A Falcon Flies Part 25

With the major objectives of the expedition unfulfilled? " Zouga.

asked quickly. The major objectives were to find Fuller Ballantyne, and report on the slave trade, both of which we can accomplish if we march down the slave road to the sea."

Robyn broke off, and then made a show of dawning comprehension. "Oh dear, how silly of me, you mean the gold and the ivory. Those were the major objectives all along, were they not, my dear brother? " We have a duty to our sponsors! And none to that poor sick old man up there? " Robyn flung out one hand dramatically, and then spoiled the effect by stamping her foot. Angry with herself as well as with him, she yelled at him. "I am taking Pater down to the coast, and quickly as I can. "I say you are not. "And I say the h.e.l.l with you, Morris Zouga Ballantyne! " The oath gave her a dark pleasure, and she turned and strode away from him, long-legged in her tight-fitting breeches.

Two days later Robyn was ready to march. All exchanges between Zouga. and herself since their final meeting at the river had been in the form of written notes, and Robyn realized that her brother would be keeping copies of all this correspondence to justify his actions later.

She had briefly repudiated his written command not to attempt a march with the sick man. Zouga had listed half a dozen reasons, each neatly enumerated, why she should remain. once he had her written defiance, his next note sent up the hill in Juba's sweating little hand was magnanimous, written for future readers other than herself, Robyn decided sourly. If you insist on this folly, he began and he went on to offer her the protection of the entire force of Hottentot musketeers, with the exception of Sergeant Cheroot who had expressed a desire to remain with Zouga. Under the Corporal they would form an escort capable, as Zouga worded it "of bringing you and your charge safely to the coast, and protecting you from any hazards upon the way'.

He insisted that she take most of the remaining porters. He would keep five porters to carry his essential stores, together with his four gunbearers, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.

He also ordered her to take the Sharps rifle and all the remaining stores, "leaving me only sufficient powder and shot, and the bare minimum of medicines to enable me to complete the further objectives of this expedition Which I deem to be of prime importance'.

His final note reiterated all his reasons for keeping Fuller Ballantyne on the hilltop, and asked her once more to reconsider her decision. Robyn saved him the trouble of making fair copies by simply turning over the note and scribbling on it. "My mind is made up. I will march at first light tomorrow for the coast Then she dated and signed it.

The next morning, before sun-up, Zouga sent a team of porters up the hill, carrying a litter of mopani poles.

The poles had been peeled of their rough bark and bound together with raw-hide strips from the green hide of a freshly killed roan antelope, and the body of the litter was made from the same interwoven hide strips. Fuller Ballantyne had to be strapped into the litter to prevent him throwing himself out of it.

When Robyn brought them down again, walking beside the litter to try and calm the crazy old man on it, the Hottentot escort and the porters were ready to join her on the march. Zouga was waiting also, standing a little aside as though he had already dissociated himself, but Robyn went to him directly.

At least we know each other now, " she said huskily. We may not be able to rub along together, Zouga. I doubt we ever could have, or ever will be able to, but that does not mean I do not respect you, and love you even more than I respect you."

Zouga flushed and looked away. As she should have known, such a declaration could only embarra.s.s him. I have made sure that you have a hundred pounds of gunpowder, that is more than you could ever need, he said. Do you not wish to say farewell to Pater? " Zouga nodded stiffly, and followed her to the litter, avoiding looking at the Mashona woman who stood beside it and spoke formally to Fuller Ballantyne. Good-bye, sir. I wish you a swift safe journey and a speedy return to good health."

The wizened toothless face, revolved towards him upon its scrawny neck. The shaven head had a pale porcelain gloss in the grey dawn light, and the eyes were bird-bright, glittering with madness. G.o.d is my shepherd, I shall fear no evil, Fuller cawed, mouthing the words so they were barely understandable. Quite right, sir, Zouga nodded seriously. "No doubt at all about that. " He touched his cap in a military salute and stepped back. He nodded to the porters and they lifted the litter and moved away towards the pale orange and yellow sunrise.

