Mackenzie Ford

by The Clouds Beneath the Sun (v5)

  Then had come the war. Natalie’s father had spent most of the Second World War playing the piano, as accompanist to a well-known opera singer who had toured the troops. Owen had suffered a slight shrapnel wound when one concert had been shelled, but he had carried on playing and received a medal in 1946.

  But all that meant he was away for months at a time. During the war years, when Natalie was reaching her early teens, she saw her father on barely three occasions and mother and daughter became very close. Moirans-en-Montagne was famous for its traditional toy-making industry. Violette had worked there as a toy maker before she had met Owen and, when she arrived in Gainsborough, she had brought with her a number of beautiful, hand-carved wooden jigsaws and a wooden toy theater, with equally wonderful carved puppets. Just before France was invaded in 1940, Violette’s sister sent her two daughters to England for safety and so, during the war years, the Nelson household in Gainsborough was mostly French and entirely female. By the time peace came, Natalie was virtually bilingual and had acquired a passion for jigsaws and the theater.

  Violette’s accident had ended her life but started something else. Owen Nelson had been propelled into his shell. He had thrown himself into his work, embraced the church and his faith ever more closely, and turned his back on Natalie. She reminded him too much of Violette, he said.

  Then had come the blow with Dominic and Natalie had been doubly plunged into despair, bereaved twice over, within the space of a few months. The worst of it was that she suspected Dominic had found her naïveté attractive to begin with but that it had eventually palled. In the middle of her wretchedness, the letter from Eleanor Deacon had arrived, inviting her to Kihara—on other digs, during her work for her Ph.D., Natalie had impressed her seniors, who had spread the word. So the roller coaster of Natalie’s emotions was still on the rails, just.

  “Mind if I join you?”

  She flinched. She recognized Russell North’s voice but hadn’t heard him approach. She had thought everyone was in bed. She turned and looked up at him—he towered over her. “You’ve found me out,” she whispered, raising the cap of her whiskey flask. “Drinking in secret.”

  He sat down in the other canvas chair, on the far side of the small writing table they all had. The canvas complained as it stretched under his weight. “Your secret is safe with me. It’s not a silly rule to ban booze on digs, but a late-night nip can’t do any harm.”

  He pulled at the sleeve of his shirt where it had been caught up with his watch. He was wearing a khaki shirt and jeans and a pair of what she now knew Americans (and Australians who lived in America) called loafers. No socks. Red hair showed on his chest above where his shirt was unbuttoned. But his eyelashes were fair, golden almost.

  He looked at her for a moment without speaking, absently rubbing a finger down his cheek.

  At length he said, softly, “I came to apologize, Natalie. Dick shouldn’t have yelled at you like he did tonight. He was out of line, way out. But we are both so fired up. This find is big—big. We’ve got to get into print as soon as we possibly can. Dick and I are working on that, but he was over the top in going for you like a baboon on heat. I’m sorry. Really.”

  A wind stirred. The stunted calls of bats, overhead, punctuated the silence.

  “Are we forgiven?”

  What did Russell mean, that Dick and he were working on how they could go into print quickly? But she was relieved he had come to apologize, even if it was really Richard who should be sitting here. So all she said was “Thank you. Of course I forgive you. It is an important find and I’m glad I was here when it happened.” She held out the cup of whiskey.

  “Can you spare it?” Instinctively, he looked across to Eleanor’s tent, which was in darkness. “I’d love one.”

  “Only on condition that you don’t betray me to the authorities.”

  He made a mock salute. “Deal.”

  She handed him the cap she was drinking from, which formed the lid of the flask that contained the whiskey.

  “Ahhh,” he said softly, downing the scotch. “That hits the spot.”

  They sat together in a companionable silence.

  “Listen to the baboons,” he said at length, as a burst of screaming could be heard. “They’re worse than we are.” He looked about him and went on, “You can tell this is a woman’s tent.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Little touches. This is your very first day here but… that photograph there, the little vase of flowers, above all the smell. Is it perfume, or talcum powder, or what?”

