“What is it?” Louisa’s voice shook.
“Lions,” Jim told her. There was no point in trying to deceive her so, instead, he tried to distract her. “Even the bravest of men is frightened by a lion three times—when first he sees its spoor, when first he hears its roar, when first he meets it face to face.”
“Once is enough for me,” she said, and although her voice quavered, she gave a small, uncertain laugh. Jim felt a lift of pride at her courage. Then he dropped his arm from her shoulders as he felt her shift uncomfortably in his embrace. She still could not bear a masculine touch. “They are after the horses,” he told her. “If fortune favours us, they might go after Keyser’s animals instead of ours.” As if in answer to his wish, a few minutes later they heard a fusillade of musket fire further back down the valley where they had seen the enemy set up camp at nightfall.
“The lions must be on our side.” Louisa laughed again, a little more convincingly. At intervals during the rest of the night there came the clap of a distant musket shot.
“The lions are still harassing Keyser’s camp,” Jim said. “With luck they will lose some horses.”
At dawn as they began their flight again, Jim looked back through the telescope and saw that Keyser had lost none of his horses. “They were able to drive off the lions, more’s the pity,” he told Louisa.
“Let’s hope they try again tonight,” she said.
It was the hardest day they had so far been forced to endure. During the afternoon a thunderstorm swept down from the north-west and drenched them with cold, driving rain. It blew over just as the sun was setting, and in the last light of the day they saw the enemy less than a league behind them, coming on steadily. Jim continued the retreat long after dark. It was a nightmare march over wet and treacherous ground, through rills that had swollen dangerously with rain. Jim knew in his heart that they could not carry on like this much longer.
When at last they halted Louisa almost fell from Trueheart’s back. Jim wrapped her in a sodden fur kaross and gave her a small stick of chagga, almost the last of their food.
“You have it. I am not hungry,” she protested.
“Eat it,” he commanded. “No time for heroics now.”
She slumped and fell asleep before she had taken more than a few mouthfuls. Jim went to where Zama and Bakkat were sitting together. “This is just about the end,” he said grimly. “We have to do it tonight, or not at all. We have to get at their horses.” They had been planning all that day, but it would be a forlorn attempt. Although he kept a bold face, Jim knew it was almost certainly doomed.
Bakkat was the only one of them who had any chance at all of thwarting Xhia’s vigilance and getting into the enemy camp undiscovered, and he could not untether all eighteen horses and bring them out on his own.
“One or two, yes,” he told Jim, “but not eighteen.”
“We must take all of them.” He looked up at the sky. A sickle moon sailed through the streaming remnants of the rainclouds. “Just enough light to do the job.”
“Bakkat could get into the horselines and cripple them, hamstring them,” Zama suggested.
Jim shifted uneasily: the idea of mutilating a horse was distasteful. “The first animal would scream so loudly Bakkat would have the whole camp down on him. No, that won’t work.”
At that moment Bakkat sprang to his feet and sniffed loudly. “Hold the horses!” he cried. “Quickly! The lions are here.”
Zama ran to Trueheart and seized her halter rope. Bakkat darted to the mules to control them. They would be more docile than the two thoroughbreds.
Jim was only just in time. He grabbed Drumfire’s head as the stallion reared on his hind legs and whinnied shrilly with terror. Jim was lifted off his feet but he managed to throw an arm around Drumfire’s neck, and hold him down. “Steady, my darling. Whoa now! Easy! Easy!” he soothed him. But still the horse stamped and reared and tried to break away. Jim shouted across at Bakkat, “What is it? What’s happening?”
“It’s the lion,” Bakkat panted. “Foul demon! He has circled upwind, and squirted his stinking piss for the horses to smell. The lioness will be waiting down wind to catch any that break away.”
“Sweet Christ!” Jim exclaimed. “Even I can smell it!” It was a rank feline stench in the back of his throat, more repulsive than the spray of a tomcat. Drumfire reared again. The odour was driving him crazy. He was beyond control. This time Jim knew he could not hold him. He still had both arms around the stallion’s neck but his feet barely touched the ground. Drumfire broke into a gallop dragging Jim along with him.
