The Quest - Smith Wilbur (читаем книги онлайн бесплатно TXT) 📗

'Did any escape?' Taita demanded of That, when they met in the middle of the field strewn with the dead and dying.

'I saw some run back into the huts. Shall we go after them?'

'No. By now they will have armed themselves, and will be as dangerous as cornered leopards. I will not risk any more of our people. Put fire into the thatch of the huts and smoke them out.'

By the time the sun had risen above the trees it was all over. Two of Tinat's men had been lightly wounded, but the Chima were annihilated.

They left the corpses lying where they had fallen for the hyenas to deal with, and were back on board, sailing northwards again, before the sun had made its noon.

'Now only the swamps of the Great Sud stand in our way,' Taita told Fenn, as they sat together on the foredeck, 'the swamps in which I found you. You were a little wild savage, running with a tribe of them.'

'It all seems so long ago,' she murmured. 'The memory is pale and faded. I remember my other life more clearly than that one. I hope we do not encounter any of the bestial Luo. I would like to forget it all completely.' She tossed her head to throw the dancing golden tresses back over her shoulder. 'Let us talk of more pleasant things,' she suggested. 'Did you know that Imbali has a baby growing inside her?'

'Ah! So that is it. I have seen Nakonto looking at her in a peculiar way. But how do you know that this is so?'

'Imbali told me. She is very proud. She says the babe will be a great warrior, like Nakonto.'

'What if it should be a girl?'

'No doubt it will be a great warrior like Imbali.' She laughed.

'It is good tidings for them, but sad for us.'

'Why sad?' she demanded.

'I fear we shall soon lose them. Now that he is to be a father,

Nakonto's days as a roving warrior are numbered. He will want to take Imbali and his child back to his own village. That will be soon, for we are nearing the land of the Shilluk.”

The terrain along the banks changed its nature as they left behind the forests and the elephant country to enter a wide savannah dotted with flat-topped acacia trees. Towering giraffe, with reticulated white markings on their coffee-coloured bodies, fed on the high branches and below them, grazing on the sweet savannah grasses, herds of antelope, kob, topi, eland, mingled with herds of fat striped zebra. The resuscitated Nile had brought them flocking back to partake of her bounty.

Two days' further sailing, and they sighted a herd of several hundred humped cattle, with long swept-back horns, grazing close to the edge of the reed banks. Young boys were herding them. 'I doubt not that they are Shilluk,' Taita told Fenn. 'Nakonto has come home.'

'How can you be sure of it?'

'See how tall and slender they are, and the manner in which they stand, like roosting storks, balanced on one long leg with the other foot resting on the calf. They can be none other than Shilluk.'

Nakonto had seen them too, and his usually aloof, disdainful manner evaporated. He broke into a stamping, prancing war-dance that shook the deck, and hallooed in a high-pitched tone that carried clearly over the reeds. Imbali laughed at his antics, clapped her hands and ululated to encourage him to greater efforts.

The herders heard someone calling to them in their own language from the boat, and ran to the bank to stare at the visitors in amazement.

Nakonto recognized two and hailed them across the water: 'Sikunela!

Timbai!'

The lads responded with astonishment: 'Stranger, who are you?'

'I am no stranger. I am your uncle Nakonto, the famous spearman!' he shouted back.

The boys whooped with excitement, and raced away to the village to call their elders. Before long several hundred Shilluk were gathered on the riverbank, gabbling at Nakonto in amazement. Then came Nontu the Short, all four and a half cubits of him, followed by his wives and their multitudinous offspring.

Nakonto and Nontu embraced rapturously. Then Nontu shouted instructions at the women, who trooped away to the village. They returned presently balancing on their heads enormous pots of bubbling beer.

The celebration on the riverbank lasted several days, but at last

Nakonto came to Taita. 'I have travelled far with you, great one who is no longer ancient,' he said. 'It has been good, especially the fighting, but this is the end of our road together. You are returning to your own people, and I must go back to mine.'

'This I understand. You have found a good woman who can put up with your ways, and you wish to see your sons grow as tall as you.

Perchance you can teach them to handle a stabbing spear with the same skill as their father.'

'This is true, old father who is younger than me. But how will you find your way back through the great swamps without me to guide you?'

'You will choose two young men of your tribe who are now as you were when I met you, hungry for fighting and adventure. You will send them with me to show me the way.' Nakonto chose two of his nephews to guide them through the Great Sud.

'They are very young.' Taita looked them over. 'Will they know the channels?'

'Does a baby know how to find its mother's teat?' Nakonto laughed.

'Go now. I shall think of you often as I grow older, and always it will be with pleasure.'

'Take as many beads from the ship's stores as will buy you five hundred head of fine cattle.' A Shilluk measured his wealth in terms of the cattle he owned and the sons he had fathered. 'Take also a hundred bronze spearheads so that your sons will always be well armed.'

'I praise you and Fenn, your woman with hair like sunlight dancing on the waters of the Nile.'

Imbali and Fenn embraced and both women wept. Nakonto and Imbali followed the flotilla for half of the morning, running along the riverbank, keeping pace with the leading boat, waving, dancing and shouting farewell. At last they halted, and Fenn and Taita stood together in the stern to watch their tall figures grow small with distance.

A the first dreary vista of the papyrus banks appeared ahead, stretching away to a boundless horizon, Nakonto's nephews took their .place in the bows, and as they entered the watery wilderness they signalled the turns and twists of the narrow channel to Meren on the steering oar.

With the Nile running high, the great swamp was water and more water, with no dry landings, so they were bound to the boats day after

day. But the wind that had driven them northwards remained constant and true, filling the lateen sails and driving down the swarms of stinging insects that rose from the reeds. Fenn thought often about the unnatural compliancy of that wind. At last she decided that Taita was exerting the extraordinary powers he had inherited from Eos to make even the elements sway to his will.

In these conditions, the journey through the watery wastes was not unendurable. There were few demands on Taita and he was able to leave the navigation to Meren and Nakonto's nephews, and all other matters to That. He and Fenn passed most of the days and nights in their own private space on the foredeck. The subjects that dominated most of their conversations were, first, Taita's confrontation with Eos and, second, his discovery of the Font and its miraculous properties. Fenn never tired of his descriptions of Eos.

'Was she the most beautiful woman you have ever seen?'

'No, Fenn. You are the most beautiful.'

'Do you say so to still my busy tongue or do you truly mean it?'

'You are my little fish, and your beauty is that of the golden dorado, the loveliest creature in all the oceans.'

'And Eos? What of her? Was she not beautiful, also?'

'She was very beautiful, but in the same way that a great killer shark is beautiful. She possessed a sinister and terrifying beauty.'