The Burning Shore (50 page)

I weep for joy of this gift. O’wa tried to maintain dignity, but his voice choked, That is a stupid reason to weep, H’ani told him, and twinkled mischievously as she covered her laughter with one slim, graceful old band.

They followed the dry river bed into the east, but now the urgency that had accompanied their night marches through the dune country was left behind them, for there was good water under the sand.

They travelled from before sunrise until the heat drove them into shelter, and then from late afternoon until after dark; the pace was leisurely for they foraged and hunted on the march.

H’ani cut a special digging stick for Centaine, peeled it and hardened the point in the fire, and showed her how to use it. Within a few short days Centaine was recognizing the surface indications of many of the edible and useful tubers and plants. It soon became evident that though O’wa was so adept in the bushcraft and lore of the desert and that although his hunting and tracking skills were almost supernatural, it was the foraging and gathering of the women that provided their little clan with the staples of life. In the days and weeks when game was scarce or simply non-existent, they lived on the plants which the two of them brought into camp.

Although Centaine learned swiftly and her young eyes were hawk-sharp, she knew that she would never be able to match the innate knowledge and gifts of perception of the old woman. H’ani could find the plants and insects that gave no sign on the surface of their hiding-place deep down in the earth, and when she dug the hard dirt flew in all directions.

How do you do it? Centaine could at last demand, for her command of the San language increased every day she spent listening and responding to the old woman’s chatter.

Like O’wa found the sip-wells from afar, H’ani explained. I smell it, Nam Child. Smell! Use your nose! You tease me, revered old grandmother! Centaine protested, but she watched Ram carefully after that, and she saw that she indeed gave every indication of smelling out the deep nests of termites to raid them of the crumbling white ant bread which she made into a foul-tasting but nutritious porridge.

Just like Kaiser Wilhelm, Centaine marvelled, and she called to H’ani ChercheP the way that she and Anna had called to the gross boar when they had hunted truffles in the forest at Mort Homme.

Cherche, H’ani! and the old woman laughed and hugged herself with glee at the joke she did not understand and then quite casually produced a miracle.

She and Centaine had fallen behind O’wa on the evening stage of the journey, for the old man had gone ahead to search for an ostrich nesting ground that he remembered from his last visit many years before.

The two of them were arguing amiably. No, no! Nam Child, You must not dig two roots from the same place. You must always walk past one before you dig again, I have told you that before! H’ani scolded.

Why? Centaine straightened up and pushed the thick bushy curls off her forehead, leaving a sweaty smear of mud on her face.

You must leave one for the children. Silly old woman, there are no children. There will be- H’ani pointed at Centaine’s belly significantly. There will be. And if we leave nothing for them, what will they say of us when they are starving? But there are so many plants! Centaine was exasperated.

When O’wa finds the nest of the ostrich, he will leave some of the eggs. When you find two tubers, you will leave one of them, and your son will grow strong and smile when he repeats your name to his children. H’ani broke off from her lecture and scurried forward to a bare, stony patch on the bank of the dry river bed, her nose twitching as she stooped to examine the earth.

Cherche, H’ani! Centaine laughed at her, and H’ani ghed back as she started to dig, and then she dropped to her knees and lifted something from the shallow excavation.

This is the first one you have seen, Nam Child. Smell it. It tastes very good. She handed the lumpy, dirt-crusted, potato-like tuber to Centaine, and Centaine sniffed it gingerly, and her eyes flew wide open at the well-remembered aroma. Quickly she wiped the clinging dirt from the lumpy surface and bit into it.

H’ani, you old darling, she cried. It’s a truffle! A real truffle. It’s not the same shape or colour, but it smells and tastes just like the truffles from our own land! O’wa had found his ostrich nests and Centaine whipped one of the eggs in its own half-shell and mixed in the chopped truffles and cooked an enormous omelette aux truffes on a flat stone heated in the camp fire.

Despite the dirt from Centaine’s fingers, which gave it a faintly greyish colour, and the grains of sand and eggshell chips that crunched under their teeth, they ate it with relish.

it was only afterwards as she lay under the primitive roof of twigs and leaves, that Centaine gave in to the homesickness which the taste of truffles had invoked, and she buried her face in the crook of her arm to muffle her sobs.

