The Day of Creation (Harper Perennial Modern Classics) Page 25

  For all his exhaustion, he listened keenly to the sounds around him, the faint gurgle of the Mallory through the gap in the barrage, the soft smoulder of the ropes, and the low wail of the Salammbo’s keel. As I climbed through the rubble he could hear my panting breath, and the clicking of the rifle sling against the empty magazine.

  ‘Mallory? Dr Mallory? You’re crawling around me. Like a disease …’

  ‘Sanger – how did you get here?’

  ‘Do you need help? I can’t cure you.’ Sanger pointed the camera at me, as if its magic lens might ease my ills. A bullet or piece of shrapnel had penetrated the case, carrying away a section of the lens. ‘You escaped from the Diana …’

  I leaned the rifle against the stern of the ferry and took Sanger’s wrist, my first conscious act as a physician since leaving Port-la-Nouvelle. ‘I’ll dress that for you. Where are Mrs Warrender and the women?’

  ‘They’ve gone – their task is over. Or almost over. I wanted them to kill you, Mallory.’

  ‘They didn’t try to keep me alive. What about Noon? Is she with them?’

  ‘Perhaps … not. I’ve heard her here but …’ Sanger lowered his ravaged face behind his broken camera, losing interest in me. ‘It’s over for the child. And for you, Mallory. As you wished, your river is dying.’

  ‘We can still save it. Where did you hear Noon? Did Kagwa’s soldiers take her?’

  ‘Kagwa’s soldiers? Dear doctor, their bodies are sailing back to Lake Kotto on the last tide. My film is done: the country doctor is mad, and his river is dead …’

  ‘No—’ I stared at the sombre mountains, waiting for some encouragement from the hard blue slopes. ‘There’s a landslip up in the gorges – some kind of obstruction that I can try to clear.’

  ‘You’ll save the river? After all your efforts?’ Sanger retched over his camera. ‘That’s an improbable postscript, doctor, a touching epilogue. You should go into the film world.’

  ‘I have. Now, I’ll move you to the ferry. You can wait for me there – when the Mallory flows you’ll be safe.’

  ‘When the Mallory flows—? Are such powers in your gift …?’

  I lifted him from the booth and held his skeletal body against my chest. Together we tottered in the shifting earth, trying to find our footing in the sliding mud, two tramps dancing on a garbage hill.

  ‘You’re starving, Sanger – before I go I’ll catch that macaque for you.’

  ‘The monkey – I could never eat the little beast. It would be a crime. Roast on a spit, or boiled?’

  ‘Think of your film, Sanger. You’re too weak to hold that camera. First I’ll find Noon. You said that you’d heard her …?’

  ‘She was here. Or part of her. The confused children … you poisoned her, Mallory, with your sick river, like all these desert people. They’re sick with your dream …’

  ‘I’ll bring them fresh water again. I’ve done it before, Sanger.’

  I propped Sanger against the rail of the ferry. The effort of supporting him had exhausted me. Bent double over the rifle, I scanned the silent beaches of the pool, and then turned to the shallow waterway of the Mallory above the barrage. Captain Kagwa’s limousine waited in the sunlight, its shabby, bullet-pocked body covered with white ash, as if it had been decorated for a funeral cortege. Above the highest shelf of the cascade Noon’s steel skiff was beached between the exposed legs of the landing-stage.

  Through the ash and oil flecks the left headlamp of the limousine pulsed faintly, the last blurred glow of a fading battery.

  ‘A trick of the sun …?’ I asked aloud.

  ‘Yes, the whole expedition. The sun tricked us from the start …’

  ‘Noon …!’

  ‘Leave her. We’ll eat the macaque.’

  Sanger’s hand clutched my shoulders, feeling the hard flesh. Already I guessed that he saw me taking the macaque’s place in due course. I seized his wrists and pulled his nails from my skin, then pressed the rifle to his chest and threw him across the deck. While he fumbled for his camera I ran down the inner face of the barrage, swinging myself between the pipes and girders. I clambered across the stranded raft with its outboard motor, and ran along the exposed river-bed between the bodies of the dead fish.

  Noon lay in the front seat of the Mercedes, her head against the driver’s door, one arm resting weakly on the steering wheel. In an effort to warm herself, she had wrapped her shoulders in the camouflage jacket.

