The Burning Shore (68 page)

She watched Shasa tottering around the camp, hanging on to one of Lothar’s hands and engaging him in loquacious conversation that only the two of them could understand, and was appalled to find that she was jealous of her own child.

I will give Shasa his food, she told him coldly. It is time I resumed my duties. You need no longer discommode yourself, sir.

Of course, Mrs Courtney. And she wanted to cry, Please, I am truly sorry, But their pride was a mountain range between them.

She listened all that afternoon for the sound of his horse returning. She heard only the sound of distant rifle fire, but it was after dark when Lothar rode in, and she and Shasa were already in their cots. She lay in the darkness and listened to the voices and the sounds as the carcasses of the springbok that Lothar had shot were offloaded from his hunting horse and hung upon the butchering rack.

Lothar sat late at the fire with his men, and bursts of their laughter carried to her as she tried to compose herself to sleep.

At last she heard him come to the shelter beside hers, and she listened to the splash of water as he washed in the bucket at the entrance, the rustle of his clothing and finally the creak of the lacings of his cot as he settled upon it.

Shasa’s cries awoke her, and she knew instantly that he was in pain, and she swung her legs off the cot and still half-asleep groped for him. A match flared and lantern light bloomed in Lothar’s shelter.

Shh! Quiet, my little one. She cradled Shasa against her chest, and his hot little body alarmed her.

May I enter? Lothar asked from the entrance.

Oh, yes. He stooped into the tent and set down the lantern.

Shasa, he’s sick, Lothar took the child from her. He wore only a pair of breeches, his chest and feet were bare. His hair was tangled from the pillow.

He touched Shasa’s flushed cheek and then slipped a finger into his squalling mouth. Shasa choked off his next howl and bit down on the finger like a shark.

Another tooth, Lothar smiled, I felt it this morning. He handed Shasa back to her and he let out a howl of rejection.

I’ll be back, soldier, and she heard him rummaging in the medicine chest he kept bolted to the floor of his wagon.

He had a small bottle in his hand when he returned, and she wrinkled her nose at the pungent odour of oil of cloves as he pulled the cork.

We’ll fix that bad old tooth, won’t we just. Lothar massaged the child’s gums as Shasa sucked on his finger. That’s a brave soldier. He laid Shasa back in his cot and within minutes he had fallen asleep again.

Lothar picked up the lantern. Good night, Mrs Courtney, he said quietly, and went to the entrance.

Lothar! His name on her lips startled her as it did him.

Please, she whispered, I’ve been alone for so long.

Please, don’t be cruel to me any more. She held out both arms towards him and he crossed to her and sank down on to the edge of the cot beside her.

Oh, Lothar- Her voice was choked and gusty, and she wrapped her arms around his neck. Love me, she pleaded, oh, please love me, and his mouth was hot as fever on hers, his arms about her so fierce that she gasped as the breath was driven from her lungs.

Yes, I was cruel to you, he told her softly, his voice trembling in his throat, but only because I wanted so desperately to hold you, because I ached and burned with my love for you- Oh, Lothar, hold me and love me, and never ever let me go.

The days that followed were full recompense for all the hardships and loneliness of the months and years. It was as though the fates had conspired to heap upon Centaine all the delights that she had been denied for so long.

She woke each dawn in the narrow cot and before her eyes were open, she was groping for him with a tantalizing terror that he might no longer be there, but he always was. Sometimes he was feigning sleep and she had to try and open one of his eyelids with her fingertips, and when she succeeded, he rolled his eyeball upwards until only the white showed, and she giggled and thrust her tongue deeply into his ear, having discovered that that was the one torture he could not endure, and the gooseflesh sprang up on his bare arms and he came awake like a lion and seized her and turned her giggles to gasps and then to moans.

In the cool of the morning they rode out together with Shasa on the saddle in front of Lothar. For the first few days they kept the horses to a walk and stayed close by the camp. However, as Centaine’s strength returned, they ventured further and on the return they covered the last mile at a mad flying gallop, racing each other, and Shasa, secure in Lothar’s arms, shrieked with excitement as they tore into the camp, all of them flushed and ravenous for their breakfasts.