Brother and sister stood side by side for the last time watching the column of escort and porters file past, and when the last of them had gone and only little Juba remained beside her, Robyn reached up impulsively and threw her arms around Zouga's neck, embraced him almost fiercely. I try to understand you, won't you do the same for me? " For a moment she thought he might unbend, she felt the hard erect body sway and soften, and then Zouga straightened again. This is not good-bye, he said. "Once I have done what is necessary, I shall follow you. We'll meet again Robyn dropped her arms to her sides, and stood back. Until then, she agreed wistfully, sad that he had not been able to make even a show of affectionUntil then, she repeated, and turned away. Juba followed her away into the forest, after the departing column.

Zouga waited until the singing of the porters dwindled, and the only sound was the sweet wild bird chorus that greets each dawn in Africa, and the distant melancholy whooping of a hyena slinking away to its earth.

There were many emotions warring in him. Guilt that he had let a woman, however well supported, attempt the journey to the coast; worry that once she reached it, her accounts would be the first to reach London; doubt as to the authenticity of the clues which Fuller Ballantyne had left for him to follow, but overlying it all a sense of relief and excitement that he was at last answerable only to himself, free to range as fast and far as hard legs and harder determination would take him.

He shook himself, a physical purging of guilt and doubt, leaving only the excitement and soaring sense of antic.i.p.ation. and he turned to where Sergeant Cheroot waited at the perimeter of the forlorn and deserted camp. When you smile, your face makes the children cry, Zouga told him, "but when you frown. . . What troubles you now, oh mighty hunter of elephants? " The little Hottentot lugubriously indicated the bulky tin box that contained Zouga's dress uniform and hat.

Say not another word, Sergeant, " Zouga warned him. But the porters complain, they have carried it so far. "And they will carry it to the gates of h.e.l.l itself, if I say so. Safari! " Zouga raised his voice, elated with the sense of excitement still strongly upon him. "We march! " Zouga was prepared for wide discrepancies in the positions that his father had fixed by celestial observation, and his own. A few seconds of error in the chronometers would put them many miles out.

So he treated with suspicion the terrain features which he saw ahead and which seemed to match with uncanny accuracy the sketch maps he had copied from Fuller's journals.

Yet as each day's march that he made opened up country that fitted his father's descriptions, he became more confident, more certain that the Umlimo and the ruined city were real and that they lay not many days march ahead.

It was beautiful country they pa.s.sed through, though the air was more sultry as they descended the sloping plateau towards the south and west. The long dry season, now drawing to its close, had scared the gra.s.slands to the colour of fields of ripening wheat, and turned the foliage of the forests to a hundred shades of plum reds and soft apricots. Many of the trees were bare of all leaves, lifting arthritically contorted limbs to the sky as if beseeching it for the relief of rain.

Each day the thunderheads built up, tall silver ranges of cloud turning purple and sullen leaden blue, threatening rain, but never making good that threat, though the thunder muttered, and in the evenings the lightning flickered low on the horizon as though great armies were locked in battle far to the east.

The big game was concentrated on the remaining water, the deeper river pools and the strongest waterholes, so that each day's march was through a wonderland of wild animals.

In one herd Zouga counted thirty-two giraffe, from the old slink-bull almost black with age, his long neck taller than the trees on which he fed, to the pale beige splotched calves on their disproportionately long legs, galloping away in that slow rocking gait with their long tufted tails twisted up over their backs.

Every clearing had its family of rhinoceros, the cows with the distinctively long slender nose horn, running their calves ahead of them, guiding them with a touch of the horn on the flank. There were herds of Cape buffalo, a thousand strong, flowing in a black dense ma.s.s across the open glades, steaming with pale dust like the lava from an active volcano.

Then there were elephant. There was not one day they did not cut fresh spoor, veritable roads through the forest, tall trees pushed down or still standing but stripped of their bark so the trunks were naked and weeping with fresh sap, the earth beneath them strewn with chewed twigs and bunches of picked leaves only just beginning to wither, the huge piles of fibrous dung standing like monuments to the pa.s.sing of the great grey beasts, and the baboon and the plump brown pheasant scratching and foraging enthusiastically in them for the half digested wild nuts and other tidbits.