  ‘Mal …’ She smiled at me with a brave grimace. The blood from her mouth ulcer stained her teeth. Between her blanched lips they tapped out a faint morse, a deep signal to herself. The recurrent fever of the past weeks had leached all pigment from her pale skin, which seemed as ashen as the grey flakes that covered the limousine, as if she were a plague-ridden princess who had somehow survived her own funeral pyre.

  ‘Noon … let me carry you.’ I reached into the car, which was filled with the acid odour of her sweat and the scent of the cheap perfume I had last smelled on the limbs of the young woman who had slept beside me in the Diana. Had I embraced Noon, or had she shared the perfume jar of the hostess into whose cabin I had blundered?

  ‘Give me your hands. We’ll get you to the ferry.’

  I held her arms but she slipped from me and fell against the instrument panel. Embarrassed by her weakness, she smiled at me, disguising the wound in her mouth, and concerned that I might abandon her in this derelict Mercedes. At the same time I was aware of another motive. She lay back, thighs sprawled and open, using her last fever to draw me to her. For all her distress, she was still trying to enlist me in whatever cause had sent her from Port-la-Nouvelle to the source of the Mallory.

  I sat her upright, my hands under her armpits, and shook her lightly, settling her bones like the contents of a shopping-bag. Her mouth fell forward against my shoulder, leaving a bloody stain on my skin.

  I held her to me, concerned for this disoriented child, but she pulled away from me, stiffening in alarm.

  ‘Noon – it’s all right …’

  She was pointing at the barrage. Beyond the tilting wheelhouse of the Salammbo came a familiar drone, the wearying sound of a helicopter.

  ‘So Kagwa’s come back … that’s too bad for us …’

  Still holding Noon’s head to my chest, I gripped the barrel of the Lee-Enfield. The distant ache of the helicopter’s engine resolved itself into a concussive clacking. I watched its exhaust plume winding towards us like a hairless boa among the sand-bars and gravel cliffs of the drained river. The craft emerged from the empty valley of the Mallory, drawing its black trail behind it, an aerial sign advertising a death to come.

  It crossed the pool and made a slow circuit of the deserted beaches and the collapsed west wall of the barrage. As it hovered above the ferry, little more than fifty yards away, Captain Kagwa sat by the open passenger door. He had abandoned his flak jacket, now that his war against Harare was over and, with it, his dream of being the Governor-General of this northern province. But his expression was as set and determined as I had ever known. He stared hard at the ferry, and then pointed to where Noon and I stood beside his Mercedes.

  He signalled to the French pilot to descend, and the machine revolved twice and approached the barrage beside the Salammbo.

  Captain Kagwa dismounted beneath the rotating blades. Head lowered, he strode through the down-draught towards the ferry. When he saw Sanger crouching against the wheelhouse he loosened the flap of his holster, but I knew from his tight mouth that he was not concerned with the film-maker. He nodded to him, and then set off down the slope of the barrage. Twice he slipped in the broken earth, stumbling to his knees, but he picked himself up and reached the narrow beach beside my raft.

  I sat Noon against the passenger door and raised the rifle, drawing back the bolt on the empty breech. This time, however, Kagwa would not be impressed by the bluff. I felt calm, but empty-headed, as if a large part of my mind had already left. In a confused way I imagined that I migh
t start the engine of the Mercedes and drive into the safety of the foothills to the east of the river. But I was too exhausted even to walk around the car.

  Kagwa had left the beach and was striding up the slope to the landing-stage. His eyes noted the old truck tyres and the dead rats, the moss-covered shell of Noon’s skiff between the wooden piers. His hand was on the revolver in his holster, freeing the heavy weapon.

  ‘Noon … stay here as long as you can. He won’t shoot you in the car …’

  I pushed her away from me, but she had seized my wrist and drummed with her hand at my breastbone, her teeth clicking some primitive curse. For all her fear, her eyes were fixed on Kagwa with the same hate she had first displayed at the airstrip. I looked down and realized that her fist was clenched around a silver peg, some toggle from the limousine’s dashboard. She pressed it into my hand, urging me on with a rictus of her wounded mouth, as if she wanted me to attack Kagwa with this miniature weapon.

