The Day of Creation (Harper Perennial Modern Classics) (12 page)

16

I knelt beside the radiator grille of the Mercedes, trying to conceal myself from the French pilot. Noon had taken refuge in the rear seat of the limousine, terrified by the noise and violence of this threatening machine. The down-draught dented the water, and then scythed through the riverside trees, driving away a whirlwind of coloured blossom. As the petalled cloud drifted towards the desert a storm of furious air thrashed the groves of myrtle and bamboo beside the beach, erasing all memory of our riverside idyll.

Captain Kagwa sat in the cockpit beside the pilot, sunglasses propped on to his broad forehead. Clearly he had not expected to find the handsome limousine in the charge of a naked man and his twelve-year-old companion. He signalled to the young Frenchman, ordering him to circle the
Salammbo
, still unsure whether the savage figure stained with red and black stripes was the former WHO physician at Port-la-Nouvelle.

The helicopter approached the ferry, barely twenty feet above the wheelhouse. The navigation lights kept up their monotonous pulse, reimposing the rule of the electric circuit on the tranquil day. Already hundreds of birds were rising from the wooded banks of the river, and fleeing out into the desert.

Kagwa leaned against his lap-strap and loosened the buckle of his holster. The noise of the engine sank to a flatter pitch as the pilot levelled his rotor blades before coming down to land.

‘Noon …!’ I ran around the Mercedes and opened the passenger door. ‘Stay there. I’ll find the rifle.’

She lay across the rear seat, one thumb in her mouth, the other plugging the bullet hole in the leather upholstery as if this would ward off any further missiles.

‘Doc …?’

‘Don’t move … Kagwa won’t shoot his precious car …’

I closed the door and darted between the fuel drums to the wheelhouse. The helicopter settled on to the water beside the ore-conveyor. The pilot throttled back the engine, the blades thudding as they cuffed the warm air. Mooring line in hand, Captain Kagwa stepped from the cockpit on to the starboard float, and secured the cable to the gantry of the conveyor. He tested the exposed trelliswork, head lowered below the flicking propeller blade, and then walked towards the ferry. Already he was sweating in the sunlight as his buffed leather boots picked their way among the upturned ore-buckets, clearly concerned with more important matters than this minor episode of river piracy.

I watched him through the broken glass of the wheelhouse. Beside me on the bunk was the Lee-Enfield. Careful not to reveal the rifle to the Captain, I cocked the firing-pin.

‘Dr Mallory …?’ Recognizing me with difficulty, Kagwa shook his head. He scrutinized the Mercedes parked on the cargo deck. Grudgingly satisfied with its condition, he glanced up and down the length of the ferry, noting the stove and piles of firewood, Noon’s clothes and other evidence of this odd menage. He then peered beneath the stern of the ferry, and examined the coils of cable looped around the propeller shaft. I had cut away almost all the steel threads, but Kagwa seemed to decide that the shaft was hopelessly snagged.

‘You’ve come a long way, doctor. But again you’ve been thinking too much. You are very tired. We’ll take you back to Port-la-Nouvelle.’

‘I’ll stay here, Captain. My journey isn’t over.’

‘Your journey is finished.’ Kagwa stood on the metal catwalk twenty feet from me, hands on hips, still shaking his head in sympathy at my tragic mental plight. From the brutal interrogations I had witnessed, I knew that it was during these moments of understanding when Captain Kagwa was at his most dangerous. ‘Piracy, doctor. You assaulted my men and carried out an armed seizure of this vessel and cargo. A most valuable cargo. WHO will have to pay much compensation.’

‘They aren’t keen on ransom, Captain. I’ll return the ferry to you when my mission is over.’

‘You have no mission. What is this mission? The same foolishness about destroying the river?’

‘My river, Captain. I created it, I gave my name to it, and I’ll do what I want with it.’

‘My dear Dr Mallory … this river is now a strategic waterway. You are in a military operational zone. Also’ – he pointed to the Mercedes – ‘you are giving shelter to one of Harare’s guerillas …’

‘She’s not with Harare, Captain. The girl is working for me.’

‘The
girl
? Is she still a girl, doctor? Your medical dictionary might say something else. I won’t harm her, doctor, Mrs Warrender can care for the child. Everyone is concerned for you – I had to stop Mrs Warrender hiring a boat to follow you …’

‘Tell her to care for Professor Sanger – the last time I saw him the poor man needed it.’

‘That was for your sake, doctor. To save you being a laughing stock on Japanese television. He was making a secret programme about you …’

Kagwa stepped on to one of the ore-buckets, shouting in Sudanese at the Mercedes. Noon’s face appeared in the rear passenger window. She stared back at the Captain, and squeezed her trembling nostrils, wiping the phlegm on to the driver’s headrest. The door opened, and her scarred heel touched the deck.

