The Burning Shore

by Wilbur Smith

  Even Centaine was delighted with her handiwork.

  ‘It’s turning out better than I had hoped,’ she told O’wa, speaking in French and holding it up and turning it to catch the sunlight. ‘Not as good as Monsieur Cartier,’ she remembered her father’s wedding gift to her mother which he had allowed her to wear on her birthdays ‘ – but not too bad for a wild girl’s first effort in a wild place!’

  They made a little ceremony of the presentation, and H’ani sat beaming like a little amber-coloured hobgoblin while Centaine thanked her for being such a paragon of a grandmother and the best midwife of the San, but when she placed the gift around the old woman’s neck it seemed too big and weighty for the frail wrinkled body.

  ‘Ha, old man, you are so proud of that knife of yours, but it is as nothing to this,’ H’ani told O’wa as she stroked the necklace lovingly. ‘This is a true gift. Look you! Now I wear the moon and the stars around my throat!’

  She refused to remove it. It thumped against her breastbone as she wielded her digging stick or stooped to gather the mongongo nuts. When she crouched over the cooking fires, it dangled between the empty pouches of her swinging dugs. Even in the night as she slept with her head cradled on her own bare shoulder, Centaine looked across from her own shelter and saw the necklace shining on her chest, and it seemed to weigh the little old body down to the earth.

  Once Centaine’s preoccupation with the necklace was over, and her strength and vitality fully recovered after childbirth, she began to find the days too long and the rock cliffs of the valley as restrictive as the high walls of a prison.

  The daily routine of life was undemanding, and Shasa slept on her hip or strapped to her back while she gathered the fallen nuts in the grove or helped H’ani bring in the firewood. Her menses resumed their course, and she itched with unexpected energy.

  She had sudden moods of black depression, when even H’ani’s innocent chatter irritated her, and she went off alone with the baby. Though he slept soundly through it all, she held him on her lap and spoke to him in French or English. She told him about his father and the château, about Nuage and Anna and General Courtney, and the names and the memories instilled in her a deep and undirected melancholy. Sometimes in the night, when she could not sleep, she lay and listened to the music in her head, the strains of Aïda or the songs the peasants sang in the fields at Mort Homme during the vendange.

  So the months passed and the seasons of the desert rotated. The mongongo tree flowered and fruited again, and one day Shasa lifted himself on to hands and knees and to the delight of all set off on his first explorations of the valley. Yet Centaine’s mood swung more violently than the seasons, her joy in Shasa and her contentment in the old people’s company alternating with blacker moods when she felt like a life prisoner in the valley.

  ‘They have come here to die,’ she realized as she saw how the old San had settled into an established routine, ‘but I don’t want to die – I want to live, to live!’

  H’ani watched her shrewdly until she realized it was time, and then told O’wa, ‘Tomorrow Nam Child and I are going out of the valley.’

  ‘Why, old woman?’ O’wa looked startled. He was entirely contented and had not yet thought about leaving.

  ‘We need medicines, and a change of food.’

  ‘That is no reason to risk passing the guardians of the tunnel.’

  ‘We will go out in the cool of the dawn, when the bees are sleepy, and return in the late evening – besides, the guardians have accepted us.’

  O’wa started to protest further, but she cut him short. ‘It is necessary, old grandfather, there are things that a man does not understand.’

  As H’ani had intended, Centaine was excited and happy with the promised outing, and she shook H’ani awake long before the agreed hour. They slipped quietly through the tunnel of the bees, and with Shasa bound tightly to her back and her carrying satchel slung over one shoulder, Centaine ran down the narrow valley and out into the endless spaces of the desert like a schoolchild released from the classroom. Her mood lasted through the morning and she and H’ani chattered happily as they moved through the forest, searching and digging for the roots that H’ani said she needed.

  In the heat of the noonday they found shelter under an acacia, and while Centaine nursed the baby, H’ani curled up in the shade and slept like an old yellow cat. Once Shasa had drunk his fill, Centaine leaned back against the trunk of the acacia and dozed off as well.

