The Last Leopard (16 page)

When he judged there were enough of them, he summoned Griffin again. Martine, who’d wiped the paint dust off her face and pinched her cheeks so she looked flushed, pretended to be revived and ready to at least discuss helping to find the leopard if it would mean he would let them go sooner. Her job was to keep Griffin standing on the threshold long enough for the Enemies of Lions to make their way up his pants leg.

Their plan came close to failing. Once Griffin was satisfied that Martine was again in possession of her powers, he wanted to leave right away. Martine had to fake a sudden relapse to keep him in the room. Ben used the distraction to flick the dregs of the cream soda onto Griffin’s shoe in the hope that it would encourage the ants to make the climb up his leg.

Seconds later, Griffin let out a tormented scream. He unlocked the storeroom door and went tearing out into the overcast morning. He was leaping, twisting, and screeching like a madman. His friends sat up, bleary-eyed. As soon as they saw the storeroom door open, the keys swinging in the lock, they came barreling toward it, but Martine and Ben were ready with the sacks. A single swish sent showers of biting ants all over the men. They ripped off their shirts, shouting and cursing, and went tearing into the bush after Griffin. None of them were in any condition to prevent their prisoners’ getaway.

Now Martine and Ben were racing to try to reach Khan, not knowing if the hunters had gotten there first. A pair of Black Eagles and a few vultures were circling the granite mountain where Martine had initially encountered him, and she feared the worst, but Ben insisted that birds of prey often hovered in the vicinity of hunts, knowing there might be easy pickings.

They were trotting again when Odilo suddenly came rushing out of the bush, his mournful face transformed by a smile. Sirocco shied again, but this time Martine was ready for her and barely lost her seat.

“Please, my friends, you must go to Black Eagle Lodge straightaway,” he said, reaching up to give them each an African handshake. “Straightaway. Ngwenya came to our village with your grandmother and Sadie not even one hour past. They are searching for you.”

“My grandmother and Sadie are at the retreat?” Martine cried. “That’s fantastic. Are they all right? Have the charges been dropped?”

“Yes,” said Odilo, “but they are very frightened because we had to tell them we had not seen you both since yesterday. Ngwenya is too much upset. He is very cross with himself for not accompanying you to the village. He is searching for you in the hills. Where have you been?”

As thrilled as she was to hear that her grandmother was at the retreat and unharmed, Martine was aware that every second was precious if she and Ben were to get to Khan in time. She gave a sketchy account of their night at the hands of Griffin and his friends, leaving out the part about the Enemies of Lions. The details would keep for another day.

Odilo’s expression resumed its customary mournfulness. “I’m sorry for this,” he said. “My son, even as a small boy he was very, very smart. For many years he dreamed of going to university to be a lawyer. But after school he met these
tsotsis
and they turned his head with stories of the life he will have if he finds this treasure. Now all he can talk about is gold, gold, gold. I tell him, ‘Griffin, no good can come of this. It will end with you crying in jail.’”

He looked up at Martine. “I’m sorry for what he did to you, especially after you gave us the
muti
that made our daughter well again.”

Gunshots rang out in the distance. Sirocco danced skittishly and pawed at the ground. There was a knot of panic in Martine’s throat as she tried to control the Arab.

Ben urged Mambo up beside her. “We need to go,” he said.

“Yes,” agreed Odilo, misunderstanding, “you must get back to Gogo and your grandmother at Black Eagle.”

“Sorry, Odilo,” said Martine. “We can’t until we’ve found Khan. We have to try to save him from Mr. Rat’s hunters.”

Odilo couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “This is madness,” he protested. “Mr. Ratcliffe and his hunters, these are very dangerous men. This is something for the police. Please, children, you must get home to Gogo and your granny. Come, let me go with you.”

Martine’s chin was set with determination. “Tell my grandmother that I love her and can’t wait to see her. Tell her that I hope she understands why we can’t come back just yet. Right now we have a promise to keep.”