Captain Kagwa braced his feet against the gantry. I saw his hand move to the heavy police holster on his left hip. His broad fingers lifted the leather flap.

‘Get down, Noon …!’

I shouted to the child above the soft thudding of the helicopter’s propeller, and stepped from the wheelhouse on to the deck, waving Noon behind the car. Fifteen feet from me, Kagwa’s service revolver was already in his hand. As I stood naked beside the funnel, waving my paint-streaked arms at Noon, the young French pilot watched me without expression through the aircraft’s bubble canopy, like a tourist observing some curious native rite.

Without hesitating, Kagwa levelled the revolver and fired a single shot at my head. The discharge burst into my eyes, and I heard the bullet strike the funnel. It shattered against the cast-iron casing, and a small fragment hit the side of my head. The metal spur cut my right ear and then tore through my scalp. Stunned by the noise, and by the calculated way in which Kagwa had lured me from the wheelhouse, I felt the blood run on to my shoulder. On the deck behind me lay a bloody pelt of hair and scalp. Although Kagwa was aiming his revolver at my head for a second shot, I stared at this leaking fragment of myself, unable to move.

‘… wild-life and the exploitation of racist …’

The lecturer’s voice boomed from the limousine’s loudspeaker. Noon sat forward over the cassette player, working the volume control. When Kagwa hesitated, I ducked back into the wheelhouse and switched on the magneto of the starter motor. As the blood dripped on to the deck at my feet I primed the carburettor. Working the crank with both hands, I swung the small motor into life, and then released the clutch and engaged the main engine. Above the noise of the helicopter I heard the diesel turn and begin to fire, its cylinders one by one shaking into motion.

Already the steel gantry of the ore-conveyor was dipping in and out of the water. Kagwa swayed on his feet, revolver lowered, riding the switchback as smoke pumped from the ferry’s funnel. I advanced the throttle, winding up the diesel’s heavy pistons. The ferry lumbered forward, and there was a brief scream of metal from beneath the stern when the propeller chopped through the last threads of cable around the shaft.

In a roar of foam and rusty water the
Salammbo
moved away, tilting to starboard as I spun the helm to keep us in the deeper stream. The ore-conveyor began to sink below the surface. The waves swilled across the trellis-work, the wash running over Kagwa’s boots as he sank knee-deep in the
Salammbo
’s wake. Drenched to the waist, he pulled himself over the last few struts to the helicopter’s mooring line. He freed the anchor and tried to reach the nearer pontoon, but the aircraft was already drifting on the current.

I steered the ferry into the centre of the channel, heading for a right-hand bend two hundred yards away. Through the mist of my blood sprayed across the window of the wheelhouse I saw Kagwa holding to the mooring line, while the young Frenchman tried to pull him towards the passenger door. Head ducking among the waves, he was carried along below the cloud of blossom that sailed high into the air above the floral shore.

17

As I well knew, the Captain would soon be back. Still shaking with panic, I tried to steady myself against the helm, steering the ferry away from the submerged sandbanks that might have stranded us. The great brown back of the Mallory flowed towards us, its beaches already striped by the shadows of the trees in the late afternoon sun. For all their welcome, these pleasant groves of feather-palms and spring bamboo offered far less protection than the overhangs of the rain-forest we had left behind.

Noon sat in the front seat of the limousine, one hand over her mouth, the other resting on the buttons of the cassette player, as if she could again save me from Kagwa and the helicopter with a few paragraphs of correspondence-college sociology. I was still naked, but she had not seen the blood caked on my right shoulder in a dark red epaulette. The wounds to my ear and scalp had dried, but I could already feel the effects of a mild concussion, and the first stray mental confusion. Inside my head the pain seemed to merge with the roar of the
Salammbo’s
engine, the clicking rush of water against the hull plates, and my own anger at the river below my blood-stained feet. I looked down at the rifle beside me, unsure whether I should have fired the last bullet into Captain Kagwa or the treacherous current that had lured me into his sights. Had the river possessed a heart, I would have stepped from the wheelhouse and fired at the warm stream that had lulled us with the day-long idyll at ‘Port Noon’. I could almost believe that an unconscious conspiracy existed between Kagwa and the river, that the Mallory had enlisted the policeman in its own defence. Naively I had taken for granted that the river would allow me to sail unmolested to its source and cut off its headwaters. Instead, it had beguiled me with sweet winds and floral groves, and dressed Noon in its gayest blossoms …

There was a surge of dialogue from the cassette speaker. Noon pushed the driver’s door to and fro, trying to fan the sound towards me. Through the blood on the stern window I could see the helicopter’s navigation lights reflected in the darker water of the late afternoon. Fifty feet above the river, it came up behind us and cruised alongside, slightly aft of the
Salammbo’s
funnel. Kagwa crouched in the open passenger seat, a police carbine across his knees. His face was without expression, all trace erased of our sometime friendship. The down-draught from the propeller had already dried his uniform, and the creased and shrunken cotton made his thickset figure all the more menacing, as if in his rage he were about to burst through the rumpled fabric.