The long sultry desert noondays they spent under the thatched shelter, sitting apart, touching only fleetingly when he handed her a book or when passing Shasa between them, but caressing each other with their eyes and their voices until the suspense was a kind of exquisite torment.

As the heat passed and the sun mellowed, Lothar again called for the horses and they rode to the foot of the scree slope below the mountain. They hobbled the horses and with Shasa riding on Lothar’s shoulder climbed up into one of the narrow sheer-sided valleys. Here, below a fresco of ancient Bushman paintings, screened by dense foliage, Lothar had discovered another of the thermal springs. It spurted from out of the cliff face and drained into a small circular rock pool.

On their first visit, it was Lothar who had to be coaxed out of his clothes, while Centaine, happy to be rid of long skirts and petticoats which still irked her, delighting in the freedom of nakedness to which the desert had accustomed her, splashed him with water and teased and challenged him until at last, almost defiantly, he dropped his breeches and plunged hurriedly into the pool. You are shameless, he told her, only half-jokingly.

Shasa’s presence placed a restraint upon them, and they touched lightly and furtively under the concealment of the green waters, driving each other to trembling distraction, until Lothar could bear it no longer, and reached for her with that determined set to his jaw that she had come to know so well. Then she would evade his clutches with a maidenly squeal, and leap from the pool, slipping on her skirts over her long wet gleaming legs and her bottom that glowed pink from the heat of the water.

Last one home misses his dinner! It was only after she had laid Shasa in his cot, and blown out the lantern, that she crept breathlessly through to Lothar’s shelter, He was waiting for her, strung out by all the touching and teasing and artful withdrawals of the day. Then they went at each other in a desperate frenzy, almost as though they were antagonists locked in mortal combat.

Much later, lying in the darkness in each other’s arms, talking very softly so as not to disturb Shasa, they made their plans and their promises for a future that stretched before them as though they stood on the threshold of paradise itself.

It seemed he had been gone only a few days, when in the middle of a baking afternoon, on a lathered horse, Vark Jan rode back into camp.

He carried a package of letters, sewed up in canvas wrapping and sealed with tar. One letter was for Lothar, a single sheet, and he read it at a glance.

I have the honour to inform you that I have in my possession a document of amnesty in your favour, signed by both the Attorney-General of the Cape of Good Hope and the Minister of justice of the Union of South Africa.

I congratulate you on the success of your endeavours and I look forward to our meeting at the time and place nominated when I shall take pleasure in handing the document to you.

Yours truly, Garrick Courtney (Col.) The other letters were both for Centaine. One was also from Garry Courtney, welcoming her and Shasa to the family and assuring them both of all the love and consideration and privilege that that entailed.

From the most miserable creature, immersed in unbearable grief, you have transformed me at a stroke into the happiest and most joyful of all fathers and grandfathers.

I long to embrace you both.

Speed that day, Your affectionate and dutiful father-in-law, Garrick Courtney The third letter, many times thicker than the other two combined, was in Anna Stok’s clumsy, semi-literate scrawl. Her face flushed with excitement, alternately laughing aloud with joy or her eyes sparkling with tears, Centaine read snatches aloud for Lothar’s benefit, and when she had reached the end, she folded both letters carefully.

I long to see them, and yet I am reluctant to let the world intrude upon our happiness together. I want to go, and yet I want to stay here for ever with you. Is that silly? Yes, he laughed. It certainly is. We leave at sunset.

They travelled at night to avoid the heat of the desert day.

With Shasa sound asleep in the wagon cot, lulled by the motion of rolling wheels, Centaine rode stirrup to stirrup with Lothar. His hair shone in the moonlight, and the shadows softened the marks of hardship and suffering on his features, so she found it difficult to take her eyes from his face.

Each morning before the dawn, they went into laager.

If they were between water-holes, they watered the cattle and the horses from the bucket before they sought the shade of the wagon awnings to wait out the heat of the day.

In the late afternoon while the servants packed up the camp and inspanned for the night’s trek, Lothar would ride out to hunt. At first Centaine rode with him, for she could not bear to be parted from him for even an hour.

Then one evening in failing light Lothar made a poor shot and the Mauser bullet ripped through the belly of a beautiful little springbok.