  “The photograph is of my parents. The flowers were a gift, put there by Mgina—you know, the woman who cleans the tents. The smell, if there is a smell, can only be soap. Who would bring perfume on a dig?”

  The minute she said it, she smiled. “Arnold Pryce!”

  Russell grinned. “Well, no one ever puts flowers in my tent. All my tent smells of is sweat and dust. You must come visit.” He grinned again and stood up, and so did Natalie. For a brief moment, they stood very close together, so close she could smell him. He was wearing some sort of aftershave, not as strong as Arnold Pryce’s but not just sweat and dust.

  He said nothing but looked down at her, breathing hard. The shadows slid over his throat as he swallowed and his Adam’s apple moved.

  “Good night.” He turned, ducked under the guy ropes that held up the tent, and was gone.

  Natalie hid away the whiskey flask and tidied a few things that didn’t need tidying. She was glad Russell had apologized. He was a not unattractive man. Not in the Dominic class, of course—

  She checked herself. She must stop making these comparisons. Dom was gone, gone.

  She moved around the tent for a few minutes, changing into her pajamas, brushing her hair and teeth, until she could be certain Russell was back in his own quarters. Then she took another cigarette and returned to the seat she had been sitting in. She lit the cigarette, breathed in slowly, then out slowly. She thought briefly of her mother in her final moments, and then a sense of well-being spread down her chest.

  She looked up at the stars, feeling tired but content. Here she was, at last, at long last, on a dig in the warm night of Africa, thousands of miles from Cambridge. She turned off her hurricane lamp, and darkness—save for the stars and the crimson glow of the campfire logs—closed in around her.

  Now, with any luck, she could have a few moments to herself.

  • • •

  “Oh yes,” said Eleanor Deacon. “That’s the two-million level all right.” She stood, legs apart, shoulders thrown back, head held erect in the morning sun, the skin on her cheeks sweating slightly. She stared down at the wall of the gorge. She was wearing a knee-length gabardine skirt, leather boots, and the same white shirt of the evening before, and her hair was covered in a large white bandana. Her eyes were ablaze with excitement.

  They had all come out to the gorge early this morning, using three of the Land Rovers assigned to the dig. Christopher Deacon was already hard at it, and had been for hours, his tripod in place, an umbrella on a pole behind him, shielding him and the camera from the sun. He’d brought a guard, who stood some way off. They also had other equipment necessary for proper publication of the discovery—measuring sticks divided into meters and centimeters, to show scale, white paint to mark off the area where the bones had been found, soil bores to take samples of the earth and rock around the find spot, better fencing to keep out wild animals, and plenty of buckets in which to store the soil-sand that had been dislodged during the digging and which, in days to come, would be scrutinized and inspected and scrutinized all over again, to make sure nothing had been missed. Arnold Pryce was just beginning the painstaking task of sifting through the soil-sand for ancient pollen. He too had a big yellow beach parasol, to keep off the sun. From a distance the excavation resembled a stylish picnic.

  So this was the famous Kihara Gorge, Natalie reflected, as her eyes raked the landscape. This was to be the center of her attention
for the next few months—two rocky red walls, thirty yards apart, occupied by spiky thorn bushes, thin trees, deadwood, dust, and, if the smell was anything to go by, various vintages of dung. It was a long way from Jesus Lane in Cambridge.

  Eleanor turned to Daniel. She swept her arm in an arc around the find spot. “I want an area thirty feet either side of the discovery, and thirty feet in front, sealed off. Build a proper fence, five feet high. Anyone going inside the fence must wear lightweight shoes, not boots. There’s a good chance that the rest of the skeleton is around here somewhere, so let’s create a little haven of safety.”

  Daniel nodded. “The Maasai won’t like it. Any fence we build they might pull down.”

