The Burning Shore (47 page)

The memory of the ocean stayed with them long after it was out of sight, the soft hiss of their footsteps in the sand seined to echo its gentle kissing surf on the yellow beaches, and the air was still cooled by its vast green waters.

They had been following the valley for almost a half of the moon’s rise to its zenith when suddenly Centaine trotted into an eddy of heat. After the ocean-cooled airs it was like running into a solid barrier. Centaine gasped with surprise and H’ani murmured without breaking the rhythm of her gait, Now it begins.”But they passed swiftly through it, and beyond the air was so cold by contrast that Centaine shivered and drew her cloak closer about her shoulders.

The valley twisted and as they came around the corner of a towering dune on which the moon shadows lay like bruises, the desert breathed upon them again.

Stay close, Nam Child. But the heat had a viscosity and weight so that Centaine felt that she was wading into a lava flow. At midnight it was hotter than in the boiler room at Mort Homme with the furnace stoked with oak logs, and as she breathed it into her lungs, she felt the heat entering her body like an invader, and with each breath expelled, she could feel it taking her moisture like a thief.

They paused once, only briefly, and drank from an eggbottle. Both H’ani and O’wa watched carefully as Centaine lifted it to her lips, but neither of them had to caution her now.

When the sky began to lighten, O’wa slackened his pace a little, and once or twice paused to survey the valley with a critical eye. It was obvious that he was choosing a place to wait out the day, and when at last they halted, it was close under the lee of a steep dune wall.

There was no material for a fire, and H’ani offered Centaine a piece of sun-dried fish wrapped in seaweed, but she was too tired and hot to eat and afraid also that food would increase her thirst during the day ahead. She drank her ration of water from the egg-bottle, and then wearily stood up and moved a short distance from the others. But as soon as she squatted, H’ani let out a shrill reprimand and hurried to her.

No! she repeated, and Centaine was embarrassed and confused, until the old woman fished in her satchel and brought out the dried wild gourd that she used as a bowl and ladle.

Here, this one - She proffered it to Centaine, who still did not understand. Exasperated, the old woman snatched back the gourd and holding it between her own legs urinated into it. Here, do. She offered the bowl to Centaine again.

I can’t, H’ani, not in front of everybody, Centaine protested modestly.

O’wa, come here,H’ani called. Show the child.”The old man came across and noisily reinforced H’anils demonstration.

Despite her embarrassment, Centaine could not help feeling a touch of envy. How much more convenient! Now, do! Rani offered her the gourd once again, and Centaine capitulated. She turned away modestly and with both the old people encouraging her loudly, she added her own tinkling stream to the communal gourd. H’ani bore it away triumphantly.

Hurry, Nam Child, she beckoned. The sun will come soon. And she showed Centaine how to scoop a shallow trench in the sand in which to lie.

The sun struck the face of the dune on the opposite side of the valley, and it flung reflected heat at them like a mirror of polished bronze. They lay in the strip of shade and cringed into their trenches.

The sun rose higher and the dune shadow shrank. The heat rose and filled the valley with silvery mirage so that the dunes began to dance, and then the sands began to sing. It was a low but pervading vibration as though the desert was the sounding box of a gigantic string instrument. It rose and fell and died away and then started again.

The sands are singing, H’ani told her quietly, and Centaine understood.

She lay with her ear to the ground and listened to the strange and wonderful music of the desert.

Still the heat increased, and following the example of the San, Centaine covered her head with the canvas shawl and lay quietly. It was too hot to sleep, but she fell into a sort of stupefied coma, and rode the long swelling waves of heat as though they were the sound of the sea.

Still it became hotter, and the shade shrivelled away as the sun nooned, and there was no relief or asylum from its merciless lash, Centaine lay and panted like a maimed animal, and each quick and shallow breath seemed to abrade her throat and burn the strength from her body.

It can’t get worse, she told herself. This is the end of it, soon it will begin to cool. She was wrong. The heat grew stronger yet and the desert hissed and vibrated like a tortured beast, and Centaine was almost afraid to open her eyes lest it sear her eyeballs.

