Luana (19 page)

It was a spectacle worthy of ancient Rome, only the scenario was reversed. The lions had allied themselves with the martyrs and turned on the audience.

Barrett felt a sudden slight breeze at his back and his hands fell free. Another, lower down, and he was stumbling forward on weak ankles. Turning, he saw an impossibly big male lion take a casual swipe at Albright’s bonds, then another, and the scientist too was freed. Another centimeter closer, Barrett reflected, and the big cat could just as easily have removed his hands instead of the rope. He tried to rub some circulation back into his wrists, fighting the pins and needles.

Chaugh didn’t even bother with the elaborate, thick knots binding Luana. He simply gripped the wood just back of each binding place in his powerful jaws and bit down. The poles snapped like matchsticks.

“Come,” she ordered, having to shout to be heard over the hellish cacophony. “We’ll go back to camp for the rest of your supplies. Then we can go on to the plane.”

“Again?” said Isabel wonderingly. “I hate to give up—so close after so long! But hadn’t we better run like hell back the way we came?”

Barrett glanced back over his shoulder as they jogged out of the village. No Wanderi tried to stop them. At least two hundred big cats were loose in the compound. He moved closer to Isabel.

“I think Luana means to say that the Wanderi—what’s left of them—will not be in shape to chase anyone for quite a while.”

“Then it appears,” Albright put in, puffing with the unaccustomed exertion, “that thanks to dear Luana we may reach the plane after all!” The chemist saw no point in arguing for a retreat. That had been tried before and failed. Harping on that line, especially now, could only provoke suspicion.

“No thanks to me,” she replied, “but all to these two.” She indicated Chaugh and Jukakhan. They’d left the destruction to others and joined them. “And to Ohoh.”

She looked momentarily puzzled and searched the ground around them. Then her gaze rose. She saw her three animals in the trees now, moving away from the village. Luana doubled over in laughter. Barrett, Isabel, Albright, Kobenene, and Murin had to halt also. When they finally located what she was looking at, even the scientist couldn’t supress a chuckle.

Ohoh swung in the tree above them, carrying a Wanderi war club and dripping crushed feathers from the once lovely headdress of the Wanderi chief.

Behind them, the army of cats, without Chaugh and Jukakhan to give purpose and direction and meaning to their work, began to revert to their natural state. They squabbled and scrapped among themselves. Soon, in groups and twos and singly, they began to split and leave the village.

Unsurprisingly their retreat went uncontested.

Chapter X

They reformed themselves the next day for another try at the plane. Barrett’s toughest task, after calming the frantic bearers who’d remained in camp, was deciding what to leave behind and what to throw away.

It was doubly painful for someone used to figuring budgets to the penny, but there was nothing to be done about it. Half their men were gone. If anything, now was the time to travel light and not burden themselves with luxuries and unnecessary material.

He’d made the formality of asking Isabel whether she wanted anything particular saved. Barrett needn’t have worried. She couldn’t have cared less if they’d dumped everything. So Barrett was able to proceed with the redistribution of the load with a clear conscience. Only his own sense of thrift was outraged.

More importantly, seven of their nine rifles had been lost. The superstitious Wanderi had destroyed them that first, terrible night. Despite Luana’s assurances that the witch-men would give them no trouble, he would have felt better with the rifles back. Only he and Murin had brought spare guns. Murin’s telescopic .470 automatic would have to serve for general use, and he still had the Express.

While those two ought to stand them in good stead against assorted bellicose fauna, they’d be of little use if the Wanderi ever pulled themselves together again. Not, he reflected wryly, that the loose weapons had been any good in staving off that first assault.

They took everything that could be easily carried and destroyed the rest. Even Isabel was fitted with a small pack. Barrett was damned if he’d let the witch-men amble out and help themselves to the big tents, for example. And there was no point in trying to bury or otherwise hide them. They might not be returning by the same route. If Barrett had his way, they’d circle far to the south on the march back. Splitting the troop in half again to have the luxury of a permanent base camp was, of course, out of the question now.

The hike to the plane was uneventful, but Barrett still got little sleep the one night they camped. The brush with disaster had been too close. He found himself spinning in his bedroll at every sound, every falling twig, every clicking insect. He hadn’t done that in many years.

His nervousness continued despite Luana’s presence and the sure knowledge that she’d detect anything dangerous long before he would, continued despite Ohoh’s aerial reconnaissance and the two big cats flanking them on either side.

After all they’d been through, Barrett thought that the actual finding of the wreck would prove anticlimatic. Instead he found himself feeling a little thrill when they topped the slight rise before the river and first saw the rusting hulk.

Vines and creepers had found the broken right wing and battered tail a firm anchorage. Birds had made the hollow places under the wings and tail look almost natural with small bowers and nests. Mice lodged in the fuselage, and from a hole in the base of the tail an old mongoose regarded their approach with curious stare and the smile of a Chinese philosopher.

Barrett barely had time to shout a warning about snakes and rusty old slivers of metal before Isabel had sped past him towards the wreck. He followed hurriedly and helped her up into the slanted cabin. In the excitement, no one noticed Albright and Kobenene’s lack of same.

Those two put their own packs aside, while the bearers stacked packs and cases and began trying to arrange a much reduced camp.

Barrett followed her into the plane, with Murin close on his heels. The inside, as expected, was a shambles. Remnants of stains on the floor and control board had been mercifully obscured by rust and time.

The pilot’s seat was twisted half out of the floor, the bolts holding it to the metal broken or bent. Luana pulled herself in and watched them curiously. She’d been here many times.

She pointed out her neatly stacked collection of books in the back of the cabin, behind the rear seats. They’d been wrapped in big leaves to help retard rot and were suspended by thin wires drawn from the plane’s ruined engine to minimize their accessibility to insects.

