The Secret Chamber (21 page)

Both were naked except for knotted twine wrapped around their waists, which hung in a belt over their groin but left their buttocks bare. Their hair was shaved to the skin, while old white paint, cracked and faded around the edges, ran in a band across the tops of their arms and thighs in some kind of tribal marking. Each held a spear loosely in his right hand, with burn marks running down from the tip, while the second boy also had a bow and arrow hanging from a vine strap slung across his shoulder. A huge brown net, that had been carefully wound together, was balanced on the head of the nearest boy, its coils falling down his back to his waist.

‘
Jambo
,’ Bear said, her voice softening as she greeted the boys with a smile. It was hard to tell from their size, but she guessed both to be in their early teens. They stared at her, brown eyes wide, but not with fear or apprehension. They just stared, waiting.

‘
Naitwa kina nani?
’ What are your names?

The two boys exchanged glances before the first widened his stance and spoke. His voice was so soft it barely carried across the clearing.

‘
Lanso
,’ he whispered. He pointed with his spear to his brother. ‘
Abasi
.’

‘
Na vijiji vyenu vingine viko wapi?
’ And where is the rest of your village?

The boy’s voice dropped even lower.

“
Yingi ni kwa moyo
.’ Most are with the spirits.

‘
Na wengine?
’ And the others?

‘
Ilienda kutoka hapa. Ni parefu
.’ Gone from here. Long way.

Lanso blinked several times, before his gaze switched to Luca.

‘
Tunawajua wazungu! Mwambie atupe dawa
,’ Lanso said. We have seen white men before. Tell him to give us the medicine. ‘
Kaka yangu anahitaji pia!
’ My brother needs some.

‘
Tutakupatia dawa sasa hivi
,’ We shall get your medicine now, Bear replied.

‘You speak their dialect?’ Luca asked.

‘No, but a lot of the Maputies speak a kind of Swahili that’s pretty close to what I grew up with.’ She pushed back a loose strand of hair. ‘He told me the rest of the village is either dead or gone.’

‘So what happened to them? How come the boys are the only ones left?’

Bear turned back to them, speaking slowly while squatting down on her haunches, so that her head was just below the level of their chests. Lanso hesitated for several seconds, staring at her suspiciously, before taking a step closer. While Bear spoke, he seemed fascinated by her right eye where the loss of pigmentation had bleached the white speck across her iris.

After an exchange which seemed to go backwards and forwards for a couple of minutes, with Lanso getting bolder with each answer he gave, Bear turned back to Luca.

‘OK, he basically says that they are here because this is their village and they don’t have anywhere else to go. As for
the
rest of them, the men were taken some time ago. I don’t know how long ago because the Maputies only count up to seven, after that it’s just “a lot”. They followed the trail for a little while before they got scared and turned back.’

‘And the women and children?’

Bear exhaled heavily. ‘It doesn’t look good.’

‘You reckon this was the LRA?’

‘Who else?’

Luca glanced back at the entrance to the village. ‘We’re wasting too much time,’ he muttered, and when Bear went to speak further with the boys, motioned for her to be quiet. There was the drum again, the beat filtering through the tall trees and out across the clearing. As the boys caught the sound, they both went rigid.

‘We’ve got to get them to guide us out of here,’ Bear whispered, turning back to Lanso and gripping him by his shoulders. ‘
Unajua kituo cha MONUC? Kituo cha wazungu kusini mwa ha
.’ Do you know the MONUC base? The white man’s base south of here?

Luca shook his head. ‘We shouldn’t get them involved. We should just leave them and hope those bastards follow our tracks and not theirs.’

Bear stared up at him.

‘We’re not going to last another hour running like this! And these boys can show us a way out of this. What the hell are you talking about?’

‘We could get them killed, trying to help us.’

‘Are you crazy?’ she shouted, turning to confront him ‘If they can get us out of here, then we go for it. Period.’

