by Wilbur Smith
He grunted with satisfaction when he saw the bullet hole exactly where he had aimed. It had been an extremely difficult shot, at that range and deflected. He transferred his attention immediately from the bullet wound to the extraordinary decoration that the old woman wore around her neck.
Lothar had never seen anything like it in southern Africa, although in his father’s collection there had been a Masai necklace from east Africa, which was vaguely similar. However, the Masai jewellery had been made with trade beads, while for this collar the old woman had collected coloured pebbles and had graded and arranged them with remarkable aesthetic appreciation. Then she had most cunningly fastened them into a breast plate that was at once strong and decorative.
Lothar realized that it would have considerable value for its rarity, and he rolled the old woman on to her face to unknot the string that held it at the back of her neck. Blood from the massive exit wound had soaked the string, run down it and clotted on some of the coloured stones, but he wiped it off carefully.
Many of the stones were in their original crystalline form, and others were water-worn and polished. The old woman had probably picked them out of the gravel banks in the dry river beds. He turned them to catch the light and smiled with pleasure at the lovely sparkle of reflected sunlight. He wrapped the necklace in his bandanna and placed it carefully in his breast pocket.
One last glance at the dead Bushwoman convinced him that there was nothing else of interest about her, and Lothar left her lying on her face and turned to the difficult climb up the ravine wall to where Swart Hendrick waited above him.
Centaine became aware of the feeling of woven cloth upon her body, and it was so unfamiliar that it brought her to the very threshold of consciousness. She thought that she lay upon something soft, but she knew that was impossible, as was the filtered light through green canvas. She was too tired to ponder these things, and when she tried to keep her eyelids open, they drooped against her best efforts and she became aware of her weakness. Her insides had been scooped out of her as though she were a soft-boiled egg, and only her brittle outer shell remained. The thought made her want to smile, but even that effort was too great and she drifted away into that lulling darkness again.
When next she became aware, it was to the sound of someone singing softly. She lay with her eyes closed and realized that she could understand the words. It was a love song, a lament for a girl that the singer had known before the war began.
It was a man’s voice, and she thought it was one of the most thrilling voices she had ever heard. She did not want the song to end, but suddenly it broke off, and the man laughed.
‘So, you like that do you?’ he said in Afrikaans, and a child said, ‘Da! Da!’ so loudly and so clearly that Centaine’s eyelids flew open. It was Shasa’s voice and every memory of that night with the lion in the mopani came rushing back at her, and she wanted to scream again.
‘My baby, save my baby!’ and she rolled her head from side to side, and found she was alone in a hut with thatched roof and canvas sides. She lay on a camp cot, and she was dressed in a long cool cotton nightgown.
‘Shasa!’ she called out, and tried to sit up. She managed only a spasmodic jerk, and her voice was a dull, hoarse whisper.
‘Shasa!’ This time she summoned all her strength. ‘Shasa!’ and it came out as a croak.
There was a startled exclamation, and she heard a stool clatter as it was overturned. The hut darkened as someone stepped into the doorway, and she rolled her head towards the opening.
A man stood there. He was holding Shasa on his hip.
He was tall, with wide shoulders, but the light was behind him so she could not see his face.
‘So, the sleeping princess awakes—’ that deep, thrilling voice ‘ – at last, at long last.’
Still carrying her son, he stepped to the side of her cot and bent over her.
‘We have been worried,’ he said gently, and she looked up into the face of the most beautiful man she had ever seen, a golden man, with golden hair and yellow leopard’s eyes in his tanned golden face.
On his hip Shasa bounced up and down and reached towards her.
‘Mama!’
‘My baby!’ She lifted one hand, and the stranger swung Shasa off his hip and placed him beside her on the cot.
Then he lifted Centaine’s shoulders and propped her into a sitting position with a bolster behind her. His hands were brown and strong, yet the fingers were as elegant as those of a pianist.
