This Stream of Dreams (Mirella, Rashid and Adam Book 2) (29 page)

By the time the hunt had stretched into its second week, news of the exploits and expertise of Adam’s party had traveled through the highlands preceding their arrival. They shot hippo, and rhino, cheetah, leopard, lion, and any number of smaller animals, all of which they offered as food to the peasants. But first they took their trophies and sent them back by a relay of walking messengers, who would appear as if from nowhere, to agents in key towns in the highlands who were ready to fly them to the taxidermist in Addis.

Adam was beginning to be concerned. Aida Desta had not appeared. He half expected her in Lalibela, because, as it was one of Ethiopia’s main tourist centers she could conceal herself in its crowds or in the surrounding chaos of mountains and gorges, where the men trekked and hunted on mules and on
foot across cliffs and ridges that plunged a thousand feet below. He imagined she’d catch up with him in a junglelike area where the hunters had frolicked with baboons they found sitting in a semicircle around one of the dominant males of the troop. The beast had chattered and squealed and screamed incessantly to his family of simians. Adam knew Aida would be safe among the nomads of the highlands, far from the world of finance and politics. He even lingered under a white nearly full moon within the eleven famed churches sculpted out of living rock, a wondrous place that was the heart and soul of Christian Abyssinia. Adam realized he had made nothing but bad guesses.

One night, they had been camped on the banks of the Blue Nile, far off the track, in an unpeopled flatness of man-high thistles that flowered like giant foxgloves, and surrounded by heavily wooded country inhabited by innumerable small monkeys. Adam woke in the night, certain that she was in the tent, or had been. Could he have been simply wrong? In the morning they had found a scrap of bright red cloth.

By six forty-five, the convoy of jeeps had torn out of a settlement on a mountain near Gondar. They had gone as far as they could before abandoning the jeeps to switch to mule and pack horse, heading for higher mountains and other settlements, an area well-known for leopard.

The jeeps had made their last, breathtaking, hairpin turn up curving tracks of hard dirt roads, and bounced in and out of holes for the last time because the track was no longer wide enough for the jeeps’ four wheels.

From nowhere they had appeared, two slender, barefooted Ethiopian nomads, their hair shiny and curled with rancid butter, dressed in tatters worn as elegantly as Brooks Brothers suits. They had loped along like gazelles toward the jeep, rifles slung over their shoulders. Before Adam could pull on the hand brake, they had slung their rifles off their shoulders and fired shots into the air.

She had sent them, he knew that instinctively. The hunting party had made camp where the nomads suggested, in a wooded area clinging to the side of the mountain, the Blue Nile flowing lazily far below, where bathed a herd of hippopotamuses.

In the setting sun the men had watched the mountain turn from green to red. The four of them stood together searching
the mountain range through their binoculars, and absorbing the jungle, the birds and wildlife. They were in their element.

Jock had touched Adam’s arm, and silently each man alerted another. They detected a leopard ten feet away from Mac. The handsome creature lay asleep along the branch of a tree. Delight was edged with excitement and fear. No one moved a muscle. Eyes transmitted their instructions. Slowly Rex had pulled out the magnum he always carried tucked under his trouser belt. Adam had put his hand around the barrel of the Purdey rifle leaning against his thigh, ready to yank it into action. The scent of fear was in the air.

What wind there was shifted — not much, but enough for a still-hot breeze to bring the sharp scent of the animal, and its smell was not repulsive. There was a latent savagery about it, and great power and beauty. The leopard opened its eyes and looked into Adam’s. Man and beast, the hunter and the hunted locked together in a trance that immobilized them both. A footstep had disturbed it. It growled, and the glorious beast was still growling when it sprang to another tree, grazed over a branch, and slid in one sinuous movement into the undergrowth.

Each man had sprung into action at the first movement the leopard made. All weapons were cocked and held at the ready to fire. But no bullet shattered the leopard’s grace. Their action was one of self-protection. Since the beast had riot attacked, for hunters such as they were, to kill the leopard would have been a cheap shot, not sport. Unthinkable. They relaxed as it slunk away.

