At some stage in the night Bond had fallen asleep in his sitting position against the tree, his forehead resting on his knees, his arms locked around his shins. At first light he woke and, very slowly, stretched his legs out, massaging his thigh muscles back to life and taking his time to rise to his feet. He windmilled his arms and ran on the spot for a minute or two to get his circulation going. Then he pushed cautiously through the undergrowth until he found the pathway and advanced slowly up to the road. There was a crude confetti of shredded leaves everywhere, as if some violent storm had passed, but not a body to be seen, all casualties carted away. The road surface was scarred and torn with bullet strikes and there were two drying pools of blood, humming with flies, where the two soldiers had been hit by the first fusillade.
He cast around half-heartedly up and down the road, not expecting to find Blessing or any trace of her. Brass cartridges glinted everywhere on the ground and he found a bloodstained pack with a few rounds of ammunition in it. Otherwise there was little sign of the firefight and its victims.
He stood in the middle of the road feeling the heat of the rising sun on his face. What to do? Which direction to take? He turned northwards – that was where the Zanza Force fire had come from. If he walked up the road in that direction surely he’d reach the advancing columns of the main army . . . Bond forced himself to think about his options for a while, kicking at bits of the shattered road surface. He could, he supposed, realistically abort his mission, after what he’d been through. M would surely understand. But there was unfinished business and he felt an obscure sense of guilt over what had happened to Blessing. If he’d only held on to her more forcefully, even knocked her out . . . Was she dead? Was she safe in the hands of Zanza Force? Or perhaps Kobus and his men had recaptured her.
Bond looked around him. Kobus’s plan had been to cross this road and continue on the forest path they had been walking along. Perhaps that was the option to choose . . . he had no food, no water, no weapon. He could last a couple of days, he reckoned, perhaps longer if he could find something to eat or drink. Bond thought – Kobus knew exactly where this path was heading and that it was the route to follow. Bond made up his mind: he crossed the road and walked into the forest.
He walked for two hours, he calculated, then stopped and rested. It was hot and clammy and he had been bitten by many insects but at least the path was shaded by the tall trees it meandered through. Bond looked up at the high canopy of trees above him, the branches like twisted beams in some giant deformed attic. He set off again. The path remained surprisingly well trodden and occasionally he came across evidence of human passage – a bottle top, a shred of indigo material, a foil wrapper from a chocolate bar. At one stage he found a butt from a hand-rolled cigarette with some shreds of tobacco left – and he cursed the loss of his lighter. There was enough tobacco to provide a good couple of lungfuls of smoke. Bond was about to throw it away when he saw that it wasn’t tobacco in the cigarette at all. He sniffed – marijuana or some other kind of potent weed. Was this a hunters’ path, he wondered, some traditional route from village to village, from tribal land to tribal land, or, more likely, was it used by Kobus and his men to mount raids and incursions behind Zanzari lines?
He moved on, noting that there were fruits and berries of every hue and size on the plants and bushes that bordered the pathway, but he didn’t dare try one and, for such lush and green vegetation, there was no visible water source. He found a smooth round pebble and popped it in his mouth and sucked on it, coaxing some saliva flow to ease his increasingly parched throat.
He rested up again at midday, the sunbeams that penetrated the canopy now shining down directly on the path, and waited until the afternoon shade encroached. He thought he was heading vaguely south, though the path did take many illogical jinks and turns. He came across a gym shoe (left foot) with a flapping sole and a label-less tin with an inch of rainwater in it. He was about to swig it down when he saw that it was hotching with pale yellow larvae.
By dusk he was feeling tired and footsore and uncomfortably thirsty. He found a large ash-grey tree with great buttressing roots and settled down snugly between two of them. Darkness arrived with its usual tropic speed and, to distract himself from his cracked throat and his hollow stomach, he forced his mind to concentrate on matters far from the Zanza River Delta. He debated with himself over the respective merits of the Jensen FF and the Interceptor II, trying to calculate if he had enough ready cash to make the deposit required for an eventual purchase. Then he wondered if Doig and his team had finished redecorating his Chelsea flat. He had instructed Donalda to supervise the work in his absence and issue cheques as required. It would be a bonus to go home to an effectively transformed flat after this job was over, he thought, and he was particularly looking forward to his new shower – then he laughed at himself. He was lost in a tropical rainforest wandering along a path somewhere between two warring armies. The reality sank in and with it came the questions about Blessing and her fate. Blessing whose lithe slim naked body he could see in his mind’s eye, their night of intimacy so violently interrupted nearly forty-eight hours ago. He felt bitter and remorseful – but what more could he have done? He had his own survival to focus on now.
He turned up the collar of his safari jacket and thrust his hands in his pockets. He was not the repining kind – he felt absolutely sure tomorrow would prove better than today.
Some fluting bird-call woke him at dawn and he set off again without more ado, his throat swollen and sore, his tongue dry as a leather belt. After about half an hour he noticed the forest was starting to thin. There were clearings of blond grass, the giant trees diminished – lower, scrubbier varieties beginning to dominate. He also lost his shade and felt the sun start to burn. He took off his safari jacket and buttoned it over his head like an Arab kufiyya. Sweat began to drip from his nose and chin.
And then the path simply disappeared. The ground beneath his feet was cracked and arid with tufts of wiry grass – as if the path were a forest creature and this scrubby orchard-bush was not the sort of environment it liked.
Then he saw the pawpaw tree.
It was about ten feet tall and had a solitary ripe fruit on it. He grabbed its rough trunk and gave it a vigorous shake, then butted it with his shoulders, making it whip to and fro and, as the pawpaw was shaken free and fell, he caught it safely in both hands.
