Wilbur Smith's Smashing Thrillers (128 page)

There were twenty thousand square. miles out there that she had never seen and where she might lose herself for ever. She must give up trying to find them, and go on to her own base camp at Gondola, the place of the happy elephant. In time the Bambuti would find her there and she must be patient.

She sat a little longer and listened to the forest. It seemed at first to be a silent lonely place. Only when the ear had learned to hear beyond the quiet did one realise that the forest was always filled with living sound. The orchestra of the insects played an eternal background music, the hum and reverberation like softly stroked violins, the click and clatter like tiny castanets, the wails and whine and buzz like the wind instruments.

From the high upper galleries the birds called and sang and the monkeys crashed from branch to branch or [owed mournfully to the open sky, while on the leaf-strewn floor the dwarf antelope scuttled and scampered furtively. Now when Kelly listened more intently still, she thought she heard far away and very faintly the clear whistle from high in the trees that old Sepoo solemnly swore was the crested chameleon announcing that the hives were overflowing and the honey season had begun.

Kelly smiled and stood up. She knew as a biologist that chameleons could not whistle. And yet … She smiled again, settled her pack and stepped back on to the dim trail and went on towards Gondola. More and more frequently there were landmarks and signposts she recognized along the trail, the shape of certain tree-trunks and the juncture of trails, a sandbank at a river crossing and blazes on the tree-trunks which she had cut long ago with her machete. She was getting closer and closer to home.

At a turning in the trail she came suddenly upon a steaming pile of yellow dung, as high as her knee. She looked about eagerly for the elephant that had dropped it, but already it had, disappeared like a grey shadow into the trees. She wondered if it might be the Old Man with One Ear, a heavily tusked bull elephant that was often in the forest around Gondola.

Once the elephant. herds had roamed the open savannah, along the shores of the lake and in the Lada Enclave to the north of the forest. However, a century of ruthless persecution, first by the old Arab slavers and their minions armed with muzzle-loading black powder guns and then by the European sportsmen and ivory-hunters with their deadly rifled weapons had decimated the herds and driven the survivors into the fastness of the forest.

It gave Kelly a deep sense of satisfaction to know that, although she seldom saw them, she shared the forest with those great sagacious beasts, and that her home was named after one of them.

At the next stream she paused to bathe and comb her hair and don her Tshirt. She would be home in a few hours. She had just tied the thong in her braid and put away her comb when she chilled to a new sound, fierce and menacing. She came to her feet and seized her digging-stick. The sound came again, the hoarse sawing that roughened her nerves like sandpaper, and she felt her pulse accelerate and her breath come short.

It was unusual to hear a leopard call in daylight. The spotted cat was a creature of the night, but anything unusual in the forest was to be treated with caution. The leopard called again, a little closer, almost directly upstream on the bank of the river, and Kelly cocked her head to listen. There was something odd about this leopard. A suspicion flitted across her mind, and she waited, crouching, holding the sharpened digging-stick ready. There was a long silence.

All the forest was listening to the leopard, and then it called again, that terrible ripping sound. it was on the riverbank above her, not more than fifty feet from where she crouched. This time, listening to the call, Kelly’s suspicion became certainty.

With a blood-curdling scream of her own, she launched herself at the creature’s hiding-place brandishing her pointed stick. There was a sudden commotion amongst the lotus leaves on the bank and a small figure darted out and scampered away. Kelly took a full round-armed swing with her stick and caught it a resounding crack on bare brown buttocks.

There was an anguished bowl. “You wicked old man!” Kelly yelled, and swung again. “You tried to frighten me.” She missed as the pixie figure leaped over a bush ahead of her and took refuge behind it. “You cruel little devil.” She hounded him out of the bush, and he darted around the side, shrieking with mock terror and laughter. “I’ll beat your backside blue as a baboon’s,” Kelly threatened, her stick swishing, and they went twice round the bush, the small figure dancing and ducking just out of range.

They were both laughing now. “Sepoo, you little monster, I shall never forgive you!” Kelly choked on her laughter.