Zouga could seldom resist him when Jan Cheroot looked up from his examination of the pad marks and said, "A big bull, this one, walking heavy in the front quarters. Good teeth, I'd stake my sister's virtue on it. "A commodity which was staked and lost many years ago, Zouga observed drily. "But we will follow, none the less."

Most evenings they could cut teeth and, having buried them, carry the bleeding heart to where they had left the porters, two men to carry the forty-pound hunk of raw flesh slung on a pole between them, a feast for the whole party. Because of the hunt, progress was slow and not always direct, but steadily Zouga identified and pa.s.sed the landmarks that his father had described.

Then at last, knowing he was close, Zouga withstood the temptation to hunt, for the first time refusing to follow the fresh spoor of three fine bulls, and disappointing Jan Cheroot most grievously by doing so. You should never leave a good elephant, or a warm and willing lady, he advised dolefully, "because you never know where or when you are going to meet the next one."

Jan Cheroot did not yet know the new object of their quest and Zouga's behaviour puzzled him. Zouga often caught him watching him with a quizzical sparkle in his bright little slitty eyes, but he avoided the direct question diplomatically and accepted Zouga's orders to abandon the spoor with only a little further grumbling, and they went on.

it was the porters who first baulked. Zouga never knew how they guessed, perhaps old Karanga had spoken of the Umlirno around the camp fire, or perhaps it was part of their tribal lore, although the gunbearers and most of the porters were from the Zambezi many hundreds of miles to the north. Yet Zouga had learned enough of Africa by now to recognize the strange, almost telepathic knowledge of far events and places. Whatever it was, and however they had acquired forewarning, there were thorns in the porters" feet for the first time in months.

At first Zouga was angry, and would have lived up to his nickname of "Bakelal, the Fist, but then he realized that their reluctance to continue towards the range of bald hills that showed above the horizon was confirmation that he was on a hot scent and close to his goal.

In camp that night, he drew Jan Cheroot aside and, speaking in English, explained what he was seeking and where. He was unprepared for the sickly expression that slowly spread over Jan Cheroot's wizened yellow features. Nie wat! Ik lol me met daai goed nieP The little Hottentot was driven in his superst.i.tious terror to fall back on the b.a.s.t.a.r.d Cape Dutch. "No what! I don't mess around with that sort of thing, he repeated in English, and Zouga smiled tauntingly across the camp fire at him. Sergeant Cheroot, I have seen you run, with a bare backside, right up to a wounded bull elephant, and wave your hat to turn him when he chargedElephants, said Jan Cheroot without returning the smile, "is one thing. Witches is another thing Then he perked up and twinkled like a mischievous gnome. Somebody must stay with the porters or they'll steal our traps and run for home."

Zouga left them camped near a muddy little waterhole, within an hour's match of the northernmost granite kopje. At the water-hole he filled the big enamelled water bottle, and wet its thick covering of felt to keep the contents cool, slung a freshly charged powder sack on one hip and a food bag on the other, and, with the heavy smooth-bore elephant gun over his shoulder set out alone while the shadows were still long on the earth, and the gra.s.s wet with the dew.

The hills ahead of him were rounded domes of pearly grey granite, smooth as a bald man's pate and completely free of vegetation. As he trudged towards them across the lightly forested plain, his spirit quailed at the task ahead of him.

With each step the hills seemed to rise higher and steeper, the valleys between them deeper and more sheer, the th.o.r.n.y bush that choked the gorges and ravines more dense.

It could take months to search all of this broken wilderness, and he did not, have a guide as his father had had. Yet, in the end, it was so easy that he was irritated with his own lack of foresight.

His father had written in the journals "Even Mzilikazi, that sanguine tyrant, sends gifts for her oracle."