He sat in a patch of shade and dug his thumbnail into the yielding skin, breaking off a portion of the fruit. He flicked away the soft, swart seeds and sank his teeth into the warm orange flesh. It was moist and sweet and Bond felt his throat respond and ease as he swallowed avidly. He closed his eyes and suddenly he was transported to the terrace of the Blue Hills Hotel in Kingston, Jamaica, where it was his habit to eat two halves of a chilled pawpaw for breakfast, drizzled with freshly squeezed juice from a quartered lime. He would have happily killed for a cup of Blue Mountain coffee and a cigarette. His impromptu memories of those days and that life brought a thickening to his throat – then, cross with himself for this expression of emotion, he wolfed down the rest of the pawpaw with caveman hunger, eating the seeds as well and scraping the skin free of any lingering shred with his teeth.
It was extraordinary how good he felt having eaten something at last. The morning sun was still clearly in the east so he knew in what direction the south lay. He headed on with fresh purpose. Two hundred yards from the pawpaw tree he came across a rudimentary track for wheeled vehicles. He followed the track and it led him to a dirt road where there was an ancient bleached sign that read ‘Forêt de Lokani’, some forgotten legacy from the former French colonial days. But where there was a road sign, Bond realised, there must be some kind of traffic. His spirits lifted and he strode down the road with new enthusiasm.
He rounded a bend and saw the thatched conical roofs of a small village half a mile further on. He found a heavy stick to use as a makeshift weapon and advanced cautiously down the road towards the mud huts. There was no smoke rising from cooking fires; the cassava fields were withered and neglected. Bond walked into the village sticking close to the mud walls of the houses. There were about twenty dwellings clustered round a big shade tree. On some of the huts the thatch had been burnt away and one or two had demolished walls, as if hit with some kind of ordnance. As he stepped into the beaten-earth meeting area beneath the tree Bond saw three badly decomposed bodies – a woman and two men – a shifting miasma of flies humming above them. Bond skirted them, moving through the alleyways between the houses looking for water – some well or trough. There must be a stream or a river nearby, he reasoned, from where water could be easily carried – no African village was far from water.
Then in a doorway he saw a small boy sitting, leaning weakly against the door jamb. A small boy as skeletal as an ancient wizened man. Naked, his ribs stretching his slack dusty skin, running sores on his stick legs, his head huge, almost teetering on his thin neck. Flies explored his eyelids and the corners of his mouth. He stared at Bond listlessly, barely interested, it seemed, in this apparition of a white man standing in front of him.
Bond crouched down, disturbed and unsettled.
‘Hello,’ he said, with a token smile, before realising how stupid he sounded.
Something moved behind the boy and another skull-faced child appeared, staring at him, dully. Bond stood and went to peer into the mud hut but an awful smell made him recoil, rake his throat and spit. It seemed full of the corpses of children. Nothing was moving inside. Starved into this kind of fatal inertia, Bond supposed: crawl away to some shade and wait to die. This was the fate of the weak and forgotten in the shrinking heartland of Dahum.
Bond left the village feeling helpless and depressed. It had been like witnessing some surreal version of hell. What could he do for those two kids? They’d be dead before nightfall, like all the others lying in that infernal room. His powerlessness made him want to weep. Perhaps there was another village further down the road; perhaps help could be sent from—
Then, miraculously, he saw a figure up ahead – a very skinny young man in a tattered pair of shorts. The young man shouted at him and then threw a stone. It kicked up a puff of dust by Bond’s feet. The young man shouted at him and threw two more stones.
‘Hey!’ Bond shouted. ‘Come here! Help!’
But the figure turned and sprinted away, disappearing from view behind a copse of thorn trees. Bond gave chase but stopped as he rounded the copse. Here was the water source for the village – a small creek dammed to form a shallow pool. The skinny young man seemed to have vanished into thin air, like some kind of sprite or vision. Bond wondered if he had been hallucinating, but he didn’t care any more – he waded out into the centre of the pool and sat down, soaking himself, scooping up mouthfuls of warm cloudy water with his cupped hands. He could press on now, and perhaps see if there was any way of getting some help for those children. He lay back and submerged his head, closing his eyes, feeling weak with relief. When he surfaced a moment later he could hear the distant sound of a car changing gear. His long walk was nearly over.
Bond stood by the side of the dammed creek, his sodden clothes dripping, in a sudden stasis of indecision. No, he couldn’t just walk on. He made his way back to the village and found an empty calabash and a large tin that had once contained powdered milk. Returning to the creek he filled them both with water and carried them to the mud hut with the dead children. The little boy had disappeared – crawled back inside, Bond hoped, and he set the two containers down carefully at the threshold. Then he heard a cracked shout from behind him.
A stooped old man stood there at the entry to the meeting square, leaning on a staff. He was incredibly thin, his arms and legs like vanilla pods, wearing a tatter of rags. Bond approached slowly as the old man berated him with hoarse incomprehensible curses. He had a small head with a powdering of grey hair, a collapsed face with white corpse-stubble. He was like something from a myth – or a symbol of death, Bond thought – and his red eyes blazed at Bond with a weary venom.
Bond pointed at the hut with his two water containers placed in front of the door.
‘Children – pickin – inside. Help them.’
The old man shook his fist at Bond and continued with his spitting maledictions.
Bond pointed at the doorway again and as he did so saw two tiny claw-hands reach out and drag the powdered-milk tin inside. Now the old man grasped his stave and giddily, powerlessly tried to hit Bond with it. It thwacked painlessly against his leg.
‘Help those children!’ Bond admonished the old man for a final time and turned and strode out of the village, his head in a swoon of pressure, feeling as if he’d taken part in some atavistic dumb-show – a stranger’s encounter with death on the road – all the ingredients of some dreadful folktale or legend. He concentrated. He had heard a car, he would be saved – unless the malign spirits of this place were still tormenting him.