“The lioness!” Bakkat yelled. “Beware! The lioness is waiting for you.”
Drumfire’s hoofs thundered over the rocky ground, and Jim felt as though his arms were being wrenched out of their sockets.
“Let him go, Somoya. You cannot stop him!” Bakkat screamed after him. “The lioness will get you too!”
Jim jackknifed his body forward and as his feet struck the earth he used the power of both legs to boost himself high and swing one leg over Drumfire’s back. Balancing easily to the stallion’s run, he snatched Keyser’s pistol from his belt and cocked the hammer with a single movement.
“To your right, Somoya!” Bakkat’s voice receded behind him, but he picked up the warning just in time. He saw the movement as the lioness broke from cover and streaked in from his right. She was ghostly pale in the faint moonlight, silent, huge and terrible.
He lifted the pistol and leaned forward. He tried to steer Drumfire with the pressure of his knees, but the horse was far beyond any restraint. He saw the lioness get ahead of them and crouch down, gathering herself to spring. Then she rose from the earth, launching herself straight at Jim. There was no time to aim. Instinctively he pointed the muzzle into her face. She was so close that he could see both her front paws, reaching for him with great curved claws. Her open jaws were a black pit. Her teeth shone like porcelain in the moonlight, and the graveyard stench of her breath blew hot into his face as she roared.
He fired the pistol at the full reach of his right arm, and the muzzle flash blinded him. The weight of the lioness’s body crashed into them. Even Drumfire reeled at the weight, but then he gathered himself and galloped on. Jim felt the lioness’s claws rip into his boot, but they did not hold. The huge carcass dropped away, tumbled slackly across the hard ground, then lay in an inert pile.
It took seconds for Jim to realize that he had come through the attack unscathed. Then his next care was for Drumfire. He leaned forward and clasped him around the neck, calling to him soothingly, “It’s all over, my sweetheart. Whoa! There’s a good boy.”
Drumfire’s ears twitched back as he listened to Jim’s voice. He slowed down to an easy trot, and at last to a walk. Jim steered him back up the slope. But as soon as he smelt the lioness’s blood, he started mincing and dancing, throwing his head nervously.
“Lioness is dead,” Bakkat called out of the darkness. “Shot through the mouth and out the back of her skull.”
“Where is the lion?” Jim shouted back.
As if in reply they heard the lion roar near the top of the mountain, a good mile off. “Now she is of no further use to him, he has deserted his wife,” Bakkat sneered. “Cowardly and thieving beast.”
It was with difficulty that Jim coaxed Drumfire back to where Bakkat stood beside the dead lioness. He was still skittish and nervous. “I’ve never seen him so terrified,” Jim exclaimed.
“No animal can stay calm and brave with the smell of lion’s piss or blood in his nostrils,” Bakkat told him. Then they exclaimed in the same voice: “That’s it! We have it!”
It was long after midnight by the time they reached the ridge overlooking the enemy camp. Keyser’s watchfires had burned low, but they could see that the sentries were still awake.
“Just a small breeze from the east.” Jim held Drumfire’s head to calm him. The stallion was still shivering and sweating with terror. Not even Jim’s hand and voice could so
othe him. Every time the carcass he was towing behind him slithered forward, he rolled his eyes until the whites glared in the moonlight.
“We must keep below the wind,” Bakkat murmured. “The other horses must not catch the scent until we are ready.”
They had muffled Drumfire’s hoofs with leather booties, and wrapped all the metal pieces of his tack. Bakkat went ahead to make sure that the way was clear as they circled out round the western perimeter of the enemy camp.
“Even Xhia has to sleep sometime,” Jim whispered to Bakkat, but he was unconvinced. They closed in slowly and were within half a pistol shot of the perimeter where they could see the enemy sentries outlined against the faint glow of their fire.
“Give me your knife, Somoya,” whispered Bakkat. “It is sharper than mine.”
“If you lose it, I will have both your ears in exchange,” Jim muttered, as he handed it over.
“Wait for my signal.” Bakkat left him, in his disconcertingly abrupt fashion, seeming to vanish into the air. Jim stood at Drumfire’s head, holding his nostrils closed to prevent him whickering at the smell of the other horses so close to him.
