THE LAST SAVANNA Read online

  You bastard M’kele, you sweet bastard, he thought. While I was too exhausted to travel faster, you were champing at the bit. MacAdam returned for the packs, lashed M’kele’s to his own, and followed the tracks. From the length of the stride it was clear M’kele was running; his tracks made him seem both nearer and more absent.

  When the moon had climbed part-way he saw a speck on the sand which soon became M’kele, coming at a fast lope.

  “Christ, you should’ve wakened me!” MacAdam said.

  “Sure, bwana, and you would’ve wanted to go with me. It’s faster alone.” M’kele did not seem out of breath. “They followed her across the Dukana and camped in a laga on the far side. One of them, the young one, went on foot and came back with her; then they put her on the camel again and turned north—they’re going to Ethiopia on the trail by Dibandiba into the Selach hills.”

  “Can we catch them before the border?”

  “Maybe.”

  “We’ve gained time.”

  “Three days.”

  “Want to rest?”

  M’kele reached for his pack. “Let’s go.”

  “At this rate, Gideon and Darius’ll never catch us…”

  The breeze shifted into their faces as they turned north, evoking desert scents and a lingering sense of Rebecca so fresh MacAdam was sure she was just ahead. As they climbed the soil became rockier, less sandy, littered with sharp volcanic debris that shifted underfoot and cut their ankles, but M’kele kept stepping on as if nothing bothered him, tireless and calmly resolute, now singing snatches of repetitive song in Maa under his breath, now chattering softly back in Swahili at MacAdam, now making no noise but the near-silent swish of his sandaled feet across the rock, the hiss of his canvas backpack, the rustle of his rifle slung across his shoulder.

  Heartbeats thundered in MacAdam’s ears. His pack lurched clumsily, the rifle a dead weight he traded from shoulder to shoulder, the pain like a rope of fire across his chest. “M’kele!” he whispered.

  Not slowing, M’kele looked back over his shoulder.

  “Stop!”

  M’kele halted, half-turned on his toes. His breath was coming in low steady pulses.

  “We’re near the border.”

  M’kele gripped MacAdam’s shoulders and bent him round, pointing. “See that ridge we crossed two hours after moonrise?” It was unimaginably far behind: a charcoal line against a chrome and black palette. “That was the border.”

  WITHOUT WARWAR the balance was against her. These two would not let her go, nor much longer would they keep her. Yet without Warwar she dared less to escape. She saw his hands, his cloak as he hunched forward to eat, his swift small feet. His voice was permanently inside her. Why did they make him stay back there? Couldn’t they see he’d never get away? He’s saved us, she decided, given up his life for us. Now these two will kill me. The thought was so terrifying she could not inhale nor stop her wrists from shaking, nor turn round enough to face the horror at her back. She could feel the ugly smashing bullets and the knife burning across her throat, and was so afraid she refused to think of it. She would find a way to make them keep her, would be Ibrahim’s wife the rest of his days and never once think that she’d done wrong. Or Warwar’s too, if only he’d come back.

  LIKE A BIRD Warwar fled south, away from Dibandiba spring, making his tracks possible for the Borani to follow in daylight. His rifle light as a wing, his feet soaring over the rocks as if each step could set them free, he reached a vast windswept tableland of rock, unmarked and brilliant under the moon, his fleeing form soon a tiny speck way out upon it. And soon after disappeared, with no trace left to track.

  After many miles he swung north again, still not tiring; the slope thickened, rose into the Dukana hills; he slowed to a jog and picked his way among the rocks and canyons towards Dibandiba.

  SHE WAS CRAZY WITH THIRST but when she pointed to her mouth Rashid snarled and raised his rifle. Jackals were calling and he kept twisting his head to listen; Ibrahim came in silently from guarding and for a few moments, although she could not understand the words, she knew they talked about her, Rashid’s voice rising in rapid irritation, Ibrahim’s placid, deliberate. She caught the word for “morning” several times; whatever they would do, they argued as to whether they should do it now or in the “morning.”

  “Rashid!” she whispered. “Ibrahim!” If she called them by their names then she and they would be one family, intimates—how could they kill her then? They barely acknowledged her. “If you want just leave me—I’ll never say a word…be false.” She could not think of the Swahili for “betray you”. But Ibrahim hissed sharply and kicked something that smeared her face with rough dampness; she raised her bound hands to it and smelled that it was dung.

