Текст книги "Elephant Song"

Автор книги: Wilbur Smith

Соавторы: Wilbur Smith
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Текущая страница: 21 (всего у книги 36 страниц)

Paul had been a medical doctor like herself.  The two of them had qualified in the same year and had come out to Africa as a team.  He had died from the bite of one of the deadly forest mambas within the first six months and at every opportunity she still visited his grave at the foot of a gigantic silk-cotton tree on the banks of the Ubomo River deep in the forest.

Four lovers in all her thirty-two years.  No, she was not a sensual person, but she had been intensely aware of the strong pull that Daniel Armstrong had exerted upon her, and she Had experienced no great urge to resist it.  He was the kind of man for her.

Then suddenly it was all a lie and a delusion, and he was just like the rest of them.  A hired gun, she thought angrily, for BOSS and that monster Hawison.  She tried to use her anger to shield herself against the sense of loss she felt at the destruction of an ideal.  She had believed in Daniel -Armstrong.  She had given him her trust and he had betrayed it.

Put him out of your mind, she determined.  Don't think about him again.

He's not worth it.  But she was honest enough to realise that it was not going to be that easy.

From the stern the helmsman of the dhow called softly to her in Swahili and she roused herself and looked forward.  The shoreline was half a mile ahead, the low line of beach surf creaming softly in the starlight.

Ubomo.  She was coming home.  Her mood soared.

Suddenly there was a cry from the helm and she spun about.

The two crew men, naked except for their loin-cloths, ran forward.

In haste they seized the main sheet and brought the boom of the sail crashing down upon the deck.  The lateen sail billowed and folded and they sprang upon it and furled it swiftly.  Within seconds the stubby mast was bare and the dhow was wallowing low on the dark waters.  What is it) Kelly called softly in Swahili, and the helmsman answered quietly, Patrol boat.  She heard it then, the throb of the diesel engine above the wind and her nerves sprang tight.  The crew of the dhow were all Uhati tribesmen, loyal to old President Omeru.  They were risking their lives, just as she was, by defying the curfew and crossing the lake in darkness.

They crouched on the open deck and stared out into the darkness, listening to the beat of the engine swelling louder.  The gunboat was the gift of an Arab oil sheikh to the new regime, a fast forty-foot assault craft with twin cannon in armoured turrets fore and aft.  It had seen thirty years' service in the Red Sea.  It spent most of its time tied-up in the port of Kahali, with engines broken down, awaiting spare parts.

However, they had picked a bad night for the crossing; the gunboat was for once seaworthy and dangerous.

Kelly saw the flash of foam at the bows of the oncoming patrol boat.

It was heading up from the south.  Instinctively she crouched lower, trying to shield herself behind the bulwark as she considered her position.  On its present course the patrol boat must surely spot them.

If Kelly were found on board the dhow, the crew would be shot without trial, one of those public executions on the beach of Kahali which were part of Ephrem Taffari's new style of government.  Of course she would be shot alongside them, but that did not concern Kelly at that moment.

These were good men who had risked their lives for her.  She had to do all in her power to protect them.

If she were not found on board, and there were no other contraband, the crew might have a chance of talking thereselves out of trouble.

They would almost certainly be beaten and fined, and the dhow might be confiscated, but they might escape execution.

She reached for her backpack that lay in the bows.  Quickly she undid the straps that held the inflatable mattress strapped to the underside of the pack.  She unrolled the nylon-covered mattress and frantically blew into the valve, filling her lungs and then exhaling long and hard, all the time watching the dark shape of the patrol boat loom out of the night.

it was coming up fast.  There was no time to inflate the mattress fully. It was still soft and floppy as she closed the valve.

She stood up and slung the pack on her back and called back to the helmsman, Thank you, my friend.  Peace be with you, and may Allah preserve you.  The lake people were nearly all Muslim.  And with you be peace, he called back.  She could hear the relief and gratitude in his tone.  He knew she was doing this for him and his crew.

Kelly sat on the bulwark and swung her legs overboard.  She clutched the semi-inflated mattress to her chest and drew a deep breath before she dropped into the lake.  The water closed over her head.  It was surprisingly cold and the heavy pack on her back carried her deep before the buoyancy of the mattress asserted itself and lifted her back to the surface.

