The Child's Elephant (32 page)

Muka and Bat felt their hearts flip with fright.

‘If they find us, they’ll kill us.’ Gulu pressed his point home. ‘They always take their revenge.’

‘So will none of the other soldiers ever find a way to escape?’ Bat wondered. ‘Will none of them ever find their way back home?’

For a long while Gulu was quiet. He drew his legs up to his chest-bone. His knees and elbows stuck out like the knots on a stick. ‘Some will,’ he eventually said. ‘They will reach the point when they are ready to risk everything. Then they will run. The best time,’ he murmured, ‘is when you are out on a raid and crossing a road. The army only dares send its soldiers across one by one. It’s dangerous out in the open. One by one each squad member dashes across. If you are among the first to the far side, that’s your chance to vanish. You duck your head low and disappear in the scrub. Then you just have to run and keep running and keep praying that no one will catch you up.’

‘And then what?’ asked Bat.

‘And then,’ muttered Gulu, ‘if you know your way back to your village you try to reach it. But you’ll probably find that it’s been abandoned. And then’ – he drew in a deep breath – ‘then you go to the town, you find an army barracks. You give yourself up.’

‘But the government soldiers?’ cried Muka.

‘The government soldiers don’t harm you,’ said Gulu flatly. ‘They want to encourage defectors. They will keep you for a while; you will stay in a camp. And then an announcement will be put out on the radio. Your name will be listed. They will say they have found you, that
your family must come to fetch you. And if you are lucky they will. They will come to the market square; they will search the lines of ex-soldiers and find you.’ He paused for a moment. ‘They will recognize you by your face,’ he eventually added. ‘But they won’t know who you are in your heart any more.’

‘But whatever has happened, deep down it can’t change you?’ ventured Muka. ‘You’ll still know who you are, know that deep down you’re the same?’

The boy didn’t answer. He just stared into the black. The children couldn’t see his face; but Bat knew the memories would be moving across it like the shadows of clouds sweeping over a rock.

What was it that had happened to Gulu? he wondered with a shudder. What had cut him so deeply that his very soul was scarred? He remembered the words that the boy had once whispered. ‘I have done such things. I have done things that no one could forgive me for,’ he had said.

Reaching out gently, Bat slid an arm around his friend. But Gulu gave no response, and a few moments later, pulling himself away, he lay down, his back like a wall turned against them. He clutched his knees close to his chest. As if he was locking them out . . . and himself in, Bat thought.

Gulu did not speak another word that night. But the next day at dawn he was the first to get up. ‘We have to keep moving,’ he urged as he roused them. ‘We can’t afford to slack. We have to keep going . . .’

He was more jumpy than normal that morning. His eyes were constantly darting. The bark of a jackal made
him freeze in his tracks. The bustle of a bush pig sent him sprawling face downwards. Even the flick of a grasshopper was enough to draw him up short.

In the afternoon they found an orange tree. Its fruit was hard and green: so bitter it pulled grimaces from the children’s lips. Only Meya could eat without wincing. She soon stripped the bush. A family of colobus monkeys crept down from the high canopies to see what was happening. They purred as they parted the branches with flickering paws.

‘It’s not safe; it’s not safe here!’ cried the agitated Gulu. The monkeys sprang back to the tree-tops, clicking their tongues. ‘We must press on.’ Gulu was looking wildly about.

‘Can’t we rest a little longer?’ pleaded Muka. She was feeling so weak she was not sure how much more she could manage. She looked imploringly at Bat. He was weary too. Even Meya was flagging. The elephant should have been feeding throughout the mornings, not waking straight from a brief fretful sleep and moving instantly on.

Gulu glanced up at the monkeys, whose long rolling croaks were now resounding across the canopies. ‘We can’t stay,’ he cried. ‘Any wild thing out here will know where we are now. The warning of the monkeys will lead them straight to us.’

But it was not the forest animals that scared the boy, not the skulking leopard, its skin sliding like silk over sinew and muscle; not the poisonous scorpion or the swivelling snake: it was men.

