THE LAST SAVANNA Page 21

  At the bottom of the cliff he could find no sign that she’d descended. Again he climbed the cliff and searched in widening circles far above it, but there was no trace or smell of death, nor could he find her tracks. Even if a lion had carried her off there would be blood, even if the jackals had licked it off the rocks something would be left, if only their scattered, deep-clawed prints.

  A MALACHITE SUNBIRD alit twittering on a desert rose, its feathers iridescent in the rising sun against the rose bush’s round red flowers. Warwar threw a stone but missed, the bird darting off in an emerald flash; on the bush a gout of sap appeared where the stone had cut the thin bark. After a moment’s thought Warwar crawled to the bush, found a sharp rock, and began to make parallel gashes up and down its trunk.

  When the pus-like sap had filled all the gashes he gingerly collected it on the rock and, watching for Ibrahim, returned to the spring between the doum palms. Ibrahim’s tracks were everywhere, and the imprint of his knees in the sand beside the tiny pool, together with the tracks of a lion and two gazelles that had drunk this morning. Warwar knelt also and drank as deeply as he could, then stirred the poisonous sap into the water. Suddenly he was thirsty again. He glanced round as if to locate another spring and saw a small white shape, descending the mountain, that could only be Ibrahim.

  He waited until Ibrahim was close enough to see him but was still beyond range, then hobbled on his frond-wrapped feet away from the doum palms at an angle so that Ibrahim would pass by the water in pursuing him. But Ibrahim swung east to avoid a wadi and passed by the palms without drinking. His voice, tiny and sharpened by the dry air, bounced over the rocks. Warwar halted.

  Ibrahim stood at the foot of the wadi, put down his rifle, and waved both arms over his head; his widening cloak, at this distance, made him look like a namaqua dove settling to earth. Leaving his rifle, he began to walk towards Warwar, gesturing and calling.

  Warwar looked down at his naked body for a place to hide the knife. Hurriedly he knelt, partially unwrapped the palm fronds round his feet, laid the dagger against the strip of skin and muscle which was all that held his shattered left arm, and awkwardly lashed the fronds round it, holding their ends with his teeth, then tying them off till they completely covered the knife. The pain made him nearly unconscious and again he felt very thirsty.

  Ibrahim was nearer. “Yes?” Warwar called, his voice sounding peaked as an old woman’s.

  “Come closer. I have no gun.”

  Warwar tried to imagine where Ibrahim could have hidden a second gun: the first stood propped against a rock at the foot of the distant wadi; truly Ibrahim had carried only one. There was no way he, Warwar, could reach it before Ibrahim, yet if Ibrahim returned for it Warwar could easily escape beyond range. A chill wind cut his face; he glanced at the sky: tall, puffy cumulus tinged with gray had collected over the eastern peaks.

  “Are you hurt?” Ibrahim cried.

  “Not badly.”

  “Come—let me see.”

  Warwar eased nearer. “Why did you shoot me?”

  The wind grew stronger, driving pebbles before it, making him tremble. “What did you wish to do with your knife?” Ibrahim answered, close enough now Warwar could see his jagged, pockmarked face.

  “I felt impure, and had gone to wash with a little water from the well. There was a noise—I went past you to see it—the whitewoman it must have been. Then you shot me and I ran.”

  “I think you were coming to kill me.”

  “I’m not the Devil’s child. Why would I kill in my clan?”

  “There are many reasons, perhaps—”

  “Any one of us could kill the others with his rifle—if I’d wanted to do such a horrible thing that’s the only way to do it.”

  Ibrahim watched him, djellabah tugged by the cold wind. “Where is your knife?”

  “Lost when you shot me.”

  “How is thy arm, then?”

  Warwar could not still his shivering. “It’s broken, but I’ve splinted it. I must get out of the sun.”

  “We’ll go back to camp. Rashid must be afraid for us.”

  “You won’t shoot me?”

  “I was sad that you tried to attack me. Now I understand you did not and my faith in you is healed. Come, we will go together as father and son. In camp I’ll try to heal your arm.” He raised his cloaked arm in welcome, like a bird’s wing, Warwar thought, making him feel cold and bitter.