He struck the well-defined road, leading out of the west, broad enough for two men to walk along it, and aimed directly into the maze of smooth, granite hills. It could only be the road used by the emissaries of the Matabele king.

it led Zouga up the first gentle slope of ground, and then turned abruptly into one of the gorges between peaks. The path narrowed, and jinked between huge round granite boulders, the bush so thick on each side that he had to duck below the th.o.r.n.y branches that interlinked to form a gloomy tunnel overhead.

The valley was so deep that the sunlight did not penetrate to the floor, but the heat was thrown out by the granite as though it had been baked in an open fire, and the sweat soaked Zouga's s.h.i.+rt and slid in cool, tickling drops down his flanks. The bush thinned and the valley narrowed, and then pinched out into a narrow neck between the converging rock walls. It was a natural gateway where a few good spearsmen could have held a regiment. On a ledge high above was a small thatched watch hut, and beside it an idle blue tendril of smoke rising from a watchfire into the still hot air. But if there had been a guard he had deserted his post at Zouga's approach.

Zouga grounded the b.u.t.t of his elephant gun, and leaned upon it to rest from the climb and at the same time surrept.i.tiously to search the cliffs above him for a hidden enemy, or for the spot from which one could send the familiar boulders bounding and clanging down upon him.

The gorge was silent, hot and deserted. There was not even the chattering of birds or the murmur of insects in the undergrowth. The silence was more oppressive than the heat, and Zouga threw back his head and hallooed up at the deserted watch-hut.

The echoes, boomed grotesquely back and forth across the gorge, and then descended through confused whispers to the same foreboding silence. The last white man to pa.s.s this way was the Sword of G.o.d, in person, intent on decapitating the oracle, Zouga thought bitterly. He could not expect a hero's welcome.

He shouldered the gun again and went into the natural granite gateway, his instinct telling him that the bold approach was the only one open to him. The narrow pa.s.sageway was floored with crunching grey sand, full of mica chips that sparkled like diamonds even in the subdued light. The pa.s.sage curved gently until he could see neither the entrance behind him nor the end of it. He wanted to hurry, for this was like a cage, or a trap, but he controlled his feet and showed neither fear nor indecision in his tread.

Around the curve the pa.s.sageway fanned open, and from one wall a small freshet rippled down the granite cliff, spilled with a tiny liquid gurgle into a natural basin of rock and then overflowed to run down into the hidden valley beyond. Zouga came out of the natural gateway and paused again to stare about him. It was a pleasant valley, probably a mile long and half as wide. The rivulet watered it, and the gra.s.s was cool green.

In the centre of the valley was a huddle of neatly thatched huts, around which scratched a few scrawny fowls. He went down to them. The huts were all deserted, although there was everywhere evidence of very recent occupation, even the porridge in the cooking pot was still hot.

Three of the largest huts were crammed with treasures, leather bags of salt, tools and weapons of iron, ingots of smelted red copper, a pile of small ivory tusks, and Zouga guessed that these were the tributes and gifts sent by pet.i.tioners and supplicants to the oracle. Payments made for her intercession with the rain G.o.ds, fees for a spell cast upon an enemy, or to soften a coquette's heart.

The fact that these treasures were left unguarded was proof of the Umlimo's power, and her own belief in that power. However, if Fuller Ballantyne's journal was the truth "the foul and midnight hag" as he referred to her was long ago dead, and her severed skull crunched by the hyenas or bleaching somewhere in the hot African sun.

Zouga stooped out through the low entrance of the last hut, into the sunlight once more. He called again, but again there was no answer. There were people here, many of them, but to make contact with them, and then to learn from them the location of the "burial place of the kings" was going to be more difficult than he expected.

Leaning on the long gun he turned his attention to the steep side of the valley, and again it was the pathway that caught his eye and led it to the entrance of the cave.

For the path continued beyond the village, running down the centre of the valley and climbed the far slope of the valley, then came to an abrupt end against the granite cliff. The mouth of the cave was low and wide, a narrow horizontal gash in the base of the cliff like a toad's mouth and the path led directly into it.

