by Wilbur Smith
‘Could you lead us to her?’ Garry demanded, and Lothar glanced at him, his expression hardening again.
‘I would try to find her again on certain conditions.’
‘Money,’ said Garry flatly.
‘Why are rich men always obsessed with their money?’ Lothar drew on the cigar, and let the fragrant smoke trickle over his tongue. ‘Yes, Colonel, I would need some money,’ he nodded. ‘But not £5,000. I would need £1,000 to equip an expedition to go into the desert fastness where I first saw her. We would need good horses – ours are almost worn out – and wagons to carry water, and I would need to pay my men. £1,000 would cover those expenses.’
‘What else?’ Garry demanded. ‘There must be some other price.’
‘Yes,’ Lothar nodded. ‘There is. I am tired of living in the shadow of the gallows.’
‘You want a pardon for your crimes!’ Garry stared incredulously. ‘What makes you think that is in my power!’
‘You are a powerful man, Colonel. A personal friend of both Smuts and Botha, your brother is a general, a cabinet minister in the Botha Government—’
‘I would not thwart the course of justice.’
‘I fought an honourable war, Colonel. I fought it to the bitter end, like your friends Smuts and Botha once fought their war. I am no criminal, I am no murderer. I lost a father, a mother, a wife and a son – I paid the price of defeat in a heavy coin. Now, I want the right to live the life of an ordinary man – and you want this girl.’
‘I couldn’t agree to that. You are an enemy,’ Garry blustered.
‘You find the girl,’ said Anna softly, ‘and you will be a free man. Colonel Courtney will arrange it. I give you my word on it.’
Lothar glanced at her and then back at Garry, and he smiled again as he divined the true chain of authority here.
‘Well, Colonel, do we have an agreement?’
‘How do I know who this girl is? How do I know she is my daughter-in-law?’ Garry hedged uncomfortably. ‘Will you agree to a test?’
Lothar shrugged. ‘As you wish.’ And Garry turned to Anna.
‘Show him,’ he said. ‘Let him choose.’
Between them, Garry and Anna had designed this test to thwart the rogues and chancers that the reward posters had attracted. Anna snapped open the clasp of the voluminous carpet bag she carried on a strap over one shoulder and took out a thick buff envelope. It contained a pack of postcard-sized photographs, and she handed these to Lothar.
He studied the top photograph. It was a studio portrait of a young girl, a pretty girl in a velvet dress and feathered hat; dark ringlets hung to her shoulders. Lothar shook his head and placed the photograph at the bottom of the pack. Swiftly he flicked through the rest of them, all of young women, and then handed them back to Anna.
‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry to have brought you so far for nothing. The girl I saw is not amongst those,’ he looked over his shoulder at the big Ovambo. ‘Very well, Hendrick, take them back to the drift.’
‘Wait, Mijnheer.’ Anna dropped the pile of photographs into the bag and took out another smaller stack. ‘There are more.’
‘You are careful,’ Lothar smiled in acknowledgement.
‘We have had many try to cheat us – £5,000 is a great deal of money,’ Garry told him, but Lothar did not even look up from the photographs.
He turned over two of the paste boards, then stopped at the third.
‘That’s her.’
Centaine de Thiry, in her white confirmation dress, smiled self-consciously up at him.
‘She is older now, and her hair—’ Lothar made a gesture describing a thick wild bush. ‘But those eyes. Yes, that’s her.’
Neither Garry nor Anna could speak. For a year and a half they had worked for this moment, and now that it had come they could not truly believe it.
‘I have to sit down!’ Anna said faintly, and Garry helped her to the log beside the entrance to the cave. While he tended her, Lothar pulled the gold locket from his shirt front, and snapped open the lid. He took out a lock of dark hair and offered it to Anna. She accepted it from him almost fearfully, and then with a fiercely protective gesture she pressed the lock to her lips. She closed her eyes, but from the corners of her clenched lids two fat oily tears squeezed out and began to trickle slowly down her red cheeks.
‘It’s just a hank of hair. It could be anyone’s hair. How do you know?’ Garry asked uncomfortably.