“Hello, hello. Not Mr. Livingstone, I presume.” Jock Warren-Williams’s words broke the tension. All eyes followed his to where Aida Desta Ras Mangasha Seyoum stood. Adam stepped forward, raised her hand and kissed it.

“To come between me and the predators in my life, be they human or animal, seems a role you are fated to play, Aida Desta.”

When Adam had hastily organized the hunting party at Aida Desta’s request, he had felt it necessary to tell his friends only the outline without the details of their safari. Until Aida Desta’s appearance in the bush, the men knew only that they were invited for good sport as Adam’s guests. They might also be asked to assist Adam in a possibly dangerous exit from
the country with an additional person in the party. All had accepted, and no questions had been asked.

For them, romantic names such as Prester John, Rasselas, the Queen of Sheba, and the Lion of Judah linked the present-day Ethiopia with the land that had been Abyssinia. The appearance now of Aida Desta, though a surprise, was a delight. The men still clung to the romance of the country. They identified her at once, without knowing who she was, as a new romantic figure whose name they might rank with the great names of the imagined past.

Macalister was the first to step forward after Adam, doff his wide-brimmed, tiger-bound hat, drop to one knee, and kiss the hem of her dress. In Kenya there were still old movies that taught this sort of routine.

“Madame, your servant, your slave,” he quipped, a smile forming under his bushy, ginger-colored moustache.

“Rex Walker, at your service, ma’am,” the next hunter said, as he mimicked Macalister’s expansive gesture, gallantly sweeping his New York Yankees baseball cap from his black curly hair, while giving her a knowing smile. Clark Gable was hovering in the wings, Adam thought with amusement.

Jock Warren-Williams removed his worn safari hat, famous for its supposedly lucky white-leopard band, and after running his fingers through his hair, smiled at Aida Desta. He had spent less of his childhood at the movies.

“Princess,” he said, and bowed his head in respect. Then, looking into her eyes, silently he held out his hat and she touched the band, aware of the legend associated with it.

Aida Desta by that time was surrounded by her escort: two Amharas and two Tigréans, true-blooded Abyssinians like herself and most of the population of the six highland provinces.

Adam could barely take his eyes from Aida Desta. He felt that nowhere in the world could there be more stunningly beautiful examples of the human being than he found in her and the people of this vast fissured plateau that lay between the Upper Nile valley and the Somaliland desert. The ebony satin skin stretched taut over the tall slender body of the princess with pure Semitic features. Pride and the power of keen intelligence emanated from her. The rich spiritual quality of her special Christianity that vied with her still savage paganism was unique and thrilling. It tortured his senses.

Her hair was pulled away from her face and plaited in one long braid wound on top of her head into a small sturdy crown. Over it was draped a cloth of thin handwoven indigo-blue cotton, which stayed in place because of the manner in which she draped it over one shoulder. Her dress was of the same indigo-blue, a loose shift that finished at the ankle. Around her neck she wore a circle of antique ivory matching the ones around her wrists.

He wanted her. The erotic side of his nature demanded he vanquish this woman. His desire for her was a physical urge that rose from his baser nature. It was a fleshly appetite shared with the animals he stalked.

He watched her talking to his friends, and all the time she spoke there was a silence about her. Her mouth was framing words, and yet also this incredible silence. It was a sort of silence of the soul.

He and his hunting friends often claimed that one of the reasons for the great beauty of the Ethiopian people was their stoicism, their deep silence, their mistrust of the outside world. They might be poverty-stricken and suffering famine but they were not beggars. Rex had the habit of calling them the Chinese of Africa because he found them inscrutable.

Adam was amused because he could see erotic lust in the eyes of his hunting companions, every one of them, and it perfectly mirrored what they might detect in his.

“You are very gallant, gentlemen,” Aida Desta said. “And all across this region of the highlands the people talk about your hunting exploits. A mile more up this escarpment there is a small settlement of
tukuls
and there the people have prepared a feast of
injera
and
wot
in your honor. They wait to drink
tela
with you. There are several fine hunters there who know the game and hope to take you out at sunrise for some special hunting.”

There was not much initial enthusiasm in Adam’s companions over the idea of drinking pints of
tela
, the cloudy, home-brewed highland beer, while sitting within a circle of tukuls, the round thatched huts clumsily constructed of stakes and mud. But their spirits lifted over thoughts of a meal of the fermented bread, injera, made from
ttef
— the cereal grain that only grows in the highlands.