‘Who are you?’ Her voice was a husky whisper, and there were dark smears below her eyes, the colour of fresh bruises.
‘My name is Lothar De La Rey,’ he answered, and Shasa clenched his fists and pounded his mother’s shoulder in a gesture of overwhelming affection.
‘Gently!’ Lothar caught his wrist to restrain him. ‘Your mama is not up to so much love, not yet.’ She saw how Lothar’s expression softened as he looked at the child.
‘What happened to me?’ Centaine asked. ‘Where am I?’
‘You were attacked and mauled by a lion. When I shot the beast, you fell out of the tree.’
She nodded. ‘Yes, I remember that, but afterwards—’
‘You suffered concussion and then the wounds from the lion claws mortified.’
‘How long?’ she breathed.
‘Six days, but the worst is past. Your leg is still very swollen and inflamed, Mevrou Courtney.’
She started. ‘You use that name. Where did you learn that name?’
‘I know that your name is Mevrou Centaine Courtney and that you were a survivor from the hospital ship Protea Castle.’
‘How? How do you know these things?’
‘I was sent by your father-in-law to search for you.’
‘My father-in-law?’
‘Colonel Courtney, and that woman, Anna Stok.’
‘Anna? Anna is alive?’ Centaine reached out and seized his wrist.
‘There is no doubt about that at all!’ Lothar laughed. ‘She is very much alive.’
‘That is the most wonderful news! I thought she was drowned—’
Centaine broke off as she realized that she was still holding his wrist. She let her hand fall to her side and sank back against the bolster.
‘Tell me,’ she whispered, ‘tell me everything. How is she? How did you know where to find me? Where is Anna now? When will I see her?’
Lothar laughed again. His teeth were very white. ‘So many questions!’ He drew the stool to her cot. ‘Where shall I begin?’
‘Begin with Anna, tell me all about her.’
He talked and she listened avidly, watching his face, asking another question as soon as one was answered, fighting off the weakness of her body to revel in the sound of his voice, in the intense pleasure of hearing glad tidings of the real world from which she had been so long excluded, of communicating with one of her own kind and looking on a white and civilized face again.
The day was almost gone, the evening gloom filling her little shelter when Shasa let out a demanding shout and Lothar broke off.
‘He is hungry.’
‘I will feed him if you will leave us a while, Mijnheer.’
‘No,’ Lothar shook his head. ‘You have lost your milk.’
Centaine’s head jerked as though the words were a blow in her face, and she stared at him while thoughts tumbled and crowded in her mind. Up to that moment she had been so wrapped up in listening and questioning that she had not considered that there was no other woman in the camp, that for six days she had been entirely helpless, and that somebody had tended her, washed her and changed her, fed her and dressed her wounds. But his words, such an intimate subject spoken of in direct fashion, brought all this home to her, and as she stared at him, she felt herself begin to blush with shame. Her cheeks flamed – those long brown fingers of his must have touched her where only one other man had touched before. She felt her eyes smart, as she realized what those yellow eyes of his must have looked upon.
/> She felt herself burning up with embarrassment, and then incredibly with a hot and shameful excitement, so that she had difficulty breathing, and she lowered her eyes and turned her head away so that he could not see her scarlet cheeks.
Lothar seemed to be entirely unaware of her predicament. ‘Come on, soldier, let’s show mama our new trick.’ He lifted Shasa and fed him with a spoon, and Shasa bounced on his lip and said, ‘Hum! Hum!’ as he saw each spoonful coming, and then launched himself at it with mouth wide open.
‘He likes you,’ Centaine said.
‘We are friends,’ Lothar admitted, as he removed the heavy coating of gruel from Shasa’s forehead and chin and ears with a damp cloth.
‘You are good with children,’ Centaine whispered and saw the sudden biting pain reflected in the darkening gold of his eyes.
‘Once I had a son,’ he said, and placed Shasa at her side, then picked up the spoon and empty bowl and went to the doorway.