“I am not Sepoo. I am a leopard.” He staggered with mirth and she nearly caught him. He made a spurt to keep just out of range and squealed merrily. In the end she had to give up and lean, exhausted with laughter, on her stick. Sepoo fell down in the leaves and beat his own belly and hiccuped and rolled over and hugged his knees and laughed until the tears poured down his cheeks and ran into the wrinkles and were channelled back behind his ears.

“Kara-Ki.” He belched and hiccuped and laughed some more. “Kara-Ki, the fearless one, is frightened by old Sepoo!” It was a joke that he would tell at every campfire for the next dozen moons.

It took some time for Sepoo to become rational again. He had to laugh himself out. Kelly stood by and watched him affectionately, joining in some of his wilder outbursts of hilarity. Gradually these became less frequent, until at last they could converse normally.

They squatted side by side and talked. The Bambuti had long ago lost their own language, and had adopted those of the wazungu with whom they came in contact. They spoke a curious mixture of Swahili and Uhali and Hita with an accent and colourful idiom of their own.

With his bow and arrow Sepoo had shot a colobus monkey that morning. He had salted the beautiful black and white pelt to trade at the roadside. Now he built a fire and cooked the flesh for their lunch.

As they chatted and ate, she became aware of a strange mood in her companion. It was difficult for a pygmy to remain serious for long. His irrepressible sense of fun and his merry laughter could not be suppressed. They kept bubbling to the surface, and yet beneath it there was something new that- had not been there when last Kelly had been with him. She could not define exactly what had changed. There was an air of preoccupation in Sepoo’s mien, a worry, a sadness that dimmed the twinkle of his gaze and in repose made his mouth droop at the corners.

Kelly asked about the other members of the tribe, about Pambal his wife.

“She scolds like a monkey from the treetops, and she mutters like the thunder of the skies.” Sepoo grinned with love undimmed after forty years of marriage. “She is a cantankerous old woman, but when I tell her that I will get a pretty young wife she replies that any girl stupid enough to take me, can have me.” And he chortled at the joke and slapped his thigh, leaving monkey grease on the wrinkled skin.

“What of the others?” Kelly pressed him, seeking the cause of Sepoo’s unhappiness. “Was there dissension in the tribe? How is your brother Pirri?” That was always a possible cause of strife in the tribe. There was a sibling rivalry between the half-brothers. Sepoo and Pirri were the master hunters, the oldest male members of the small tribal unit. They should have been friends as well as brothers, but Pirri was not a typical Bambuti. His father had been a Hita.

Long ago, further back than any of the tribe could remember, their mother while still a virgin had wandered to the edge of the forest where a Hita hunting-party had caught her. She had been young and pretty as a pixie and the Hita had held her in their camp for two nights and taken it in turns to have sport with her. Perhaps they might have killed her carelessly when they tired of her, but before that happened she escaped.

Pirri was born from this experience and he was taller than any other men of the tribe and lighter in colour and finer-featured, with the mouth and thin nose of the Hita. He was different in character also, more aggressive and acquisitive than any Bambuti Kelly had ever met.

“Pirri is Pirri,” Sepoo replied evasively, but although the old antagonism was still evident, Kelly sensed that it was something other than his elder brother that worried him.

Although it was only a few hours journey to Gondola, the two of them talked the daylight away and evening found them still squatting at the cooking-fire with the threat of rain heavy in the air. Kelly used the last of the light to cut the thin supple wands of the selepe tree and, as Pamba had taught her, to plant them in a circle in the soft earth and bend them inwards and plait them into the framework of a traditional Bambuti hut. Meanwhile old Sepoo went off on his own. He returned just as she was completing the framework, and he was bowed under a burden of mongongo leaves with which to thatch the hut. The structure was complete within an hour of the work commencing. When the thunderstorm broke, they were huddled warm and dry in the tiny structure with a cheerful fire flickering, eating the last of the monkey steaks.

At last Kelly settled down on her inflated mattress in the darkness and Sepoo curled on the soft leaf mould close beside her, but neither of them slept immediately. Kelly was aware of the old man lying awake and she waited.

With darkness as a cover for his unhappiness Sepoo whispered at last, “Are you awake, Kara-Ki?”