  The Maasai were the local tribe in the area around Kihara. They lived by herding goats, sheep, and cows and regarded all land in this part of the Serengeti as theirs.

  “Take them a gift, then, Daniel. A bolt of cloth maybe. We have some in the stores. Tell the elders what we are doing. Say that the fence will be temporary. Will you do that?”

  Daniel nodded. He was a Luo himself, a tribe with its homeland some miles to the north and west. They were traditional enemies of the Maasai but, for the moment at least, and in recent memory, intertribal relations were good.

  Eleanor spent some time showing Daniel and a few of the other local helpers where she wanted the fence built. Above them the sun rose in the sky and shade disappeared. Baboons peered over the lip of the gorge, then ran away. A few deer ventured between the wild thorn bushes on the far side, then they too disappeared.

  Around one o’clock, Eleanor called a halt. It was too hot for any physical work and the light was too bright for photography. They drove back in high spirits, the Land Rovers racing one another across the flat plain of the Serengeti, churning up great red-brown dust clouds behind them. Giraffe looked on, then lolloped away.

  Back at the camp, most of them took a shower. It was always dusty in the gorge and, with water limited, a shower at this time of day was much more useful than first thing or in the early evening.

  Mgina, the slender Maasai woman Natalie had told Russell North about, brought her shower water in two galvanized iron buckets. Although she was uneducated, Mgina had picked up a stilted English in the few years she had been working at the camp, and, despite her cheeks being stippled by tribal cut marks, she was pretty, Natalie thought, and had a natural, slow-moving, languid grace. She was slight but still wiry enough to carry the water with which she filled the canvas shower cistern. Natalie had established that Mgina came from a village about five hours’ walk from the camp, where she had numerous sisters and brothers.

  While Natalie took a shower, letting the hot water chase the sand and grit out of her eyelids and ears and sluice down the back of her neck, while she lathered her arms and thighs and let the smell of the soap, which she had brought with her from Gainsborough, remind her of the rainy Lincolnshire fens, Mgina collected up her used shirt and trousers and underwear, and set out fresh ones on the bed.

  When she had used all the available hot water, Natalie half dried herself, so she didn’t drip water everywhere, but then she let the remains of the water evaporate on her skin as she sat on her towel on the chair of her dressing table, combing her hair. Evaporation was deliciously cooling.

  She had always had a thing about her hair, ever since she was a girl. She never felt properly dressed unless her hair was brushed and brushed and brushed again. Her fellow undergraduates at Cambridge had teased her about it but she hadn’t minded. And they had given up in the end, and accepted her for what she was. In the gorge, she realized, brushing her hair was even more important: with water strictly rationed, brushing kept the dust to a minimum and she needed to feel that her hair was as clean as could be.

  Mgina watched as Natalie did this, as fascinated by her straight hair as Natalie was with Mgina’s close-cropped curls.

  “What is your comb made of, Miss Natalie?”

  “Tortoiseshell.”

  “It is very beautiful.”

  Natalie nodded her head. “Yes, it was my mother’s—she gave it to me.”

  “Does she have hair like you?”

  “She did. She’s dead now. She was killed, an accident.”

  “I am sorry for you. They go fast, these cars.”

  “They do, yes.” Natalie put down the comb. “And your family, Mgina? How are they, they are well?”

  Mgina made a face. “Not the little one, Odnate. He has the flu, I think, but also spots under his tongue.”

  “Oh,” said Natalie, quietly. “Oh dear.” She frowned and stopped brushing her hair. “When did this flu start, Mgina?”

  “The day before yesterday. There was a feast the day before that and it was the first time Odnate had been old enough to attend. The next day he was ill—it was too much for him.”

  Natalie had stood up and was toweling herself dry. “What did you eat at this feast?”

  “Corn, berries, meat of course. Fruit. What is it, Miss Natalie?”

  Natalie had thrown the towel on the bed. “Just wait there, Mgina, while I get dressed.”

