostrils and mouth.
Then H’ani took the child, handling him with familiar expertise, and she tied off the umbilical cord with the soft white inner bark threads of the mongongo tree, before severing it with a quick slash of her bone knife. Then she rolled the end of the tube in the medicinal leaves of the wild quince and bound it in place with a rawhide strip around his middle.
Sitting on the soiled gemsbok skin, in a puddle of her own blood and amniotic fluids, Centaine watched her work with shining eyes.
‘Now!’ H’ani nodded with vast self-satisfaction. ‘He is ready for the breast.’ And she placed him in Centaine’s lap.
He and Centaine needed only the barest introduction. H’ani squeezed Centaine’s nipple and touched the milk-wet tip to the infant’s lips, and he fasten
ed on it like a leech, with a noisy rhythmic suction. For a few moments Centaine was startled by the sudden sharp sympathetic contractions of her womb as the child suckled, but this was lost and forgotten in the wonder and mystery of examining her incredible accomplishment.
Gently she unfolded his fist and marvelled at the perfection of each tiny pink finger, at the pearly nails, each no bigger than a grain of rice, and when he suddenly seized her finger in the surprisingly powerful grip, he squeezed her heart as well. She stroked his damp dark hair, and as it dried it sprang up into ringlets. It awed her to see the pulsing movement under the thin membrane that covered the opening of his skull.
He stopped suckling and lay quiescent in her arms, so she could take him from her breast and examine his face. He was smiling. Apart from the puffy eyelids, his features were well formed, not squashed and rubbery like those of the other newborn infants she had seen. His brow was broad and deep and his nose was large. She thought of Michael – no, it was more arrogant than Michael’s nose – and then she remembered General Sean Courtney.
‘That’s it!’ she chuckled aloud. ‘The true Courtney nose.’
The infant stiffened and broke wind simultaneously both fore and aft, a trickle of her milk dribbled from the corner of his mouth, and instantly he began to hunt for the nipple again, mouthing demandingly, rolling his head from side to side. Centaine changed him to her other arm, and guided her nipple into his open mouth.
Kneeling in front of her, H’ani was working between Centaine’s knees. Centaine winced and bit her lip as the afterbirth came free, and H’ani wrapped it in the leaves of the elephant-ear plant, tied it with bark and scampered away into the grove with the bundle.
When she returned, the child was asleep in Centaine’s lap, with his legs splayed and his belly tight as a balloon.
‘If you permit, I will fetch O’wa,’ H’ani suggested. ‘He will have heard the birth cries.’
‘Oh, yes, fetch him quickly.’ Centaine had forgotten the old man, and now was delighted at the opportunity to exhibit her marvellous acquisition.
O’wa came shyly and squatted a little way off, showing the usual masculine lack of temerity when faced with the feminine mystery of birth.
‘Approach, old grandfather,’ Centaine encouraged him, and he shuffled closer on his haunches and peered solemnly at the sleeping child.
‘What do you think?’ Centaine asked. ‘Will he be a hunter? As skilful and brave a hunter as O’wa?’
O’wa made the little clicking sound reserved for those rare occasions when he was at a loss for words, and his face was a web of convoluted wrinkles like that of a worried Pekinese lap dog. Suddenly the child kicked out strongly and yelped in his sleep, and the old man dissolved into uncontrolled giggles.
‘I never thought I would see it again,’ he wheezed, and gingerly reached out and took a tiny pink foot in his hand.
The child kicked again and it was too much for O’wa. He sprang up and began to dance. Shuffling and stamping, circling the mother and child on the gemsbok skin, around and around he went, and H’ani controlled herself for three circuits, then she too leaped to her feet and danced with her husband. She followed him, with her hands on his hips, leaping when he leaped, twitching her protruding backside, performing the intricate stamp and double shuffle, and singing the chorus to O’wa’s praise song:
His arrows will fly to the stars
and when men speak his name
it will be heard as far—
and H’ani came in with the chorus.
—And he will find good water,
wherever he travels, he will find good water.
O’wa squeaked and jerked his legs and made his shoulders shake.
His bright eye will pick out the game
when other men are blind.
Effortlessly he will follow the spoor over rocky ground—
—And he will find good water,
at every camp site he will find good water—
—prettiest maidens will smile and
tiptoe to his camp fire in the night—
And H’ani reiterated in her reedy singsong:
—And he will find good water,
wherever he goes, he will find good water.
They were blessing the child, wishing upon him all the treasure of the San people, and Centaine felt that her heart would break with love for them and for the small pink bundle in her lap.
When at last the old people could dance and sing no more, they knelt in front of Centaine.
‘As the great-grandparents of the child, we would like to give him a name,’ H’ani explained shyly. ‘Is it permitted?’
‘Speak, old grandmother. Speak, old grandfather.’
H’ani looked at her husband and he nodded encouragement.