Towards the evening of the fifth day, Meya came to
an abrupt halt. Spreading her ears, she lifted her trunk, probing the air for some unfamiliar scent. Suddenly Gulu froze. He too had just noticed the track that cut through the trees ahead of them. He too had just heard the sound of an approaching engine. He leaped forward and pushed his companions down flat.

‘Why?’ Muka whispered, when she had regained her winded breath. ‘It might not be the army. Isn’t it more likely to be someone who can help?’

‘No one will help us,’ Gulu hissed. ‘They will probably kill us. They are sure to have guns. No one would be out here in the jungle without a weapon, and they will shoot a stranger rather than run the risk of trust.’

‘But when they see we are just children?’

‘Especially when they see that we’re children,’ Gulu snapped. ‘No decent villager will ever trust a strange child: not now that they have learned what children are capable of. Now quiet!’

Muka huddled miserably down in the leaf mould. She felt so very tired. She listened to the noise of the engine as it gradually faded. It sounded to her like the ebbing of hope. She hauled herself upright, momentarily giddy. The sudden harsh sunburst of light on the track pierced her brain. She felt herself staggering. Then she was across, swallowed up by the forest gloom again.

For a short while the path plunged steeply downwards. They stumbled and slipped. Every muscle in Muka’s body felt like it was tearing. But then they had to start climbing again, on and on until every pace started to feel to her like the last. Reaching the base of an
insurmountable cliff, they began to wind their way round. It was a slow out-of-the-way route.

At least the elephant paths were carefully graded, Bat thought. However slow the climb felt, it was never more than he could manage. But whenever he turned to check on Muka, she was flagging, and night had not yet fallen when even Gulu agreed that they should stop.

They were crouching under a bush of hard pear-shaped fruits. The seeds were so acid that they had to spit them out, but the fibrous flesh was good. And yet Muka was now almost too weary to care. ‘We can’t push her any further,’ conceded Gula at last. ‘Let’s just stay here for the night’. He began to scrape a shallow hollow in the leaf mould for her to lie down. She was shivering as he settled her and, taking off his shirt, laid it tenderly over her. Despite her trembling she felt hot. Her skin burned to the touch.

As Bat took the first watch, he wondered how much longer the three of them would last out. Muka was fading. Her breath as she slept was no more than a faint rasp in her throat. Every knobble in Gulu’s spine poked out through his skin. He twitched and flinched amid dreams that would not let his mind rest. If they didn’t get somewhere soon, they would just die in the forest, Bat thought. He gazed dully around him with huge forlorn eyes. A sense of despair settled over him like dust.

Suddenly he tensed. There was something there: a faint movement, somewhere among the trees. Instantly alert, he rose stealthily to his feet, every muscle steeled, every sinew strained taut. He darted a quick sideways glance at Meya. She was already awake and on guard,
standing head tilted, ears spread. Together they waited. And then Bat saw them, emerging from the shadows: a line of magical creatures gliding silently through the trees. He stared, entranced.

Elephants! But not like any elephants that he had ever seen. They were the same as Meya and yet, at the same time, they were not like her at all. They were slighter, more delicate, with smaller ears and slender tusks that were tinged a faint pink. Bat’s heart leaped in his throat. He remembered a story which Bitek had once told him. All elephants had originally belonged to the same family, the fisherman had said, but slowly this family had drifted apart. Driven from their homelands by humans, one group of elephants had taken refuge in the forests, moving deeper and deeper and never coming out, until gradually, over the centuries, they had grown apart from their savannah-dwelling cousins. Now they lived only among shadows, Bitek had said. They moved through the trees in their shy, graceful herds, singing songs to each other in musical harmony. People said that their strange humming could be heard with the soul.

Bat stood as if spellbound. Meya was listening too. She lifted her trunk in a tentative greeting, winding it round like she did when she was uncertain. But the creatures passed her like phantoms. They faded back into the shadows from which they had first come.