Noon climbed into the rear seat of the car and closed the door. She sat back, head against the bullet hole in the seat, clasping a cassette between her hands and crooning to herself. I made a last effort to calm my arms and hands, searching the banks for any foliage that might give us cover. The saplings and shrubs formed a thin palisade that would shelter us if I beached the
Salammbo
. However, once we abandoned the ferry to Kagwa we would have to make our journey on foot, and be relentlessly hunted from the air.

Fifty yards beyond the port bow a steel post rose from the water, bearing a display of broken glass lamps set into a rusty metal bracket. Here the river had overrun the abandoned French army base which guarded the mining concessions at Saliere. We passed more posts that had once formed a line of landing lights in the approach to the military airstrip. The metal humps of a hangar and several workshops stood in the channel like a family of elephants around their bull, asleep with their heads in the water.

The helicopter drew alongside, its pontoons almost as long as the
Salammbo
. Above the clatter of its propeller I heard the harsh report of a gunshot, its sound swept behind us in the wake of foam and diesel exhaust that lifted into the air. Kagwa leaned sideways in the cockpit, and fired again at the wheelhouse. The first bullet passed through the wooden roof and knocked the glass from a window, but the second struck the helm between my hands, and tore out a foot-long dagger of stained teak. Exhausted by the heavy rudder, I forced the wheel to port and drove the ferry below the helicopter, trying to clip the pontoons with the iron funnel.

The young pilot pulled his craft away, his level eyes watching me without comment, and set out on a wide circuit of the river. As I steered past the upper storey of the airstrip control tower, still marked with the name of the French commanding officer, the bows sent a gust of spray against the galvanized iron panels. Then the helicopter lowered its nose and came in towards the ferry.

Through the approaching clatter of its engine I heard the machine-gun fire a short burst. A bullet rang against the steel hull and another kicked the last of the blood-stained glass from the stern window of the wheelhouse. The helicopter soared past and banked above the partly submerged hangar, ready to attack again. I rolled the wheel to starboard, in an attempt to tack to and fro. The deck tilted and the Mercedes lurched forward and jumped its wooden chocks. Still held by the guy ropes, it slid several feet across the deck, radiator grille overhanging the water.

I tried to change course, throttled back the engine and reversed the rudder. Too late, I saw the long white crescent of a sand-bank emerge from the brown water. The
Salammbo
ran gently aground, the hull hissing along the sand, and then began to right itself, lifting the nose of the limousine in whose rear seat I could see Noon looking out with the wide-eyed gaze of a child after her first ride on a roller-coaster.

I switched off the fuel pumps to the diesel and cut the engine. In the brief silence I listened to the water lapping at the hull. The river ran past, making its way through the open doors of a drowned workshop. The helicopter flew towards the western bank, its tail pointing towards us, and for a moment I hoped that Kagwa had decided to give up his pursuit, not realizing that the
Salammbo
was grounded. But then it changed course, banked and approached cautiously across the water. Kagwa had put away his carbine, and sat in the cockpit, looking down at the tilting bonnet of his Mercedes.

He signalled to the pilot, who began a slow descent. Wary of the suction that the wet surface of the sand-bar might exert upon his floats, he landed in the shallow water nearby.

Kagwa jumped down into the knee-deep stream. He stepped on to the white beach of the sand-bar and stood in the fading sunlight, looking up at the grounded hull of the ferry. He walked forward, unbuckling the flap of his holster. As he passed the Mercedes he touched the chromium fender and wiped away the brown silt caked over the headlamps and radiator grille. His face remained closed, and I knew that in his eyes I was already dead, and that my present survival was no more than a brief administrative oversight.

When he drew abreast of the wheelhouse and glanced up at me, he was obviously surprised to see the Lee-Enfield levelled at his chest. I snapped down the bolt, steadying the barrel against the doorpost of the wheelhouse. Kagwa looked back at his footprints in the soft sand, puzzled that they should have led him into this modest ambush. He made no attempt to draw his revolver, and retreated awkwardly along the sand-bar. He raised his right hand in a signal to the young Frenchman, who was watching me from the cockpit of the helicopter, carbine at the ready.

