AK Page 7

  Into the hot and steamy silence came a noise, unmistakable, the roar of a large engine as the driver changed gear to take the hairpin on the last steep slope off the hills. Jilli ran across the platform and snatched the pot of clay from her grandmother’s lap.

  “Finishing in boat,” she said. “Quick, quick!”

  She twittered a snatch of Fulu, kissed the old lady on the forehead, and ran to the ladder. The boys followed. Kashka’s left leg was still black from the knee down. Jilli cast off and Paul and Kashka nudged the boat out with their paddle butts and then spun it around.

  There was no time to rig the motor. They knelt by the thwarts and all four paddling together drove toward the nearest channel into the reeds. The bulky boat had its own natural speed and once it had reached that no amount of effort would push it much faster. They seemed to be loitering across the oily, motionless water while the sound of engines—clearly more than one of them now—came nearer and nearer. Three shots rang out before they were halfway to the reeds, and Jilli missed her stroke and craned around.

  “Okay, okay,” called Kashka. “Not shooting at us.”

  Half a mile away still, thought Paul. Jilli was still staring back, her mouth open, her look appalled. This was new in her world. Then she gripped her paddle, straightened their course, and didn’t look around again till they reached the reeds.

  As soon as they were out of sight they rested, panting. By now the cries from the shore had become screams. There were more shots, several bursts, and then another familiar sound from the old days, the sudden booming roar of a hut going up in flames. Above the reed beds a billow of yellow smoke exploded into the steam-grey sky. Jilli leaped to her feet and craned to see.

  “Al! Ai!” she gasped. “They burn houses. Ai! No!”

  Kashka shrugged. Like Paul he had seen too many burned villages to think this astonishing.

  “Shall I have a go at the motor?” he said.

  “Do you know how?”

  “We did a course one base-camp.”

  He edged past Jilli, and lifted one end of the ancient object. Paul took the other and together they hefted it aft. The boat rocked wildly with their efforts. The reeds at the stern were woven to a neat but fragile-looking point.

  “Don’t see how it fits on,” said Paul.

  “Must go somewhere,” said Kashka.

  Paul turned. Jilli would know. She must have watched her father rigging the motor a hundred times. She was sitting in the bottom of the boat now, shuddering and shaking, with the clay on her face channelled with falling tears. He sighed. That there should be whole stretches of Nagala where the war had never come! That there should be people, thousands and thousands of them, who had never known what it was like! He teetered toward her, knelt, and put his arm gently around her shoulders. She looked up and stared at Kashka.

  “What he doing?” she said.

  “Fitting the motor,” said Paul. “Can’t see how it goes.”

  She straightened her spine. He could sense her effort of will as she heaved herself out of her grief and shock. She felt beneath the pile of stores and eased out a long, narrow bundle of stout reeds lashed together to make a rigid pole. A grass rope was tied to one end. She slotted the pole across the boat so that the part with the rope projected about a meter, then took the farther end of the rope aft and looped it over a stubby sort of reed hook. A shorter reed bundle fitted below the pole against the side of the boat.

  “Motor go here,” she said, patting the main pole.

  The boys carried it again and lashed it in place as she told them. Kashka filled the tank from the jerrican, but when he put out his hand to open the gas valve she stopped him.

  “Not like this,” she said. “You making it sick, this way.”

  With delicate fingers she adjusted the controls and part flooded the carburettor. Then she spread her hands and said what was obviously some kind of charm or blessing. She handed Kashka the starter cord,

  “Now you pull,” she said. “Three time. Then it go.”

  She was right. At the third pull the motor caught, sputtered while she juggled with the throttle and choke, and at last steadied, drowning all sounds. She rose and looked toward the shore. Now above the reed beds they could see five separate smoke pillars rising, and as they watched another hut went up. They couldn’t hear the explosion above the racket from the motor, but the faint thud of air reached them as the smoke cloud shot skyward. Jilli stared for another few seconds, then set her jaw and crouched down by the motor, pushing Kashka firmly aside. She opened the throttle and the boat surged forward.