‘Where is your son?’ she called softly after him, and he paused in the opening, then turned slowly back to her.
‘My son is dead,’ he said softly.
She was ripe and over-ripe for love. Her loneliness was a hunger so intense that it seemed it could not be assuaged, not even by those long languid conversations under the awning of the wagon tent when, with Shasa between them, they talked away the hottest hours of those lazy African days.
Mostly they discussed the things she held dearest, music and books. Although he preferred Goethe to Victor Hugo and Wagner to Verdi, these differences gave them grounds for amusing and satisfying dispute. In those arguments she discovered that his learning and scholarship far exceeded her own, but she strangely did not resent it. It merely made her more attentive to his voice. It was a marvellous voice; after the clicking and grunting of the San language, she could listen to it for the lilt and cadence as though it were music in itself.
‘Sing for me!’ she ordered, when they had for the moment exhausted a particular topic. ‘Both Shasa and I command it.’
‘Your servant, of course!’ he smiled and gave them a mocking little bow, then he sang without any self-consciousness.
‘Take the chick and the hen will follow you.’ Centaine had often heard Anna repeat the old proverb, and when she watched Shasa riding around the camp on Lothar’s shoulder, she realized the wisdom behind it, for her eyes and her heart followed both of them.
At first she felt quick resentment whenever Shasa greeted Lothar with cries of ‘Da! Da!’. That name should have been reserved for Michael alone. Then with a painful stab she remembered that Michael was lying in the cemetery at Mort Homme.
After that it was easy to smile when Shasa’s first attempts at walking unaided on his own two legs ended with a precipitous and headlong return to earth and he bawled for Lothar and crawled to him, seeking comfort. It was Lothar’s tenderness and gentleness with her son that nudged her affections and her need for him forward, for she recognized that beneath that handsome exterior he was a hard man and fierce. She saw the awe and respect in which his own men held him, and they were tough men themselves.
Just once she witnessed him in a cold, killing rage that terrified her as much as it did the man against whom it was directed. Vark Jan, the wrinkled yellow Khoisan, in indolence and ignorance had ridden Lothar’s hunting horse with an ill-fitting saddle and galled the creature’s back almost to the bone. Lothar had knocked Vark Jan down with a fist to the head, and then cut the jacket and shirt off his back with razor strokes from his sjambok, a five-foot whip of cured hippo-hide, and left him unconscious in a puddle of his own blood.
The violence had appalled and frightened Centaine, for she had witnessed every brutal detail from where she lay on her cot beneath the awning. Later, however, when she was alone in her shelter, her revulsion faded and in its place was a trembly feeling of exhilaration and a heat in the pit of her stomach.
‘He’s so dangerous,’ she thought, ‘so dangerous and cruel,’ and she shivered again and could not sleep. She lay and listened to his breathing in the shelter beside hers, and thought about how he must have undressed her and touched her while she was unconscious, and her flesh tingled at the memory and she blushed in the darkness.
In startling contrast the next day he was gentle and tender, holding her injured leg in his lap while he snipped the threads of cotton and plucked them from her swollen, inflamed flesh. They left dark punctures in her skin, and he bent over her leg and sniffed the wound.
‘It’s clean now. That redness is only your body attempting to rid itself of the stitches. It will heal swiftly now they are gone.’
Lothar was right. Within two days she was able, with the help of the crutch he had whittled for her, to make her first foray out of the canvas shelter.
‘My legs feel wobbly,’ she protested, ‘and I am as weak as Shasa.’
‘You’ll soon be strong again.’ He placed his arm around her shoulders to steady her, and she trembled at his touch and hoped he would not notice and withdraw his arm.
They paused by the horse lines and Centaine petted the animals, stroking their silky muzzles and revelling in that nostalgic horse odour.
‘I want to ride again,’ she told him.
‘Anna Stok told me you were a skilled horsewoman – she told me you had a stallion, a white stallion.’