A pair of hands parted the leaves. A face popped out between them. It peered straight at the children.

‘There’s someone there,’ Gulu hissed. It was he who was now on watch. Seizing a branch, he brandished it like a weapon, but there was nothing there. He swivelled slowly about. The trees soared up around him like the stakes of a trap. The moonlight fell in bright shards through the foliage, sharp as the fear that flashed in his eyes. Meya, a dark mass amid the greater darkness around her, shifted. Her pale tusks gleamed.

‘Get up. We must go.’ Gulu shook Bat’s shoulder, rousing the huddled boy roughly from his sleep.

He turned quickly to Muka. The girl’s eyes were open but she barely stirred.

‘Get up, Muka!’

She lifted her head. It seemed so very heavy; she let it
sink back onto her dusty pillow of leaves. She hadn’t the strength to stir. Her breath had thinned to the finest of threads in her throat. It was fraying. At any moment she felt as if it might snap. Then she would no longer be tethered, she thought. She would be set free to wander without the tired weight of her body. She stared out into the black. She was already coming loose. Her mind was all fuzzy round the edges. She was dissolving away into the darkness of the night.

Putting an arm round her shoulder, Bat tried to lift her. She felt light as a bird flying free of his grasp. ‘Leave her; let her sleep a while longer,’ he told Gulu. ‘She can’t walk any further right now.’

‘We can’t wait,’ the boy urged them. ‘We must go. There’s someone watching . . . someone waiting. I can’t see them. But they’re out there, I know.’

Bat glanced around quickly. ‘It’s the brightness of the moon that disturbed you,’ he ventured; but when he looked at Meya he knew that she too had sensed something. She was shifting uncertainly, her foot lifted and swaying.

Just at that moment a figure stepped out in front of them. Bat felt his heart ricochet. He sprang backwards; saw Gulu spring forward at the same moment, fast as the shadow that leaps from a lantern’s swinging light. There was a thump and a cry. Gulu vanished. He was down on the ground. A dark figure stood above him. It was a child. Bat’s heart dropped and lay thudding at the bottom of his gut. The soldiers had found them; they had come to reclaim them. He dropped into a crouch and got ready to launch a last frantic attack, but just at
that moment he noticed that the figure too was stooping, stretching out a hand to help his fallen friend; and it was not a child, but a man: a man no taller than a child, with short legs and a broad back and a string of animal teeth around his neck. They shone in the moonlight like the smile that now spread over his face.

Slowly it dawned upon Bat who this person might be. He was one of the little people who lived in the forest, one of the pygmies who his grandmother used to tell him about. ‘They hunt for their food,’ she had told him, ‘and they sell medicines to traders.’ He snatched at the hope. Maybe this man could help Muka now? Maybe he could make her well again? He glanced down at the girl. She was no more than a tiny huddled heap in the darkness, sweating and shivering beneath Gulu’s tattered shirt.

‘She’s ill. She has a fever!’ Bat cried. ‘Can you help us? She has a fever. She will die without help.’

The little man looked at him quizzically. He didn’t understand the language which Bat was speaking, but he seemed somehow to pick up on the sense of what he was saying because now he was turning, gazing gently down at the girl. As he watched him, Bat suddenly realized it was the first time he had seen kindness in the face of an adult since all those months ago when he had been snatched.

The little man jerked his head as if to say follow. They had to trust him, thought Bat. It was their only chance. He darted a look at the still-dubious Gulu, but it was Meya who persuaded him. Though she had edged softly into the deepest shadows, she was calm.

Hauling the limp Muka on to her feet, the two boys draped her arms round their shoulders and set off in the direction in which the pygmy led. He seemed not to notice what a burden she was, hanging all but insensible between them, half stumbling, half dragging, her head jerking and lolling. He moved along at a jog, humming to himself as he skimmed lightly through the trees, flickering through the shadows like some strange burly sprite; disappearing into the darkness and leaving only the trail of his song to guide them before suddenly darting back to check that they were still following.