Oh, Anna, I would give anything, anything at all just to see your lovely ugly old face again.

As they followed the dry river bed, and the weeks turned into months, so Centaine’s unborn child grew strongly With her sparse but healthy diet and the daily exercise of walking and- digging and carrying and reaching, the child never grew big and she carried it high, but her breasts filled out and sometimes when she was alone, scrubbing her body with the juicy pith of the hi tuber, she looked down at them proudly and admired the jaunty upward tilt of the rosy tips.

I wish you could see them now Anna, she murmured. You couldn’t tell me I still look like a boy. But as always you’d complain about my legs, too long and thin and with hard muscles, oh, Anna, I wonder where you are.

One morning at sunrise when they had already been travelling for many hours, Centaine stopped on the top of a low rise and looked around her slowly.

The air was still cool from the night and so clear that she could see to the horizon. Later, with the heat, it would thicken to an opaline translucence and the sun would drain all colour from the landscape. The heat mirage would close in around her, and shapes would be weirdly deformed, the most mundane groups of rocks or clump of vegetation transformed into quivering monsters.

Now they were sharp-edged and rich with their true colours. The undulating plains were hazed with pale silver grasses, and there were trees, real, living trees, not those heat-struck ancient mummies that had stood upon the plains below the dunes.

These stately camel-thorn acacias grew well separated.

Their massive trunks, clad in rough crocodile-skin bark, were at odds with the wide umbrella-shaped crown of airy and delicate silvery-green foliage. In the nearest of them a colony of sociable weavers had built a communal nest the size of a haystack, each generation of these insignificant, dun-coloured little birds adding to it, until one day the weight would be too much and would split the great tree. Centaine had seen others lying on the earth beneath the shattered acacia, still attached to the supporting branches and stinking with carcasses of hundreds of fledglings and broken eggs.

Beyond this open forest there were steep hills rising abruptly out of the plain, the kopjes of Africa, riven by wind and split by the sun’s heat into geometrical shapes as hard-edged as dragons teeth. The soft light of the early sun struck hues of sepia and red and bronze from their rocky walls, and the antediluvian kokerboom trees with their fleshy trunks and palm-like heads crowned their summits.

Centaine paused and leaned upon her digging stick, awed by the harsh grandeur of the scene. Upon the dustcoloured plain grazed herds of dainty antelope. They were pale as smoke and as insubstantial, graceful little animals with lyre-shaped horns, the lovely bright cinnamonbrown of their backs divided from the snow white lower parts by a lateral band of chocolate red.

As Centaine watched, the nearest antelopes took fright at the human presence, and began stotting, the characteristic alarm behaviour that gave them their name of springbok. They lowered their heads until their muzzles almost touched their four bunched hooves and shot stiff-legged straight into the air, at the same time opening the long folded pouch of skin that ran down their backs and flashing the feather mane of white hair that it concealed.

Oh, look at them, H’ani! Centaine cried. They are so beautiful. The alarm stotting was wildly infectious, and across the plain hundreds of springbok bounced on high, with white manes flashing.

O’wa dropped his burden, lowered his head and imitated them perfectly, prancing stiff-legged, flicking his fingers over his back, so that he seemed transformed into one of the fleet little antelope, and the two women were so overcome with laughter that they had to sit down and hug each other. The joy of it lasted long after the mountains had receded into the heat mists, and it alleviated the crushing misery of the noonday sun.

During those long halts in the middle of the day, O’wa took to separating himself from the women, and Centaine became accustomed to seeing his tiny figure sitting crosslegged in the shade of an adjacent came]-thorn tree, scraping with the clasp knife at the gemsbok skin that was spread across his lap. He carried the skin carefully folded and rolled into a bundle on his head during the day’s march, and once when Centaine had begun to examine it casually, O’wa had become so agitated that she quickly placated him.

I meant no harm, old grandfather. But her curiosity had been piqued.

The old man was a craftsman, and usually he was delighted to show off his handiwork. He had not protested when Centaine watched as he split the pliable yellow bark off the trunk of a kokerboom tree, rolled it into a quiver to hold his spare arrows and decorated it with designs of birds and animals burned into the bark with a coal from the camp fire.

