The Devil's Breath (26 page)

“You will need more than skin when the monster sucks you into its belly.”

“If you’re that scared, why didn’t you stay back there?”

“Because I am supposed to protect you.”

Max felt humbled. The boy had overcome his terror to honor his obligation; the least Max could do was put on a brave face and keep his own fear under control. He smiled. “It’s not a monster, I promise, !Koga. It’s just a geyser. Pressure builds up and blows water from an underground river, and my guess is, it’s the source of power for the fort. It’s called hydroelectric. Just like the huge dam they’ve built in the mountains.”

!Koga had that blank look which Max recognized as his own when Mr. Lewis the maths teacher tried to explain something beyond his comprehension. But before he could explain his own limited understanding of hydroelectric power, the ground began to shudder. It happened so quickly, the boys could not move. They reached out to steady themselves because now the vibration took away the strength in their legs. And with the jarring shudder came a growl, churning deep within the bottomless pit. Max steadied !Koga as they pushed their backs against one of the boulders to stop themselves from falling. A sucking, gurgling hiss of vapor spewed from the hole, drenching everything within fifty meters, its plume at least twenty meters high. The gossamer mist settled like dew and then, with the retreating water pressure, the plume plunged back downwards, belching air and noise as it receded. The explosion had lasted less than
thirty seconds, but the power that drove up from beneath the ground rattled nerves as well as bones.

The suddenness of the eruption and the silence that quickly followed left them both mute. It took a moment for their ears to stop ringing. Max pulled a piece of something slimy off !Koga’s head, a ragged piece of weed, and presented it to him.

“A present from the monster,” he said, but !Koga was not smiling. Instead he was retreating slowly backwards, never taking his eyes from the crater.

“!Koga, it’s OK. I promise. It can’t harm us.”

!Koga stopped and shook his head. “We must leave this place now. That was a warning. We are not welcome here. It is a bad sign, it is as my father told me. A bad place.”

Max knew he could not argue with a belief so rooted in nature spirits. He would never deride such strong feelings. His experiences so far had taught him that the Bushmen’s secrets and their understanding of the natural world were far beyond anything he had ever come across. He deferred to his friend and nodded towards their resting place that overlooked the void.

“Come on, let’s get back up there.” He turned away but felt the light touch of !Koga’s hand.

“Wait. You are planning something.”

Max nodded. There was never going to be a good time to tell !Koga his plan. It might as well be now. The same dread of frightening his friend away still lingered. “I think my father could be in that fort. If he isn’t, then the people in there may know what happened to him. I reckon at the very least there have to be some clues.”

He gazed across the landscape. In an hour the sun would scorch and they would be hard pressed to find shelter, not so much from the heat as from anyone seeing them move across the ground.

“Max, if your father is in that place, how can we get inside? The men in there might be the same men who attacked us. They searched for us and we escaped, now you want to knock on their door. Are we giving up?”

“No, we’re going inside. There’s a secret passage that should lead straight into the fort. At least, I think there is. Come on, I’ll show you.”

He turned towards the hole, hoping !Koga would follow. When he reached the chasm’s edge he held back a couple of meters, nervous of the drop despite the firm footing the embedded rock provided. He turned. !Koga was walking forward nervously, as wary as an animal seeking to drink at a dangerous water hole. But he kept walking until he joined Max. They steadied each other and falteringly shuffled to the edge. It was a bottomless shaft, and saw-toothed sheets of rock clung to the sides.

A fetid, quivering air breathed malevolence on them. The sibilant whisper of the unseen water beckoned them closer.
Edge forward, see what lies below, see how far it is to fall
. Max seemed mesmerized by its lure and stepped to the very edge, his gaze locked firmly on the black, unblinking eye far below, where the light ended and the totally unknown began. It had to be more than four hundred meters deep. That volume of water, under pressure, could blow a double-decker bus to the moon. So what was stopping all that power? How come the water never burst above the
surface in any great quantity? The whole area should have been a wetland.