‘Think about …’ Luca begun, but Bear raised her hand.

‘
Assez!
’ Enough, she shouted. ‘There’s no place for that bullshit out here. We survive. That’s it.’

Both Lanso and Abasi were frightened by the sudden change in the foreigners. Lanso suddenly reached up, yanking Bear’s hand to get her attention. He quickly muttered something in Swahili.

‘They want to show us a place to hide,’ she translated. ‘Morality doesn’t exist out here. You know as well as I do, it’s our only chance.’

THEY SCRAMBLED DOWN
a steep hill to where a stream bubbled through the undergrowth, brimming out into clear pools of water before widening again. Luca could see flashes of colour through the bushes as Bear followed Lanso, sprinting upstream as fast as they could go. Water splashed up over his trousers and seeped through the stitching of his leather boots. At least the stream would hide their tracks.

Abasi was moving fast, ducking and flexing as he pivoted around the bushes and branches. His body was lithe and quick, while his size meant that he could duck under low branches with just a simple dip of his head or shoulders. His bare toes made nothing of the slippery mud and rocks, while behind him Luca crashed through the undergrowth, catching himself on the thorn bushes. It was as much as he could do to keep up, let alone see where they were going. And it was only at the last second that he noticed Abasi jump out of the stream and on to an outcrop of rock.

The boy was staring intently at something. As Luca pulled up next to him, he tried to see what it was.

Then, he saw it. Fingers of an upturned hand poked through the scattering of leaves. They were curved unnaturally back on themselves with the wrists bound together with old rope twine. Just above the fingers, he could see the shape of an arm, then further up a bulge in the leaves where a head might have been.

Luca stared, transfixed by the body, then he realised there were more of them. The ground was covered in a twisted heap of limbs, the joints angular and tortured. Tens of bodies lay half-submerged in the mud and leaves. They faced in different directions as if carelessly discarded like so much rubbish. As he looked from one to the next, he saw a single hand clinging to the remains of a torn, once brightly coloured piece of fabric. It still clenched tight in death, the fingers pudgy, with tiny half-moon nails rimmed with dirt. It was a toddler who lay as he had died, clinging to the hem of his mother’s skirt.

‘Jesus,’ Luca breathed, feeling his stomach clench as he caught wind of the stench. Flies feasted on the decaying bodies.

He gently put his hand on Abasi’s shoulder.

‘I’m so sorry,’ he whispered. The boy stared at him, looking deep into Luca’s eyes, before grabbing his forearm and pulling him forward after the others.

They continued over the rock, steadily climbing higher. A crude rope bridge had been erected by the pygmies at some point in the distant past, spanning a deep chasm
between
two of the larger outcrops. As he came to it, Luca hesitated for a second, staring at the old twine, weathered by the rain and sun. It had been built to accommodate people barely taller than five foot and less than half his weight. He wondered if it would support someone his size, but glancing back down the slope, it was clear there was no other option.

With Abasi just ahead of him, they worked their way along the bridge, gripping on to the sides as the structure swayed from side to side. Each thread and knot seemed to creak as Luca passed, with the bridge sagging deeper into the chasm under his weight. They clambered on, soon coming out in a wide, open area.

Here, the bushes had thinned, with only dwarf trees managing to gain any sort of purchase on the rough ground. Pools of stagnant water had collected naturally, scummed with algae, while higher up Luca could see the beginnings of a cliff rising up ahead of them. It rose about twenty metres in an almost smooth vertical stretch, like the base of a mighty pillar. At the very top it tapered off into a flat section covered in knotted vines and foliage. It had to be one of the inselbergs they had seen from the plane.

Bear and Lanso were waiting at the base of the cliff.

‘Lanso says we’ll be safe here,’ Bear said, her eyes narrowing against the sun. ‘It’s one of the village’s holy places and, at the very least, a good vantage point from which we can see them coming.’

After a moment, Luca shook his head.