  Accept you’re going to die, she told herself. The boys are old enough to do without you. Klaus doesn’t care. The one man you dared to love you chased away—you’re so good at killing your own joy. You learned how from your parents and no doubt you’ve taught it to your sons. Told yourself love’s a fantasy, not how life’s lived. You never lived expecting to be happy.

  Tears burnt her eyelids, dribbled down her cheeks. It couldn’t hurt any worse to try to be happy. Why had she settled for a loyal supporting role, first to her father’s stolid wisdom, then to Klaus as his wide-eyed favorite student, so shy, so desperate for excellence that finally the highest mark he could give her was as assistant archaeologist and wife? That each of her finds became his, her scholarship his, as all the while he told her “dear, you must publish more, put your name on things”, when even her name had gone, had become his.

  Wind chilled her sunburnt flesh. The bonds round her wrists and ankles had numbed her hands and feet again. Rashid came in from guarding and Ibrahim went out. Rashid watched her; she could hear him grinding moustache hairs between his teeth, heard his fingernails picking lice, his breath clogged and corroded by the desert dust. I will learn to be happy, she told herself. Even now.

  25

  THE STARS BEGAN to lighten, as if the finest veil rose between them and the earth. She realized she’d been dreaming of Warwar, in the dream hearing his voice, then woke to find him speaking with Rashid as if he’d always been there, as if nothing had gone wrong. How far back, she wondered for an instant, have things gone wrong? She sat up quickly and extended bound hands as if to embrace him, then dropped them. “I was so afraid!”

  “Don’t worry, Mama, you were safe.”

  “No.” Afraid for you, she wanted to say. “Where are they?”

  “The Borani? Chasing me far into Chalbi. It will make them very thirsty.”

  “I’m so thirsty. Please bring water.”

  “There’s none. Be strong.”

  “Don’t let them kill me.”

  “I told you,” he said. “They’ve gone!”

  “No—them!”

  When Warwar came to sit by the fire, Ibrahim moved aside to make space for him.

  “Your whitewoman’s been the root of all our problems.” Ibrahim squeezed Warwar’s knee, consoling him for the loss that was inevitable. “She’s led us into the Chalbi, when we followed the Land Rover tracks. She’s taken us north, to keep her and find ransom. She led us into the hands of the Borani, who stole our tusks and twelve thousand shillings. And if they hadn’t sworn a vow of peace we’d have died yesterday—in ways so horrible you can’t imagine. Then she bewitched you to return for her, causing them to break their vow and hunt us. All this she’s done to us.”

  Warwar shook his head. “She’s done none of this—she’s been our captive.”

  “Her influence, little cousin. Woman’s influence is impure, and spreads around her like the disease that kills the camels, except that it kills men’s honor and will.”

  Warwar waited, telling himself not to argue. “Perhaps because my mother’s dead and I have no sisters I do not understand woman. But is it not out of her body that we come, like a calf from a camel? Who, then, creates the calf?”

 
; “God does, nestling. Just as Allah has created thee. Woman is the vessel in which God’s holy life is stored. When you eat wheat from the clay jar you don’t praise the jar! When you light a wick in a cup of tallow to brighten the night, do you thank the cup?”

  “If woman’s the vessel in which Allah’s holy life is kept, then what is man?”

  Ibrahim cocked his bushy head, as if pleased by the question. He glanced at Rashid readying the camels, checked the horizon. “Man’s the sword of God, disemboweling his foes. Man is the plough of God, inserting God’s seed. He is the house in which the clay jar of wheat and the tallow candle are kept.”

  Warwar stood, staggered with exhaustion. “Why have you not praised me, cousin, for standing alone against the Borani?”

  “If you had not shot the people at the Land Rovers and taken the whitewoman, and worse, if you had not gone to the Borani camp to find her, we would not have had to fight them. How can I praise you for merely rectifying some of the harm you’ve done?”

  “But I saved our whitewoman! The tusks and twelve thousand shillings are gone but in the Sudan we can sell her for much more!”

  “Ransom her, foolish child?” Ibrahim patted Warwar’s arm. “We can’t take her to the Sudan now. Not with your Borani hunting us.”