  Paul studied the reeds looking for a side turning that might take them clear of the buffalo pound, but when he pointed toward a promising one Jilli shook her head and steered firmly up the main channel. In a few minutes they reached the pound. This was an area around a low mud island, ringed with an underwater stockade made of reed stems as thick as your arm to keep the crocodiles out. When Paul had been there before, there had been teams of smaller children working continuously along the stockade checking that the fence was sound, and shouting as they did so and splashing the water with their paddles to frighten the crocodiles away, while the older children had been raking water-weed from the surrounding channels, loading it into the boats and ferrying it back to dump it over the stockade for the buffalo to browse. Today, all of them, thirty or so, were gathered on top of the mound, craning aghast toward the shore.

  For the moment they didn’t seem to have noticed the boat, and left to himself Paul would have tried edging around the clearing and reaching the far side of the stockade unaided, but Jilli headed straight for the entrance gap. Paul crawled aft.

  “Why are we going in here?” he shouted.

  “My brother, my brother!” said Jilli.

  She had three brothers, but Paul knew she was talking about the oldest one, Muliku. One day he would be head of the family, and already he had a lot of authority among the other children. From the first he had been deeply suspicious and resentful of the three strangers, and he would never approve of Jilli running away with them, or borrowing the boat with the precious engine.

  “He can’t do anything against guns,” said Paul. “They’ll shoot him as soon as they see him.”

  “My brother, he knows the ways in the marsh,” said Jilli, miming with a sinuous arm toward the south.

  Paul gave in. His plan of escape had not in fact got further than buying or stealing a boat and hiding in the marshes, and when the immediate danger was over, working his way along by the Strip and around past the roadblocks at the bridges, and then coming ashore and hitching a lift down the highway. South of the marshes was Fulu territory, but a different sort of Fulu living in fishing villages, and beyond that the enormous central expanse of bush, with the railway running across it. Now his instincts, all his knowledge, drew him toward the bush. And somewhere down there, twelve miles south of the railway, his AK was buried.

  The moment the bow touched land Jilli was scampering up the mound. She had a bundle under her arm. The herders came rushing to meet her, yelling questions, then ringed her while she answered, throwing her arms out in wide emphatic gestures. They turned all at once and stared at the boys in the boat. Muliku came striding down toward the shore, but Kashka had kept the motor running and immediately backed out. When Muliku waded into the water Paul drew out his hunting knife and stood up, ready, but Jilli paddled out beside her brother, took him by the elbow, and tugged him back to dry land.

  A fierce argument began between them, watched by the boys from the boat and the herders from the mound above. Muliku was older and stronger than Jilli, but she didn’t seem at all afraid of him, rising on tiptoe to gesture and yell until he backed away and made calming signals with his hands.

  Jilli paid no attention, in fact she seemed to have worked herself into a state of pure frenzy, but then all of a sudden she paused and stood motionle
ss for several seconds. Slowly, moving like a priest or a dancer, she unfastened her blue bead belt and dropped it at Muliku’s feet. She unrolled her bundle. Inside the thin grass mat were the clothes Paul had given her. She pulled the blouse over her head, stepped delicately into the jeans, closed the zip, and fastened the waist clip. She buckled the wide gold belt in place and slipped the shoes on, then stood with her hands on her hips, silent, staring at her brother.

  He stared back, began a gesture of appeal, and broke it short. The children above watched in silence, as though what Jilli had done was somehow equal to the horrors on the shore. At last Muliku bowed his head and turned away to a pile of fresh-cut reeds. He chose several long, thin stems which he began to plait together in an irregular pattern while Jilli stood at his elbow watching intently. Sometimes he spoke. Sometimes she asked a question and he would answer briefly. The herders returned to the top of the mound to watch the shore. Yells and shouts and sounds of burning, with occasional shots, came steadily through the heat haze. Paul waited, wary, watching in case any of the herders took a boat from the far side of the mound and tried to work around and cut them off. None did.

