Wilbur Smith - Assegai

He blotted the page, put the game book back in his campaign bureau and locked the drawer. Then, for half an hour, he read the book his uncle Penrod had written on his experiences during the Boer War, entitled With Kitchener to Pretoria . When his eyelids drooped he set it aside, undressed and climbed under the mosquito net. He blew out the lantern and settled down contentedly to enjoy a good night’s rest.

He had barely closed his eyes before he was startled awake by the loud report of a pistol shot coming from the direction of the princess’s tent. His first thought was that some dangerous animal, lion or leopard, had broken into it. He fought his way out of the folds of the mosquito net and grabbed the big Holland, which stood fully loaded beside the bed, ready for just such an emergency. Clad only in his pyjama bottoms he ran to her tent. He saw that her lantern was still burning.

‘Your Royal Highness, are you all right?’ he called. When he received no reply he pulled open the canvas fly and ducked inside, rifle at the ready. Then he stopped in amazement. The Princess stood facing him in the middle of the floor. Her silver hair cascaded over her shoulders and down to her waist. She wore an almost transparent rose pink nightdress. The lantern was behind her so every line of her long lean body was revealed. Her feet were bare but surprisingly small and shapely. She held the riding whip in one hand and the 9mm Luger pistol in the other. The smell of burned nitro powder still hung in the air. Her face was blanched with fury and her eyes blazed like cut sapphires as she glowered at him. She lifted the Luger and fired a second shot through the canvas roof. Then she tossed the pistol on to the enormous bed that filled half the floor space.

‘You swine! Do you think you can treat me like rubbish in front of all your servants?’ she demanded, as she took a step towards him, swinging the whip menacingly. ‘You are no better than the creatures who work for you.’

‘Kindly control yourself, ma’am,’ he warned her.

‘How dare you address me thus? I am a royal princess of the House of Hohenzollern. And you are a commoner of a mongrel race.’ Her English was perfectly enunciated. She smiled icily. ‘Ah, so! Now at last you grow angry, serf! You want to fight back but you dare not. Your bowels are too soft. You do not have the courage. You hate me but you must suffer any humiliation I might choose to heap on you.’

She threw the whip at his feet. ‘Put away that rifle. You cannot use it to bolster your flabby manhood. Pick up the whip!’ Leon laid the Holland on the groundsheet below the entrance wall of the tent and scooped up the whip. He was quivering with rage. Her insults had raked him cruelly and brought him to the brink of abandoning all restraint. He was not certain what to do with the whip, but it felt good in his right hand.

‘M’bogo, is all well? We heard shots. Is there trouble?’ Manyoro called softly through the canvas wall, and the princess drew back a few paces.

‘Go, Manyoro, and take the others with you. None of you must return until I call you,’ Leon shouted back.

‘ Ndio , Bwana.’

He heard their soft steps retreating, and the princess laughed in his face. ‘You should have asked them to help you. You do not have the courage to stand up to me on your own.’ She laughed. ‘ Ja , now you grow angry again. That is good. You want to strike me but you dare not do so.’ She leaned towards him until their faces were only inches apart.

‘You have a whip in your hand. Why do you not use it? You hate me, but you are afraid of me.’ Suddenly and unexpectedly she spat in his face. Instinctively he lashed out at her and the whiplash snapped across her cheek. She reeled back, clutching the red weal, and wailed piteously, ‘Yes! I deserved that. You’re so masterful when you’re angry.’ She flung herself at his feet, and clung to his knees. He was trembling with disgust at himself and threw the whip across the tent.

‘I wish you good night, Your Royal Highness.’ He tried to turn away to the door but, with surprising strength, she tripped him. The instant he was off balance she landed on his back with all her weight and he fell across the bed, the princess on top of him. ‘Are you mad?’ he demanded.

‘Yes!’ she replied. ‘I am crazy for you.’

It was only an hour short of dawn when she allowed him to leave her tent. On the way to his own bed he noticed that the tents of her staff, her secretary and handmaidens, were in darkness – despite the cries of the princess, which had made the long night clamorous. It seemed that all of them must have become inured long ago to the princess’s peccadilloes.

The next morning at breakfast she acted as though nothing had changed. She snapped shrewishly at her handmaidens, was cruelly sarcastic to her secretary, and ignored Leon, not even acknowledging his polite greeting until she had finished her second cup of coffee. Then she stood up and announced, ‘Courtney, today I have a great desire to kill pigs.’

Leon had devised a series of small game drives, which gave the princess endless pleasure. He and the trackers would corner a sounder of warthog in a patch of thick scrub, then place the princess in a commanding position over the open ground beyond the thicket, and beat the pigs towards her. As soon as they broke from cover she would wade into them with the Mannlicher. She had trained Heidi, the prettier of her handmaidens, to reload the spare magazines. Each held six rounds, and the princess could change an empty one in an instant. She pressed the release catch and let it drop. Heidi caught it as it fell and reloaded it with her deft pink fingers, trained by relentless needlework since childhood. Then the princess would slip a fully charged magazine into the breech and keep shooting with barely a pause. Her rate of fire was almost as staggering as her accuracy. She could get off twelve shots in as many seconds. Often the warthog would not co-operate with the beaters: they might break from cover in an unexpected direction or double back through the line of beaters, not offering Her Royal Highness a single shot. When this happened she either flew into a coldly furious rage, railing at Leon and his team, or retreated into an icy silence from which she could only be drawn by the prospect of spilling more blood.

Late that afternoon Leon and his beaters, their ranks strengthened by the inclusion of Max Rosenthal, Ishmael and the skinners, managed to pull off their most spectacular battue of the safari. They drove twenty-three warthogs, boars, sows and piglets, past the princess and her loader. She managed to kill twenty-two. The one that escaped was a lean old sow that changed direction just as she fired. The bullet flew wide and the sow doubled back between the princess’s legs when she was least expecting it, sending her flying. She sat up with her skirts above her knees and her hat over her eyes. ‘You dirty little cheat!’ she screamed, as the sow disappeared into the thicket, tail held high and straight as a pennant.

That evening at dinner she was almost genial and expansive, but not entirely so. She urged Leon to take another glass of the excellent Krug, and peeled a grape with her long white fingers before placing it between plump Heidi’s lips.

‘Eat, my darling! You did fine work today,’ she urged. But immediately afterwards she shrieked at her secretary and ordered him to leave the table for his ill manners in taking up a warthog chop in his fingers without excusing himself to her. When she had finished, she stood up without another word and stalked away to her tent.

It had been a long, hot, hard day and Leon was hoping for a full night’s sleep. He had just finished scrubbing his teeth and was buttoning his pyjama jacket when he heard the dreaded pistol shot.