Then she heard the old woman moving and she lifted the corner of her head cover and watched her carefully mixing sand into the gourdful of urine. She brought the bowl to where Centaine lay and plastered the wet sand over her baking skin.

Centaine gasped with relief of the cool touch of it, and before it could dry in the fierce beat, H’ani filled in the shallow trench with loose sand, burying Centaine under a thin layer and then arranging the shawl over her head.

Thank you, H’ani, Centaine whispered, and the old woman went to cover her husband.

With the damp sand next to her skin and the protective layer over that, Centaine lasted out those hottest hours of the desert day, and then with that African suddenness she felt the temperature on her cheeks change, and the sunlight was no longer stark dazzling white, but shaded with a mellow, buttery tone.

At nightfall they rose out of their beds and shook themselves, throwing off the sand. They drank in a transport that was almost religious, but again Centaine could not force herself to eat, and then O’wa led them off.

Now there was no novelty or fascination for Centaine in the night’s trek, and the heavenly bodies were no longer marvels to gaze upon with awe but merely instruments to mark the long tortuous passage of the hours.

The earth beneath got its character from loose sand that gave under each step and ragged at her feet, to hard, compacted mica flats where the flowerlike crystals called desert roses had edges to them like knives; they cut through her canvas sandals, and she had to pause to rebind them. Then they left the flats and crossed the low spine of a sub-dune, and from its crest saw another vast valley yawn before them.

O’wa never wavered or showed the least hesitation.

Although Centaine realised that these mountains of sand would walk before the prevailing winds, endlessly changing shape, trackless and unknowable, yet the little man moved through them the way a master mariner rides upon the shifting currents of the ocean.

The silence of the desert seemed to enter Centaine’s head like molten wax, deadening her sense of hearing, filling her eardrums with the sussurations of nothingness as though she held a seashell to her ear.

Will the sand never end? she asked herself. Is this a continent of dunes? In the dawn they halted and prepared their defences to resist the siege of the sun, and in the hottest hour of the day as Centaine lay in her shallow grave-like bed, coated with urine-damp sand, she felt her baby move within her more strongly this time, as though he too were fighting the heat and the thirst.

Patience, my darling, she whispered to him. Save your strength. We must learn the lessons and the ways of this land, so that we will never have to suffer like this again, Never again. That evening, when she rose from the sand, she ate a little of the dried fish for the baby’s sake, but as she had feared, the food made her thirst almost insupportable.

However, the strength it gave her bore her up through the night’s journey.

She did not waste strength by speaking aloud. All three of them were conserving energy and moisture, no unnecessary words or actions, but Centaine looked up at the sky as it made its grand and ponderous revolution, and she could still see Michael’s star standing across the black void of the South Pole from her own.

Please let it end, she prayed silently to his star. Let it end soon, for I don’t know how much longer I can go on. But it did not end, and it seemed that the nights grew longer, the sand deeper and more cloying around her feet, while each day seemed fiercer than the last and the heat beat down upon them like a blacksmith’s hammerstrokes on the iron of the anvil.

Centaine found that she had lost track of the days and nights, they had blended in her mind into a single endless torment of heat and thirst.

Five days, or six or even seven? she wondered vaguely, and then she counted the empty egg-bottles. It must be six, she decided. Only two full bottles left. Centaine and H’ani each placed one of the full bottles in their pack, sharing the load exactly, then they ate the last shreds of dried fish and stood up to face the night’s journey, but this time it did not begin immediately.

O’wa stared for a while into the east, turning his head slightly from side to side as though he were listening, and for the first time Centaine detected a fine shade of uncertainty in the way he held his small head with its crownlike nimbus of arrow shafts. Then O’wa began to sing softly in what Centaine had come to recognize as his ghost-voice.

Spirit of great Lion Star, he looked up to Sirius shining in the constellation of Canis Major, you are the only one who can see us here, for all the other spirits avoid the land of singing sand. We are alone, and the journey is harder than I remember it when I passed here as a young man. The path has become obscure, great Lion Star, but you have the bright eye of a vulture and can see it all.