‘Oh, you silly man,’ Anna whispered hoarsely. ‘On a thousand nights I brushed her hair. Do you think I would not know it again – anywhere?’
‘How long will you need?’ Garry asked again, and Lothar frowned with irritation.
‘In the name of all that’s merciful, how many times must I tell you I don’t know?’
The three of them were seated around the fire at the entrance to the overhanging cave. They had been talking for hours, already the stars showed along the narrow strip of sky that the canyon walls framed.
‘I have explained where I saw the girl, and the circumstances. Didn’t you understand, must I go over it all again?’
Anna lifted a hand to placate him. ‘We are very anxious. We ask stupid questions. Forgive us.’
‘Very well.’ Lothar relit the butt of the cigar with a burning twig from the fire. ‘The girl was the captive of the wild San. They are cunning and cruel as animals. They knew I was following them and they threw me off the spoor with ease. They could do it again, if I ever find their spoor. The area I will have to search is enormous, almost the size of Belgium. It’s over a year since I last saw the girl, she could be dead of disease or wild animals or those murderous little yellow apes.’
‘Do not even say it, Mijnheer,’ Anna pleaded, and Lothar threw up both hands.
‘I do not know,’ he said. ‘Months, a year? How can I tell how long I will need?’
‘We should come with you,’ Garry muttered. ‘We should be allowed to take part in the search, at least be told in what area of the territory you first saw her.’
‘Colonel, you did not trust me. Very good. Now I don’t trust you. As soon as the girl is in your hands, my usefulness to you is at an end.’ Lothar took the cigar butt from his mouth and inspected it ruefully. There was not another puff left in it; sadly he dropped it into the fire.
‘No, Colonel, when I find the girl we will make a formal exchange – amnesty for me, and your daughter for you.’
‘We accept, Mijnheer.’ Anna touched Garry’s elbow. ‘We will deliver the sum of £1,000 to you as soon as possible. When you have Centaine safely with you, you will send us the name of her white stallion. Only she can tell you that, so that way we will know you are not cheating us. We will have your pardon signed and ready.’
Lothar held out his hand across the fire.
‘Colonel, is it agreed?’
Garry hesitated a moment, but Anna prodded him so heavily in the ribs that he grunted and reached to take the proferred hand.
‘It’s agreed.’
‘One last favour, Mijnheer De La Rey. I will prepare a package for Centaine. She will need good clothes, women’s things. I will deliver it to you with the money. Will you give it to her when you find her?’ Anna asked.
‘If I find her,’ Lothar nodded.
‘When you find her,’ Anna told him firmly.
It took almost five weeks for Lothar to make his preparations and then trek back to that remote water-hole below the Cunene river where he had cut the spoor of his quarry.
There was still water in the pan – it was amazing how long those shallow unshaded basins retained water even in the sweltering desert conditions, and Lothar wondered, as he had before, if there wasn’t some subterranean seepage from the rivers in the north that found its way into them. In any event, the fact that there was still surface water boded well for their chances of being able to penetrate deeper eastwards, the direction which the long-dead spoor had taken.
While his men were refilling the water barrels from the w
ater-hole, Lothar strolled around the periphery of the circular pan and there, incredibly, was the girl’s footprint still preserved in the clay, just as he had last seen it.
He knelt beside it, and with his finger traced out the shape of the small, graceful foot. The cast was baked by the sun as hard as a brick. Though all around it the mud had been trampled by buffalo and rhinoceros and elephant, this single print remained.
‘It’s an omen,’ he told himself, and then chuckled cynically. ‘I’ve never believed in omens – why should I begin now?’ Yet his mood was buoyant and optimistic when he assembled his men around the camp fire that evening.
Apart from the camp servants and the wagoners, he had four mounted riflemen to help him conduct the actual search. All four of them had been with him since the days of the rebellion. They had fought and bled together, shared a looted bottle of Cape smoke, or a woollen blanket on a frosty desert night, or the last shreds of tobacco in the pouch, and he loved them a little, though he trusted them not at all.