  After about twenty minutes Muliku knotted the last reed ends tight and handed her what he had made, an odd-shaped woven mat a few inches wide and a bit over two feet long. She studied it and asked a question, pointing at a particular section. He explained. She put out her hand and stroked his arm, gently, while she said what was obviously some kind of goodbye, but he stood unheeding, motionless as a sleeping kite.

  His head turned to watch Jilli but he did nothing to stop her as Kashka brought the boat in and she stepped aboard, settling into the bow in a kneeling position so that she could point the best way between the groups of wallowing buffalo. They reached the entrance gap and turned along the outside of the stockade. Looking toward the mound Paul saw that the other herders were leaving the mound now and getting into their boats, but Muliku was still where they had left him, standing at the water’s edge with his head bowed and weighing the blue bead belt in his hand.

  The mat Muliku had woven was something between a map and a code, so that Jilli, by following a particular stem through the pattern, could tell which turnings to take. The put-put of the motor drowned all other sounds. Morning moved to noon, becoming steadily hotter and steamier. The air swarmed with insects, buzzing and hovering and trying to bite through the coat of clay which covered their skins. Jilli undressed and used the last of the paste to renew the coat on her legs where she had waded into the water and to finish off Kashka. They stopped the motor so that they could listen to the midday bulletin, but there was nothing new.

  Paul got out his map and did sums. It was about sixty miles across the marshes in a straight line, but judging by the sun Jilli seemed to be taking a bit of an angle, and there were twists and turnings of the channels to allow for. Say ninety. Between two and three days if the petrol lasted. Four if they had to paddle far. There was water all around and plenty of sterilizing tablets, which was just as well, as the clay, once it had dried, was porous, so it worked a bit like a cooling jar, almost sucking the sweat out of you and evaporating it, helping to keep your body heat down but making you endlessly thirsty. For food there were Jilli’s stores, and five packed lunches from the school. Jilli’s mealie cobs would need cooking, so were no use till they reached shore, but there was a sort of mealie cake the Fulu made—you had to moisten it down before you could eat it, and then it was like the porridge the commando used to live off in the bush.

  In mid-afternoon the engine stopped. Overheated, Kashka thought. He and Jilli and Paul paddled while they waited for it to cool, but Francis was very listless and slept. When Kashka got the motor started again Jilli wove a fish trap and trailed it over the side but didn’t catch anything. Not all the way was channels and reed beds. There were large open stretches through which a sluggish current sometimes moved. Toward dusk they passed islands with mangroves growing into the water, and at one point a tongue of naked rock on which thirty or forty crocodiles lay basking in the last of the sun. The reed beds were full of small birds, and fish hawks wheeled serenely over the open stretches.

  As the sun went down Jilli chose a stand of reeds and told Kashka to steer straight at it and stop the motor when they reached it. As the bow nudged in they grabbed the stems and hauled the boat forward until it was completely hidden. They ate the spare school lunches and some mealie cake for supper and Paul dished out an extra ration of repellent, waking Francis up and forcing him to swallow his chloroquin.. There was still nothing new on the World Service, and Radio Dangoum was just brass bands and boastings. They all slept badly. In the middle of the night the boat rocked as a herd of hippos passed along the channel they’d been using.

  The morning news named the dead ministers, but said nothing about Michael. There was an interview with the secretary of the OAU, who refused to say whether the Dangoum conference was going to be cancelled. Jilli had caught a nice fat fish in her trap, which she put back in the water, fish and all, so that it would still be fresh when they got a chance to cook it. By now Francis was clearly sick, his lips fat and mottled yellow and purple. He wouldn’t eat but Paul forced him to drink and swallow another chloroquin.

