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

'He has gone now. Your women have driven him away.' Taita tried to reassure and calm him.

Kalulu would have none of it. 'He will return.' He reached up and seized Taita's wrist as he stooped over the litter. 'You must get into the town and prepare to defend yourselves. Basma will return with all his regiments.'

'When I leave Tamafupa, I will take you with me, Kalulu. Our pursuit of the witch cannot succeed without your help.'

'I can feel the bleeding deep in my belly. I will not be going on with you.'

Before sunset Kalulu died. The four bodyguards dug an adit into the side of a large abandoned anthill outside the stockade of Tamafupa. Taita wrapped the corpse in a sheet of unbleached linen and they laid it in the damp clay tunnel. Then they sealed it with large boulders to prevent the hyenas digging it out.

'Your ancestral gods will welcome you, Shaman Kalulu, for you were of the Truth.' Taita bade him farewell.

When he turned away from the tomb, the four bodyguards stood before him, and Imbali spoke for them all in the Shilluk language. 'Our master is gone. We are far from our own land, alone. You are a mighty shaman, greater even than Kalulu. We will follow you.'

Taita looked at Nakonto. 'What do you make of these women? If I enlist them, will you take them under your command?' he asked.

Nakonto considered the question solemnly. 'I have seen them fight.

I will be content to have them follow me.'

With a regal tilt of her head, Imbali acknowledged his presence and his words. 'For as long as it pleases us to do so, we will march shoulder to shoulder with this strutting Shilluk rooster, but not behind him,' she told Taita.

Her eyes were almost on a level with Nakonto's. The magnificent pair stared at each other with apparent scorn. Taita opened his Inner Eye and smiled as he saw how their auras mirrored the inclination they felt towards each other. 'Nakonto, is it agreed?' he asked.

22.3

'It is agreed.' Nakonto made another lordly gesture of acquiescence.

'For the time being.';

Fenn and the Shilluk camp-followers swept out one of the largest huts for Meren. Then Fenn burnt a handful of Taita's special herbs in the open fireplace. The aromatic smoke drove out the insects and spiders that had made the hut their home. They cut a mattress of fresh grass and laid Meren's sleeping mat upon it. He was in such pain that he could hardly raise his head to drink from the bowl that Fenn held to his lips. Taita promoted Hilto-bar-Hilto to take his place at the head of the four divisions until Meren had recovered sufficiently to assume command again.

Taita and Hilto toured the town to inspect the defences. Their first concern was to ensure that the water supply was secure. There was a deep well in the centre of the village, with a narrow circular clay staircase descending to the water, which was of good quality. Taita ordered that a party under Shofar should fill all of the gourds and waterskins in readiness for the anticipated assault by the Basmara. In the thick of the fighting, thirsty men would have no opportunity to draw from the well.

Taita's next concern was the condition of the outer stockade. They found that it was still in a reasonable state of repair, except for a few sections where termites had eaten the poles. However, it was immediately apparent that they could not hope to hold such an extended line.

Tamafupa was a big town that had once been home to a large tribe. The stockade was almost half a league in circumference. 'We will have to shorten it,' he told Hilto, 'then burn the remainder of the town to clear the approaches and enable our archers to cover the ground.'

'You have set us a daunting task, Magus,' Hilto remarked. 'We had better begin at once.'

Once Taita had marked out the new perimeter, men and women fell to. They dug out the best preserved of the stockade poles and set them up along the line Taita had surveyed. There was no time to make a permanent fortification, so they filled the gaps with branches of kittar thorn bush. They erected tall watch-towers at the four compass points of the new stockade, which commanded a good view over the valley and all the approaches.

Taita ordered bonfires to be set around the perimeter. When they were lit they would illuminate the stockade walls in the event of a night

attack. Once this was done he built an inner keep round the well, their last line of defence if the Basmara regiments broke into the town. Within this inner stronghold, he stored the remaining bags of dhurra, the spare weapons and all other valuable supplies. They built stables for the remaining horses. Windsmoke and her colt were still in good condition, but many others were sick or dying after the long hard road they had travelled.

Every evening after she had fed Meren and helped Taita change the dressing over the empty socket of his right eye, Fenn went down to visit Whirlwind and take him the dhurra cakes he loved.

Taita waited for a favourable wind before he set fire to the remains of the old town that lay outside the new stockade. The thatch and wooden walls had dried and burned rapidly, the wind blowing the flames away from the new walls. By nightfall that day the old town was levelled to a smouldering field of ashes.

'Let the Basmara attack across that open ground,' Hilto observed, with satisfaction, 'and we will shock them.'

'Now you can set up markers in front of the stockade,' Taita told him.

They placed cairns of white river stones at twenty, fifty and a hundred paces so that the archers could have the enemy accurately ranged as they sent in their attacks.

Taita sent Imbali with her companions and the other women to the dry river to cut reeds for arrow-making. He had brought bags of spare arrowheads from the armoury at Qebui fort, and when they had been used, he discovered an outcrop of flint in the hillside below the stockade.

He showed the women how to chip the flint fragments into arrowheads.

They learnt the skill quickly, then bound the heads into the reed shafts with bark twine and soaked them in water to make them tight and hard.

They stacked bundles of spare arrows at salient points along the perimeter of the stockade.

Within ten days all of the preparation had been completed. The men and Imbali's women sharpened their weapons and checked their equipment for what might be the last time.

One evening as the men gathered around the fires for the evening meal, there was a sudden stir and a burst of cheering as an ill-assorted couple came into the firelight. Meren was unsteady on his feet, but supported himself with a hand on Fenn's shoulder as he came to where Taita sat with the captains. They all jumped to their feet and crowded round him, laughing and congratulating him on his swift recovery.

A linen bandage covered his empty eye socket, and he was pale and

thinner, but he was making an effort to walk with something of his old swagger, and countered the sallies of the officers with ribald ripostes. At last he stood before Taita and saluted him.'

'Ho, Meren, bored with lying abed to be tended by all the females in camp?' Taita had spoken with a smile but he had difficulty in repressing the pang he felt when he saw the callused warrior's hand on Fenn's dainty shoulder. He knew that his jealousy would become keener as her body and beauty matured. He had experienced that corrosive emotion during her other life.

The following morning Meren was at the practice butts with the archers. At first he had difficulty in keeping his balance with only one eye to steady himself, but with fierce concentration he was at last able to master his unruly senses and train them anew. His next difficulty came in estimating the range and the hold-over of his aim. His arrows either dropped away before they reached the target or flew high above it. Grimly he persevered. Taita, who had been the champion archer in all the armies of Queen Lostris, coached him, teaching him the technique of letting fly his first arrow as a marker, and using it to correct the second, which he released immediately afterwards. Soon Meren could loose a second while the first was still in flight. Fenn and the Shilluk wives made him a leather eyepatch to cover the unsightly socket. His countenance regained its naturally healthy hue, and the remaining eye its old sparkle.