I
t was the witch doctor who told them they were too late. They came cantering out of the bush in a headlong rush and were confronted with a sight so surreal that it was too much even for Mambo. He slammed on the brakes and Ben sailed over his head, fortunately landing agilely on his feet. Sirocco reared and threatened to bolt, and Martine had to dismount in order to calm her. Then she and Ben stood transfixed by the bizarre, almost mystical scene before them.

Beneath a low, charcoal sky was a ring of ten vultures. With their hunched shoulders, gray crests, and shifty, all-knowing eyes, they resembled judges—spiteful, bad-tempered judges, going by the way they were hissing, cawing, and pecking at one another over something unseen. In the center of the circle, wearing his necklace of horns, belt of ostrich feathers, and leopard-skin kilt, was the witch doctor.

Martine jolted herself out of her trance and moved forward. Ben was close behind her. She stopped so suddenly that Ben ran into her. At the witch doctor’s feet was a sticky pool of blood, buzzing with flies.

“You have come too late,” he said. “The leopard has been shot with the Rat Man’s bullet.” He put a hand close to his heart to demonstrate where the lethal bullet had struck. An odor of alcohol drifted in Martine and Ben’s direction.

“No!” cried Martine in anguish. “He can’t be dead. He just can’t. I promised him I would save him.”

“I don’t believe it,” said Ben. “It’s too quiet. If the leopard were dead, the hunters would be celebrating. There would be drag marks from where they loaded his body onto their jeep. And the vultures would not be here. They’d be circling the area where he died—possibly even the jeep.”

The witch doctor waved his arms and the vultures lifted screaming into the air, a sinister cloud of beating, dark wings. They settled in the tops of the peeling plain trees nearby, watching and waiting.

“I did not say he was dead,” he told Ben a little irritably. “But he is dying. He has run for his life with the hunters behind him. Soon those who want Lobengula’s treasure will be chasing him too.”

“Can you help us?” Martine begged. “Can you throw the bones and tell us how we might get to him before they do?”

The witch doctor gave a harsh chuckle. “You shame me in front of my tribe; in front of people who believe that I am the best healer in Zimbabwe. You make me look like a fool, and now you expect me to assist you. You are dreaming, child. Go back to your
sangoma
friend and ask her. See if she can tell you where the leopard is.”

“Firstly, I didn’t shame you,” Martine said angrily. “You brought shame on yourself. Before you came, Mercy told us that you were the most talented traditional healer in Zimbabwe. You could have at least stayed sober until after you’d treated her sick child. You made the choice to drink and behave like a fool.

“As for my friend Grace, if she were here, she
would
be able to tell me where the leopard is. But she’s a thousand miles away and you’re right here. I don’t know what Griffin bribed you with to make you tell him that the leopard needed to be dead before he could find the treasure, although I can guess. It doesn’t matter. What’s done is done. You have a chance to make things right. Are you going to take it?”

For a moment, the only sound was the eerie cries of the disgruntled vultures. Martine began to take in the enormity of what she’d done.

She glanced at Ben and he was staring at her in amazement. The witch doctor, who at the beginning of her speech had produced a brown bottle from the depths of his kilt and was in the midst of taking a swig, flung it away from him. It hit a rock and shattered. A clear liquid gushed out.

“There are many curses I could put on you for saying these things,” he said quietly. “You received my warning this morning, I am sure. But you have spoken the truth in the way that only an outsider could. It is painful for me to hear and it is shameful, but I cannot deny it. This thing, this
poison,
has a hold over me and I have found no herb, no plant, that can cure me. It is like a python around my neck, strangling me. Men such as Griffin have been feeding that python, bringing me these brown bottles so that I might help them with their wicked quest. I have been too weak to resist.”

“Is there anyone you would trust to help you?” Ben asked. “Anyone you could talk to?”

The witch doctor didn’t seem to hear him. He removed his ceremonial pouch, stepped away from the buzzing patch of red, and faced Martine. “You humiliated me in front of my tribe and I will not soon forget it,” he said. “But I will also remember something else. If it were not for you and your
sangoma’s muti
the baby might have died.”