Like a wraith Bakkat drifted closer to the fires and his heart leaped as he saw Xhia. His enemy sat on the opposite side of the second fire, his kaross wrapped about his shoulders. Bakkat could see that his eyes were closed and his head nodded on the verge of sleep.
Somoya was right. Bakkat smiled to himself. He does sleep sometimes.
Nevertheless he kept well clear of Xhia, but he slipped almost contemptuously within touching distance past Corporal Richter who was guarding the horselines. Keyser’s grey was the first animal he came to. As Bakkat crept up to it, he began to hum in his throat, a lulling sound. The grey shifted slightly and pricked its ears, but made no other sound. Bakkat took only a moment to sever three strands of its halter rope. Then he moved on to the next horse in the line, still humming his lullaby, and drew the blade carefully across the rope that held it.
He was half-way down the line when behind him he heard Corporal Richter cough, hawk and spit. Bakkat sank to the earth and lay still. He heard Richter’s booted footsteps coming down the line and watched him pause beside the grey’s head to check the halter. In the darkness he overlooked the unravelling strands of the fraying rope. Then he came on and almost stepped on Bakkat. When he reached the end of the line he unfastened the fly of his breeches and urinated noisily on the earth. When he came back, Bakkat had crawled under the belly of one of the horses, and Richter passed without glancing in his direction. He went back to his place by the fire, and said something to Xhia who grunted a reply.
Bakkat gave them a few minutes to settle again, then crept on down the line of horses, and dealt with each of their halter ropes.
Jim heard the signal, the soft liquid call of a nightbird, so convincing that he hoped that it was indeed the little man and not a real bird that had uttered it.
“No going back now!” He swung up on to Drumfire’s back. The stallion needed no urging, his nerves were raw, and as he felt Jim’s heels he started forward. The carcass of the lioness, half disembowelled, her reeking guts hanging out of the cavity, slithered after him and Drumfire could stand it no longer. At full tilt he tore into the sleeping camp, and on his back Jim was howling, gibbering and waving his hat over his head.
Bakkat leaped out of the darkness on the far side grunting and roaring at an incredible volume for such a small frame. It was a perfect imitation of the beast.
Corporal Richter, half asleep, staggered to his feet and fired his musket at Jim as he charged past. The ball missed Drumfire but hit one of the horses tethered in the lines, shattering its front leg. The animal screamed and plunged, snapping its weakened halter rope, then fell and rolled on its back kicking in the air. The other troopers woke and snatched up their muskets. The panic was contagious and they blazed away at imaginary lions and attackers, shouting challenges and orders.
“It’s the Courtney bastard!” Keyser bellowed. “There he is! Shoot him! Don’t let him get away!”
The horses were bombarded with shouts and screams and roars, by blasts of gunfire and, finally, by the terrifying scent of lion blood and guts. On the previous night they had been attacked repeatedly by the lion pride, and that memory was still vivid. They could stand no more. They fought their head ropes, kicking, rearing and whinnying with terror. One after another the ropes snapped and the horses were free. They wheeled away and thundered out of the camp in a solid bunch, heading downwind. Close behind them rode Jim on Drumfire. Bakkat darted out of the shadows and seized one of his stirrup leathers. While Drumfire carried him along, Bakkat was still roaring like a ravening lion. In their dust ran Keyser and his troopers, bellowing with rage and firing as fast as they were able to reload.
“Stop them!” Keyser howled. “They have got the horses! Stop them!” He tripped over a rock and fell to his knees, gasping for breath, his heart pounding as though it were about to burst. He stared after the vanishing herd, and the import of his predicament struck him with full force. He and his men were stranded in tractless, mountainous terrain, at least ten days’ march from civilization. Their supplies were severely depleted, even those they would not be able to carry with them.
“Swine!” he shouted. “I will get you, Jim Courtney. I will not rest until I see you swinging on the gibbet, until I see the maggots filling your skull and dribbling out of your eye-sockets. I swear by all that is holy, and may God be my witness.”