Zouga climbed the gentle slope to the cave entrance.

He had left his food bag and water bottle at the village, and, lightly burdened, he strode upwards, tall and lithe, his beard sparkling like gold thread in the sunlight, so that any hidden watcher could not have doubted that this was a chieftain and warrior to treat with respect.

He reached the cave entrance and checked, not from fatigue, for the climb had not taxed him, but merely to take his bearings. The cave entrance was a hundred paces or so wide, and the roof so low that he could reach up and touch the rough rock.

There was a guard wall built to close off the opening, a wall of dressed granite blocks, fitted so closely that it would have been impossible to drive a knife blade between the joints, clearly the work of skilled masons, but done long ago for in places the wall had tumbled, the blocks piled upon each other in disarray.

The path led into one of these gaps, and disappeared into the gloom beyond. It was a most unwelcoming entrance. Going in he would have the light at his back, and his eyes would be unaccustomed to the poor light, there would be many places where a man could wait with spear or axe. Zouga felt his first ardour cooling as he peered into that forbidding opening, and he called again in the Matabele language. I come in peace! " He was answered almost immediately, in a childish piping voice speaking the same language, close behind his shoulder, so close that his heart tripped, and he whirled. White is the colour of mourning and death, piped the voice, and Zouga looked about him in confusion. There was no child, no human, no animal even, the valley behind him was deserted, silent. The voice had emanated from the very air.

Zouga felt his mouth drying, and the skin on his forearms and at the base of his skull crawled with the loathsome little insects of fear, and while he stared another voice screeched from the cliff above him. White is the colour of war.

" It was the voice of an old woman, a very old woman, quavering and shrill. Zouga's heart jumped again, and then raced as he looked up. The cliff face was bare and smooth. His heart was fluttering against his ribs like a trapped bird, and his breath rasped and sawed in his throat. White is the colour of slavery, sang a young girl's voice, filling the air about his head, having no direction and no substance, sweet and liquid as the burble of running water. She spoke in the voices of Belial and Beelzebub, the hideous voices of Azazel and Behar, all Satan's myriad alter-egos, " his father had written, and Zouga felt the slow leaden spread of superst.i.tious terror weighing down his legs.

Another voice, roaring like a bull, boomed from the mouth of the cave. "The white eagle has cast down the stone falcons."

He took a long slow breath, to bring his mutinous body under control, and he cast his mind back deliberately to a childhood memory. Brighton pier on August bank holiday, the small boy clutching his Uncle William's hand and staring up in wonder at the magician on the stage who made a doll come to life and speak in a quaint piping voice, answering the voice from the box too small to contain even a rabbit. The memory steadied him, and he laughed. It was a clear firm laugh, surprising himself even. Keep your tricks for the children, Umlimo. I come in peace to speak with you as a man."

There was no reply, though he thought he caught the silken whisper of bare feet on stone, coming from the darkness beyond the turned stone wall. See me, Umlirno! I lay aside my weapons."

He unslung the powder bag and dropped it at his feet, and then he laid the elephant gun across it and holding his empty hands before him advanced slowly into the cave.

As he reached the step in the wall, there was the crackling spitting snarl of an angry leopard from the shadows just ahead of him. It was a terrible sound, fierce and real, but Zouga had himself in hand now. He did not miss a pace but stooped under the sill through the gap, and straightened on the far side.

He waited for a minute while his eyes adjusted, and he could make out shapes and planes in the gloom.

There were no other voices or animal sounds. There was a faint source of light somewhere ahead of him in the depths of the cave, and he could now make out a way among St. the scree and fallen rock that choked the cave, in some places as high as the low roof.

Zouga began to pick his way carefully forward. The light grew stronger, and Zouga realized that it was a single beam of sunlight, s.h.i.+ning through a narrow crack in the roof.