‘We would name the child Shasa.’
Tears prickled Centaine’s eyelids as she realized the great honour. They were naming him after the most precious, life-sustaining element in the San universe.
‘Shasa – Good Water.’
Centaine blinked back the tears and smiled at them.
‘I name this child Michel Shasa de Thiry Courtney,’ she said softly, and each of the old people reached out in turn and touched his eyes and mouth in blessing.
The sulphurous, mineralized waters of the subterranean pool were possessed of extraordinary qualities. Every noon and evening Centaine soaked in their heat, and the manner in which her birth injuries healed was almost miraculous. Of course, she was in superb physical health, without an ounce of superfluous fat or flesh upon her, and Shasa’s neat lean body and the ease of his delivery was a consequence of this. Furthermore the San looked upon parturition as such a routine process that H’ani neither pampered her, nor encouraged her to treat herself as an invalid.
Young muscles, elastic and well exercised, swiftly regained their resilience and strength. Her skin, not overstretched, was free of stria, and her belly swiftly shrank back into its greyhound profile. Only her breasts were swollen hard with copious milk, and Shasa gorged and grew like one of the desert plants after rain.
Then again there was the pool and its waters.
‘It is strange,’ H’ani told her, ‘the nursing mothers who drink this water always grow children with bones as hard as rock and teeth that shine like polished ivory. It is one of the blessings of the spirits that guard this place.’
At noon the sun struck through one of the apertures in the domed roof of the cavern, a solid white shaft of light through the steam-laden air, and Centaine loved to bask in it, moving across the pool as the beam swung, to keep in its charmed circle of light.
She lay chin-deep in the seething green water, and listened to Shasa snuffling and mewing in his sleep. She had wrapped him in the gemsbok skin and laid him on the ledge beside the pool where she could see him merely by turning her head.
The bottom of the pool was lined with gravel and pebbles. She scooped up handfuls of them and held them up in the sunlight, and they gave her a special kind of pleasure for they were strange and beautiful. There were veined agates, waterworn and smooth as swallows’ eggs, stones of soft blue with lines of red through them, or pink or yellow, and jaspers and carnelians in a hundred shades of burgundy, shiny black onyx and tiger’s eyes of gold barred with iridescent waves of shifting colour.
‘I will make a necklace, for H’ani. A gift to thank her, from Shasa!’
She began to collect the prettiest stones with the most interesting and unusual shapes.
‘I need a centrepiece for the necklace,’ she decided, and she dredged handfuls of gravel and washed them in the hot green waters, then examined them in the sunlight until at last she found exactly what she was searching for.
It was a colourless stone, clear as water, but when it caught the sunlight it contained a captive rainbow, an internal fire that burned with all the colours of the spectrum. Centaine spent a long lazy hour in the pool, turning this stone slowly in the beam of sunlight to make it flash and sparkle, staring
into its depths with delight, watching it explode into wondrous cascades of light. The stone was not large – only the size of one of the ripe mongongo fruit – but it was a symmetrical many-sided crystal, perfect for the centrepiece of the necklace.
She designed H’ani’s necklace with infinite care, spending many hours while Shasa nursed at her breast, arranging and rearranging her collection of pebbles until at last she had them in the order which most pleased her. Yet still she was not entirely satisfied, for the colourless central stone, so sparkling and regular in shape, made all the other coloured stones seem somehow drab and uninteresting.
Nevertheless, she began to experiment in stringing the pebbles in a necklace and here she immediately encountered problems. One or two of the pebbles were so soft that by dint of persistent effort and many worn-out bone augers she was finally able to drill a stringing hole through them. Others were brittle and shattered, and others again were too hard. In particular, the sparkling crystal resisted her best efforts, and remained absolutely unblemished after she had broken a dozen bone tools upon it.
She appealed to O’wa for assistance, and once he understood what she was working on, he was boyishly enthusiastic. They experimented and met with failure a dozen times before they finally worked out a means of cementing the harder stones on to the plaited sansevieria twine with acacia gum. Centaine began to assemble the necklace, and almost drove O’wa to distraction in the process, for she discarded fifty lengths of twine.
‘This is too thick,’ she would say. ‘This is not strong enough.’ And O’wa, who, when working on his own weapons and tools, was also a perfectionist, took the problem very seriously.
Finally Centaine unravelled the hem of her canvas skirt and by plaiting the threads with the sansevieria fibres, they had a string for the necklace that was fine and strong enough to satisfy both of them.
When the necklace was at last finished, O’wa’s self-satisfaction could not have been more overbearing had he conceived, planned and executed the project entirely on his own. It was a more of a pectoral than a necklace, with a single string around the back of the neck and the stones woven together in a plate-like decoration which hung on the breast with the big crystal in the centre, and a mosaic of coloured agates and jaspers and beryls surrounding it.