It ran before the horses with amazing stamina, a tangle of entrails swinging from the gaping wound. Even when at last it went down, it lifted its head to watch Lothar as he dismounted and unsheathed his hunting knife. After that Centaine stayed in camp when Lothar went out for fresh meat.

So Centaine was alone this evening when the wind came suddenly out of the north, niggling and chill. Centaine climbed up into the living wagon to fetch a warm jacket for Shasa.

The interior of the wagon was crammed with gear, packed and ready for the night’s trek. The carpet bag which contained all the clothing that Anna had provided, was stowed at the rear and she had to scramble over a yellow wood chest to reach it. Her long skirts hampered her, and she teetered on the top of the chest and put out her hand to steady herself.

Her nearest handhold was the brass handle on the front of Lothar’s travelling bureau which was lashed to the wagon bed. As she put her weight on it the handle gave slightly, and the drawer slid open an inch.

He has forgotten to lock it, she thought, I must warn him. She pushed the drawer closed and crawled over the chest, reached the stowed carpet bag, pulled out Shasa’s jacket, and was crawling back when her eye fell again on the drawer of the bureau, and she checked herself sharply and stared at it.

Temptation was like the prickle of a burr. Lothar’s journal was in that drawer.

What an awful thing to do, she told herself primly, and yet her hand went out and touched the brass handle again.

What has he written about me? She pulled the drawer open slowly and stared at the thick, leather-covered volume. Do I really want to know? She began to close the drawer again, and then capitulated to that overwhelming temptation.

I’ll only read about me, she promised herself.

She crawled quickly to the wagon flap and peered out guiltily. Swart Hendrick was bringing up the draught oxen preparatory to inspanning. Has the master returned yet? s e called to him.

No, missus, and we have heard no shots. He will be late tonight. Call me if you see him coming, she ordered, and crept back to the bureau.

She squatted beside it with the heavy journal in her lap, and she was relieved to find it was written almost entirely in Afrikaans with only occasional passages in German. She riffled through the pages until she found the date on which he had rescued her. The entry was four pages long, the longest single entry in the entire journal.

Lothar had given a full account of the lion attack and the rescue, of their return to the wagons while she was unconscious, and a description of Shasa. She smiled as she read: A sturdy lad, of the same age as Manfred when last I saw him, and I find myself much affected.

Still smiling, she scanned the page for a description of herself, and her eyes stopped at the paragraph: I have no doubt that this is indeed the woman, though she is changed from the photograph and from my brief memory of her. Her hair is thick and fuzzy as that of a Nama girl, her face thin and brown as a monkey- Centaine gasped with affront -yet when she opened her eyes for a moment, I thought my heart might crack, they were so big and soft.

She was slightly mollified and skimmed forward, turning the pages quickly, listening like a thief for the sound of Lothar’s horse. A word caught her eye in the neat blocks of teutonic script; Boesmanne. Her attention flicked to it. Bushmen’, and her heart tripped, her interest entirely captivated.

Bushmen harassing the camp during the night. Hendrick discovered their spoor near the horse lines and the cattle. We followed at first light. A difficult huntThe word jag stopped Centaine’s eye. Hunt? she puzzled. This was a word only applied to the chase, to the killing of animals, and she raced on.

We came up with the two Bushmen, but they almost gave us the slip by climbing the cliff with the agility of baboons.

We could not follow and would have lost them, but their curiosity was too strong, again, just like baboons. One of them paused at the top of the cliff and looked down at us. it was a difficult shot, at extreme upward deflection and long range The blood drained from Centaine’s face. She could not believe what she was reading, each word reverberated in her skull as though it were an empty place, cavernous and echoing.

However, I held true and brought the Bushman down. Then I witnessed a remarkable incident. I had no need of a second shot, for the remaining Bushman fell from the cliff top. From below it seemed almost as though he threw himself over the edge. However, I do not believe that this was the case, an animal is not capable of suicide. It is more likely that in terror and panic, he lost his footing. Both bodies fell in difficult positions. However, I was determined to examine them. The climb was awkward and dangerous, but I was in fact, well rewarded for my endeavours. The first body, that of a very old man, the one that had slipped from the cliff, was unremarkable except that he carried a clasp knife made by “Joseph Rodgers”