Looking up, he stumbled and put out a hand to save himself. it was not rock that he touched but something sticklike that moved beneath his touch. There was a rattle, and a loose dry rush of debris. Zouga caught his balance and glanced down. A disembodied human skull gaped up at him from empty black eye sockets, the cheekbones still covered with a parchment of dried skin.

With a jolting little shock Zouga realized that what he had taken for loose scree and rock was instead piles of human remains, dried and desiccated corpses, lying in mounds and heaps, choking the pa.s.sages and deepest recesses of the cave, here and there a single body, crouched or sprawled alone, bone s.h.i.+ning dully from gaps in its covering of dark dried skin or through the rotting leather garments. That reeking charnel house, Fuller Ballantyne had called it.

Instinctively Zouga wiped the hand that had touched the long-dead skeleton, and then went on towards the light. There was the smell of smoke now, and of human presence, and another sweet mousy odour that was hauntingly familiar but which Zouga could not place at that moment. The floor of the cave sloped downwards under his feet, and he turned a rocky shoulder and looked down into a small natural amphitheatre, with a floor of smooth granite.

In the centre of the floor burned a low fire of some aromatic wood, the smoke spiced the air and rose in a slow spiral towards the crack in the rocky roof, clouding the beam of sunlight with milky blue. There seemed to be other fingers of the cave leading further into the hillside, like the adits of a mine shaft, but Zouga's attention was focused on the figure that sat across the fire from him.

Zouga went slowly down on to the floor of the stone amphitheatre without taking his eyes from the figure. That foul and midnight hag, his father had called the Umlimo but this was no hag. She was young, in full physical prime, and as she knelt facing him Zouga realized that he had seldom seen such a fine-looking woman, certainly not in India or Africa, and very seldom, if ever, in the northern lands.

She had a long regal neck on which her head balanced like a black lily on its stern . Her features were Egyptian, with a straight fine nose and huge dark eyes above high moulded cheekbones. Her teeth were small and perfect, her lips chiselled like the flutes of a pink seash.e.l.l.

She was naked, her body slim, her limbs long and fine, her hands and feet narrow and delicately shaped with tapered fingers and pate pink palms. Her small b.r.e.a.s.t.s rode high and were perfectly round, her waist narrow but flaring into tight hard b.u.t.tocks and hips like the curve of a Venetian vase. Her s.e.x was a wide triangle, deeply cleft, the inner lips bursting out unashamedly, like the wings of a dark exotic b.u.t.terfly emerging from its woolly chrysalis.

She was watching him with those huge dark eyes, and when he stopped across the fire from her, she made a slow gracious gesture with those delicately long fingers.

Obediently Zouga squatted down opposite her and waited.

The woman took up one of the calabash gourds from the array beside her, holding it between the palms of her hands and poured from it into a shallow earthen bowl.

It was milk. She set the calabash aside, and Zouga expected her to offer him the bowl, but she did not. She continued to watch him inscrutably. I come from the north, Zouga said at last. Then call me Bakela."

Your sire slew the one before me, said the woman.

Her voice was compelling, for although the fluted lips barely moved, it was thrown with the power and timbre of the skilled ventriloquist. The sound of it seemed to quiver in the air long after she finished speaking and he knew now with certainty who had spoken in the voice of child and maid, of warrior and wild animal. He was a sick man, Zouga replied, not questioning the source of her knowledge. Not querying how she had known that he was the son of the father.

Her words explained much to Zouga, and it was logical that the Urnlimo was a hereditary duty, the office of high priestess being pa.s.sed on down the years. This magnificent woman was the latest bearer of the t.i.tle. My father was driven mad by the sickness in his blood. He did not know what he did, Zouga explained. It was part of the prophecy. " The Umlimo's statement s.h.i.+mmered against the cave walls, but she did not stir while the silence spun out over many minutes. These, Zouga spoke at last, indicating the dusty, crumbling piles of dead, "who were they, and how did they die? "They are the people of the Rozwi, " said the woman, and they died by fire and smoke."

Who laid the fire? " Zouga persisted. The black bull from the south.

The Angoni."