  Ibrahim returned, keeping ahead of Warwar, to the doum palms. Their shade was chilly; the wind gnawed Warwar’s aching arm. “Stay here—I’ll go for my gun,” Ibrahim said.

  “You do not drink, cousin?”

  “Nay—I’m full from this morning—but thee?”

  “I too.” Half-hidden by a palm trunk, Warwar began to unwrap the fronds round his broken arm, hiding the knife among the fronds on the ground beside him. “I must rewrap the arm.”

  Ibrahim edged closer. “First you must wash it.”

  “Yes. Help me, cousin.”

  Ibrahim knelt before him and carefully untied the last frond biting into the swollen black flesh. It’s like he’s praying, Warwar thought, leaning his good hand back for support on the ground among the discarded fronds. Ibrahim tipped forward, rebalanced himself and Warwar drove the blade deep into Ibrahim’s extended throat, yanked down and squirmed aside as Ibrahim fell, choking, stumbled wide-eyed to his feet, clenching his disgorged throat in both hands, blood spurting. He leaped at Warwar, fell on one knee, stood and, arms agape, plunged face down on the rocks. Warwar backed away, the blade dribbling down his leg. The earth darkened; the sun was gone. A coal-colored wind agitated the palm leaves; fat black clouds half-covered the sky. Warwar looked down sympathetically at Ibrahim’s corpse. “You should not have shot me for no reason.”

  He went to the wadi for Ibrahim’s rifle, came back and removed Ibrahim’s djellabah and sandals and rubbed off the blood with sand. He took Ibrahim’s damp wrist and dragged his naked corpse into the brush. “I was naked and you were clothed. See how Allah has punished you: for you are naked now and I am clothed!”

  From the pouch of Ibrahim’s djellabah he removed a bow with a string of camel gut, a plaque of baobab and a rod of geb. Even doing this gave him terror, but there was no other way. To make himself brave he looked into Soraya’s eyes. “Do it or you’ll die,” she said. “There is no other way.”

  With the plaque pinned under a rock on one side and under his foot on the other, he pushed the rod vertically down on it with his chin, shoved palm frond shreds around it and began to spin it back and forth into the plaque with the camel-gut bow. The rod kept slipping from under his chin, making him lose balance and jerk his smashed arm; finally a thread of smoke began to coil up from the fronds, making him spin harder, till a tiny coal appeared. But he blew too hard and the fronds scattered. Weeping he collected them, spun the bow furiously; the fire started and this time he blew more carefully, till he could add more fronds, then chunks of bark.

  When the fire was burning steadily he placed Ibrahim’s simi in the flames until it grew red. Keeping Soraya’s eyes locked on his, and clamping a stick between his teeth to keep from screaming, he laid the simi against the wound, shrieking as the black flesh sizzled. Do this or die. Do it or Soraya will marry someone else when she’d rather be with me. Make me do it, Soraya. He drove the blade through the open fracture and sliced round it, sinews popping and new blood welling out to hiss on the steel as he jerked the simi to pry the broken bone apart. Screaming he bit through the stick as the arm swung by a flap of underskin that parted and he fell back, convulsed, not knowing time or place or self.

  33

  WIND WHISTLED in the gray thorn trees, chilling her bones. The sky sank down over the peaks; a flock of swifts blew by chittering, flailed by the wind that cut through her torn shirt. “This one’s the best!” her father said, handed her down a yellow rose, “What perfume!” A rose thorn caught in his cardigan and he tugged it carefully free.

  Nigh
t must be coming, for it to be so dark. She must find a place to hide. No trees here, no cliffs. No water. Tomorrow she must go back to the water hole, or die. She inhaled a rose—”No, papa, this one’s better.” This one here by the château wall on the bank of the Seine— “like lemons and honey!” A great beast roared out of the sky—the anger of a God making her crouch instinctively— “Mais c’est quoi, papa?” He pointed the yellow rose at a black spot hurtling across the sky, “Ce n’est qu’un Mirage!”