  Then, as she passed it into my fingers, I saw the copper cartridge with its steel bullet. She had hidden this third round throughout our months together, saving it for a last emergency. When I hesitated, she took my hand and held it fiercely against her chest, so that I could feel the bullet and her breast between my fingers. She forced my nails into her nipple, trying to give me courage.

  I raised the open breech and slid the cartridge into the barrel. I drove the bolt forward, cocking the firing-pin, and snapped down the bolt. As Noon sat beside me, pressing her hands against my diaphragm, I levelled the rifle at Kagwa.

  Ignoring me, the Captain climbed the beach to within twenty feet of the Mercedes. He was breathing heavily through his strong mouth as he took the revolver from his holster, his eyes examining the damage to the limousine’s fenders and bodywork, the bullet holes in the windshield, the dents and dirt that now covered its black paintwork.

  When he raised his revolver towards me, I steadied the rifle and shot him through the head.

  Soon lost in the noise of the helicopter’s engine, the report of the rifle shot rolled among the hills, hunting the valleys among the abandoned mine shafts.

  Kagwa lay dying among the dead rats and truck tyres on the oily beach, his legs stirring as the blood ran from his head to join the Mallory. The helicopter pilot sat forward over his controls, one hand on the carbine between the seats. When I raised the rifle he eased forward his throttles and took off into the morning sun.

  From the wheelhouse of the Salammbo I watched the machine following the stream of dark water that ran southwards along the grave of the river. The engine at last faded into the dusty haze, and I could hear only Sanger fidgeting with the lens of his broken camera.

  ‘Mallory – was Kagwa here?’

  ‘He’s gone now.’

  ‘I felt his feet on the ground. Those were the feet of an angry man.’

  ‘I know. But I explained our problems to him.’

  ‘And you changed his mind?’

  ‘In a sense.’

  ‘You’re not usually very persuasive, Mallory. And the helicopter?’

  ‘It won’t be back. Don’t worry.’

  ‘That’s good. Now we can go on.’

  I looked down at Sanger, huddled like a beggar with his broken camera. He must have known that Kagwa lay dead on the beach beside the Mercedes.

  ‘You’re ready to go back to Port-la-Nouvelle?’

  ‘No! We’ve come too far now. You must find the source, Mallory. Then my film will be complete.’

  ‘Sanger, you’ll never make this film …’

  ‘It’s already made – all we are doing is performing it for anyone who cares to watch.’

  ‘All right. We’ll go when I’m ready. I want to care for Noon. You stay here while I bring her to the ship.’

  ‘Of course. I can help her. There’s a cassette in the wheelhouse. You can describe it to her …’

  But when I returned to the Mercedes I found that Noon had gone.

  33

  The River Search

  ‘Noon …! There’s a film for you …’

  Standing beside Sanger in the stern of the raft, I shouted towards the beach of blue shingle that lay behind a breakwater of fallen boulders. As I searched the empty shore I noticed once again that no echo of my voice returned from the steep granite cliffs, as if the dying river had so shrunk into itself that it had withdrawn from even the smallest response to the living.

  ‘Noon …! Professor Sanger has a film …’

  ‘Doctor …?’ Huddled in the bows, Sanger pointed his camera to left and right, trying to sense the direction of my eyes. ‘Is she here? Three o’clock?’

  ‘We’ve lost her – she can hide behind the air.’

  ‘Our bearing? Three o’clock or nine o’clock?’

  ‘Midnight … for God’s sake, Sanger, there’s no time here.’

  For two days we had sailed up the draining channel. Although we were only ten miles from the barrage beside the former Bonneville airbase, we had entered a remote mountain world, a landscape of sheer volcanic walls that faced each other across the gorges like fossilized giants. Their fluted surfaces were stained and streaked with red ores, so that the Mallory seemed to be flowing along the gutter of a vast natural abattoir. The damp air was without taste or texture, no longer touched by the spoor of birds and fish, or the scent of the flowering plants that had crowded the lower course of the river. The last heathers and old man’s beard had given way to ferns, and these in turn to sedges and groundsel.