  The stamp of hooves and horsey snorts disturbed her, and she opened her eyes, but remained absolutely still. With the breeze behind them, a herd of zebra had grazed down upon the sleeping group, not noticing them in the waist-high grass.

  There were at least a hundred animals in the herd – newly born foals with legs too long for their fluffy bodies and with smudged chocolate-coloured stripes not yet set into definite patterns, staying close to their dams and staring around at the world with huge dark apprehensive eyes, older foals quick and surefooted as they chased each other in circles through the trees, the breeding mares, sleek and glossy, with stiff upstanding manes and pricked ears, some of them huge with foal, milk already swelling in their black udders. Then there were the stallions with powerful bulging quarters, necks arched proudly as they challenged each other or snuffled one of the mares, reminding Centaine vividly of Nuage in his prime. Barely daring to breathe, she lay against the acacia trunk and watched them with deep pleasure. They moved down still closer; she could have reached out and touched one of the foals as it gambolled past her. They passed so close that she could see that each animal was different from the others, the intricate patterns of their hides as distinct as fingerprints, and the dark stripes were shadowed by a paler orangey-cream duplicate, so that every animal was a separate work of art.

  As she watched, one of the stallions, a magnificent animal standing twelve hands and with a bushy tail sweeping below his hocks, cut a young mare out of the main pack of the herd, nipping at her flanks and her neck with square yellow teeth, heading her off when she tried to circle back, pushing her well away from the other mares, but closer to the acacia tree, before he started to gentle her by nuzzling her neck.

  The mare bridled flirtatiously, well aware of her highly desirable condition, and she rolled her eyes and bit him viciously on his muscled glossy shoulder so that he snorted and reared away, but then circled back and tried to push his nose up under her tail where she was swollen tensely with her season. She squealed with a modest outrage and lashed out with both back legs, her shiny black hooves flying high past his head, and she spun around to face him, baring her teeth.

  Centaine found herself unaccountably moved. She shared the mare’s mounting excitation, empathized with her charade of reluctance that was spurring the circling stallion to greater ardour. At last the mare submitted and stood stock-still, her tail lifted as the stallion nosed her gently. Centaine felt her own body stiffen in anticipation – then when the stallion reared over her and buried his long pulsing black root deeply in her, Centaine gasped and pressed her own knees together sharply.

  That night in her rude thatched shelter beside the steaming thermal pool, she dreamed of Michael and the old barn near North Field, and woke to a deep corroding loneliness and an undirected discontent that did not subside even when she held Shasa to her breast and felt him tugging demandingly at her.

  Her dark mood persisted, and the high rocky walls of the valley closed in around her so she felt she could not breathe. However, four more days passed before she could wheedle H’ani into another expedition out into the open forests.

  Centaine looked for the zebra herd again as they meandered amongst the mopani trees, but this time the forests seemed strangely deserted and what wild game they did see was mistrusting and skittish, taking instant alarm at the first distant sign of the upright human figures.

  ‘There is something,’ H’ani muttered as they rested in the noon heat, ‘I do not know what it is, but the wild things sense it also. I
t makes me uneasy, we should return to the valley that I might talk with O’wa. He understands these things better than I do.’

  ‘Oh H’ani, not yet,’ Centaine pleaded. ‘Let us stay here a little longer. I feel so free.’

  ‘I do not like whatever is happening here,’ H’ani insisted.

  ‘The bees—’ Centaine found inspiration ‘ – we cannot pass through the tunnel until nightfall,’ and though H’ani grumped and frowned, she at last agreed.

  ‘But listen to this old woman, there is something unusual, something bad—’ and she sniffed at the air and neither of them could sleep when they rested at noon.

  H’ani took Shasa from her as soon as he had fed.

  ‘He grows so,’ she whispered, and there was a shadow of regret in her bright black eyes. ‘I wish I could see him in his full growth, straight and tall as the mopani tree.’