  Pretending to adjust his cowl, Warwar pulled his hand away, sensing in the action both his own freedom and a freedom from any further protection Ibrahim might have given him. Cold fear fluttered through his heart; I’m better now, he told himself, I’m on my own. “I’ll take her,” he said. “I don’t fear Borani.”

  “What you saw yesterday was a few riders pledged to peace!” Again Ibrahim reached out. “Foolish child, I’m trying to reason with you!”

  “And I’m trying to reason with you! Don’t call me ‘foolish child’! I won’t give up the bounty I captured—and recaptured—just because you’re afraid!”

  Ibrahim sighed, shook his head. His hands fell, hung at his sides till he crossed his arms. “It’s ten days’ ride from here to Somalia, and more than twenty days till we’ll be home safe in the Marrehan. We can’t bring her that far.”

  “Without her ransom we’ve gained nothing!”

  “We can’t risk Sudan. Even here, Ethiopia, is too dangerous…”

  “This place will soon also be Somalia—”

  “If we run into Gabbras on the Sidamo, I invite you to explain that to them.”

  Warwar spat, making a camel jerk its head. He returned to where the whitewoman lay rubbing the numbness from her hands and legs. “We go soon. If you have to make water or something…”

  She stared up at him stupidly. “How can I make water, idiot, when I’m dying of thirst?”

  They have no endurance, he thought, no will. Their skin’s so thin the sun goes right inside and boils their blood. Ibrahim’s right: pale as cactus worms—how do they find each other appealing? He felt a sudden rage at her, for bedeviling him, drawing him on. Ibrahim’s right: no one’ll pay anything for you. Even if they do, you’ll die first and cheat us of our ransom.

  He turned from her and climbed the side of the ravine to where it became a cliff, the far wall a single great blade of black rising into the dawn, its crest bloodied by sun. Kneeling on the rough rock spotted with bubbles, as if the earth’s lung tissue had been suddenly exposed and petrified, he said his prayers quickly. But the words of the prayers sank into his mind and would not be ignored. Who was the innocent? Was it true that only man, not woman, is loved by God? If God loved woman, why did He give her such inferior station? Was it the lowly He loved the most? Why—was God afraid of men?

  Again with a swallow’s vision from above he saw himself crouched against the black stone, then saw the whitewoman, squat Ibrahim and Rashid, the disinterested camels, then they were tiny amid the cloven peaks and fractured land, the earth a patient beast of burden beaten and hungry, the blue-black sky where the stars encamp on their great pilgrimages of night; he saw even beyond their embers to the great sea without end that holds the universe like an embryo within its mother’s womb. And what was God if not the mother of all this?

  Beyond the ravine the black blade of stone grew bright. Halfway up its flank a single gray commiphora bush wavered in the heat which began to coil and tumble up from the maw of the ravine as from an iron cauldron sitting empty on the flames. His heart went out to this bush, gripping the rock, alone yet surviving where no other had, battling for a place to pass life on.

  But I have not brought life to any children, he thought. My friend Biou is not yet twenty and he has given life to three sons. His cousin Sfey had two sons before he was eighteen. In a year I will be seventeen; they had wealthy fathers who paid the bride price. I have no father; it will be many years until I have so many animals. By then Soraya will be gone and I’ll have to choose others: I’ll soon be like the old men spitting in the fire while their young wives bend over for the warriors behind the thorn fence or on the way home from the water hole, their bodies slick under their black gowns.

  He saw he would be absent from eternity. With an unexpected queasy feeling in his limbs, he took the last water gourd from Ibrahim’s pannier and put it on the ground beside the whitewoman. In her haste she knocked it over, its wooden plug rolling over the stones as the gourd glugged milky brown, but she snatched it and drank it empty, sucked at the pebbles where it had spilled, held the gourd upside down over her mouth for the three drops that came out. He felt ashamed, as if he’d seen her in an intimate act.

  Ibrahim seemed huge, blocking the light. “What do you, child, with the last water?”

  Warwar could not keep the quaver from his voice. “She drank it.”

  “She?” Ibrahim’s voice was a scream, a curse, his eyes wide in desperate understanding. “You gave it to her?!”