‘Nuage.’ Tears prickled her eyes as she remembered, and she pressed her face against the neck of Lothar’s hunting horse to hide them. ‘My white cloud, he was so beautiful, so strong and swift.’
‘Nuage,’ Lothar took her arm, ‘a lovely name.’ Then he went on, ‘Yes, you will ride again soon. We have a long journey ahead of us, back to where your father-in-law and Anna Stok will be waiting for you.’
It was the first time she had considered an end to this magical interlude, and she pulled away from the horse and stared at him over its back. She didn’t want it to end, she didn’t want him to leave her, as she knew he soon would.
‘I’m tired,’ she said. ‘I don’t think I am ready to start riding just yet.’
That evening as she sat under the awning with a book in her lap, pretending to read, while watching him from under her lowered lids, he looked up suddenly and smiled with such a knowing glint in his eye that she blushed and looked away in confusion.
‘I’m writing to Colonel Courtney,’ he told her, sitting at the collapsible travelling bureau with the pen in his hand smiling across at her, ‘I will send a rider back to Windhoek tomorrow, but it will take him two weeks or more to get there and back. I am letting Colonel Courtney know when and where we can meet, and I have suggested a rendezvous for the 19th day of next month.’
She wanted to say, ‘So soon?’ but instead, she nodded silently.
‘I am sure you are most anxious to be reunited with your family, but I don’t think we will be able to reach the rendezvous before that date.’
‘I understand.’
‘However, I would be delighted to send any letter that you might care to write, with the messenger.’
‘Oh, that would be wonderful – Anna, dear Anna, she will be fussing like an old hen.’
Lothar stood up from the bureau. ‘Please seat yourself here and use the pen and what paper you need, Mrs Courtney. While you are busy, master Shasa and I will see to his dinner.’
Surprisingly, once she penned the opening salutation, ‘My dearest dear Anna,’ she could think of nothing to follow it, mere words seemed so paltry.
‘I give thanks to God that you survived that terrible night, and I have thought of you every day since then—’ The dam holding back the words burst, and they flooded out on to the paper.
‘We will need a packhorse to carry that epistle.’ Lothar stood behind her shoulder, and she started as she realized that she had covered a dozen sheets with close script.
‘There is so much still to tell her, but the rest will have to wait.’ Centaine folded the sheets and sealed them with a wax wafer from the silver box fitted into the top of the b
ureau, while Lothar held the candle for her.
‘It was strange,’ she whispered. ‘I had almost forgotten how to hold a pen. It has been so long.’
‘You have never told me what happened to you, how you escaped from the sinking ship, how you survived so long, how you came to be so many hundreds of miles from the coast where you must have come ashore—’
‘I don’t want to talk about it.’ She cut him off quickly. She saw for a moment in her mind’s eye the little heart-shaped, wrinkled, amber-coloured faces, and suppressed her nagging guilt at having deserted them so cruelly.
‘I don’t even want to think about that. Kindly never address the subject again, sir.’ Her tone was stingingly severe.
‘Of course, Mrs Courtney.’ He picked up the two sealed letters. ‘If you will excuse me, I will give these to Vark Jan now. He can leave before dawn tomorrow.’ He was stiff-faced and resentful of the rebuff.
She watched him cross to the servants’ fire and heard the murmur of voices as he gave Vark Jan his orders.
When he returned to the shelter, she made a pretence of being engrossed with her book, hoping that he would interrupt her, but he seated himself at the bureau and opened his journal. It was his nightly ritual, his entry in the leather-bound journal. She listened to his pen scratching on the paper, and she resented his attention being focused anywhere but on herself.
‘There is so little time left to us,’ she thought, ‘and he squanders it so.’ She closed her book loudly but he did not look up.
‘What are you writing?’ she demanded.
‘You know what I am writing, since we have discussed it before, Mrs Courtney.’
‘Do you write everything in your journal?’
