Assegai

Swinging wildly on her parachute shrouds Eva stared down as the forest tops rushed up to meet her. She crashed through the uppermost branches, twigs breaking and crackling around her head. Each time she collided with another branch it slowed her a little more, until she hit the ground in a small clearing on the mountainside.

The slope was steep so she let herself roll head over heels until she came to rest in a patch of swamp. She remembered Graf Otto’s advice and tugged frantically at the buckles of her harness until she could shrug herself free. Then she got gingerly to her feet and checked herself for injuries. There were a few scratches on her arms and legs and her left buttock was bruised, but then she remembered the terror of being thrown out of the airship and saw how lucky she had been.

She squared her shoulders and lifted her chin.

‘Now, where will I find Badger? If only I had some idea of where he came from, but he popped up out of the blue.’ She thought about it for no more than a few seconds before she answered her own question. ‘Sheba’s Pool, of course! It’s the first place he will look for me.’

She knew the ground so well because she and Leon had wandered over it on their forays about the slopes during the enchanted months they had spent at Lusima’s manyatta. Now a sudden glimpse of the cliff face through the jungle helped her to orientate her present position. ‘The waterfall can’t be more than a few miles to the south,’ she told herself.

She started off, using the direction of the slope to guide her and keeping the line of the cliff on her right hand. But then she pulled up sharply. There was a commotion in the bushes ahead and a hideous spotted hyena bolted out of the thicket, a strip of tattered raw flesh dangling from its jaws. She had disturbed its meal of carrion.

She went forward cautiously and found the corpse of Thomas Bueler, the first officer, lying crumpled in the shrubbery. He was one of those whose parachute had failed to open. She recognized him by his uniform: most of his face was missing – the hyena had torn it away. She was about to hurry on down the path but then she saw that Bueler had a small rucksack fastened to the front of his harness – that was why the parachute had failed to open: it had snagged the shrouds of his chute. Perhaps it contained something that would help her to survive, alone and unarmed, on the mountain.

She knelt beside the corpse and forced herself not to look at its mutilated face as she opened the rucksack. She found a small first-aid kit, several packets of dried fruit and smoked meat, a tin of Vestas for fire-making and a 9mm Mauser pistol in its wooden holster with two spare clips of ammunition. All these things could be invaluable.

She disentangled the strap of the rucksack from the parachute harness and slung it over her shoulder, then jumped up and hurried along the game path. Half a mile further on she heard Otto’s voice, calling plaintively for help from a little higher up the slope: ‘Can anybody hear me? Ritter! Bueler! Come! I need your help.’ She turned off the game trail she was following and moved cautiously towards the sound. When he called again, she looked up and found him. He was hanging high in the canopy. His shrouds had wrapped around a large branch, and he was dangling seventy feet above the ground, swinging himself back and forth, trying to get a grip on the branch from which he was suspended, but he could not muster sufficient momentum to reach it.

Eva looked around her carefully. None of the Assegai crew was in sight. They were alone in the forest. She was about to sneak away and continue her escape when he spotted her. ‘Eva! Thank God you have come.’ She stopped. ‘Come, Eva, you must help me to get down. If I open my harness I will fall to my death. But I have a light rope in my pack.’ He reached under its flap and pulled out a hank of jute twine. ‘I am going to drop the end of it to you. You must pull me towards the branch so I can get a hold on it.’ She stood perfectly still, staring up at him. Now that he knew she had survived the crash she could not leave him. He would follow her. He would never let her escape.

‘Hurry, woman. Don’t just stand there. Take the end of the line,’ he shouted impatiently.

For the first time in their long relationship he was totally in her power. This was the man who had murdered her father, the one who had humiliated and tortured her mentally and physically. This was the moment for retribution. If she killed him now she could expunge all those memories. She would be clean and whole. Moving as slowly as a sleep-walker, she came towards him, at the same time reaching into Bueler’s pack.

‘Yes, Eva, that’s good. I know I can always depend on you. Take the rope.’ There was a wheedling tone in his voice that she had never heard before. She felt strength and resolution flowing through her body. The hilt of the Mauser fitted perfectly into her hand.

‘I am the dark angel,’ she whispered, as she stared up at the man hanging helplessly above her. ‘I am the revenger.’ She drew the pistol, and pulled back the slide. There was a sharp metallic click as she let it fly forward again, feeding a round into the chamber.

‘What are you doing?’ Graf Otto shouted in consternation. ‘Put that gun down. Somebody will get hurt!’ Slowly she lifted it and aimed up at him.

‘Stop, Eva! In the name of God, what are you doing?’ Now she heard fear in his voice.

‘I am going to kill you,’ she said softly.

‘Are you mad? Have you lost your mind?’

‘I have lost more than my mind. You have taken everything from me. Now I am taking it back.’

She fired.

She had not expected the report to be so loud and the recoil to be so vicious. She had aimed at his black heart, but the bullet had nicked his left arm above the elbow. Blood trickled down his forearm and dripped from his fingertips.

‘Don’t do this, Eva. Please! I will do anything you say.’ She fired again and this shot flew wider than the first. It did not touch him. She had not known how difficult it was to shoot a pistol accurately at that range. Graf Otto was wriggling in the harness, swinging and jerking from side to side. She fired again and again. He was screaming with terror. ‘Stop! Stop my darling! I will make it up to you, I promise. You will have anything in the world you want from me.’ She drew a deep breath and tried to still the pounding of her heart as she levelled the pistol for the last time – but before she could squeeze off the shot a strong arm whipped around her from behind and a hand fastened on her wrist, pushing the gun down. The shot ploughed into the ground between the toecaps of her boots.

‘Good man, Ritter!’ Graf Otto bellowed. ‘Hold her fast! Wait until I can get my hands on the treacherous bitch.’

Ritter twisted the pistol out of Eva’s hands, then bore her to the ground with a knee between her shoulder-blades. He held her hands behind her back while one of his crew secured them with half a dozen workmanlike knots. Ritter handed him the Mauser. ‘Shoot her if she gives you an excuse to do so,’ he ordered, then ran to bring Graf Otto down from the tree. He grabbed the end of the dangling line and pulled it across. Graf Otto took a firm hold on a branch, then swung himself up until he was lying across it. There, he unbuckled his harness and let it fall. As agile as a huge ginger ape, he swarmed down the main trunk to the ground. He paused for only a minute to catch his breath, then walked slowly to where Eva lay. ‘Pick her up,’ he ordered the crewman, ‘and hold her firm.’ He smiled at her and showed her the metal fist. ‘This is for you, my darling!’ He hit her. He had judged the strength of his blow carefully: he did not want her to die too quickly.

‘Bitch!’ he said, then took a handful of her hair and twisted it until she fell on to her knees. ‘Treacherous bitch. Now I understand that it was you all along, not that pathetic Boer creature.’ He pushed her face into the rain-soaked earth and put his boot on the back of her head. ‘I don’t know what is the best way for you to die. Should I drown you in mud? Should I strangle you slowly? Or should I pound your beautiful head to jelly? It is a difficult decision.’ He lifted her face and stared into her eyes. The blood oozing from her nose mingled with the mud, streamed down her face and dripped off her chin. ‘Not so beautiful any more. More like the dirty little whore you truly are.’