  He does not need this whitewoman’s ransom, Warwar thought. He knows I do. “Without the tusks and twelve thousand shillings, what else do we have?”

  Ibrahim slowly drew in a breath, exhaled. “Mount her behind Rashid. You behind me. I pray the Borani find us. So we can leave you both to them.”

  When they stopped at noon she lay motionless in the shade of a camel, almost beneath its hooves, but when the camel moved she did not follow. Her hand when Warwar took it was hot and dry; he fanned her face with his sleeve, found four hareri sticks, pounded them into the ground, and stretched a goatskin over her.

  “What’s this?”

  With disgust he noted how Ibrahim’s thick yellow curved nails protruded from his tattered sandals. “She needs water.”

  “So do I, nestling, and Rashid. Even the camels need water.”

  “She won’t live!”

  “She’s eaten your soul. Look! He covers her like a lover.”

  “If you want her money,” Rashid offered, “we must take her to water.”

  “She can’t ride! We must bring water to her!” Warwar was shocked by his own plaintive, pleading voice. “I’ll stay—you’re the ones who know how to find the Gabbra water hole beyond the baboon-backed mountain—I’ll keep her alive till you get back!”

  “We’ll keep her,” Ibrahim said. “Unless the Borani come. You go.”

  “I don’t know where it is!” Warwar noticed the woman’s feet showing from under the goatskin, her funny white rubber-soled shoes like disassembled parts of a painted doll. As soon as I go they will kill you. Then there’ll be no one to keep Ibrahim from Soraya. But why would Rashid sacrifice his share? Does he owe Ibrahim a deed? If I say I fear the Gabbras, want to stay, they won’t believe me, will know I don’t trust them.

  If you hate a man, never let him know, he told himself. If you distrust him, don’t let it show. “Tell me where it is. If you swear not to kill her, I’ll go.”

  “It’s on the other side.” Ibrahim pointed to the left of the baboon-backed mountain rising above the lower Selach peaks. “It’s a cleft of white rock, you can see it, when you climb the baboon’s neck.”

  From Rashid’s camel Warwar gathered three empty
water gourds, then turned to Ibrahim’s. “Don’t!” Ibrahim called. “In case somehow you lose them…”

  In case you fear I won’t come back? Thought Warwar bitterly. That I’ll go to water with all the gourds then leave you here for the sun and the Borani? What would keep you from going to the water yourself? But without your gourds how far thereafter would you get? Do you fear I’ll ambush you? Why would I not kill you now? In any case, your fear, your distrust, show how bad things have become between us. Do you see that? “Watch carefully!” Warwar called. “Pray I bring water!”

  26

  “IT WAS BORANI,” M’kele said. “But they didn’t shoot.”

  “They gather up the cartridges. Afterwards.” MacAdam stared out on the desolate valley crisscrossed and pummeled by hoof prints. Don’t be a fool, he ordered himself. This is just the pain that comes after an injured limb has finally been removed. If I could tell Dorothy she’d understand. If only I’d told her, all along. But it never would’ve happened, me and Rebecca, if I’d talked to Dorothy. If I’d told her, that would have meant a kinship existed between us, and then I wouldn’t have needed Rebecca.

  “They let them go!” M’kele shouted. “Here! The Somalis’ camels! The boy’s still on foot!”

  MacAdam ran to the camel prints angling north away from the Boranis’ trail. M’kele’s fingers on the tracks were like a doctor’s parting injured flesh. “But Bwana, the Somalis now have only two camels.”

  MacAdam’s backpack was like concrete; he raised a hand to slip off its strap, then noticed he’d already put it down. With a cupped palm he covered up a single track.

  “Let’s see what the Borani did to her,” he said. “Then we’ll kill them too.”

  THE SUN HAD SHIFTED into her eyes but her head was too heavy to move. If she could get away from Ibrahim and Rashid she could go to the geb tree and have water. As soon as Warwar returned he’d go with her. But if Warwar didn’t come back?

  At the geb tree there had been water in the little pool. How did she know exactly how it would be, before she ever saw it? How did she grow from a little girl in Papa’s lap on the lawn of the house by the Seine to that assured, frightened young woman in Klaus’ class at the Sorbonne, to a mother? How did something come out of nothing?