  ‘You will, old grandmother,’ Centaine smiled, ‘you will live to see him as a man.’

  H’ani did not look up at her. ‘You will go, both of you, one day soon. I sense it, you will go back to your own people.’ Her voice was hoarse with regret. ‘You will go, and when you do there will be nothing left in life for this old woman.’

  ‘No, old grandmother,’ Centaine reached out and took her hand. ‘Perhaps we will have to go one day. But we will come back to you. I give you my word on that.’

  Gently H’ani disentangled her grip, and still without looking at Centaine, stood up. ‘The heat is past.’

  They worked back towards the mountain, moving widely separated through the forest, keeping each other just in sight, except when denser bush intervened. As was her habit, Centaine chatted to the sleeping infant on her hip, speaking French to train his ear to the sound of the language, and to keep her own tongue exercised.

  They had almost reached the scree slope below the cliffs when Centaine saw the fresh tracks of a pair of zebra stallions imprinted deeply in the soft earth ahead of her. Under H’ani’s instruction, she had developed acute powers of observation, and O’wa had taught her to read the signs of the wild with fluent ease. There was something about these tracks that puzzled her. They ran side by side, as though the animals that made them had been harnessed to each other. She hefted Shasa on to her other hip and turned aside to examine them more closely.

  She stopped with a jerk that alarmed the child, and he squawked in protest. Centaine stood paralysed with shock, staring at the hoof prints, not yet able to comprehend what she was seeing. Then suddenly a rush of emotions and understanding made her reel back. She understood the agitated behaviour of the wild creatures, and H’ani’s undirected premonition of evil. She began to tremble, at the same moment filled with fear and joy, with confusion and shaking excitement.

  ‘Shasa,’ she whispered, ‘they are not zebra prints.’ The hooves that had made these chains of tracks were shod with crescents of steel. ‘Horsemen, Shasa, civilized men riding horses shod with steel!’ It seemed impossible. Not here, not in this desert fastness.

  Instinctively her hands flew to the opening of the canvas shawl she wore about her shoulders, and from which her breasts thrust out unashamedly. She covered them and glanced around her fearfully. With the San she had come to accept nudity as completely natural. Now she was aware that her skirts rode high on her long slim thighs, and she was ashamed.

  She backed away from the prints as though from an accuser’s finger.

  ‘Man – a civilized man,’ she repeated, and immediately the image of Michael formed in her mind, and her longing overcame her shame. She crept forward again and knelt beside the spoor, staring at it avidly, not able to bring herself to touch it in case it proved to be hallucination.

  It was fresh, so very fresh that even as she watched the crisply outlined edge of one hoofprint, it collapsed and slid in upon itself in a trickle of loose sand.

  ‘An hour ago, Shasa, they passed only an hour ago, not longer.’

  The riders had been walking their horses, moving at less than five miles an hour.

  ‘There is a civilized man within five miles of us at this very moment, Shasa.’

  She jumped up and ran along the line, fifty paces, before she stopped again and dropped to her knees. She would not have seen it before – without O’wa’s instruction she had been blind – but now she picked out the alien texture of metal, even though it was only the size of a thumbnail and had fallen into a clump of dry grass.

  She picked it out and laid it in her palm. It was a tarnished brass button, a military button with an embossed crest, and the broken thread still knotted in the tang.

  She stared at it as though it were a priceless jewel. The design upon it depicted a unicorn and an antelope guarding a shield and below there was a motto in a ribbon.

  ‘Ex Unitate Vires,’ she read aloud. She had seen the same buttons on General Sean Courtney’s tunic, but his were brightly polished. ‘From Unity Strength.’ The coat of arms of the Union of South Africa.

  ‘A soldier, Shasa! One of General Courtney’s men!’

  At that moment there was a distant whistle, H’ani’s summons, and Centaine sprang to her feet and hovered undecidedly. All her instinct was to race desperately after the horsemen, and to plead to be allowed to travel with them back to civilization, but then H’ani whistled again and she turned to look back.

