The Burning Shore

by Wilbur Smith

  As the stacked mopani timbers caught and burned, she could feel the heat leap out at her like a savage thing, and Centaine backed away from it and gazed with a horrid fascination at the destruction. From the fiery cavern she heard a new sound that puzzled her, the sound of soft heavy weights thudding to the stone floor, almost as though many living bodies were dropping from the roof of the cavern. She did not understand what it was until she saw a snake of dark liquid, slow and viscous as oil, creep out of the cavern’s entrance.

  ‘Honey!’ she whispered. ‘The honeycombs are melting!’

  Those huge combs, the product of a century of labour by a myriad bees, were softening in the heat and falling, a hundredweight at a time, from the high roof into the flames below. The trickle of molten honey and wax turned into a running rivulet, then into a flood of boiling steaming liquid that seethed in the ruddy furnace glow. The hot sweet stench of boiling honey seemed to thicken the air, and the flood of molten gold drove Centaine back before it.

  ‘Oh God,’ she whispered, ‘oh God, forgive me for what I have done.’

  Centaine stood by as the flames burned through the rest of that night, and in the dawn light the cliffs were blackened with soot, the cavern was a ruined black maw and the floor of the valley was coated thickly with a caramelized layer of black sticky sugar.

  When Centaine staggered wearily into the stockade of Lion Tree Camp, Sister Ameliana was waiting to help her to her cot, and to bathe the sugar-reeking soot from her face and body.

  An hour after noon, Centaine went into labour.

  It was more like mortal combat than giving birth.

  Centaine and the child fought each other through the rest of that burning afternoon and on into the night.

  ‘I will not cry out,’ Centaine muttered through clenched teeth, ‘you will not make me cry, damn you.’

  And the pain came in waves that made her think of the high surf of the Atlantic breaking on the barren beaches of the Skeleton Coast. She rode them, from their crests into the depths of each sickening trough.

  Each time, at the pinnacle of pain, she tried to struggle up into the squatting birthing stance that H’ani had taught her, but Sister Ameliana pushed her down on to her back, and the child was locked within her.

  ‘I hate you,’ she snarled at the nun, and the sweat burned her eyes and blinded her. ‘I hate you – and I hate this thing inside me.’ And the child felt her hatred and ripped at her, twisting its limbs to block her.

  ‘Out!’ she hissed. ‘Get out of me!’ and she longed to feel H’ani’s thin strong arms around her, sharing the strain as she bore down.

  Once Lothar asked at the tent, ‘How does it go, Sister?’ The nun replied, ‘It’s a terrible thing – she fights like a warrior, not a mother.’

  Two hours before dawn in one last spasm that seemed to cleave through her spine and separate the joints of her thighs from her pelvis, Centaine forced out the child’s head, big and round as a cannon-ball, and a minute later the birth cry rang out into the night.

  ‘You cried,’ she whispered triumphantly, ‘not me!’

  As she subsided on to the cot the strength and resolve and hatred flowed out of her, so she was left an empty, aching husk.

  When Centaine awoke, Lothar was standing at the foot of her cot. The dawn was lighting the canvas of the tent behind him, so he was in dark silhouette only.

  ‘It’s a boy,’ he told her. ‘You have a son.’

  ‘No,’ she croaked. ‘Not mine. He’s yours.’

  A son, she thought, a boy – part of me, part of my body, blood of my blood.

  ‘His hair will be gold,’ Lothar said.

  ‘I didn’t want to know – that was our bargain.’

  So his hair will burn in the sunlight, she thought, and will he be as beautiful as his father?

  ‘His name is Manfred, after my firstborn.’

  ‘Call him what you will,’ she whispered, ‘and take him far away from me.’

  Manfred, my son, and she felt her heart breaking, tearing like silk in her chest.

  ‘He is at the nurse’s breast now – she can bring him to you if you wish to see him.’

  ‘Never. I never want to see him. That was our bargain.

  Take him away.’ And her swollen untapped breasts ached to give suck to her golden-headed son.

  ‘Very well.’ He waited for a minute for her to speak again, but she turned her face away from him. ‘Sister Ameliana will take him with her. They are ready to leave for Windhoek immediately.’

  ‘Tell her to go, and let her take your bastard with her.’

  The light was behind him, so she could not see his face. He turned and left the tent and minutes later she heard the motor of the truck, as it started and then dwindled away across the plain.

  She lay in the quiet tent watching the sunrise through the green canvas of the wall. She breathed the flinty desert air that she loved, but it was tainted by the sweet odour of blood, the birth blood of her son, or was it the blood of a little old San woman clotting and congealing in the hot Kalahari sun? The image of H’ani’s blood on the rocks changed in her mind’s eye, and became dark seething puddles of boiling honey running like water from the sacred places of the San, and the choking sugary smoke blotted out the smell of blood.

  Through the smoke she thought she saw H’ani’s little heart-shaped face peering sadly out at her.

  ‘Shasa, my baby, may you always find good water.’ But his image smudged also and his dark hair turned to gold. ‘You, too, my little one, I wish you good water also.’

  But it was Lothar’s face now, or was it Michael’s face – she was no longer certain.

  ‘I’m so alone!’ she cried into the silent spaces of her soul. ‘And I don’t want to be alone.’

  Then she remembered the words: ‘At this moment, Mrs Courtney, you are probably one of the wealthiest women in the world.’

  She thought, ‘I would give it all, every single diamond in the H’ani Mine, for the right to love a man, and have him love me – for the chance to have both my babies, both my sons, for ever at my side.’

  She crushed down the thought angrily. ‘Those are the woolly sentimental notions of a weak and cowardly woman. You are sick and weary. You will sleep now,’ she told herself harshly. ‘And tomorrow—’ she closed her eyes ‘ – you will be brave again, tomorrow.’