She broke through, gasping and with water streaming into her eyes.

it took her a few minutes to master the trim of the bobbing mattress, but at last she lay half across it, her legs dangling, the strap of the backpack hooked over her arm.  It held her head clear, but she was low down in the water.  The waves dashed into her face and threatened to overturn her precarious craft.

She looked for the dhow and was surprised to see how far she had drifted from it.  As she watched, the boom was hoisted and the sail filled.  The ungainly little boat turned to run free before the breeze, trying to get clear of the forbidden coast before the patrol boat spotted her.

Good luck, she whispered, and a wave broke into her face.

She choked and coughed, and when she looked again both the dhow and the patrol boat had disappeared into the night.

She kicked out gently, careful not to upset her balance, conserving her strength for the long night ahead.  She knew that some monstrous crocodiles inhabited the lake; she had seen a photograph of one that measured eighteen feet from the tip of its hideous snout to the end of its thick crested tail.  She put the picture out of her mind and kept kicking, lining herself up by the stars, swimming towards where Orion stood on his head upon the western horizon.

A few minutes later she glimpsed a flash of light far upwind.

It may have been the searchlight of the patrol boat as it picked up the shape of the dhow.  She forced herself not to look back.

She didn't want to know the worst, for there was nothing more she could do to save the men who had helped her.

She kept swimming, kicking to a steady rhythm.  After an hour she wondered if she had moved at all.  The backpack was like a drogue anchor hanging below the half-inflated mattress.

However, she dared not jettison it.  Without the basic equipment it contained, she was doomed.

She kept on swimming.  Another hour and she was almost exhausted.

She was forced to rest.  One calf was cramping badly.  The breeze had dropped and in the silence she heard a soft regular rumbling, like an old man snoring in his sleep.  It took her a moment to place the sound.

The beach surf, she whispered, and kicked out again with renewed strength.

She felt the water lift and surge under her as it met the shelving bottom.  She swam on, torturously slowly, dragging herself and the sodden pack through the water.

Now She saw the ivory-nut palms above the beach silhouetted against the stars.  She held her breath and reached down with both feet.  Again the water closed over her head, but with her toes she felt the sandy bottom, six feet below the surface, and found enough strength for one last effort.

Minutes later she could stand.  The surf knocked her sprawling, but she dragged herself up again and staggered up the narrow beach to find shelter in a patch of papyrus reeds.  Her watch was a waterproof Rolex, a wedding gift from Paul.  The time was a few minutes after four.  It would be light soon.  She must get in before a Hita patrol picked her up, but she was too cold and stiff and exhausted to move just yet.

While she rested she forced herself to open the pack with numb fingers and to empty out the water that almost doubled its weight.  She wrung out her few spare items of clothing and wiped down the other equipment as best she could.  While she worked she chewed a high-energy sugar bar and almost immediately felt better.

She repacked the bag, slung it, and started back northwards, keeping parallel to the lake, but well back from the soft beach sand which would record her footprints for a Hita patrol to follow.

Every few hundred yards there were the gardens and thatched buildings of the small sharnbas.  Dogs barked and she was forced to detour round the huts to avoid detection.  She hoped that she was heading in the right direction.  She reasoned that the captain of the dhow would have come in upwind of his destination to give himself leeway in which to make his landfall so she must keep northwards.

She had been going for almost an hour, but reckoned that she had covered only a couple of miles when, with a surge of relief, she saw ahead of her the pale round dome of the little mosque shining like a bald man's head in the first pearly radiance of the dawn.

She broke into a weary trot, weighed down by the pack and her fatigue.

She smelt woodsmoke, and saw the faint glow of the fire under the dark tamarind tree, just where it should have been.  Closer, she made out the figures of two men squatting close beside the fire.

Patrick!  she called hoarsely, and one of the figures jumped up and ran towards her.  Patrick, she repeated, and stumbled and would have fallen if he had not caught her.  Kelly!  Allah be praised.  We had given you up.  The patrol boat.  . she gasped.  Yes.  We heard firing and saw the light.  We thought they Had caught you.

Patrick Omeru was one of old President Omeru's nephews.

So far he had escaped the purges by Taffari's soldiers.  He was one of the first friends that Kelly had made after her arrival in Ubomo.