  In front of the other woman, Natalie stepped into her underwear, put on her fresh set of trousers and shirt, laced her boots. She fastened the cuffs of her shirt at her wrists, so her arms were protected from the sun.

  Then she said, “Come with me. Leave the laundry on the bed. Quickly now.”

  Frowning herself, Mgina did as she was told.

  Natalie led the way along the row of tents to where she knew Jonas Jefferson was billeted.

  “Jonas!” she half shouted when they reached his tent. “Are you there?”

  A short pause, then the flap was pulled back. “Yes—what is it?”

  Natalie turned to Mgina, then back to Jonas.

  “Mgina’s brother has ‘flu,’ she thinks. But he also has spots under his tongue.”

  Jonas looked from Natalie to Mgina and back again. “Anthrax?”

  “He woke up with it the day before yesterday, after a big feast. The meat could have been contaminated.”

  Jonas nodded. “You could be right. How do you know about anthrax?”

  “I saw it on a dig in Israel two years ago. Do we have any penicillin?”

  “Yes, of course, but it’s precious. Where does Mgina’s family live?”

  “The village doesn’t have a name, but it’s five hours’ walk away—ten to twelve miles.”

  “Okay. I’ll get the antibiotics; meet me at the Land Rovers in ten minutes.”

  • • •

  “Anthrax?” said Eleanor, helping herself to water from the jug, as Mutevu Ndekei began serving dinner—lamb chops. “That can be serious, right?”

  “Oh, yes,” said Jonas. “If you don’t catch it in the first couple of days, the patient can be dead inside a week.”

  “Nasty,” said Eleanor with a shudder. “And how do you catch such a disease?”

  “It varies. Through an open wound, from someone else who has it … in this case by eating contaminated meat.”

  “And penicillin cures it?”

  Jefferson nodded. “I’ll be driving over to see the boy again tomorrow.” He looked across to Natalie and smiled.

  “You saved the boy’s life,” said Eleanor, addressing Natalie. “How do you know so much about disease?”

  Natalie was helping herself to chops. “As I told Jonas, I was on a dig in Israel, with Ira Ben-Osman, two years ago. There was an outbreak among the local Palestinians. Three died but we managed to save another fifteen. They had all eaten contaminated meat.”

  The business with Mgina and Mgina’s brother had been quite an episode. Natalie didn’t feel as though she had saved someone’s life, but the boy—when they had reached him—obviously didn’t have flu. He was vomiting blood and had severe abdominal pains and a fever. It was right that they had gone when they had. Mgina’s family had clearly been worried—their traditional herbal remedies were not working. Of course, the penicillin hadn’t produced any immedia
te effect, so the family had still been anxious when Jonas and Natalie had left. They had done their best to reassure Odnate’s parents but had not wholly succeeded. Hopefully, tomorrow would bring better news.

  The lamb had reached Eleanor. She inspected it doubtfully. “How can you tell if meat is contaminated?”

  “It’s not easy,” said Jonas. “Animals that have anthrax collapse, so they mustn’t be used for food, which is probably what happened in this case. If the spores are dense enough, you can see them with the naked eye—they are gray-white and resemble ground glass.”

  Eleanor picked up the chop in her fingers and turned it over. “Hmmm. Did anyone else in the village contract the disease?”

  “Not so far as I could see,” replied Jonas. “Odnate was the youngest at the feast, with the least resistance. If the animal they were eating was not badly infected, and well roasted … he was unlucky.”

  Eleanor nodded. “So is the boy out of the woods?”

  “Not necessarily. His family must be disciplined and give him the full course of antibiotics.”

  “Is that going to leave us short? You know, in case we have an accident here?”

  Jonas shook his head. “We’re fine, unless we have our own epidemic. But next time anyone goes to Nairobi, they should top up our supplies.”

  Eleanor nodded again. “If I talk to Jack, I’ll mention it. I’m not sure when he’s planning to come. He’s on some political committee in Nairobi.”