  They used the motor all day, managing it more carefully this time so that it didn’t overheat. At noon they landed on an island, made a fire with the mealie shucks and roasted strips of fish to eat with the mealie cake. That night Francis moaned continually, and Paul sat up by him, trying to dribble water between the swollen lips.

  “Why bother?” said Kashka. “He’s dying, isn’t he?”

  “No!” muttered Paul. “He’s got to live, and I’m going to see he does. One day he’s going to be Prime Minister of Nagala. My father, Michael Kagomi, said so.”

  Kashka snorted surprise, turning the snort into a sneer, but he said nothing more about letting Francis die.

  The next morning news barely mentioned Nagala. The jerrican had to be tilted right over and still didn’t fill the tank. Well before noon the engine spluttered and died, while the marsh seemed to stretch on ahead of them, all the same, endless. Jilli wasn’t worried. She held up Muliku’s map and put her finger an inch from the top.

  “We’re here,” she said. “We’re going just to here.”

  They paddled on, two at a time, taking turns, while Francis lay in the bow shaded by grass mats which Jilli had strung for him between the thwarts. He had stopped moaning, but as he breathed bubbles of froth came and went in his nostrils. By mid-afternoon when Paul rose to change places he could see through gaps in the nearer reeds a low line of something in the distance ahead which wasn’t also reeds. Jilli caught another fish. The water became blacker, so that in places they were forcing the boat through what was almost soft slime. The channel they were in turned, widened, and they were looking at trees, a long, dark line of them rising from a network of roots above the water.

  Jilli made them paddle another hour along the shore to an inlet where they forced the boat between reed stems and found dry land. Paul stepped ashore and looked around. There was a faint path running away south, but it showed no signs of recent use. It was only an hour till sunset.

  “Okay,” he said. “Let’s camp here tonight and go on tomorrow.”

  Jilli shook her head and gestured at the trees.

  “No, no,” she said. “My brother said, ‘Don’t sleep in this place. You’ll all get sick.’

  Paul gave in at once. Michael had used local guides when he could, and had trusted their warnings. They unloaded their stores, stowed the motor, and covered it with mats, then pushed the boat back into the reeds to hide it. Paul picked Francis up in the hold that the Warriors had been taught for carrying a wounded comrade. Jilli led the way up the path.

  The belt of trees turned out to be only a few hundred yards wide, and beyond it, mile after mile, stretched the familiar brown and grey and yellow landscape of the bush. Almost at
once they reached a cleared level of dust with tire marks running across it. The map had shown a road along the southern edge of the marsh. This would be it.

  He caught Jilli by the elbow as she started to cross and told her to follow him, stepping in his footsteps, so that they didn’t break any of the tire tracks. Kashka came last, twisting back and using a branch broken from a bush to wipe the footprints away. This was something you did, always. Any tracker could still have told that someone had crossed the road here, but no one in a passing truck would notice, whereas they would certainly have seen footprints or a break in the tire tracks.

  Paul led on into the slowly rising bush till he found a suitable hollow. Wearily he eased Francis down and looked around him. This would do. They’d need a fire, and the sides of the hollow would hide the flames. Anyway he couldn’t carry Francis much farther.

  It was like the old days. They gathered wood and lit a fire and roasted Jilli’s fish and ate it with hot mealie. Francis woke and managed to swallow a few tiny mouthfuls. Then they sat in the dark, feeding the fire and watching the flames.

  “What are you going to do next?” said Kashka.

  “Head south to the railway,” said Paul. “See if I can jump a train with Francis and get out toward Shidi. There’s someone’ll look after him there. Then I’ll head for Dangoum and find what’s happened to my father. What about you?”

  “I’ll go to Baroba. Look for my friends.”

  “Got enough money to buy a ride?”

  “I’ll walk.”

  “It’s a hell of a distance, and there’s bound to be at least one roadblock you can’t walk around, at the Oloro bridge. I’ll show you my map. I could give you some gurai.”

  “You’re going to Shidi, Paul?” said Jilli. “Where’s Shidi?”