He lifted the pack from her shoulders, and she groaned with relief.

The wet straps had abraded her delicate skin.  Kill the fire, Patrick called to his brother, and he kicked sand over the coals.  Between them they led Kelly to where the truck was parked in a grove of mango trees behind the derelict mosque.  They helped her into the back and spread a tarpaulin over her as she lay on the dirty floorboards.  The truck stank of dried fish.

Even though the truck jolted and crashed through the potholes, she was at last warm, and soon she slept.  It was a trick she had learned in the forest, to be able to sleep in any circumstances of discomfort.

The sudden cessation of engine noise and movement woke her again.

She did not know how long she had slept, but it was light now and a glance at her watch showed her it was after nine in the morning.  She lay quietly under her tarpaulin and listened to the sound of men's voices close alongside the truck.

She knew better than to disclose her presence.

Minutes later, Patrick pulled back the tarpaulin and smiled at her.

Where are we, Patrick?  Kahali, in the old town.  A safe place.  The truck was parked in the small yard of one of the old Arab houses.  The building was dilapidated, the yard filthy with chicken droppings and rubbish.

Chickens roosted under the eaves or scratched in the dirt.  There was a strong smell of drains and sewage.  The Omeru family had fallen on hard times since the old president's downfall.

In the sparsely furnished frontroom, with its stained walls on which old yellowed newspaper cuttings had been pasted, Patrick's wife had a meal ready for her.  It was a stew of chicken spiced with chilli and served with a bowl of manioc and stewed plantains.  She was hungry, and it was good.

While she ate, other men came to speak to her.  They slipped in quietly and squatted beside her in the bare room.  They told her what had happened in Ubomo during her absence, and she frowned while she listened.  Very little of it was good tidings.

They knew where she was going and they gave her messages to take with her.  Then they slipped.  away again as quietly and furtively as they had arrived.

It was long after dark when Patrick stood up and told her quietly, It is time to go on.

The truck was now loaded with dried fish in woven baskets.

They had built a small hiding-place for her under the load.  She crawled into it and Patrick passed her pack in to her, then seated the opening behind her with another basket of fish.

The truck started and rumbled out of the yard.  This part of the journey was only three hundred miles.  She settled down and slept again.

She woke every time the truck stopped.  Whenever she heard voices, the loud arrogant voices of Hita speaking Swahili with the distinctive cutting accent, she knew they had halted at another military road-block.

Once Patrick stopped the truck along a deserted stretch of road and let her out of her hiding-place and-she went a short distance into the veld to relieve herself.  They were still in the open grassland savannah below the rim of the Great Rift.  She heard cattle lowing somewhere close and knew that there was a Hita manyatta nearby.

When she woke again it was to a peculiar new motion and to the chant of the ferrymen.  It was a nostalgic sound and she knew she was nearly home.

During the night she had opened a small peephole from her little cave under the baskets of dried fish into the outside world.  Through it she caught glimpses of the expanses of the Ubomo River touched with the hot orange and violet of the breaking dawn.

The silhouettes of the ferrymen passed back and forth in front of her peephole as they handled the lines that linked the ferry-boat from one bank of the river to the other.  The ferry across the Ubomo River was almost at the edge of the great forest.  She could imagine it as clearly as if she were actually looking at it.

The wide sweep of the river was the natural boundary between savannah and forest.  The first time she had stood upon its bank she had been amazed by the abruptness with which the forest began.  On the east bank the open grass and acacia dropped away towards the lake, while on the far bank stood a gigantic palisade of dark trees, a solid unbroken wall a hundred feet high, with some of the real giants towering another fifty feet above those.  It had seemed to her at once both forbidding and frightening.  On the far bank the road tunneled into the forest like a rabbit hole.

In the few short years since then, the forest had been hacked back as the land-hungry peasantry nibbled at its edges.  They had toppled the great trees that had taken hundreds of years to grow and burned them where they fell for charcoal and fertiliser.  The forest retreated before this onslaught.  It was now almost five miles from the ferry to the edge of the tree-line.

In between sprawling shambas with fields of plantains and manioc.

The worked-out ground was being abandoned to weeds and secondary growth. The fragile forest soils could bear only two or three years of cultivation before they were exhausted and the peasant farmers moved on to clear more forest.

