The Quest - Smith Wilbur (читать лучшие читаемые книги TXT) 📗

He chuckled and she blinked. No Luo had ever emitted such a sound.

A spark of interest flashed for an instant in the green depths of her eyes, then she glared at him.

'You were so beautiful then, but look at you now.' His voice still carried the hypnotic inflection. 'You are a vision from the void.' He made it sound like an endearment. 'Your hair is filthy.' He stroked it but she tried to duck. It was not possible to guess the true colour of her hair under the thick clay and acacia gum, but he kept his voice calm and his smile reassuring as a stream of red lice crawled out of the clotted mass and climbed up his arm.

'By Ahura Maasda and the Truth, you stink worse than any polecat,'

he told her. 'It will take a month of scrubbing to get down to your skin.'

She wriggled and squirmed to be free. 'Now you are rubbing your filth on to me. I shall be in no better case than you by the time I have quietened you. We shall have to camp away from Meren and his troopers. Even rough soldiers will not withstand our combined odour.' He kept speaking: the sense of the words was unimportant, but the tone and inflection gradually lulled her. He felt her begin to relax, and the hostile light in her green eyes faded. She blinked almost sleepily, and he relaxed his grip.

At that she shook herself awake, and the malevolence flared again. He had to hold her hard as she renewed her struggles.

'You are indomitable.' He let the admiration and approval sound in his voice. 'You have the heart of a warrior, and the determination of the goddess you once were.' This time she quietened more readily. The migrating lice nipped Taita under his tunic, but he ignored them and continued to talk.

'Let me tell you about yourself, Fenn. You were once my ward, as you have become again. You were the daughter of an evil man who cared little for you. To this day I cannot fathom how he sired a lovely tiling like you. You were beautiful, Fenn, beyond the telling of it. Under the fleas, lice and dirt I know you are still.' Slowly her resistance faded as he related her childhood to her in loving detail, and recounted some of the funny things she had done or said. When he laughed now she looked at him with interest rather than anger. She began to blink again.

This time when he relaxed his grip she did not attempt to escape but sat quietly in his lap. The sun had reached its zenith when at last he stood up. She looked up at him solemnly and he reached down to take her hand. She did not pull away.

'Come along, now. If you are not hungry, I certainly am.' He set off towards the village and she trotted at his side.

Meren had set up a temporary camp well away from the village: in the sun the Luo corpses would soon begin to rot and the area become uninhabitable. As they approached the camp, he hurried to meet them.

'I am glad to see you, Magus. I thought the vixen had done away with you,' he shouted. Fenn hid behind Taita and clung to one of his legs as Meren came up to them. 'By the wounded eye of Horus, she stinks. I can smell her from here.'

'Lower your voice,' Taita ordered. 'Ignore her. Do not look at her like that or you will undo my hard work in an instant. Go ahead of us to the camp and warn your men not to stare at her or alarm her. Have food ready for her.'

'So now we have a wild filly to break?' Meren shook his head ruefully.

'Oh, no! You underestimate the task ahead of us,' Taita assured him.

Taita and Fenn sat in the shade under the great sausage tree in the centre of the camp, and one of the men brought food. Fenn tasted the dhurra cake gingerly, but after the first mouthfuls she ate ravenously. Then she turned her attention to the cold slices of wild duck breast. She stuffed them into her mouth so rapidly that she choked and coughed.

'I can see you need instruction in manners before you are fit to dine with Pharaoh,' Taita observed, as she gnawed the duck bones with her black teeth. When she had stuffed her skinny belly to bursting point, he called for Nakonto. Like most of the men, he had been watching from a discreet distance, but he came to squat in front of them. Fenn huddled closer to Taita and stared at the huge black man with renewed suspicion.

'Ask the child her name. I am sure she speaks and understands Luo,'

Taita instructed, and Nakonto spoke a few words to her. It was clear that she understood him, but her face set and her mouth closed in a hard, stubborn line. He tried for a while longer to induce her to answer him, but Fenn would not budge.

'Fetch one of the captured Luo women,' Taita told Nakonto. He left

them briefly, and when he returned he was dragging with him a wailing old woman from the village.

'Ask her if she knows this girl,' Taita said.

Nakonto had to speak sharply to the woman before she would cease whining and weeping, but at last she made a lengthy statement. 'She knows her,' Nakonto translated. 'She says she is a devil. They drove her out of the village, but she lived close by in the forest, and she has brought bad witchcraft on the tribe. They believe it was she who sent you to kill their men.'

'So the child is not of her tribe?' Taita asked.

The old woman's reply was a vehement denial. 'No, she is a stranger.

One of the women found her floating in the swamps in a tiny boat made of reeds.' Nakonto described a papyrus cradle such as Egyptian peasant women wove for their infants. 'She brought the devil to the village and named her Khona Manzi, which means “the one from the waters”.

The woman was childless and for that reason had been rejected by her husband. She took this strange creature as her own. She dressed her ugly hair in the decent fashion, and covered her fish-white body with clay and ash to protect her from the sun and the insects, as is fitting and customary. She fed her and cared for her.' The old woman looked at Fenn with evident distaste.

'Where is this woman?' Taita asked.

'She has died of some strange disease that the devil child brought down upon her with witchcraft.'

'Is that why you drove her out of the village?'

'Not for that reason alone. She brought many other afflictions upon us. In the same season that she came into the village the waters failed and the swamp, which is our home, began to shrivel and die. It was the devil child's work.' The old woman gobbled with outrage. 'She brought sickness upon us that blinded our children, made many of our young women barren and our men impotent.'

'AH this from one child?' Taita asked.

Nakonto translated the woman's reply. 'She is no ordinary child.

She is a devil and a sorcerer. She led our enemies to our secret places, and caused them to triumph over us, just as she has now brought you to attack us.'

Then Fenn spoke for the first time. Her voice was filled with bitter anger.

'What does she say?' Taita asked.

'She says that the woman lies. She has done none of those things. She

does not know how to make witchcraft. She loved the woman who was her mother, and she did not kill her.' The old woman replied to this with equal venom, and then the two were screeching at each othef.

For a while Taita listened to them with mild amusement, then told Nakonto, 'Take the woman back to the village. She is no match for the child.'

Nakonto laughed. 'You have found a lion cub as your new pet, old one. We will all learn to fear her.'

As soon as they were gone Fenn quietened.

'Come,' Taita invited her. She recognized his meaning, if not the word, and stood up at once. As he walked away she ran after him and took his hand again. The gesture was so unaffected that Taita was deeply moved. She began to chatter naturally, so he answered her although he did not understand a word she said. He went to his saddle-bag and found the leather roll of his surgical instruments. He paused only to speak to Meren: 'Send Nontu back to fetch the rest of the men and horses out of the swamps and bring them here. Keep Nakonto with us for he is our eyes and our tongue.'