The Burning Shore - Smith Wilbur. Страница 80

They burned their fingers and squealed with laughter as they broke open the scaly red tails and dug out the rich white meat.

H'ani beckoned to Centaine and she squatted beside them. The legs of the crayfish contained sticks of flesh the size of her finger, the thorax was filled with the yellow livers which had been broken down in the cooking to a custard. The San used this as sauce for the flesh.

Centaine could not remember ever having so much enjoyed eating. She used the knife to slice bite-sized chunks off the tail of the crayfish. H'ani smiled at her in the firelight, her cheeks bulging with food, and she said, Nam! and then again, Nam! Centaine listened carefully, then repeated it, with the same inflexion as the old woman had used. Nam! And H'ani squealed gleefully. Did you hear, O'wa, the child said "Good!"

O'wa grunted and watched the knife in the female's hand. He found he could not take his eyes off it. The blade sliced through the meat so cleanly that it left a sheen on it. How sharp it must be, thought O'wa, and the sharpness of the blade spoiled his appetite.

With her stomach so full that it was almost painful, Centaine lay down beside the fire, and H'ani came to her and scraped out a hollow for her hip in the sand beneath her. It was immediately more comfortable and she settled down again, but H'ani was trying to show her something else.

You must not lay your head on the ground, Nam Child, she explained. You must keep it up, like this. Ham propped herself on one elbow and then laid her head on her own shoulder. It looked awkward and uncomfortable, and Centaine smiled her thanks but lay flat.

Leave her, grunted O'wa. When a scorpion crawls into her ear during the night, she will understand. She has learned enough for one day, H'ani agreed. Did you hear her say "Nam"? That is her first word and that is the name I will give her, "Nam", she repeated it, Nam Child. O'wa grunted and went off into the darkness to relieve himself. He understood his wife's unnatural interest in the stranger and the child she carried in her womb, but there was a fearful journey ahead and the woman would be a dangerous nuisance. Then, of course, there was the knife, thinking about the knife made him angry.

Centaine awoke screaming. It had been a terrible dream, confused but deeply distressing, she had seen Michael again, not in the flaming body of the aeroplane, but riding Nuage. Michael's body was still blackened by the flames and his hair was burning like a torch, and beneath him Nuage was torn and mutilated by the shells and his blood was bright on the snowy hide and his entrails dangled from the torn belly as he ran.

There is my star, Centaine, Michael pointed ahead with a hand like a black claw. Why don't you follow it? I cannot, Michael, Centaine cried, oh, I cannot. And Michael galloped away across the dunes into the south without looking back and Centaine screamed after him, Wait, Michel, wait for me! She was still screaming when gentle hands shook her awake.

Peace, Nam Child, H'ani whispered to her. Your head is full of the sleep demons, but see, they are gone now. Centaine was still sobbing and shivering and the old woman lay down beside her and spread her fur cape over them both and held her and stroked her hair. After a while Centaine quietened down. The old woman's body smelled of woodsmoke and animal fat and wild herbs, but it was not offensive and her warmth comforted Centaine, and after a while she slept again, this time without the nightmares.

H'ani did not sleep. Old people do not need the sleep that the young do. But she felt at peace. The bodily contact with another human being was something she had missed all these long months. She had known from childhood how important it was. The infant San was strapped close to its mother's body, and lived the rest of its life in intimate physical contact with the rest of the clan. There was a saying of the clan, The zebra on his own falls easy prey to the hunting lion, and the clan was a close-knit entity.

Thinking thus, the old woman became sad again, and the loss of her people became a great stone in her chest too heavy to carry. There had been nineteen of them in the clan of O'wa and H'ani, their three sons and their wives and the eleven children of their sons. The youngest of H'ani's grandchildren was still unweaned and the eldest, a girl whom she loved most dearly, had just menstruated for the first time when the sickness came on the clan.

It had been a plague beyond anything in the annals of the clan and of the San; something so swift and savage that H'ani still could not comprehend it or come to terms with it. It had started first as a sore throat which changed to raging fever, a skin so hot that it was almost searing to the touch and a thirst beyond anything the Kalahari itself, which the San called the Great Dry, could generate.

At this stage the little ones had died, just a day or two after the first symptoms, and the elders had been so debilitated by the sickness that they did not have the strength to bury them and their tiny bodies decomposed swiftly in the heat.

Then the fever passed and they believed that they had been spared. They buried the babies, but they were too weak even to dance for the spirits of the infants or to sing them away on their journey into the other world.

They had not been spared, however, for the sickness had only changed its form, and now there came a new fever, but at the same time their lungs filled with water and they rattled and choked as they died.

They all died, all of them except O'wa and H'ani, but even they were so close to death that it was many days and many nights before they were strong enough to appreciate the full extent of the disaster that had overtaken them.

When the two old people were sufficiently recovered, they danced for their doomed clan, and H'ani cried for her babies that she would never again carry on her hip nor enchant with her fairy-tales.

Then they had discussed the cause and the meaning of the tragedy, they discussed it endlessly around their campfire in the night, grieving still to the depths of their beings, until one night O'wa had said, When we are strong enough for the journey, and you know, H'ani, what a fearsome journey it is, then we must go back to the Place of All Life, for only there will we find the meaning of this thing, and learn how we can make recompense to the angry spirits that have smitten us so. H'ani became once more aware of the young and fruitful body in her arms and her sadness lifted a little and she felt the resurgence of the mother instinct in her milkless and withered bosom, which had been snuffed out by the great sickness.

It may be, she thought, that already the spirits are mollified because we have begun the pilgrimage, and that they will grant this old woman the boon of hearing once more the birth cry of a new infant before she dies. In the dawn H'ani unstoppered one of the little buckhoms that hung from her girdle and with an aromatic paste dressed the sun blisters on Centaine's cheeks and nose and lips, and the grazes and bruises on her legs and arms, chattering away to her as she worked. Then she allowed Centaine a carefully measured ration of water.

Centaine was still savouring it, holding it in her mouth as though it were a rare Bordeaux, when without further ceremony the two San stood up, turned their faces northwards and set off along the beach in that rhythmic jogtrot.

Centaine sprang up in consternation and without wasting breath on entreaties, she snatched up her club, adjusted the canvas hood over her head and started after them.

Within the first mile she realized how the food and rest had strengthened her. She was at first able to hold the pair of tiny figures in sight. She saw H'ani prod the sand with her digging stick, scoop up a sand clam almost without breaking stride and hand it to O'wa, then pluck another for herself and eat it on the run.