“I would never have known Grace’s medicine would help Emelia if you hadn’t said the name of the plant,” Martine said graciously. Her rage had subsided and she felt an urge to comfort him.

The witch doctor shook his head. “I will throw the bones and tell you what you need to know. It is true that the prophecy says the last resting place of the king of leopards is the hiding place of the king’s treasure, but what you call destiny is written in sand and not in stone. Perhaps there is still time for you to save your friend.”

He squatted and began chanting to himself, though whether it was in Ndebele or some ancient African language, they couldn’t tell. His rough hands, like the parched skin of an elephant, scattered the bones onto the dry earth. Martine tried her hardest to visualize Khan safe and well and happy, and once again she saw him on a mountainside at Sawubona, golden and whole.

The witch doctor looked up from his bones. “The one who reads the sign best will find the leopard first.”

“Oh,” said Ben.

That’s not particularly helpful, thought Martine.

But the witch doctor hadn’t finished. He addressed them both, but his eyes were on Martine. “You are bound together, but you will be torn apart. When that happens, look to the House of Bees.”

“
T
hat’s not a lot to go on, especially if we have to interpret the sign before the hunters do,” said Martine, urging Sirocco forward. She was finding it hard not to panic at the thought of Khan’s life ebbing away. “They have a head start.”

“It’s not a lot to go on,” agreed Ben. He was leaning down from his saddle, scanning the ground for tracks or spots of blood as they went. “But he did tell us something that could prove vital. He said we’d be torn apart. Now that we know that, maybe we can prevent it.”

Martine had a flashback to her conversation with Grace before she left Sawubona, the one where she’d said that if the San had only made her destiny clearer in their paintings she could have avoided all the bad stuff.

“We can try,” she said to Ben, “but I don’t think it really works that way. Grace says that if a person could see their future, they’d ‘only choose the good stuff, the easy stuff.’ They’d never learn from their mistakes and never experience the important things in life because they’re usually the hardest things. But I do think it’s a bit weird that both Grace and the witch doctor talked about us being bound together. What do you think the witch doctor meant when he said ‘Look to the House of Bees’?”

“I don’t know,” Ben said absently. They had reached a stretch of bare rock leading down to a river, a tracker’s biggest challenge. “Maybe we’re meant to look for a beehive, or maybe it’s the name of a local house or even a hill?”

He got off Mambo. It took several minutes of casting around before a trace of sand in a crevice of the rock revealed a partial boot-print. A little way on he found a smear of blood.

“They’re right behind him,” he said. “I wish Tendai were here. He has such an amazing eye for this. It’s going to take me years to learn even half of what he knows about tracking.”

Martine was on tenterhooks. She was worried about what would happen if they didn’t find the leopard, but she was even more afraid of what would happen if they did. When she’d had to rescue Jemmy, she’d done so knowing that he was a gentle, beautiful creature who would never harm her. She and Ben hadn’t thought through the rescue of Khan in any way. If he were wounded he would be lashing out at everyone and everything. He’d be more likely to bite her head off than lie around waiting for her to summon up her gift.

Ben was at the river’s edge. “Martine, it looks like Khan and the hunters have crossed here. We should probably go on foot.”

Martine opened her mouth to say that the best thing they could do was race back to Black Eagle and get Sadie and her grandmother to call the police. But that would take hours. No, she and Ben would have to press on and hope for the best.

“All right,” she said, putting a hand on her survival pouch to check that it was fastened securely. “Let’s give the horses a drink of water and tie them up in the shade.”

It was easy for Ben to track the men across the river, because their boots had left bits of mud drying on the flat rocks on the other side. But where the grass began, there was a problem. There were two faint leopard paw prints heading southwest, one smudged and slightly twisted, but then, inexplicably, they vanished. It was as if Khan had been plucked into the heavens. The hunters had obviously spent a considerable time searching the area for some trace of him, before setting off in the direction that the leopard had last been taking.

Ben lingered by the riverbank.

“Let’s go, Ben,” Martine said impatiently. “We’re going to have to run for a while or at least jog if we’re going to overtake the hunters.”