There was ‘Swart Hendrick’ or ‘Black Henry’, the tall, purplish-black Ovambo and ‘Klein Boy’ or ‘Little Boy’, his bastard son by a Herero woman. There was ‘Vark Jan’ or ‘Pig John’, the wrinkled yellow Khoisan. Mixed blood of Nama and Bergdama and even of the true San ran in his veins, for his grandmother had been a Bushman slave, captured as a child on one of the great commando raids of the last century that the Boers had ridden against the San people. Lastly there was ‘Vuil Lippe’, the Bondelswart Hottentot with lips like fresh-cut liver and a vocabulary that gave him his name ‘Dirty Lips’.
‘My hunting pack,’ Lothar smiled, half-affectionately and half in revulsion as he looked them over. Truly the term ‘outlaw’ had meaning when applied to them, they were beyond the rules of tribe or tradition. He studied their faces in the firelight. ‘Like half-tamed wolves, they would turn and savage me at the first sign of weakness,’ he thought.
‘All right, you sons of the great hyena, listen to me. We are looking for San, the little yellow killers.’ Their eyes sparkled. ‘We are looking for the white girl they had as their captive, and there are a hundred gold sovereigns for the man who cuts her spoor. This is how we will conduct the hunt—’ Lothar smoothed the sand between his feet and then traced out the plan for them with a twig.
‘The wagons will follow the line of the water-holes, here and here, and we will fan out, like this and like this. Between us we can sweep fifty miles of country.’
So they rode into the east, as he had planned it, and within the first ten days they cut the spoor of a small party of wild San. Lothar called in his outriders and they followed up the trail of tiny childlike footprints.
They moved with extreme caution, carefully spying out the terrain ahead through Lothar’s telescope, and skirting each stand where an ambush could be laid. The idea of a poisoned bone arrowhead burying itself in his flesh made Lothar shudder every time he let himself think about it. Bullets and bayonets were the tools of his trade, but the filthy poisons that these little pygmies brewed unmanned him, and he hated them more each hot tortuous nerve-racking mile that they followed the spoor.
Reading the sign, Lothar learned that there were eight San in the party they were following: two adult males and two women, probably their wives. There were also four small children, two still at the breast and two just old enough to walk on their own.
‘The children will slow them down,’ Vark Jan gloated, ‘they will not be able to stand the pace.’
‘I want one of them alive,’ Lothar warned them. ‘I want to know about the girl.’
Vark Jan’s slave grandmother had taught him enough of the San language to interrogate a captive and he grinned. ‘Catch one of them and I will make him talk, be sure of that.’
The San were hunting and foraging and Lothar’s band gained on them rapidly. They were only an hour behind when the San, with their animal perceptions, sensed their presence.
Lothar found the spot where they had become aware, the spot where the trail seemed to vanish.
‘They are anti-tracking,’ he growled. ‘Get down and search,’ he ordered.
‘They are carrying the children,’ Vark Jan squatted to examine the earth, ‘the babies are too young to cover their own spoor. The women are carrying them, but they will tire quickly under the load.’
Though the trail seemed to end and the ground beyond seemed unmarked even to Lothar’s experienced eye, yet even the San had left sign that Vark Jan and Swart Hendrick could follow. The pace was slower, for they had to dismount to be closer to the earth, but still they followed, and within four hours Swart Hendrick nodded and grinned.
‘The women are tiring quickly. They are leaving better sign and moving slower. We are gaining on them now.’
Far ahead the San women, toiling under the weight of the children, looked back and wailed softly. The following horses showed across the plain, magnified by the mirage until they loomed like monsters, but even the sight of their pursuers could not drive the women on at a better speed.
‘So I must play the plover,’ said the oldest of the San hunters. He was referring to the way the plover feigns injury to lead a predator away from its nest. ‘If I can make them follow me, I may be able to burn up their horses with thirst,’ he told his clan. ‘Then when you reach the next water-hole and after you have drunk and filled the water-eggs—’ He proffered a sealed buckhorn container to his wife and he did not have to say the fateful words. Poisoning a water-hole was such a desperate deed that none of them wanted to talk of it. ‘If you can kill the horses, you will be safe,’ the hunter told them. ‘I will try to give you time to do it.’
