The Burning Shore - Smith Wilbur - Страница 90
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How do you do it? Centaine could at last demand, for her command of the San language increased every day she spent listening and responding to the old woman's chatter.
Like O'wa found the sip-wells from afar, H'ani explained. I smell it, Nam Child. Smell! Use your nose! You tease me, revered old grandmother! Centaine protested, but she watched Ram carefully after that, and she saw that she indeed gave every indication of smelling out the deep nests of termites to raid them of the crumbling white ant bread which she made into a foul-tasting but nutritious porridge.
Just like Kaiser Wilhelm, Centaine marvelled, and she called to H'ani ChercheP the way that she and Anna had called to the gross boar when they had hunted truffles in the forest at Mort Homme.
Cherche, H'ani! and the old woman laughed and hugged herself with glee at the joke she did not understand and then quite casually produced a miracle.
She and Centaine had fallen behind O'wa on the evening stage of the journey, for the old man had gone ahead to search for an ostrich nesting ground that he remembered from his last visit many years before.
The two of them were arguing amiably. No, no! Nam Child, You must not dig two roots from the same place. You must always walk past one before you dig again, I have told you that before! H'ani scolded.
Why? Centaine straightened up and pushed the thick bushy curls off her forehead, leaving a sweaty smear of mud on her face.
You must leave one for the children. Silly old woman, there are no children. There will be- H'ani pointed at Centaine's belly significantly. There will be. And if we leave nothing for them, what will they say of us when they are starving? But there are so many plants! Centaine was exasperated.
When O'wa finds the nest of the ostrich, he will leave some of the eggs. When you find two tubers, you will leave one of them, and your son will grow strong and smile when he repeats your name to his children. H'ani broke off from her lecture and scurried forward to a bare, stony patch on the bank of the dry river bed, her nose twitching as she stooped to examine the earth.
Cherche, H'ani! Centaine laughed at her, and H'ani ghed back as she started to dig, and then she dropped to her knees and lifted something from the shallow excavation.
This is the first one you have seen, Nam Child. Smell it. It tastes very good. She handed the lumpy, dirt-crusted, potato-like tuber to Centaine, and Centaine sniffed it gingerly, and her eyes flew wide open at the well-remembered aroma. Quickly she wiped the clinging dirt from the lumpy surface and bit into it.
H'ani, you old darling, she cried. It's a truffle! A real truffle. It's not the same shape or colour, but it smells and tastes just like the truffles from our own land! O'wa had found his ostrich nests and Centaine whipped one of the eggs in its own half-shell and mixed in the chopped truffles and cooked an enormous omelette aux truffes on a flat stone heated in the camp fire.
Despite the dirt from Centaine's fingers, which gave it a faintly greyish colour, and the grains of sand and eggshell chips that crunched under their teeth, they ate it with relish.
it was only afterwards as she lay under the primitive roof of twigs and leaves, that Centaine gave in to the homesickness which the taste of truffles had invoked, and she buried her face in the crook of her arm to muffle her sobs.
Oh, Anna, I would give anything, anything at all just to see your lovely ugly old face again.
As they followed the dry river bed, and the weeks turned into months, so Centaine's unborn child grew strongly With her sparse but healthy diet and the daily exercise of walking and- digging and carrying and reaching, the child never grew big and she carried it high, but her breasts filled out and sometimes when she was alone, scrubbing her body with the juicy pith of the hi tuber, she looked down at them proudly and admired the jaunty upward tilt of the rosy tips.
I wish you could see them now Anna, she murmured. You couldn't tell me I still look like a boy. But as always you'd complain about my legs, too long and thin and with hard muscles, oh, Anna, I wonder where you are.
One morning at sunrise when they had already been travelling for many hours, Centaine stopped on the top of a low rise and looked around her slowly.
The air was still cool from the night and so clear that she could see to the horizon. Later, with the heat, it would thicken to an opaline translucence and the sun would drain all colour from the landscape. The heat mirage would close in around her, and shapes would be weirdly deformed, the most mundane groups of rocks or clump of vegetation transformed into quivering monsters.
Now they were sharp-edged and rich with their true colours. The undulating plains were hazed with pale silver grasses, and there were trees, real, living trees, not those heat-struck ancient mummies that had stood upon the plains below the dunes.
These stately camel-thorn acacias grew well separated.
Their massive trunks, clad in rough crocodile-skin bark, were at odds with the wide umbrella-shaped crown of airy and delicate silvery-green foliage. In the nearest of them a colony of sociable weavers had built a communal nest the size of a haystack, each generation of these insignificant, dun-coloured little birds adding to it, until one day the weight would be too much and would split the great tree. Centaine had seen others lying on the earth beneath the shattered acacia, still attached to the supporting branches and stinking with carcasses of hundreds of fledglings and broken eggs.
Beyond this open forest there were steep hills rising abruptly out of the plain, the kopjes of Africa, riven by wind and split by the sun's heat into geometrical shapes as hard-edged as dragons teeth. The soft light of the early sun struck hues of sepia and red and bronze from their rocky walls, and the antediluvian kokerboom trees with their fleshy trunks and palm-like heads crowned their summits.
Centaine paused and leaned upon her digging stick, awed by the harsh grandeur of the scene. Upon the dustcoloured plain grazed herds of dainty antelope. They were pale as smoke and as insubstantial, graceful little animals with lyre-shaped horns, the lovely bright cinnamonbrown of their backs divided from the snow white lower parts by a lateral band of chocolate red.
As Centaine watched, the nearest antelopes took fright at the human presence, and began stotting, the characteristic alarm behaviour that gave them their name of springbok. They lowered their heads until their muzzles almost touched their four bunched hooves and shot stiff-legged straight into the air, at the same time opening the long folded pouch of skin that ran down their backs and flashing the feather mane of white hair that it concealed.
Oh, look at them, H'ani! Centaine cried. They are so beautiful. The alarm stotting was wildly infectious, and across the plain hundreds of springbok bounced on high, with white manes flashing.
O'wa dropped his burden, lowered his head and imitated them perfectly, prancing stiff-legged, flicking his fingers over his back, so that he seemed transformed into one of the fleet little antelope, and the two women were so overcome with laughter that they had to sit down and hug each other. The joy of it lasted long after the mountains had receded into the heat mists, and it alleviated the crushing misery of the noonday sun.
During those long halts in the middle of the day, O'wa took to separating himself from the women, and Centaine became accustomed to seeing his tiny figure sitting crosslegged in the shade of an adjacent came]-thorn tree, scraping with the clasp knife at the gemsbok skin that was spread across his lap. He carried the skin carefully folded and rolled into a bundle on his head during the day's march, and once when Centaine had begun to examine it casually, O'wa had become so agitated that she quickly placated him.
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