The Burning Shore (51 page)

In what direction, and how far away? Would I be able to reach them? Please tell me. H’ani’s eyes clouded with a film of incomprehension and she picked a grain of dried mucus from her nostril and examined it with minute attention.

Tell me, H’ani.1 Centaine shook her arm gently.

I have heard the old people talk of such things, H’ani grudgingly admitted, but I have never seen these people, and I do not know where they could be found. And Centaine knew she was lying. Then, in a sudden vehement gabble, Kain went on. They are fierce as lions and poisonous as the scorpion, the San hide from them- She jumped up in agitation, seized her satchel and digging stick and hurried from the camp and did not return until sunset.

That night after Centaine had curled in her grass bed, H’ani whispered to O’wa. The child yearns for her own people. I have seen her look southwards with sadness in her eyes, O’wa admitted.

How many days travel to reach the land of the pale giants? Ram asked reluctantly. How far to travel to her own clan? I Less than a moon, Olwa grunted, and they were both silent for a long time, staring into the hot bluish flames, of the camel-thorn log fire.

I want to hear a baby cry once more before I die, I H’ani said at last and O’wa nodded. And both their little heartshaped faces turned towards the east. They stared out into the darkness, towards the Place of All Life.

Once when H’ani found Centaine kneeling alone and praying in the wilderness, she asked, Who are you speaking to, Nam Child? and Centaine was at a loss, for though the San language was rich and complex in its descriptive powers of the material aspects of the desert world, it was extremely difficult to use it to convey abstract ideas.

However, after long discussion spread over many days while they foraged in the desert or worked over the cooking fire, Centaine managed to describe her concept of the Godhead, and H’ani nodded dubiously and mumbled and frowned as she considered it.

You are talking to the spirits? she asked. But most of the spirits live in the stars, and if you speak so softly, how will they hear you? It is necessary to dance and sing and whistle loudly to attract their attention. She lowered her voice. And it is even then not certain they will listen to you, for I have found the star spirits to be fickle and forgetful. H’ani glanced around her like a conspirator. It is my experience, Nam Child, that Mantis and Eland are much more reliable. Mantis and Eland? Centaine tried not to show her amusement.

Mantis is an insect with huge eyes that see all and with arms like a little man. Eland is an animal, oh, yes, much larger than the gemsbok, with a dewlap so full of rich fat that it sweeps the earth. The San’s love of fat was almost equal to their love of wild honey. And twisted horns that sweep the sky. If we are fortunate we will find both Mantis and Eland at the place to which we are going.

In the meantime, talk to the stars, Nam Child, for they are beautiful, but put your trust in Mantis and Eland. Thus simply H’ani explained the religion of the San, and that night she and Centaine sat under a brilliant sky and she pointed out Orion’s glittering train.

That is the herd of celestial zebras, Nam Child, and there is the inept huntsman, she picked out the star Aldebaran, sent by his seven wives, she stabbed a gnarled finger at the Pleiades, to find meat. See how he has shot his arrow, and it has flown high and wide to fall at the feet of Lion Star. Sirius, the brightest of all the fixed stars, seemed truly lionlike. And now the huntsman is afraid to retrieve his arrow and afraid to return to his seven wives, and he sits there forever twinkling with fear, which is just like a man, Nam Child. H’ani hooted with laughter, and dug her bony thumb into her husband’s scrawny ribs.

Because the San were also star-lovers, Centaine’s bond of affection for them was so strengthened that she pointed out Michael’s star and her own in the far south.

But, Nam Child, O’wa protested, how can that star belong to you? It belongs to no one and to everybody, like the shade of the camel-thorn, and the water in the desert pool, or the land on which we tread, to nobody and yet to everybody. Nobody owns the eland, but we may take of his fat if we have need. Nobody owns the big plants but we may gather them on condition that we leave some for the children. How can you say that a star belongs to you alone? It was an expression of the philosophy which was the tragedy of his people, a denial of the existence of property which had doomed them to merciless persecution, to massacre and slavery or to exile in the far reaches of the desert where no other people could exist.