Even when it reached the retreating forest edge, the road was no longer a tunnel through the trees, roofed over with a high canopy of vegetation as it once had been.  The verges of the road had been cut back half a mile on each side.  The peasants had used the road as an access to the interior of the forest.

They had built their villages alongside the road and hacked out their gardens and plantations from the living forest that bordered it.

This was the terribly destructive slash and burncultivation method by which they felled the trees and burned them where they fell.  Those true giants of the forest, whose girth defied the puny axes, they destroyed by building a slow fire around the base of the trunk.  They kept it burning week after week until it ate through the hardwood core and toppled two hundred feet of massive trunk.

The road itself was like a deadly blade, a spear into the guts of the forest, steeped in the poison of civilisation.  Kelly hated the road.

It was a channel of infection and corruption into the virginal womb of the forest.

Looking out of her peephole she saw that the road was wider now than she remembered it.  The deep rutted tracks were churned by the wheels of logging and mining trucks and the other heavy traffic that had begun using it since President Omeru had been overthrown and the forest concession given to the powerful foreign syndicate to develop.

She knew from her studies and the meticulous records that she kept that already the road had altered the local rainfall patterns.  The mile-wide cutline was unprotected by the umbrella of the forest canopy.

The tropical sun struck down on this open swathe and heated the unshielded earth, causing a vast updraught of air above the road.  This dispersed the rain clouds that daily gathered over the green forest.

Nowadays little rain fell along the roadway, although it still teemed down at the rate of three hundred inches a year upon the pristine forests only a few miles away.

The roadside was dry and dusty and hot.  The mango trees witted in the noonday heat and the people living beside the road built themselves barazas, thatched roofs supported by poles without walls, to shield them from the cloudless sky above the roadway.  Without the forest canopy the whole Ubomo basin would soon become a little Sahara.

To Kelly the road was the Sodom and Gomorrah of the forest.  it was temptation to her Bambuti friends.  The truckdrivers had money and they wanted meat and honey and women.  The Bambuti were skilled hunters who could provide both meat and honey, and their young girls, tiny and graceful, laughing and big-breasted, were peculiarly attractive to the tall bantu men.

The roadway seduced the Bambuti and lured them out of the fastness of the deep forest.  It was destroying their traditional way of life.  It encouraged the pygmies to over-hunt their forest preserves.  Where once they had hunted only to feed themselves and their tribe, now they hunted to sell the meat at the roadside dukas, the little trading stores set up at each new village.  , .

Game was each day scarcer in the forest and soon, Kelly knew, the Bambuti would be tempted to hunt in the heartland, that special remote centre of the forest where by tradition and religious restraint no Bambuti had ever hunted before.

At the roadside the Bambuti discovered palm wine and bottled beer and spirits.  Like most stone-age people, from the Australian Aboriginals to the Inuit Eskimos of the Arctic, they had little resistance to alcohol. A drunken pygmy was a pitiful sight.

In the deep forest, there was no tribal tradition that restrained the Bambuti girls from sexual intercourse before marriage.

They were allowed all the experimentation and indulgence they wanted with the boys of the tribe, except only that intercourse must not be with a full embrace.  The unmarried couple must hold each other's elbows only, not clasp each other chest to chest.  To them the sexual act was a natural and pleasant expression of affection, and they were by nature friendly and full of fun.  They were easy game for the sophisticated truckdrivers from the towns.  Eager to please, they sold their favours for a trinket or a bottle of beer or a few shillings, and from the lopsided bargain they were left with syphilis or gonorrhoea or, most deadly of all, AIDS.

In her hatred of the road, Kelly wished there was some way to halt this intrusion, this accelerating process of degradation and destruction, but she knew that there was none.  BOSS and the syndicate were behemoths on the march.  The forest, its soil, its trees, its animals, birds and its people were all too fragile.

All she could hope for was to help retard the process and in the end to save some precious fragment from the melting-pot of progress and development, and exploitation.

Abruptly the truck swung off the road and in a cloud of red talcum dust drew up at the rear of one of the roadside dukes.

Peering from her peephole, Kelly saw that it was a typical roadside store with mud walls and roof, thatched with ilala palm fronds.  There was a logging truck parked in front of it and the driver and his mate were haggling with the store-keeper for the purchase of sweet yams and strips of dried game meat blackened with smoke.