“I am listening, old father,” she whispered back, and he sighed. It was a sound so different from his usual merry chuckles.

“Kara-Ki, the Mother and Father are angry. I have never known them so angry,” Sepoo said, and she knew that he meant the god of the Bambuti, the twin godhead of the living forest, male and female in one. Kelly was silent for a while in deference to the seriousness of this statement.

“That is a grave matter,” she replied at last. “What has made them angry?”

“They have been wounded,” Sepoo said softly. “The rivers flow red with their blood.”

This was a startling concept, and Kelly was silent again as she tried to visualize what Sepoo meant. How could the rivers run with the blood of the forest? she wondered. She was finally forced to ask, “I do not understand, old father. What are you telling me?”

“It is beyond my humble words to describe,” Sepoo whispered. “There has been a terrible sacrilege and the Mother and Father are in pain. Perhaps the Molimo will come.”

Kelly had been in camp with the Bambuti only once during the Molimo visitation. The women were excluded, and Kelly had remained in the huts with Pamba and the other women when the Molimo came, but she had heard its voice roaring like a bull buffalo and trumpeting like an enraged elephant as it rampaged through the forest in the night. In the morning Kelly had asked Sepoo, “What creature is the Molimo?”

“The Molimo is the Molimo,” he had replied enigmatically. “It is the creature of the forest. It is the voice of the Mother and the Father.” Now Sepoo suggested that the Molimo might come again, and Kelly shivered with a little superstitious thrill. This time she would not remain in the huts with the women, she promised herself. This time she would find out more about this fabulous creature. For the moment, however, she put it out of her mind and, instead, concerned herself with the sacrilege that had been committed somewhere deep in the forest.

“Sepoo,” she whispered. “If you cannot tell me about this terrible thing, will you show me? Will you take me and show me the rivers that run with the blood of the gods?”

Sepoo snuffled in the darkness and hawked to clear his throat and spat into the coals of the fire. Then he grunted, “Very well, Kara-Ki. I will show you. In the morning, before we reach Gondola we will go out of our way and I will show you the rivers that bleed.”

In the morning Sepoo was full of high spirits again, almost as though their conversation in the night had never taken place. Kelly gave him the present which she had brought for him, a Swiss army knife. Sepoo was enchanted with all the blades and implements and tools that folded out of the red plastic handle, and promptly cut himself on one of them. He cackled with laughter and sucked his thumb, then held it out to Kelly as proof of the marvelous sharpness of the little blade.

Kelly knew he would probably lose the knife within a week, or give it away to someone else in the tribe on an impulse, as he had done with all the other gifts she had given him. But for the moment his joy was childlike and complete. “Now you must show me the bleeding rivers,” she reminded him as she adjusted the headband of her pack, and for a moment his eyes were sad again.

Then he grinned and pirouetted. “Come along, Kara-Ki. Let us see if you still move in the forest like one of the real people.” Soon they left the broad trail, and Sepoo led her swiftly through the secret unmarked ways. He danced ahead of her like a sprite and the foliage closed behind him, leaving no trace of his passing.

Where Sepoo moved upright, Kelly was forced to stoop beneath the branches, and at times she lost sight of him. No wonder the old Egyptians believed the Bambuti had the power of invisibility, Kelly thought, as she extended herself to keep up with him.

If Sepoo had moved silently she might have lost him, but like all the pygmies he sang and laughed and chattered to her and the forest as he went. His voice ahead guided her, and warned the dangerous forest creatures of his approach so that there would be no confrontation.

She knew that he was moving at his best pace, to test and tease her, and she was determined not to fall too far behind. She called replies back to him and joined in the chorus of the praise songs and when he stepped out on the bank of the river many hours later she was only seconds behind him.

He grinned at her until his eyes disappeared in the web, of wrinkles and shook his head in reluctant approval, but Kelly was not interested in his approbation. She was gazing at the river. This was one of the tributaries of the Ubomo that had its source high up in the Mountains of the Moon, at the foot of one of the glaciers above fifteen thousand feet, the altitude where the permanent snowline stood.