Lead us, I beg of you. Make the path clear for us.

Then he took the egg-bottle from H’ani’s satchel and drew the stopper and spilled a little of the water on to the sand. It formed small round balls, and Centaine made a little moaning sound in her throat and sank on to her knees.

See, spirit of great Lion Star, we share water with you, O’wa sang and replugged the bottle, but Centaine stared at the little wet balls of sand and moaned again.

Peace, Nam Child, H’ani whispered to her. To receive a special boon, it is sometimes necessary to give up what is precious. She took Centaine’s wrist and pulled her gently to her feet, and then turned to follow O’wa over the endless dunes.

With the silences deafening her, and weariness a crushing burden to carry, and thirst a raging torment, Centaine struggled on, once again losing all sense of time or distance or direction, seeing nothing but the two dancing figures ahead of her, transformed by the rays of the waning moon into tiny hobgoblins.

They stopped so suddenly that Centaine ran into H’ani and would have fallen had not the old woman steadied her, and then quietly drawn her down until they lay side by side.

What, Centaine began, but H’ani placed a hand over her mouth to quieten her.

O’wa lay beside them, and when Centaine was quiet he pointed over the lip of the dune on which they were lying.

Two hundred feet below at the dune’s foot began a level plain, awash with soft silver moonlight. It reached to the very limit of Centaine’s night vision, flat, without end, and it gave her hope that at last the dunes were behind them. Upon this plain stood a scattered forest of longdead trees.

Leprous-grey in the moonlight, they lifted the blighted and twisted limbs of arthritic beggars of an uncaring sky.

The weird scene invoked in Centaine a superstitious chill, and when something large but shapeless moved amongst the ancient trees like a monster from mythology, she shivered and wriggled closer to H’ani.

Both the San were trembling with eagerness like hunting dogs on the leash, and H’ani shook Centaine’s hand and pointed silently. As Centaine’s eyes adjusted, she saw that there were more living shapes than the one she had first spotted, but they were as still as great grey boulders.

She counted five of them altogether.

Lying on his side, O’wa was restringing his little hunting bow, and when he had tested the tension of its string, he selected a pair of arrows from the leather band around his forehead, made a sign to H’ani and then slithered back from the crest of the dune. Once he was off the skyline, he leaped to his feet and slipped away into the shadows and folds of windblown sands.

The two women lay behind the ridge, still and silent as the shadows. Centaine was learning the animal patience that this ancient wilderness demanded of all its creatures. The sky began to bloom with the first promise of day, and now she could see more clearly the creatures on the plain below them.

They were huge antelopes. Four of them lying quietly, while one of them, larger and more thickset in shoulders and neck, stood a little apart. Centaine judged that he was the herd bull, for at his shoulder he stood as tall as Nuage, her beloved stallion, but he carried a magnificent pair of horns, long and straight and vicious, and Centaine was reminded vividly of the tapestry La Dame d la Licorne at the Muse de Cluny, which her father had taken her to see on her twelfth birthday.

The light strengthened and the bull gleamed a lovely soft mulberry-fawn colour. His face was marked with F darker lines in a diamond pattern, that looked as though he were wearing a head halter, but there was that wild dignity about him that immediately dispelled any suggestion of captivity.

He swung his noble head towards where Centaine lay, extended his trumpet-like ears and swished his dark bushy horse-like tail uneasily. H’ani laid her hand on Centaine’s arm and they shrank down. The bull stared in their direction for many minutes, rigid and still as a marble carving, but neither of the women moved, and at last the bull lowered his head and began to dig in the loose earth of the plain with his sharp black forehooves.

All, yes! Dig for the sweet root of the hi plant, great and splendid bull, O’wa exhorted him silently. Do not lift your head, you marvelous chieftain of all gemsbok, feed well, and I will dance you such a dance that all the spirits of the gemsbok will envy you for ever! O’wa lay one hundred and fifty feet from where the gemsbok bull was standing, still far beyond the range of his puny bow. He had left the shadow of the dune valley almost an hour before, and in that time had covered less than five hundred paces.