So intense was Max’s concentration that !Koga thought he was about to step into the abyss. He whispered Max’s name. Max turned and faced him. “Follow me. I think I know what we have to do,” he said grimly.

Both boys now squatted at the other side of the crater, watching the rays shine down into the hole. Even if anyone in the fort was on lookout—and there was no reason to suppose they were—there would be little chance of being spotted. Not at that distance, and not with the glare of the sun directly in the watcher’s eyes. Max pointed. About sixty meters down was another hole which looked like the entrance to a cave, almost unnoticeable. It was no more than five meters across and as high again. Around it were about a dozen smaller holes, each no more than a meter wide, punched into the rock face. “I think that’s the underground passage,” Max said, pointing to the cavelike entrance.

“You cannot know that. You cannot be certain.”

“No, but look at this.” Max opened the hydrology chart. The thin, almost inconsequential line that wriggled across the plan from the Devil’s Breath to the fort could be nothing but the conduit they were now looking at. At least that’s what Max told himself. “I reckon the water gushes up, and it’s so powerful it forces itself into that hole—that’s like a channel, and I bet it’d be strong enough to power a turbine or something closer to the fort.”

!Koga looked doubtful.

Max scratched his head, his fingernails scraping away some of the caked dirt in his scalp. “At least I
think
that’s
how it works. Something to do with ventricular power, whatever that is. I should have paid more attention in science class.”

“And those other holes?”

“Er … yeah. Not sure. Probably some kind of natural venting system. Y’see, I think it’s so powerful that when the water surges, it wallops down that big hole and either blows back pressure through the smaller ones, or …” Stuck again. What else? He looked at !Koga, who now, for the first time, smiled.

“You don’t know.”

“Not a hundred percent. I reckon it has something to do with releasing pressure from the main surge.” He hesitated and said almost to himself, “My dad would know.”

They sat quietly for some time.

Max finally spoke. “It doesn’t seem as though this thing is going to erupt again. Next one’s probably at the end of the day. Yeah, that makes sense, maybe. Twice a day. Morning and night.” It sounded as though he was trying to convince himself.

“We go? Down there?”

Max shook his head. He had already made his decision. “I’m going. On my own.”

!Koga stood up quickly. “No! I am not afraid!”

“No one said you were. I know I am, but I’ve been scared more times these last couple of weeks than I’ve ever been, so I can probably manage it once more.”

“I will not let you go alone. My place is with you.”

“But I can’t risk us both getting hurt or captured—not now, !Koga, not after all this bloody effort.”

!Koga went quiet and shook his head slowly. He would be held responsible if Max did not survive.

“You cannot stop me from following you, Max. You will not know I am there. I will be the hunter tracking your shadow.”

Max touched his shoulder. “!Koga, you will always be with me. I’ll carry your friendship with me. But I need you to do something else.” Max took out his father’s Ordnance Survey map. “You remember the place where the earth bleeds? And the marks my father made on his map. You know this is where Bushmen died. And all those other marks, in different places, these are places my father found. This is what he was going to report. Now, this isn’t enough evidence, I know that, but it’s all we have right now. My father had been in all these places because of this….” He showed the hydrology map. “He found what was killing your people. And maybe there’s a lot more we don’t know about. And I know he must have other evidence hidden somewhere, real evidence, something really concrete that can’t be disputed, but I have to find him first and you have to go.” He gazed down at the vertical drop. “I reckon I can free-climb down to that entrance, then in a few hours I’ll be under the fort. !Koga, don’t give me a hard time on this, I need you to take Dad’s map to the police.”

“Police?”

“You said there was a police post, a few days from here. Get to them, don’t give them the map, give them this.” Max undid his watch strap. The old stainless-steel chronograph was his dad’s when he’d climbed Everest, twenty years ago, and he’d given it to Max for his twelfth birthday when he
enrolled at Dartmoor High. Engraved on the back plate were the words
To Max. Nothing is impossible. Love, Dad
.

He fastened the watch around !Koga’s wrist. “Give the cops this watch, it’ll prove you’ve been with me. Tell them you know where the son of the missing white man is. But don’t tell them where I am. You have to get them to contact Kallie van Reenen. Give her the map. You tell her what we’ve discovered. She’ll know what to do. You have to do this, !Koga—to save us all.”