“May I look at your books, Luana?” Isabel asked.

“Yes. There are many I do not understand. Perhaps if we have time and you do not have to rush from here, you can tell me what some of the big words mean—”

Isabel smiled. “Certainly I will . . . sister.” She began to dig energetically through the aging tomes. Some of the volumes were general texts on Africa. There was also an almanac, a dictionary, a few magazines, and general books. All were illustrated, some profusely. Even the dictionary. There were also a couple of children’s books, looking utterly out of place with their pale pink and blue covers. They sobered Isabel even further.

She went through them again, more carefully. When she finished the second inspection, any hint of a smile had vanished.

“It’s not here.” She shook her head resignedly. “Nothing, not a hint, not a clue.”

“What’s not there?” asked Barrett politely, though he had a fairly good idea.

“What I told you I was searching for.” She paused, then looked up and over at Luana again. “Luana—are these all the books?”

“Why, no,” the girl replied, mildly surprised. “They were only the ones I found useful. There are more there in the back, under the old leather box.” Her tone turned spiteful. “They have few pictures, and many big words I could not learn the meaning of.”

But Isabel was already shoving furiously at the rotting suitcase, ignoring the dry, soft plants that crumbled like stale cake in her hands. The first books that came into view clearly hadn’t received the care of the picture tomes. In consequence, they’d fallen prey to the less dramatic, less impressive, but nonetheless efficient consumers of the forest—the molds and fungi and tiny beetles.

Some of them were so rotten they fell apart when Isabel tried to pull them out into the light. Then she gave a startled exclamation. For a bad moment Barrett was afraid she might have chanced across something larger and more toxic than scale rot.

Quite the opposite.

There were four of the plastic bookcases, each containing a specially treated leather notebook. The embossed covers still had a pristine newness to them. Luana had known the retardant, protective qualities of certain leaves but not those of plastic boxes. Fortunately, she hadn’t made use of these for her picture books. Or perhaps, some time in the past, she’d sorted out the books she could use and simply forgotten about the others, never bothering to check the discarded pile.

Barrett looked at her. If she was susprised at the state of preservation of the notebooks in the boxes, she gave no sign. But then, she probably wouldn’t.

The first three contained workbooks, crammed full of old Hardi’s scribblings and jottings and abstract formulae. It was all very technical. What little Barrett could see over Isabel’s shoulder made no sense at all. Hardly surprising Luana should look at them once and then ignore them. But they seemed to excite Isabel.

The last book . . . the last made Isabel’s eyes glow like Chaugh’s by firelight. Carefully, she slipped the foundling free of its case and held it up for Barrett to see. She was hardly able to form the words.

“Oh Lord—I hadn’t hoped—the workbooks I guessed would be protected, but to find this, too! It’s just like I dreamed!” She sniffled.

Barrett grinned uncertainly, not at the discovery of the book, whatever it was, but at Isabel’s obvious pleasure. He sat down in the still upright copilot’s chair. Luana and Murin both looked on expectantly.

“You’re beautiful,” he said finally, “when you’re happy. I haven’t seen you happy in a long time.”

That interrupted her trend of thought, but only momentarily. She sat down on the edge of the long departed door, her legs dangling towards the ground, and began thumbing through the hand-written pages. When no further information was forthcoming, Barrett allowed himself a modicum of impatience.

“I don’t want to shatter your nostalgic reverie, Izzy, but how about telling the rest of us what this extraordinary discovery is, hey? Pornography?”

“What?” His flippancy missed her completely. After all, it was only a bunch of old notes. He didn’t buy that “posthumous Nobel prize” stuff.

She didn’t look up and continued reading. “It’s Father’s old diary.”

“Couldn’t very well be his new diary,” he muttered, but he obviously wasn’t going to get a rise out of her, not now.

“See . . . it even has the volume number marked at the top of each page! Twelve—”

He was incredulous. “You mean you came all the way to Africa and hauled me out here for some notebooks, and all the while you were really hoping that your old man just might have left you a diary? Faith is one thing, kid, but . . .”

“It wasn’t just a hope,” was the defiant, confident reply. “Would you have come, despite the money, if I’d told you I really wanted to find a diary?” He hesitated. The notebooks he’d been able to understand. Prize money, valuable discoveries. But a nutty hunt for old platitudes—he didn’t know.

“See?” she told him. “And it wasn’t just a hope. Father was very careful with his diaries. There are eleven more volumes at home, the last returning with his . . . his effects, that had been left at his house in Nairobi. This one,” and she held up the small, narrow book, “is not only numbered last in the series—it’s dated, too.”

She returned to her quiet reading. An hour and a half later, she was on the final pages.

“July seventeenth. These may be the last words I ever commit to paper. Insallah is holding the plane as best she can while I write this, but there is no longer any doubt that we shall go down in the morass below. It was not a slow leak, but rather one that seemed to open abruptly in the tank wall. The gauge did not drop . . . simply flipped from three-quarters full over to empty.

“We have been flying on the small reserve tank for some time now. But despite keeping our air speed to the bare minimum, I fear we shall shortly have to commit ourselves to the mercy of the wind.

“The child, of course, has been told nothing. Nor shall she. It is sad that I must take this unfortunate occasion to at last formally acknowledge paternity.”

All eyes went to Luana, who was listening intently without understanding all the words.

“I may be able to locate an open space of sufficient size to attempt a landing, although—” Isabel’s voice broke and she took a moment, to recompose herself. “Although I am not sure but that it may be a blessing simply to push the wheel all the way in and end it quickly. No. I fear the human mind is not so constructed. I have not the courage to commit suicide even on the eve of certain death.