‘This isn’t go to work, Bear,’ he whispered. ‘They tracked
us
the whole way through the night. And they didn’t just track us, they gained on us. The stream and rocks are only going to fool them for so long.’

She exhaled heavily, letting her shoulders sag against the rock.

‘There’s nowhere left for us to go,’ she said, turning to face him. ‘And I can’t keep running like this.’

He had his head tilted back, hands clenched in front of his mouth as if blowing on them for warmth. His gaze ran over every impression in the wall, and as it settled on the overhang, his right hand moved away from his body, fingers curling into position as if already touching the rock.

From this distance the route looked technical, but he knew he could work the crack running all the way up to the summit. Aside from the lack of ropes, there was the added danger of climbing ‘on site’, with no way of knowing how good the handholds were until he actually reached them. But despite all that, he knew he could make it. As a teenager, he had free climbed much harder routes in Chamonix, let alone the kind of competition pitches he had been used to before heading out to Tibet.

Bear pushed herself off the cliff.

‘You can make it,’ she whispered, following his gaze. ‘It’s perfect. They’d never find us up there.’

Luca continued staring towards the overhang.

‘Just one more climb, Luca,’ Bear breathed. ‘One more, and you can save us all.’

Luca’s eyes narrowed as he squinted into the distance. He then suddenly stepped away from the cliff.

‘The overhang,’ he whispered. ‘I won’t make it past the overhang.’

Bear reached out her hand, pressing her fingers against his shoulder. ‘You can do it, Luca. René said you were one of the best climbers in the world. So, come on, let’s do this.’

He stared out across the tops of the trees, fists clenched tight. She could see the skin had whitened along the bridge of his knuckles.

‘No,’ he said flatly. ‘I’m not a climber anymore. Think of something else.’

Bear raised her arms towards the rock to either side of them. It hemmed them into a narrow gully and would mean they would have to descend all the way to the stream again if they wanted to try to work their way round to the other side of the inselberg.

‘Something else?’ she asked, the frustration causing her voice to raise. ‘If we don’t find a place to hide, they will kill us, Luca. Do you understand that? And they’ll take their time with the boys for helping us. Make no mistake about that.’

Luca stared ahead.

‘Come on, Luca!’ she screamed. ‘This is our only chance!’

She pushed his shoulder, shunting him forward a step. ‘Stop being such a coward!’

Luca suddenly grabbed the front of her vest and pulled her whole body towards him. Bear was forced up on to the tips of her toes, as he almost lifted her clear of the ground.

‘If you’re in such a hurry to get up there,’ he snarled, ‘why don’t you fucking climb it?’

Shunting her away, he shouted in frustration. Then he turned back to the cliff and began stalking along its length. All the while he muttered to himself, his gaze occasionally lifting as he followed the line of the crack running up the side of the inselberg. Twenty metres away from the others, he stopped. A series of thick vines clung to the rock, reaching up into a narrow gulley that led unbroken all the way to the summit. Luca yanked back on these several times, testing their strength, before his head slowly lowered again and he continued.

Lanso and Abasi were watching him carefully. A few seconds later, they followed Luca to the same spot, talking quickly to each other. Throwing down the coils of netting, Lanso immediately began clambering up the vine, his movements quick and well-practised. His bare toes curled into each indentation of the wiry stem, while his body was so light that within just a few seconds he had pulled himself nearly five metres off the ground. He stopped, shouting down to Bear, as a smile lit up his face.

‘He says he can make it to the top,’ Bear translated. ‘He’s saying it’s no higher than some of the mapani trees near the village.’

Luca stared down at Lanso. ‘He’s sure about this?’

Bear nodded. ‘But how the hell do we get up? There’s no way that vine will support our weight.’

Drawing his survival knife from his belt, Luca crouched down, picking up Lanso’s netting in his free hand. With a few turns of his wrist, he unravelled the coils on the bare rock, steadily working his knife down the netting.