Max was well aware that this was almost a replay of what his father had done with !Koga’s father. He had sent the Bushman on a mission to van Reenen’s farm, knowing that he had to get his field notes out while he went on searching. Fate had twisted events like a noose around a sack—Max, !Koga and Kallie van Reenen: drawn together, trapped in the same danger.

But Max felt strong. He was getting closer to his father now—he knew it—and that would drive him on. “I’ll make a start when the sun shifts a bit, that’ll give me some shade down there. I reckon it’s going to be a bit of a climb.” A bit? It was going to take everything he had, by the look of it. He would have to choose his route with all his skill.

They agreed that !Koga would wait until nightfall, then he could travel faster, with virtually no chance of detection. But the night was not the time Bushmen felt comfortable. Their lives centered around the fire. This was where they cooked and ate, danced and told stories of great hunts and of gods who were animals and stars that were lovers. The warmth and comfort of the fire was as much a part of their life as the sun rising and the moon taking it away. Alone,
!Koga would have to travel across predators’ natural habitats. Memory maps were all he had to guide him, but the night sky would show him the way, and moonlight would warn him of shadows that moved. He would do this thing so that Max Gordon, the boy from the ancient cave drawings, could help save his people.

And because the white boy was his friend.

Max began his descent a couple of hours later, as !Koga sat nestled in the low boulders around the rim. He could watch Max’s progress from there, and when he finally crawled into the cave he would return to the low plateau where they had slept the previous night. There was shade there and he would rest, before beginning his own journey into darkness.

Max was already twenty meters down, his right hand jammed into a narrow crevice above his head as he tried to find a toehold below. His weight stretched ligaments and tendons in his shoulder, but he reached out with his left hand, clawed his fingers against the uneven surface and shifted his body slightly. A sliver of rock took his weight as he swung precariously half a meter to his left; his fingers slipped as his right hand came free and the sudden, sickening drop churned his stomach as he plunged down.

“Max!” !Koga couldn’t help crying out.

Max had scraped his knees and the inside of his arm when he fell, but the drop was barely the distance from his ankle to his knee—it just felt a lot more scary than it was. Without looking back, he managed a reassuring shout to !Koga. “OK! I’m all right!”

Controlling his breathing, he muttered encouragement to himself. “It’s fine. It happens. Nothing to worry about. Just a little slip. Nothing to get het up about. Clumsy sod.”

As often happens on a climb—or, in this case, a descent—a rhythm developed, and now Max found a steady pace. The rock face was kind to him for the next ten meters as he gripped, swung, twisted and wedged his way down. The scrapes and cuts were stinging, but adrenaline pushed the pain to the back of his mind. Now he was feeling good, he could see his way down; spurs of rock as wicked as razor blades shafted downwards, but their edges were sufficiently ragged to allow purchase. And behind each sheet of rock, the moss and lichen offered a small comfort zone for his back and shoulders as he wedged himself in to support the next downwards movement. A wet sheen covered everything, reminding him of home. Clambering down quarry walls in Devon or practicing for the bigger climbs in Scotland usually meant the rock surfaces were wet, but when he did that, he reminded himself, he was attached to a safety line. A lifeline is really important when you’re climbing in a rock-strewn quarry. Nothing too serious to worry about here then, he kidded himself. If he fell, he’d only fall a few hundred meters into the water, though that’d be like landing on a concrete floor. The shock of falling that far would probably kill him anyway.
Don’t think about it. Just imagine the lifeline is attached;
that was the best thing. There, he’d already made another five meters and hadn’t even thought about it.

Time condensed into seconds, that was what his attention span demanded—attention focused on every centimeter
of the way—but a small voice in his head told him that he must have been on the rock face for an hour, probably more. The sun had shifted and was almost overhead now, and he still had another thirty meters to go. He jammed his hand into a letter-box slit in the rock and rested. With his free hand he wiped the sweat and grime from his eyes.