  She knew how terrified the San were of all foreigners, for the old people had told her all the stories of brutal persecution. ‘H’ani must not see these tracks.’

  She shaded her eyes and stared longingly in the direction in which the spoor pointed, but nothing moved amongst the mopani trees. ‘She will try to stop us following them, Shasa, she and O’wa will do anything to stop us. How can we leave the old people, and yet they can’t come with us, they will be in great danger—’ she was torn and undecided ‘ – but we can’t let this chance go. It might be our only—’

  H’ani whistled again, this time much closer, and Centaine saw her small figure amongst the trees coming towards her. Centaine’s hand closed guiltily on the brass button and she thrust it into the bottom of her satchel.

  ‘H’ani mustn’t see the tracks,’ she repeated, and glanced quickly up at the cliffs, orientating herself so that she could return and find them herself, and then whirled and ran to meet the old woman and led her away, back towards the hidden valley.

  That evening, as they performed the routine camp chores, Centaine had difficulty disguising the nervous excitement that gripped her, and she replied distractedly to H’ani’s questions. As soon as they had eaten and the short African dusk ended, she went to her shelter and settled down as though to sleep, pulling the gemsbok skin over both the infant and herself. Although she lay quietly, and regulated her breathing, she was fretting and worrying, as she tried to reach her decision.

  She had no means of guessing who the horsemen were, and she was determined not to lead the San into mortal danger, yet she was equally determined to take her own chances and to follow up those tantalizing tracks for the promise they held of salvation and return to her own world – of escape from this harsh existence which would at last turn her and her infant into savages.

  ‘We must give ourselves a start, so that we can catch up with the horsemen before H’ani and O’wa even realize we have gone. That way they will not follow us, will not be exposed to danger. We will go as soon as the moon rises, my baby.’

  She lay tense and still, feigning sleep, until the gibbous moon showed over the rim of the valley. Then she rose quietly and Shasa murmured and grunted sleepily as she gathered up her satchel and stave and crept quietly out on to the path.

  She paused at the corner of the hill and looked back. The fire had died to embers, but the moonlight played into the old people’s shelter. O’wa was in the shadows, just a small dark shape, but the moonlight washed H’ani.

  Her amber skin seemed to glow in the soft light, and her head, propped on her own shoulder, was turned towards Centaine. Her expression seemed forlorn and hopeless, a harbinger of
the terrible sorrow and loss that Centaine knew she would suffer when she woke, and the necklace of pebbles gleamed dully on her bony old chest.

  ‘Goodbye, old grandmother,’ Centaine whispered. ‘Thank you for your great humanity and kindness to us. I will always love you. Forgive us, little H’ani, but we have to go.’

  Centaine had to steel herself before she could turn the rocky corner that cut her off from the camp. As she hurried up the rough pathway to the tunnel of the bees, her own tears blurred the moonlight and tasted of seawater as they ran into the corners of her mouth.

  She groped her way through the utter darkness and the warm honey smell of the tunnel and out into the moonlight in the narrow valley beyond. She paused to listen for the sound of bare feet on the rocks behind her, but the only sound was the yelp of the jackal packs out on the plains below, and she started forward again.

  As she reached the plain Shasa mewed and wriggled on her hip, and without stopping she adjusted his sling so that he could reach her breast. He fastened on it greedily, and she whispered to him as she hurried through the forest, ‘Don’t be afraid, baby, even though this is the first time we have been alone at night. The horsemen will be camped just a short way ahead. We will catch up with them before sunrise, before H’ani and O’wa are even awake. Don’t look at the shadows, don’t imagine things, Shasa—’ She kept talking softly, trying to shore up her own courage, for the night was full of mystery and menace, and she had never realized until that moment how she had come to rely on the two old people.

  ‘We should have found the spoor by now, Shasa.’ Centaine stopped uncertainly and peered about her. Everything looked different in the moonlight. ‘We must have missed it.’