The old San hunter went quickly to each of the children and touched their eyelids and lips in blessing and farewell, and they stared at him solemnly. When he went to his woman who had borne him two sons, she gave a short keening wail. He admonished her with a glance which told her clearly, ‘Show no fear in front of the little ones.’
Then as he shed his clothing and his leather satchel, the old San whispered to the younger man, his companion in a thousand hunts, ‘Be a father to my sons.’ He handed his satchel to him, and stepped back. ‘Now, go!’
While he watched his clan trot away, the old man restrung his little bow and then carefully unwound the strips of leather that protected the heads of his arrows. His family disappeared across the plain, and he turned his back upon them and went to meet his pursuers.
Lothar was fretting at the pace. Though he knew that the quarry was only an hour ahead, they had lost the spoor again and were held up while his flanks cast forward to pick it up. They were in open country, a flat plain that stretched away to an indeterminate meeting with the sky. The plain was dotted with dark clumps of low scrub, and the mirage made them dance and squirm in the field of the telescope. It would be impossible to pick out a human figure amongst them at more than a mile distance.
The horses were almost knocked up, they had to have water soon. Within the next hour he would have to call off the pursuit and turn back to the water wagon. He lifted the telescope again, but a wild shout made him start and glance around. Swart Hendrick was pointing out to the left. The man on the extreme left flank, ‘Vuil Lippe’, the Bondelswart, was trying to control his mount. It was rearing and walking on its hindlegs, dragging him with it in a sheet of flying dust.
Lothar had heard that a horse would react to the hot scent of a wild Bushman as though to that of a lion, but he had doubted it. Vuil Lippe was helpless, both hands on the reins, his rifle in the boot on the saddle, and as Lothar watched he was dragged over one of the salt bushes and sprawled in the dirt.
Then quite miraculously another human shape seemed to appear out of the very earth. The tiny naked pixie-like shape stood up only twenty paces beyond the dragging rider. Unlikely as it seemed, he must have been completely concealed behind a clump of scrub that should not have hidden a hare.
As Lothar watched with helpless horror, the little mannikin drew his bow and let fly. Lothar s
aw the flight of the arrow, like a dust mote in the sunlight, and then the naked Bushman whirled and trotted directly away from the line of horsemen.
Lothar’s men were all shouting and struggling to remount, but terror seemed to have infected the horses, and they pranced and circled. Lothar was the first up. He did not touch the stirrups, but with a hand on his horse’s withers, sprang into the saddle, turned its head and galloped down the line.
Already the running Bushman was disappearing amongst the low mirage-shrouded scrub, in a swinging trot that carried him away at an incredible rate. The man he had fired at had let his horse run free and had pulled himself to his feet. He stood with his legs braced apart, swaying slightly from side to side.
‘Are you all right?’ Lothar shouted as he rode up, and then he saw the arrow.
It dangled down Vuil Lippe’s chest, but the arrowhead was buried in his cheek, and he stared up at Lothar with a bewildered expression. Lothar jumped down and caught him by the shoulders.
‘I’m a dead man,’ Lippe said softly, his hands hanging by his sides, and Lothar seized the dangling arrow and tried to pull it free. The flesh of Lippe’s cheek was drawn out in a peak and he screamed and staggered. Gritting his teeth, Lothar heaved again, but this time the frail reed shaft snapped, leaving the bone arrowhead embedded in the man’s flesh, and he began to struggle.
Lothar seized a handful of his greasy black hair and twisted his head over to examine the wound. ‘Keep still, damn you.’ A short length of bone protruded from the wound. It was caked with a black rubbery coating.
‘Euphorbia latex.’ Lothar had examined San weapons before; his father had once possessed an important collection of tribal artefacts. Now Lothar recognized the poison, the distilled latex from the roots of one of the rare desert euphorbia plants. Even as he studied it, he could see the poison spreading beneath the skin, discolouring it a deep lavender-purple, blooming like crystals of permanganate of potash dropped into water, following the course of the shallow blood vessels as it was absorbed.