I trained the rifle’s sights at the triangle of sweat above Kagwa’s heart, and listened to the soft thudding of the engine and the silver ripple of the current. I knew that I could not shoot the Captain – if I did the pilot would take off and rake the ferry from stem to stern with his machine-gun, igniting the drums of diesel oil and killing Noon and myself. Even if we abandoned the ferry he would soon track us down. Although Kagwa was determined to kill me, I needed him in order to stay alive. In his attacks upon us he had been careful not to damage the Mercedes, and the car played a potent role in his dream of establishing himself in his secessionist capital.

The pilot had disconnected his headset. He tidied his seat and dashboard in a matter-of-fact way, and then climbed from the cockpit, carbine in hand, as the idling propeller cuffed the air over his head. Kagwa stepped backwards into his water-filled footsteps, almost within the shelter of the ferry’s bows. The pilot stood on the port pontoon, his weight tilting the helicopter to one side and exposing the underbelly of the starboard float. The water dripped from the rusting metal, revealing its patchwork of cheap welding.

I turned the sights away from Kagwa, and took aim at the underside of the starboard float. Before the pilot could jump into the water I fired the last bullet, then ejected the cartridge and drove the bolt forward, as if loading another round.

Already the pilot had climbed into his cockpit. The rifle bullet had passed through the lower hull of the pontoon, and I assumed that he would already feel the water rushing through the punctures. He replaced his headset and shouted to Kagwa, beckoning him back to the aircraft. While the Captain hesitated, the Frenchman throttled up his engine, dragging the pontoons through the wet sand. In a rush of noise and spray the helicopter rose six feet into the air, and a trickle of water emerged from the lower of the bullet holes. I raised the rifle, as if to fire another shot into the float, but already Kagwa was running to the aircraft.

Five minutes later they were gone, heading south along the river, the noise of the machine vanishing into the dusk.

‘Right, Noon, out of the car. They won’t be back until tomorrow.’

She had crawled between the front seats and now crouched against the driver’s door, the cassette pressed to her lips. She had been terrified by the aerial attack and by Kagwa’s presence, and the scar tissue around her mouth and eyebrows was flushed with blood. The harsh red lines formed vivid pain-marks in her blue skin, a notched score of her abused childhood.

Trying to reassure her, I held her arm, fearing that the violence of the helicopter assault had driven her back into her mutism. But she pulled her elbow away from me. She tapped the cassette rapidly against her teeth, as if trying to talk to me by proxy through this garrulous device. Despite her terror, she was looking me up and down, examining the wound on my head and the blood caked across my arms and shoulders, making certain that I still possessed the will to go on.

‘Fair enough, Noon – I understand you. First we’ll get free of this sand-bar. Then we’ll set off …’

*

As Noon squatted between the drums of diesel oil, I slackened the guy ropes and then kicked away the chocks from the wheels of the Mercedes. Held by its handbrake, the heavy limousine overhung the starboard rail. I sat in the driver’s seat and gradually released the brake. As the car edged across the deck, held by its cradle of guy ropes, I could feel the ferry tilting into the water. The river was still rising, and the
Salammbo
was almost free of the sandbar.

‘Noon, we’re on our way. Later, I’ll teach you to talk. More lessons soon.’

I replaced the chocks beneath the wheels of the car, unlashed the diesel drums and began to roll them across the deck. Filled with oil, the huge cylinders were almost too heavy for me. The wound in my head began to bleed again, and Noon watched solemnly as the drops fell on to the deck, staining the paintwork of the Mercedes. But with a third drum the ferry was already free. With a faint sigh the water rushed beneath the keel. The vessel slipped off the sand-bar and fell astern on the evening tide. I sat exhausted on the deck, holding a bloody hand to my head, tempted to let the
Salammbo
drift all the way back to Port-la-Nouvelle. It coasted for a quarter of a mile, and ran down one of the landing light masts before I could recover my strength and start the engine. Then I steadied the helm and moved the ferry up-channel, tilting to starboard as the stern of the Mercedes hung over the rail, its rear bumper washed by the bow wave.

The darkness settled over the river, and thousands of birds, driven away by the helicopter and the gunfire, began to return to their perches along the wooded banks. Noon squatted in the bows, warning me away from the sand-banks. We had seen off Kagwa for another day, time for us to make a few more miles up the channel of the Mallory, which had grown even broader as we moved towards its source. Wary of running the ferry aground in the dark, I steered through the open doors of the partly submerged hangar. There we moored to the rusting superstructure below the galvanized iron roof. Too tired to clear the glass from the wheelhouse, I fell asleep on the mattress among the oil drums, while Noon sat in the front seat of the limousine, crooning to herself as she softly rehearsed the phrases from the instructional tapes, the language of a private liberation that would one day set her free.