Patrick Omeru and his brother began to unload some of the baskets of dried fish to sell to the store-keeper and as they worked he spoke without looking at Kelly's hiding-place.  Are you all right, Kelly, I'm fine, Patrick.  I'm ready to move, she called back softly.  Wait, Doctor.  I must make certain that it is safe.  The army patrols the road regularly.  I'll speak to the store-keeper; he knows when the soldiers will come.  Patrick went on unloading the fish.

in front of the duka the truck-driver completed his transaction and carried his purchases to the logging truck, He climbed on board and started up with a roar and cloud of diesel smoke, then pulled out into the rutted roadway towing two huge trailers behind the truck.  The trailers were laden with forty-foot lengths of African mahogany logs, each five feet in diameter, the whole cargo comprising hundreds of tons of valuable hardwood.

As soon as the truck had gone, Patrick called to the Uhali store-keeper and they spoke together quietly.  The store-keeper shook his head and pointed back along the road.  Patrick hurried back to the side of the fish truck.  Quickly, Kelly.  The patrol will be coming any minute now, but we should hear the army vehicle long before it arrives.

The store-keeper says that the soldiers never go into the forest.

They are afraid of the forest spirits.  He pulled away the fish baskets that covered the entrance to Kelly's hiding-place, and she scrambled out and jumped down to the sun-baked earth.  She felt stiff and cramped, and she stretched her body to its full extent, lifting her hands over her head and twisting from the waist to get the kinks out of her spine.

You must go quickly, Kelly, Patrick urged her.  The patrol!

I wish I had someone to go with you, to protect you.  Kelly laughed and shook her head.  Once I'm in the forest, I will be safe.  She felt gay and happy at the prospect, but Patrick looked worried.  The forest is an evil place.  You are also afraid of the diinni, aren't you, Patrick? she teased him as she shrugged her pack on to her shoulders.

She knew that, like most Uhali or Hita, Patrick had never entered the deep forest.  They were all terrified of the forest spirits.  Whenever possible the Barnbuti were at pains to describe these malignant spirits and to invent horror stories of their own dreadful encounters with them. It was one of the Bambuti devices for keeping the big black men out of their secret preserves.  Of course not, Kelly.  Patrick denied the charge a little too hotly.  I am an educated man; I do not believe in djinni or evil spirits.

But even as he spoke his eyes strayed towards the impenetrable wall of high trees that stood just beyond the halfmile wide strip of gardens and plantations.  He shuddered and changed the subject.  You will get a message to me in the usual way?  he asked anxiously.  We must know how he is.  Don't worry.  She smiled at him and took his hand.  Thank you, Patrick.  Thank you for everything.  It is we who should thank you, Kelly.  May Allah give you peace.  Salaam aleikum, she replied.  To you peace also, Patrick.  And she turned and slipped away under the wide green fronds of the banana trees.  Within a dozen paces she was hidden from the road.

As she went through the gardens she picked the fruits from the trees, filling the pockets of her backpack with ripe mangoes and plantains.

It was a Bambuti trick.  The village gardens and the villages themselves were considered fair hunting grounds.

The pygmies borrowed anything that was left untended, but stealing was not as much fun as gulling the villagers into parting with food and valuables by elaborate confidence tricks.

Kelly smiled as she recalled the glee with which old Sepoo related his successful scams to the rest of the tribe whenever he returned from the villages to the hunting camps in the deep forest.

Now she helped herself to the garden produce with as little conscience as old Sepoo would have evinced.  In London she would have been appalled by the notion of shoplifting in Selfridges, but as she approached the edge of the forest she was already beginning to think like a Barnbuti again.

It was the way of survival.

At the end of the, last garden there was a fence of thorn branches to keep out the forest creatures that raided the crops at night, and at intervals along this fence, set on poles were grubby spirit flags and juju charms to discourage the forest demons and diinni from approaching the villages.  The Bambuti always howled with mirth when they passed this evidence of the villagers superstition.  It was proof of the success of their own subtle propaganda.

Kelly found a narrow gap in the fence, just big enough to accommodate the pygmy who had made it and she slipped through.

The forest lay ahead of her.  She lifted up her eyes and watched a flock of grey parrots flying shrieking along the treetops a hundred feet above her.

