David Gilman - The Devil's breath

“We need to eat-and talk. Get dressed.”

She had this casual way of telling him what to do. He didn’t like it, but he figured that people who lived out here didn’t have much chance to hone their conversational or social skills. He dropped the towel from around his waist and climbed into her brother’s clothes.

By the time he sat on the veranda, which she called a stoep -an Afrikaans word-the sun was setting, light bleeding gently away, giving up the land to cooling shadows. Night comes quickly to those latitudes, and by the time food was brought to the table the sky was black. Beyond the water and trees, low on the horizon, the yellow full moon edged upwards. It was a wonder of such uninhabited places that Max had experienced before. Crystal-clear nights, free from the light-pollution of city and town, gave the stars a water-like clarity-so many, the sky glistened with them. And Max never ceased to wonder that this moon, so close that it seemed he could step to the edge of the world and touch it, had known the footsteps of mankind.

One of the farm workers lit a paraffin lamp and the night bugs and moths hovered, attracted by the deadly flame.

Max ate his first decent meal in a couple of days. It was basic meat and vegetables and had been cooked by a servant, a woman with a slight pallor to her skin, an almost apricot color, and what looked like Mongolian features: high cheekbones and narrowed eyes. While Max chewed, Kallie explained. The woman was a descendant of the Bushmen, nomadic hunter-gatherers whose way of life was virtually extinct. Two hundred years ago, colonists and black tribesmen alike hunted them like animals and, although the Bushmen never owned land-a concept alien to them-in more recent times the areas in which they hunted had been taken by the government and they themselves herded into a reserve. It sounded similar to the story Max had heard about the Native Americans.

“Over the years my father did what he could for the Bushmen,” Kallie told him. “They’re very special, not many people understand them, and their language is extremely difficult to learn. It’s all about clicking the tongue against your teeth and the roof of your mouth … different sounds, different emphasis. Sorry, that doesn’t explain it very well, does it?” She turned and spoke gently to the old woman who had served them food. Max thought they were sweet-sounding, rhythmic words, and he could hear the different click sounds. The woman nodded and moved away, her eyes averted.

Kallie saw his interest.

“Don’t stare at her, Max. Staring is rude in Bushman culture.”

“Sorry,” he muttered. “I don’t know much about the indigenous people here.”

She was silent for a moment. “Y’know, the Bushmen are trapped-their souls are in a kind of hell for them. They are God’s creatures, as close to the red dirt as the animals that wander over it. Now we tell them they have to live in settlements, or reserves, but when the rains come and the lightning chases the clouds, then they have to go walkabout. Their spirit is out there in the desert. You put one of these people in prison, he dies, and if they stay out here, many die of hunger and thirst. Climate change, poaching, indifferent rainfall and the twenty-first century-it’s all stacked against them.”

She gazed at him, searching his face, and he felt the blood ease into his cheeks as he blushed, like the darkening sky. He looked away. There were so many questions he wanted to ask her-about herself-but that too was probably ill-mannered.

“Why are you here?” Kallie asked.

“What do you mean? Because of my dad. Why else?”

“I don’t know.” She looked out across the dry grassland. “This country kills a lot of people, Max. Maybe you should expect the worst.”

“I like to take a more positive outlook on things. I think my dad’s alive.”

“Fair enough. Y’know, it was because my father had always done what he could for the Bushmen that one of them brought those field notes here. He left his family out there to do that. My father was the only white man they could trust. That’s the only connection we have with whatever has happened.”

“And I appreciate your help in bringing me here.”

She looked away, and after a moment he followed her gaze. The old woman had taken a lantern and gone into the willow trees by the water, where she beckoned someone there to join her. A Bushman boy of about thirteen stepped out. He was slightly built, with an open, appealing face which smiled easily. He dipped his head in respect for the old woman. The only clothing he wore was a loincloth, embroidered with simple red and blue stitching. He carried a quiver of pencil-thin arrows and a short hunting bow over his shoulder, and in his hand a spear. He nodded as the old woman spoke to him, and then he looked up to where Max and Kallie were sitting.

“He was the one who brought your father’s notes, four weeks ago. Long before Mr. Farentino contacted us. He’s been here ever since.”

“Here?” Max asked. “Does he work here now?”

The boy stood, unmoving, silhouetted against the enormous moon. Max watched as its soft glow embraced the boy and encircled him protectively.

“No. You don’t understand,” she said. “He’s been waiting for you. He says it was written you would come. You’re some kind of ancient prophecy.”

The Bushman boy’s name was!Koga, pronounced by drawing the tongue away from the roof of the mouth-at least that’s how it sounded to Max. Cl oga was the best he could manage; he thought it sounded as though he was clucking at the hens, back at the school’s farm. There is no history of writing for the Bushmen so Kallie wrote !Koga -showing Max that the! was the European way of expressing one of the many click noises used in the Bushman language. “He speaks some English,” Kallie told him. “His family helped a geologist for a couple of years.”

Max shook hands with the boy, who glanced away shyly. “He told my father there were rock paintings in the caves,” Kallie continued. “I don’t know where, but I reckon about three hundred k’s from here. No one I know has ever been there. The paintings, so he says, show your arrival. He wants to help find your father.”

!Koga remained silent, his eyes watching the horizon. Max was uncertain. This could be a wild-goose chase. The middle of nowhere was a dangerous place to be chasing flights of fancy.

“Look,” he said quietly, hoping not to offend the boy, “pictures of me on cave walls sound a bit dodgy. Maybe my dad told him I would come, maybe!Koga or his family drew them-y’know, part of their storytelling folklore or something.”

Kallie pulled a face. “I wish that were true, but the!Kung Bushmen don’t have a history of rock painting. The last ones discovered were a thousand years old.” She nodded to the boy, who turned back towards the cool shade of the trees by the water hole. “Don’t ask me how they know some of the spooky things they know-but I trust whatever it is they’re in touch with. Call it ancient wisdom; call it spirits of their ancestors-whatever it is, a lot of Bushmen have got it. He’ll take you as far as he can, back to his own people, wherever they are. Anyway, they’re the ones who last saw your dad.”

Max only wanted to save his dad; cave paintings and prophecies felt as though they were going to get in the way. But could he afford to risk not going along with the very boy who had delivered his father’s notes?

As he crawled under the mosquito net that night, his father’s face was the last thing he saw as he tumbled into fitful sleep. At first he was troubled by images of being chased, of being cornered in dark passageways, of being held under water, suffocating-all reflections of the day that his unconscious mind interpreted in its own way. But gradually he slipped past the monsters and settled into a deep and restful slumber.