The runaway horses kept bunched together, and Jim herded them along. He cut the rope on which he was towing the lioness, and left her carcass behind. Glad to be rid of his odorous burden, Drumfire calmed down at once. Within a mile the running herd dropped from a gallop to a canter, but Jim kept them moving steadily. Within an hour he knew that none of the troopers, shod as they were and carrying their weapons and equipment, could overhaul them. He slowed down to a steady trot, a pace they could keep up for hours.
Before the attack on Keyser’s camp, Jim had sent Zama and Louisa on ahead with Trueheart and the mules. They had had several hours’ start, but Jim caught up with them an hour after sunrise. The meeting was emotional.
“We heard the gunfire in the night,” Louisa told Jim, “and feared the worst, but I prayed for you. I didn’t stop until a minute ago when I heard you shout behind us.”
“That’s what did it, then, Hedgehog. You must be a champion prayer-maker.” Although he grinned, Jim felt an almost irresistible urge to lift her down from Trueheart’s back and hold her close, to protect her and cherish her. She looked so thin, pale and exhausted. Instead he swung down from his own saddle. “Make a fire, Zama,” he ordered. “We can warm up and rest. Damn me, if we won’t eat the last mouthful of the food, drink the last mug of coffee, then sleep until we wake up.” He laughed. “Keyser is on his way back to the colony on Shanks’s pony and we won’t have any more trouble from him for a while.”
This time Jim would not allow Louisa to refuse a mug of coffee, and once she had tasted the bitter liquid she could no longer deny herself, and drank the rest thankfully. It revived her almost immediately. She stopped shivering and a little colour returned to her cheeks. She even raised a wan smile at a few of Jim’s worst jokes. He refilled the canteen with boiling water every time it was emptied. Each brew of coffee became progressively weaker but it restored his spirits and he was cheerful and ebullient again. He described to Louisa how Keyser had reacted to the surprise raid, and imitated him staggering about barefoot, waving his sword over his head, bellowing threats and tripping over his own feet in the dark. Louisa laughed until tears ran down her cheeks.
Jim and Zama examined the horses they had captured. They were in good condition, considering the long, gruelling journey that had been forced on them. Keyser’s grey gelding was the pick of the herd. Keyser had named him Zehn, but Jim translated that to the English, Frost.
Now that they had remounts they would be able to push on at speed towards the rendezvous on the Garie
p. But first Jim rested and grazed the horses knowing that Keyser could not harass them. Louisa took full advantage of this respite. She curled under her kaross and slept. She lay so still that Jim was worried. Quietly he lifted a corner of the fur to make sure she was still breathing.
That morning, just before they had caught up with Zama and Louisa, Jim had spotted a small herd of four or five mountain rhebuck grazing among the rocks higher up the slope from the valley. Now he saddled Frost and Bakkat rode bareback on another of the captured horses. Jim left Louisa to sleep with Zama to guard her, and they rode back to where they had seen the rhebuck. They found that the herd had moved on and the slope was empty, but Jim knew they were unlikely to have gone far. They knee-haltered the horses and left them to graze on a patch of sweet grass with fluffy pink seedheads ripening in the spring sunshine. They climbed the slope.
Bakkat picked up the rhebuck spoor just below the crest, and worked it swiftly, trotting along over rocky ground with Jim striding after him. On the far side of the ridge they found the herd already bedded down in the lee of a cluster of large boulders that sheltered them from the cold wind. Bakkat led Jim in close, leopard-crawling with the musket cradled in the crook of his elbow. At seventy paces Jim knew they could not get closer without bolting the herd. He picked a fat dun-coloured ewe who was lying facing away from him, chewing the cud contentedly. He knew that the musket threw three inches to the right at a hundred paces, so he propped his elbows on his knees for a steady shot and laid off his aim a thumb’s width. The ball struck at the base of the ewe’s skull with a sound like a ripe melon dropped on a stone floor. She did not move again, except to drop her head flat against the earth. The rest of the herd bounded away, flashing their bushy white tails and whistling with alarm.
They skinned the ewe and gralloched her, feasting on raw liver as they worked. She was only a medium-sized antelope, but young and plump. They left the skin and head and entrails and between them carried the rest of the carcass back to the horses.