Zouga was silent again imagining the tribe fleeing here, to their holy place, their refuge, the women carrying the children, running like driven game ahead of the beaters, looking back over their shoulders for a glimpse of the waving tufts on the crowns of the wars.h.i.+elds and the plumed headdresses of the Angoni arnadoda.

He imagined them lying here in the darkness listening to the ring of axes and shouts of the besieging warriors as they cut the timber and piled it in the mouth of the cave, and then the crackle of the flames as they put fire to it and the first choking acrid clouds of smoke boiled into the cave.

He could hear again in his imagination the screams and cries of the choking, dying victims, and the shouts and the laughter of the men beyond the flaming, smoking barricade of timber. That too was part of the prophecy, " said the Umlirno and was silent. In the silence there was a soft rustling sound like a leaf blown by the breeze across the tiles at midnight, and Zouga's eyes turned towards the sound.

A dark thing flowed out of the shadows at the back of the cave, like a trickle of spilt blood, black in the gloom but catching the firelight in pinp.r.i.c.ks of reflected light.

It rustled softly across the stone floor, and Zouga felt his skin crawl and his nostrils flare at the sweetish mousy odour which he had noticed before, but which he recognized now.

It was the smell of snake.

Zouga stared at it, frozen with fascinated horror, for the reptile was as thick as his wrist and the full length of it was lost in the recesses of the cave. The head slid into the circle of orange firelight. The scales glittered with a marble l.u.s.tre, the lidless eyes fixed Zouga with an unblinking stare and from the slyly grinning lipless mouth the silken black tongue vibrated as it tasted his scent upon the air. Sweet Christ! Zouga whispered hoa.r.s.ely and dropped his hand to the hilt of his hunting-knife on his belt, but the Urnlimo did not move.

The snake lifted its head from the stone and dipped it over the bowl of milk. It began to drink.

It was a mamba, a black mamba, the most venomous of all the reptiles, the death it could inflict was swift but agonizing beyond all nightmares of pain. Zouga had not believed that a mamba could grow to such dimensions, for as he watched it drink half its length was still lost in the shadows.

After a minute the monstrous reptile lifted its head from the bowl and turned towards the Umlirno, it began to slide forward, the muscles under the glittering scales convulsing in little waves that came running down its length towards the broad spatulate head.

It touched the woman's bare knee with the flickering black tongue, seeming to use the tongue like a blind man uses his cane to grope its way along her thigh, licking briefly at the lips of her bulging s.e.x, and then lifting itself up over her belly, over her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, still licking at her smoothly oiled skin, it rose up around her neck and then slid down over the other shoulder until it came to rest at last suspended around her neck, the head reaching out the length of a man's arm ahead of her at the level of her b.r.e.a.s.t.s; swaying slightly, it fixed Zouga once more with that cold ophidian stare.

Zouga licked his lips, and relaxed his grip on the hilt of the knife.

I have come to seek wisdom, he said hoa.r.s.ely. I know what you seek, " replied the Urnlirno. "But you will find more than you seek. "Who will lead me? "Follow the little seeker of sweetness in the treetops. "I do not understand. " Zouga frowned, still watching the huge snake, and the Umlirno did not reply. Her silence was clearly an invitation to ponder the reply, and Zouga did so in silence, but found no explanation. He memorized the words, and would have asked another question but there was a silken rush out of the darkness near him, and he started half to his feet as a second snake slid swiftly past him.

It was another mamba, but a smaller snake, not much thicker than his thumb, and as long as twice the stretch of his arms. Half its length was raised arrow-straight in the air, and it sailed on its tail up to the kneeling woman with her grotesque living necklace.

The woman did not move, and the smaller snake stood before her, swaying gently from side to side, lowering itself gradually until it touched tongue to darting black tongue with the thick reptile around her neck.

Then it slid forward and began to roll itself around the body of the other snake, throwing turn after turn like a sailor las.h.i.+ng a sheet about a mast, and each time it rolled, it showed its soft white pulsating underbelly with the narrow scales reaching from flank to flank.