So the monotonous days of waiting were passed in discussion and the leisurely routine of hunting and foraging, and then one evening both the San were galvanized by excitement and they faced into the north with their little amber faces turned up to a sky that was the flawless blue of a heron’s egg.

It took Centaine a few minutes to discover what had excited them, and then she saw the cloud. It groped up over the rim of the northern horizon like the finger of a gargantuan hand, and it grew as she watched it, the top of it flattened into an anvil shape, and the distant thunder growled like a hunting lion. Soon the cloud stood tall and heaven-high, burning with the colours of the sunset and lit with its own wondrous internal lightnings.

That night O’wa danced and whistled and sang the praises of the cloud spirits until at last he collapsed with exhaustion, but in the morning the thunderhead had dispersed.

However, the sky had changed from unsullied blue, and there were streaks of high mare’s-tails cirrus smeared across it. The air itself seemed also to have changed. It was charged with static that made Centaine’s skin prickle, and the heat was heavy and languorous, even harder to bear than the dry harsh noons had been, and the thunderheads climbed above the northern horizon and tossed their monstrous billowing heads to the sky.

Each day they grew taller and more numerous, and they massed in the north like a legion of giants and marched southward, while an enervating blanket of humid air lay upon the earth and smothered it and everything upon it.

Please let it rain, Centaine whispered each day, while the sweat snaked down her cheeks and the child weighted her womb like an ironstone boulder.

In the night O’wa danced and sang.

Spirit of Cloud, see how the earth waits for you the way that a great cow eland in heat trembles for the bull.

Come down from on high, Spirit of Cloud whom we venerate, and spill your generative fluids upon your earth wife. Mount your lover and from your seed she will bring forth new life in abundance. And when H’ani trilled and piped the chorus, Centaine cried out just as fervently.

One morning there was no sun, the clouds stretched in a solid grey mass from horizon to horizon. Low to begin with, they sank lower still, and a stupendous bolt of lightning tore from their great grey sowlike belly and clanged upon the earth so that it seemed to jump beneath their feet. A single raindrop struck Centaine in the centre of her forehead, and it was as heavy as a stone, so that she reeled back at the shock of it and cried out in astonishment.

Then the hanging clouds burst open and the rain fell from them thick as locusts. Each drop as it struck the surface of the pan rolled into a globule of mud, or made the wiry scrub branches around the edge jump and quiver as though flocks of invisible birds had alighted upon them.

The rain stung Centaine’s skin, and one drop struck her in the eye and blinded her for a second. She blinked it clear and laughed to see O’wa and H’ani capering across the pan. They had thrown aside their meagre clothing and they danced naked in the rain. Each drop burst in a silver puff upon their wrinkled amber skin and they howled delightedly at the pricks of it.

Centaine ripped off her own canvas skirt, threw aside the shawl, and mother-naked stood with her arms thrown open and her face turned to the clouds. The rain thrashed her and melted her long dark hair down across her face and shoulders. She pushed it aside with both hands and opened her mouth wide.

it was as though she stood under a waterfall. The rain poured into her mouth as fast as she could swallow. The far edge of the pan disappeared behind the blue veils of falling rain, and the surface turned to yellow mud.

The rain was so cold that a rash of goose bumps ran down Centaine’s forearms and her nipples darkened and hardened, but she laughed with joy and ran out to the pan to dance with the San, and the thunder sounded as though massive boulders were rolling across the roof of the sky.

The earth seemed to dissolve under the solid sheets of silver water. The pan was ankle-deep and the silky mud squelched up between Centaine’s toes. The rain gave them new life and strength and they danced and sang until O’wa stopped abruptly and cocked his head to listen.

Centaine could hear nothing above the thunder and the lash of the rain, but O’wa shouted a warning. They floundered to the steep bank of the pan, slipping in the glutinous mud and the yellow waters which by now reached to their knees. From the bank Centaine heard the sound which had alarmed O’wa, a low rushing like a high wind in tall trees.