  Again the great beast roared out of the sky and she fell down in fear; it flashed the desert white then dark again, images of scrub and rock seared by the lightning so she still saw them when they were gone; thunder hammered through the hills and reverberated rumbling and dying out in dark silence, but in its after-image there’d been something—a distant figure, camel—Death on a camel following her trail. The wind quickened, spraying sand and skipping rocks and pebbles over the lava. A thorn bush genuflected before it, tried to stand, bent again. It was a tiny camel and rider, negotiating now a split steep monolith where she’d rested, when? This morning? Then what had happened to this day, that she’d come so short a way? How had Death found her trail?

  On the bare black desert there was nowhere to hide. Wind screamed in her ears and yanked her hair; she ached to fall down, die, be blown away like the scraps of acacia the wind banged into her face, the branches cavorting helter-skelter through blowing sand.

  Like stones the first heavy raindrops shattered on the rocks; she faced up opening her mouth; one hit her nose and she licked its spray; one smacked painfully into her eye and she cried out, bent forward with hands over her eyes, rain whacking the back of her neck. When she looked again she could not see Death and, covering her eyes, raised her mouth to the rain, lying against a concave rock to drink it in. A tongue of fire split the sky; thunder crushed the earth and the rain crashed down, pummeling her shoulders, knocking her down but she got up and ran, for now the rain would hide her tracks and Death might not find her.

  WARWAR TWISTED his body this way and that but could not escape the stinging stones. Everywhere they struck blood welled; even Sfey and Biou, even crippled Jisha, hurled sharp rocks, even Soraya, the veil tumbling from her eyes. Wakened by his screams he sat up stunned; lightning sank forked roots into the earth; the people of El God God were gone, their stones but the hail roaring down in hard white chunks, his blood only the rain.

  RAIN AND HAIL made the lava slippery and she kept falling on its knife edges, blindly stumbled through the opaque pelting curtain as if beneath the sea. She looked back, hands like a visor over her face; the rain cascaded off them in a rippling glassy sheet through which even the nearest rocks were barely visible. Louder than the rumbling rain a hoof struck stone. Death rode out of the mist almost atop her, his camel bolting. Death leaped from his camel yelling her name, she ran but he caught her, speaking words she knew but couldn’t understand; his hand swam through walls of rain and bit her shoulder and she sank down saying do with me what you will. Death kissed her with cold lips, his beard like sharp sand, his arms like steel bands around her. She felt her heart fluttering against his chest, his rough face snagging her hair. He needs something, she thought. Death needs us all. Unafraid she looked into his eyes and saw it was MacAdam.

  “You’re alive, you’re alive!” he kept saying, holding her too tight, but she knew it wasn’t true, Death’s reassurance, this man who had been hers and now that she was dying dreamt him. And as he wasn’t real she finally could tell him what she never would have said, how every day she’d missed him, wiping a dish to put on a shelf or patting down a child’s errant hair or raising up a petrified bone to see it in the light, or suddenly awake at night, and he always her first thought—the void I made by sending you away, and what I did is the opposite of pregnancy—put an emptiness inside and let it grow, and now it’s come to term. And now I’m dead I’m with you.

  MacAdam made her sit beside him on a lava headstone, and from his camel’s saddle brought a folded cape and spread it round her shoulders, but she saw it was their goatskin and tried to throw it off. “They’re gone now,” he said, above the roaring rain. “We’re going back to Nairobi.” Little by little she let herself believe, it’s truly you, Ian, out of the desert, as he told her of the plane’s broken cylinder rod and the camels not ready at North Horr, the days of tracking over the desert, M’kele beneath his pile of stones at the water hole on Selach mountain.

  To him every thing was sacred—her lips, the look in her eyes, her wet brow and tousled hair, her cold fingers linked to his. It’s not fair, M’kele. I would not take her in return for your death. I wish it had been me, but you’re dead, dear M’kele, and I can’t help that though I caused it.

  The rain grew listless, drained away. The sun beat down and the water rose back up from the rocks in gauzy sparkling will-o’-the-wisps, as if it had been lent and now must be returned.

  WHEN THE RAIN CEASED Warwar crawled from his shelter of rocks into the sudden sun. Every stone glistened with new life; he felt washed clean. Every soul, the Prophet said, shall taste death. Dying we awaken, see life was a dream, happy in paradise to see life’s gone, that anguished hunger. He noticed the spring between the doum palms—with fresh water on its surface how innocent it seemed. Was he also innocent on the skin and yet still poisoned beneath? Or was he like the grass that after five years without rain would now burst up between the stones to make the camels heavy with young, and increase the wild herds so that even the lion brought new young into the world?

