A Time to Die - Smith Wilbur - Страница 70

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Now he stared ahead and for the first time admitted to himself how much he looked forward to seeing her again. It seemed she was all that could cancel out his grief for her father. He thought about the sound of her voice and the way she held her head when she was about to challenge him. He smiled at the bright specks of anger he could so readily kindle in her eyes and the way she pursed her lips when she was trying to keep herself from laughing at one of his digs.

He-thought about the way she walked and the way she felt when he had carried her in his arms, and he remembered the texture of her skin, like the petals of a water lily, when he touched her under a pretext of helping or guiding her.

"We are absolutely and completely wrong for each other." He smiled, and the melancholy of a few moments previously loosened its grip. "If Capo was talking about her, he had definitely gone completely round the bend." But his anticipation was honed to a sharper edge.

He looked up at the sky. The sun had set. It would be dark in a short while. Even as he watched, Venus, the evening star, appeared with a miraculous suddenness and twinkled low down in the west. One after another, the fixed stars followed her entrance, popping through the darkening canopy of night in order of their magnitude.

Sean looked up at the stars and he thought of Claudia, wondering why she evoked such contrary feelings in him. He compared her to some of the other women he had known and realized how shallow and fleeting those experiences had been. Even his marriage had been inconsequential, a wild impulse based on simple-minded lust. It had been swiftly consummated, satiated, and terminated, a disastrous mistake he had never repeated. Now he could only vaguely remember what the woman who had been his wife looked like.

He thought about Claudia and realized with a small shock that her image was so clear in his mind he could almost count the individual lashes around those big honey-brown eyes and the tiny laugh lines at the corners of her mouth. Suddenly he very much wanted to be with her again, and as he acknowledged that fact he began to worry.

"I must have been crazy to leave her alone," he thought, and as he stared ahead into the dark swamps a multitude of horrid possibilities that might have befallen her began to plague him.

"Job is with her," he tried to console himself. "But I should have stayed to care for her and sent Job with Capo. "Even though he realized that had been impossible, still he fretted.

He felt the canoe check under him as Pumula rested on his pole, hinting at permission to stop for the night.

"I'll take her for a while," Sean said. "We'll keep going until we get back to the village."

While Pumula and Matatu curled up in the bilges, Sean stood in the stern and swayed to the monotonous thrust and reach of the Punt Pole- He steered by the Southern Cross and the pointers of Centaurus, reckoning true south at the intersection of their extended center lines.

The Papyrus stems hissed softly against the hull in strict rhythm to his thrusts. Soon the work became so repetitive and automatic he could let his mind wander, and all those wanderings seemed to return in the end to Claudia Monterro.

He thought about her bereavement, how although she had been expecting it, it would still devastate her. He composed the words he would use to tell her and then to comfort her. She knew of his own feelings for her father and the companionship that they had shared in the hunting veld. She knew of their mutual regard for each other.

"I am the right person to help her through the first sorrow, I knew him so well. I will help her to remember all that was good about him." He should have dreaded bearing the sad tidings, but instead he found himself looking forward to taking the role of her comforter and protector. "Perhaps we will be able to drop the postures of antagonism that we have both forced upon ourselves. Instead of accentuating our differences, perhaps we'll be able to explore what we have in common." He found himself lengthening and quickening his Stroke with the punt pole, and he had to force himself to slow down.

"You won't last the night at that pace," he thought, but his eagerness to be with her kept him going long after fatigue demanded a halt.

Hour after hour he kept it up. Finally Pumula woke of his own accord and came to spell him, but Sean slept fitfully and was back in the stern as the coming of day turned the eastern sky to murky ruby, then to pale lemon and the waterfowl flighted overhead, their wings whistling softly as they stabbed at the dawn.

Two hours later Sean sent Matatu up the punt pole. He had not reached the top before he pointed gleefully ahead. However, it was early afternoon before the bow of the canoe knifed through the last dense stand of papyrus and ran ashore on the sand below the burnt village.

Sean leaped onto dry land and strode through the ruins of the village, trying not to break into a run. "Job should have kept a better watch," he thought angrily. "If we can arrive unseen.."

He did not finish the thought. Just ahead was the thicket in which they had built Claudia's shelter, and he stopped abruptly.

It was too quiet. His sixth sense of danger warned him. Something was wrong. He went down fast and hard, falling flat and rolling quickly into cover with the.577 held in front of him.

He lay and listened. The silence was a physical weight. He wet his lips and imitated the clucking sound of a francolin, one of the Scouts" assembly calls that Job would recognize. There was no reply. He went forward at a leopard crawl, then stopped again.

Something sparkled in the short grass just in front of his face. He picked it up and felt his stomach chill.

It was the empty brass case of a 7.62-mm. cartridge, and it was head-stamped in Cyrillic script, Soviet military issue for firing in the AK assault rifle. Sean held it, to his nose and smelled the burnt powder. It had been fired very recently. He glanced around him quickly and saw other empty shells lying in the grass, evidence of a fierce firefight.

He rolled to his feet and was running, jinking and twisting as he sprinted toward the thicket to throw off the aim of any hidden gunman.

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