The entrance to the forest was thick and entangled.  Where the sunlight had penetrated to the ground it had raised a thicket of secondary growth.  There was a pygmy track through this undergrowth, but even Kelly was forced to stoop to enter it.

The average Bambuti was at least a foot shorter than she was, and with their machetes they cut the undergrowth just above their own head-height.  When fresh, the raw shoots were easy to spot, but once they dried, they were sharp as daggers and on the level of Kelly's face and eyes.  She moved with dainty care.

She did not realise it herself, but in the forest she had learned by example to carry herself with the same agile grace as a pygmy.

It was one of the Bambuti's derisive taunts that somebody walked like a wazungu in the forest.  Wazungu was the derogatory term for any outsider, any foreigner.  Even old Sepoo admitted that Kelly walked like one of the real people and not like a white wazungu.

The peripheral screen of dense undergrowth was several hundred feet wide.

it ended abruptly and Kelly stepped out on to the true forest floor.

It was like entering a submarine cavern, a dim and secret place.  The sunlight was reflected down through successive layers of leaves, so that the entire forest world was washed with green, and the air was warm and moist and redolent of leaf mould and fungus, a relief from the heat and dust and merciless sunlight of the outside world.  Kelly filled her lungs with the smell and looked around her, blinking as her eyes adjusted to this strange and lovely light.  There was no dense undergrowth here, the great tree-trunks reached up to the high green roof and shaded away into the green depths, ahead, reminding her of the hall of pillars in the mighty temple of Karnak on the banks of the Nile.

Under her feet the dead leaves were thick and luxuriant as a precious oriental carpet.  They gave a spring to her step and rustled under her feet to give warning to the forest creatures of her approach.  it was unwise to come unannounced upon one of the wicked red buffalo or to step upon one of the deadly adders that lay curled upon the forest floor.

Kelly moved swiftly, lightly, with the susurration of dead Leaves under her feet, stopping once to cut herself a diggingstick and to sharpen the point with her clasp-knife as she went on.

She sang as she went, one of the praise songs to the forest that Sepoo's wife, Parnba, had taught her.  It was a Bambuti hymn, for the forest itself is their god.  They worship it as both Mother and Father.

They do not believe a jot in the hobgoblins and evil spirits whose existence they so solemnly endorse and whose depredations they recount with so much glee to the black villagers.  For the Bambuti the forest is a living entity, a deity which can give up or withhold its bounty, which can give favours or wreak retribution on those who flout its laws and do it injury.  Over the years she had lived under the forest roof Kelly had come more than halfway to accepting the Bambuti philosophy, and now she sang to the forest as she travelled swiftly across its floor.

In the middle of the afternoon it began to rain, one of those solid downpours that were a daily occurrence.  The heavy drops falling thick and heavy as stones upon the upper galleries of the forest roared like a distant river in spare.  Had it fallen on bare earth with such force, it would have ripped away the topsoil and raked deep scars, washed out plains and scoured the hillsides, flooding the rivers and wreaking untold harm.

In the forest the top galleries of the trees broke the force of the storm, cushioning the gouts of water, gathering them up and redirecting them down the trunks of the great trees, scattering them benevolently across the thick carpet of dead leaves and mould, so that the earth was able to absorb and restrain the rain's malevolent power.  The rivers and streams, instead of becoming muddied by the torn earth and choked by uprooted trees, still ran sweet and crystal clear.

As the rain sifted down softly upon her, Kelly slipped off her cotton shirt and placed it in one of the waterproof pockets of her pack.  The straps would cut into her bare shoulders so she rigged the headband around her forehead and kept her arms clear as the pygmy women do.  She went on, not bothering to take shelter from the blood-warm rain.

Now she was bare-chested, wearing only a brief pair of cotton shorts and her canvas running shoes.  Minimal dress was the natural forest way. The Bambuti wore only a loincloth of beaten bark.

When the first Belgian missionaries had discovered the Bambuti, they had been outraged by their nakedness and sent to Brussels for dresses and jackets and calico breeches, all in children's sizes, which they forced them to wear.  In the humidity of the forest these clothes were always damp and unhealthy and the pygmies for the first time had suffered from pneumonia and other respiratory complaints.