The bread came in sheets two feet in diameter, one tenth of an inch thick, bitter-tasting and gritty-textured. It looked like
damp foam rubber, served double-folded beside plates of the highly spiced stew of meat or chicken, wot. It was a dish unique to Ethiopia — an ethnic meal not to be missed for its strange and exotic combination of fiery flavors.

The invitation was instantly accepted by the men. Stomaching this stuff was the price of the opportunity to hunt with the local men. It seemed a fair exchange. They were busily assembling their gear for a three-day trek from the base camp, together with gifts for their hosts, boxes of candles, quinine, bags of sugar and powdered milk, and salt, when Aida Desta announced, “Mr. Corey and I will join you at the settlement as soon as we complete our business. I hope that will be before you set out hunting, but if not, we will find you.”

The men said nothing, but did hesitate and look toward Adam. Their eyebrows declared them unsatisfied with the walk-on parts apparently now allotted them. It was Aida Desta who spoke, and it was not to the men but to Adam.

“Please, Mr. Corey, it’s essential your hunting party carries on. It is a wonderful cover for us, and news of your movements and your exploits keeps us all safe. Please do it my way until tomorrow.”

“You heard the lady, guys. I’ll follow as soon as I can.” Adam grinned as they marched off the set.

In a short time they were gone and the camp was very quiet. All Adam’s men except Turhan were sent with two of Aida Desta’s escorts into the bush, a few hundred yards from the camp, for their evening meal and to sleep. Before going, Aida Desta’s men pulled from under their shirts two packets of documents wrapped carefully in oilskin cloths and handed them to her. The three spoke in Amharic for some time, and finally, much to Adam’s surprise, both men dropped to their knees, spread their arms in front of them, and bowed their foreheads on the ground. They rose only when she touched each of them on the head and, from the little Amharic that he understood, seemed to bless and thank them.

His own surprise wasn’t readily understandable to him, because there was nothing unusual about the act. In the days when Haile Selassie reigned as emperor, the people of the country considered him a living god and paid homage in that manner to him or to any man, white or black, whom they thought superior and godlike.

Aida stood alone now facing him, and suddenly he
understood the source of his wonder. Aida Desta Ras Mangasha Seyoum was both the old regime and the new. He saw in her Ethiopia’s past, its present, and its future, in the guise of the existing Marxist regime. She was breaking away from her commitment to them. She had control of all their foreign currency. She no longer trusted their methods, but she still believed in their ideals. A pattern was beginning to form in Adam’s mind about her activities and ambitions.

They gazed into each other’s eyes. Adam absorbed the sounds of the jungle chattering away the end of the day. The monkeys with their laughing screams, the birds fluting their last calls, the rustle and crack of movement throughout the bush made by animals of all sorts on the move. Aida Desta kept her silence. Adam broke the spell between them when he very gently removed the indigo cloth from her hair. She spoke. “You, Adam Corey, and I have things to resolve. Shall we take them one at a time?”

Her words brought him back to the reality of the moment. “Yes, but of course.”

He led her to the four staves that had been pounded into the earth, a canvas stretched across them to form a canopy. They sat on comfortable canvas and wood safari chairs in a small clearing ringed by a semicircle of sleeping tents.

“I think we need a table of sorts and a lamp for when the sun dies,” she said.

Turhan placed a series of wooden boxes, one butted against the other, in front of them. He covered it with a black and white batik of a handsome, bold design. Lower than a standard dining table or a desk, the assemblage of boxes did serve to satisfy their needs. Turhan returned with a dozen or more fat white candles of varying heights that needed no holders and placed them on the table with a box of matches.

“I said that we have things to resolve,” Aida Desta said, “and that we would take them one at a time, and we will, Mr. Corey.”

“Adam, please, not Mr. Corey.”

“Adam.” His Christian name seemed to give her infinite pleasure. A smile broke across her face, and she continued. “And we will, Adam.” Then she lowered her long dark lashes. “And I want you to know that the order in which we deal with things does not indicate priorities. For me, all that we say and do this evening is equally important.”