He showed her how to shape arrowheads from hard white bone by patiently grinding them against a flat stone, and Centaine was surprised at the keenness of the cutting edges and the points. He even took Centaine with him when he went out to hunt for the grubs from which be made the arrow poisons which had brought down the great gemsbok bull, and which could kill a man within hours. She helped him dig beneath a particular type of scrub and pick out of the dirt the brown pellet-like capsules which were the chrysalis in which the fat white grubs of the embryo diamphidia beetle were enclosed.

Handling the insects with elaborate caution, for the minutest quantity of their body juice entering through a scratch would mean lingering but certain death, O’wa pounded them to paste which he thickened with the juice of the wild sansevieria plant before dressing his arrowheads with the sticky mixture. From the sansevieria he separated the fibres from which he braided the twine to bind the arrow head to the shaft.

He even allowed Centaine to watch while he whittled a primitive pen-like flute on which he accompanied him self with piercing blasts when he danced, or while he carved the decorations into the heavy throwing stick which he used to knock the rocketing coqui francolin out of the air in a puff of pretty feathers or the blue-headed lizards from the uppermost branches of the camel-thorn trees, but when he worked on the gemsbok skin he went off to a discreet distance and he worked alone.

The river of sand which they had followed for so long finally contorted into a series of tight bends, like the convulsions of a dying adder, and then abruptly ended in a dry pan, go wide that the trees on the far side were merely a dark wavering line on the horizon. The surface of the pan was white with crystals of evaporated salts.

The reflection of the noon sun from this surface was painful to look at directly, and it turned the sky above it to pale silver. The Bushmen’s name for it was the big white place.

On the steep bank of the pan they built shelters sturdier and better thatched than any of the others had been, giving an air of permanence to the camp, and the two little San settled down to an undemanding routine, albeit with an underlying air of expectancy which Centaine detected and queried.

Why do we stop here, H’ani? Each uneventful day made her more impatient and restless.

We wait to make the crossing, was all that the old woman would tell her.

Crossing to where? Where are we going? Centaine insisted, but H’ani became vague and pointed in a wide arc into the east, and answered with a name that Centaine could only translate as a place were nothing must die.

Centaine’s child grew strongly within her pouting belly.

Sometimes it was difficult to breathe, and almost impossible to be comfortable on the bare ground. She made herself a nest of soft desert grass in her little sun shelter, which amused the two old people. For them the bare earth was bed enough, and they used their own shoulders are pillows.

Centaine lay in her nest and tried to count the days and months since she and Michael had been together, but time was blurred and telescoped so that all she could be sure of was that her time would be upon her soon. H’ani confirmed her estimate, probing her belly with gentle, knowing fingers.

The baby rides high and fights to be free. It will be a boy, Nam Child, she Promised, and took Centaine off into the desert to gather special herbs that they would need for the birthing.

Unlike many Stone Age peoples, the San were fully aware of the processes of procreation and saw sexual intercourse not as an isolated and random act, but as the first step in the long voyage to birth.

Where is the father of your growing infant, Nam Child? H’ani asked, and when she saw the tears in Centaine’s eyes she answered herself softly. He is dead in the north lands at the ends of the earth. Is that not so?

How did you know that I came from the north? Centaine asked, glad to turn away from the pain of Michael’s memory.

You are big, bigger than any of the San of the desert, H’ani explained.

Therefore you must come from a rich land where living is easy, a land of good rains and plentiful food. To the old woman water was all of life. The rain winds comes from the north, so you also must come from the north.

Intrigued by her logic, Centaine smiled. And how did you know I was from far away? I Your skin is pale, not darkened like the skin of the San. Here in the centre of the world the sun stands overhead, but it never goes north or south, and in the east and west it is low and wasting, so you must come from far away where the sun lacks the warmth and strength to darken your skin. Do you know of other people like me, H’ani, big people with pale skins? Have you ever before seen people like me? Centaine asked eagerly, and when she saw the shift in the old woman’s gaze, she seized her arm. Tell me, wise old grandmother, where have you seen my people?