The river, O’wa pointed through the thick palisade of silver rain, the river is alive again. It came like a living thing, a monstrous frothing yellow python down the sandy river bed, and it hissed from bank to bank, carrying the bodies of drowned animals and the branches of trees in its flood. It burst into the flooded pan and raced in serried waves across the surface, breaking on the bank beneath their feet, swirling on to catch them around the legs and threatening to drag them under.

They snatched up their few possessions and waded to higher ground, clinging to each other for support. The rain clouds brought on premature night, and it was cold.

There was no chance of a fire and they huddled together for warmth and shivered miserably.

The rain fell without slackening all that night.

In the dull leaden dawn they looked across a drowned landscape, a vast shimmering take with islands of higher ground from which the water streamed, and stranded acacia trees like the backs of whales.

Will it never stop? Centaine whispered. Her teeth chattered uncontrollably, and the chill seemed to have to reached into her womb, for the infant writhed and kicked in protest.

Please let it stop now. The San suffered the cold with the fortitude they showed for all hardship. Rather than slackening, the rain seemed to increase in tempo, and hid the sorry drowned land from them behind a glassy curtain.

Then the rain stopped. There was no warning, no faltering or tapering off; one second it was falling in a solid cascade and the next it was over. The ceiling of low bruised cloud split open and peeled away like the skin from a ripe fruit, revealing the clean washed blue of the sky, and the sun burst upon them with blinding brilliance, once more stunning Centaine with the sudden contrasts of this wild continent.

Before noon, the thirsty earth had drunk down the waters that had fallen upon it. The floods sank away without trace. Only in the pan itself surface water still lay glittering sulphurous-yellow from bank to far bank.

However, the land was cleansed and vivid with colour.

The dust that had coated each bush and tree was washed away and Centaine saw greens that she had never dreamed this tan, lion-coloured land could contain. The earth, still damp, was rich with ochres and oranges and reds and the songs of the little desert larks were joyous.

They laid out their scant possessions in the sun and they steamed as they dried. O’wa could not contain himself and be danced ecstatically.

The cloud spirits have opened the road for us. They have replenished the water-holes to the east. Make ready, H’ani, my little flower of the desert: before the dawn tomorrow we will march.

Within the first day’s march they entered a new country, so different that Centaine could scarcely believe it was on the same continent. Here the ancient dunes had compacted and consolidated into gentle undulations, and they now supported abundant plant life.

Stands of mopani and tall kiaat, alternating with almost impenetrable thickets of paper-bark, stood tall along the ridges of high ground where the dunes crests had weathered and flattened. Occasionally a giant silver terminalia or a monumental bac, hah soared seventy feet above the rest of the forest.

in the valleys, fields of sweet golden grasses and scattered giraffe acacias with flat tops gave the scene a park-like and cultivated aspect.

Here also, in the lowest depressions, the recent rains had been trapped in the shallow water-holes, and the land seemed to hum and seethe with life.

Through the yellow grasses fresh tender shoots of delicate green appeared. Gardens of wild flowers, daisies and arum lilies and gladioli and fifty other varieties which Centaine did not recognize, sprang up as though at a F magician’s flourish, delighting her with their colours and delicate beauty, and causing her to wonder anew at Africa’s prolificness. She picked the blooms and plaited them into necklaces for herself and H’ani, and the old woman preened like a bride.

Oh, I wish I had a mirror to show you how adorable you look. Centaine embraced her.

Even from the sky Africa gave of her abundance. There were flocks of quelea thick as hiving bees as they wheeled overhead, shrikes in the undergrowth with chests of purest glowing ruby, sandgrouse and francolin fat as domestic chickens, and water fowl on the brimming waterholes, wild duck and long-legged stilts and gaunt blue heron.

It’s all so beautiful, Centaine exulted. Each day’s journey was light and carefree after the hardships of the and western plains, and when they camped, there was the untold luxury of unlimited water and a Least of wild fruits and nuts and game from O’wa’s snares and arrows.

One evening O’wa climbed high into the swollen fleshy branches of a monstrous baobab and smoked the hive that had inhabited its hollow trunk since his great-grandfather’s time and beyond. He came down with a gourd full of thick waxen combs running with dark honey redolent of the perfume of the yellow acacia blossoms.