  In this realm after death, we were making our passage up the leaking cadaver of the Mallory. The low sky, the ceiling of mist a few hundred feet above our heads, and the sombre beaches together formed a zone outside time or memory.

  The stream tugged at the raft, urging it to change its course and join this last expedition to the desert below. Shipping the oar, I throttled up the engine and steered towards the centre of the channel. Within minutes of sighting Noon that morning, our first glimpse of the girl since leaving the barrage, a submerged boulder had punctured the starboard pontoon, splitting the cheap weld that formed its keel. Dead in the water, the craft began to founder. As Sanger clung to his camera, I jumped down into the cold stream and dragged the raft on to a nearby sand-bar. There I laboriously unwound the wire securing the pontoon to the wooden frame, and rotated the cumbersome cylinder so that the open weld was uppermost.

  We had lost at least an hour, but I was sure that Noon was only a quarter of a mile ahead. Although we were handicapped by the raft and its overheating engine, she never eluded us. At times, when I struggled with the motor, she seemed even to hold back, her silver shell moored in midstream against the punt pole. She stood in the stern, chin resting against her small fists as they clasped the top of the handle. When we came into view she would lean wearily against the pole and slide away, losing herself behind the rock falls that filled the floor of the gorge. Either she wished to stay in my sight, luring me to whatever mystery lay at the source of the Mallory, or she was even more ill than I guessed and needed to spur herself on with the spectacle of Sanger fumbling like a demented photographer with his broken camera.

  From the ashen pallor of her face and arms, I knew that Noon was still gripped by the fly fever. When she rinsed her mouth she would leave threads of blood in the water that clung to the bows of the raft like fading pennants. In my confused way I wanted to save both Noon and the river, and was sure that I could do so once I reached the Mallory’s source.

  ‘Doctor! The river divides …!’

  Sanger gesticulated with his camera, pointing to the western bank. In some uncanny way his ears had sensed that a long arm of still water lay between the shingle beach and a giant’s causeway of boulders that ran along the centre of the gorge.

  After scanning the main channel for any trace of Noon, I steered the raft into the arm of quieter water. I cruised quietly along the inner face of the causeway, peering into the small caverns and caves where Noon might be hiding. Eighty yards ahead, the causew
ay sank into the shallows, leaving a narrow exit between the submerged boulders.

  The rush of water disguised the soft putter of the outboard as I steered the raft among the rocks. When we swung outwards into the faster water, Noon was squatting in her steel shell only twenty feet from us. She had berthed her craft behind a shoulder of the causeway, where she waited for us to appear, watching the main channel with her back to us.

  I cut the engine, leaving the silent propeller to unravel in the water, and let the raft drift on to her. Careful not to alert Sanger, who was staring myopically at the stained cliffs, I leaned over the engine, ready to catch Noon’s arm. She was gazing at her pale fingers, marked like badly painted nail varnish with the blood from her mouth. Her shoulders trembled in the cool air, and her ribs pumped in a feverish shudder. From the pallor of her skin, so leached of pigment as to be a chalky white, I could almost believe that she had been rubbing herself with the cinders of a small fire.

  The raft rode the last few feet of water between us. I was about to embrace Noon, but Sanger was trailing one hand in the current. Always suspicious that I would trick him again, he began to slap the water as if the river were a miscreant child.

  ‘Mallory … you’ve changed course! Don’t give up now!’

  Noon turned towards me, startled by the silent rush of the raft and its bulbous pontoons. There was a flurry of the punt pole and the steel shell leapt across our bows, revolved like a surf board and sped into the open channel.

  ‘Doctor—! You’re moving south!’

  ‘Sanger, I had the child in my hands …’

  The exhaust puttered flatly as I tried to restart the engine. The raft struck an anvil of submerged rock, and pitched Sanger between the pontoons. Drenched to the armpits, he gripped their plump flanks like a stunt rider suspended between two galloping horses, then slipped and was carried below the wooden frame. He screamed at me in rage, hands reaching through the bamboo grille to seize my ankles.

  An hour later I at last beached the raft on a quiet beach, and persuaded Sanger to release the propeller shaft of the outboard motor to which he clung in the shallows. As I dragged him ashore Noon was again waiting calmly for us in midstream, her skiff moored against the punt pole.