  He stood unsteadily, the new world wavering. His shattered arm ached unbearably and he reached to hold it with his left and saw it was not there, remembered that he’d cut it off, saw that he had not died, and sank weeping to the ground.

  THE AIR WAS VERY SHARP and MacAdam could see southward all the way down the Selach Hills into the Sidamo desert, a thorn tree thirty miles away diamond-etched against a tawny slope, and beyond down into the shadowed Kaka Qagala and off the horizon, beyond the Kenya boundary to the endless Chalbi. The far bronze cliffs and agate canyons glowed; each bead of sand sparkled like new loam. The breeze tasted of a thousand joys. One by one and then together the birds chanted, warbled, whistled, and cooed, like a rare desert plant bursting into life after the rain.

  Steam rose from the camel’s pungent fur. He untied his backpack from the saddle and took out her clothes he’d put there so long ago, before M’kele had died, back at the Land Rovers, and now M’kele’s dead and I have to tell Nehemiah. Feeling like a voyeur he gave them to her, then turned his back, tightening the camel’s saddle, not to see her put them on. This is foolish, he thought, turning towards her but she was dressed, the clothes too white, too large yet insufficient; she gave a grimace-smile, shocking him with remembrance: the face making a resemblance of pleasure while the teeth show distaste and the eyes pain. Seeing again death’s rictus on M’kele’s face he wanted to sit down, bury his face in his hands. So many hours across the desert thinking constantly of you, Rebecca, praying for you, expecting you dead, but I would not give up M’kele to have you here. Months and years when never passed a day I didn’t think of you, hardly an hour, and now you sit on a lava chunk, hands pressed between your knees, a scrap of wind in your hair. And yet I couldn’t prefer you to M’kele, don’t have the right, can’t have you now because I lost him.

  “Your friend who died,” she said. “I wish you hadn’t come.”

  “He was Nehemiah’s uncle.” He realized Rebecca was not Dottie, would not know Nehemiah.

  “If I’d only known it was you, coming this way, yesterday…It isn’t worth it, what you’ve done.”

  “It’s done now. He would have said it was his job.” He looked down, saw the sands, a billion little tongues of truth. “No, he never would’ve given up his life, like this.”

  “Then we took it from him. Stole it.” She looked away, that way of hers of staring out over nothing, planning a desertion. “When will we meet your men?”

  �
�They must’ve turned back at the border. Ministry orders. Anyway, we have to go back to the water hole, up there.”

  “But if they’ve come back?”

  “The kid’s injured and the other’s chasing him. Odds are they’re far away and the kid’s dead.”

  “His name was Warwar.”

  “The one who shot everyone?”

  She looked down and he felt sad, for her.

  “How badly was he hurt?” she said.

  “Arm or shoulder. Those must have been the shots you heard when you escaped.” His voice belonged to someone who cared about casualties and targets, who thought he wanted to go back, the me she hates—the dull provider, the military mind working things out. “From the water hole we’ll head round Gamud peak to the Addis road at Faille, and get a truck to Kenya.”

  WARWAR LEANED against a doum palm and lapped the last trickles running down its trunk. His body was cooler, free from fever, since he’d cut off the arm; he felt light and off-centered. Having only one arm will make me a brave man in the eyes of the clan—did I not survive the whites’ bullets and live, while Ibrahim, nearly an elder, died?

  Ibrahim, now rendered into splinters by hyenas—all but his blackened skull jawless on the sand, eye sockets gaping in dismay. Even my arm they’ve carried off, snarling and snapping among themselves.

  But I can’t return to the clan until I kill Rashid, for he’ll want to find Ibrahim’s body, will ruin everything. And Rashid has the whitewoman. I must stop him before he kills her.

  34

  BEFORE DARK they found an overhanging shelf of rock against which to light a fire that could not be seen, and nearby acacia scrub with buds of new growth for the camel to browse. There was a little water left in one canteen to mix with the maize meal from M’kele’s pack and cook ugali that they ate in handfuls without waiting for it to cool. “Tomorrow I’ll shoot us something.”