I CRASHED into the rondavel.
“Pat,” I said, “Brutus has been arrested.”
Pat looked up from mending a saddle.
“Arrested?”
“Yes.”
“Brutus?”
“Yes.”
“The horse Brutus, that little pony Brutus?”
“The very same.”
Pat didn’t know whether to throw his head back and laugh or lift his fists and rail at the gods.
“Only in Mozambique, Mandy.”
“Come on, Pat, before they do something terrible …”
After the devastation of the cyclone, it had taken a long time for the tourists to return to Vilanculos. But return they had. I had been riding with some this morning, along the sweeping blue cove between the little rondavel where we had started living and the stables farther along the beach, when one of our local grooms had come floundering out of the long grass at the cliff’s edge and flailed at me across the sand. Underneath me, Lady seemed to want to shy away, but I kept her reined tight and listened to what the groom had to say.
“Chief Phophopho’s waiting at the Archipelago Lodge,” I explained. “Apparently, we’ve already ignored his summons twice.”
“What?”
I could only shrug. “Somebody hasn’t been passing on the message. Nobody wants to be the bearer of bad news in Africa …”
Pat and I hurried out of our little rondavel. The views from our step were perhaps the most beautiful I had ever seen—the pure white fringes of sand and calm, azure water, with the distant humps of islands marking the horizon—but there was no time to stop and admire them now, not when Brutus was in trouble.
The lodge, at which the chief was waiting, was perched on the clifftops between our home and the stables, and we made the short drive there in the Land Rover. Archipelago Lodge was a beautiful hotel with large wooden chalets featuring wide verandas from which tourists could look over the serene and spectacularly beautiful bay. The owners, Jeff and Jane Reilley, encouraged horse riding, and most of their guests would take the opportunity to ride along the beaches. The lodge had been badly damaged in the cyclone, but builders had worked night and day to restore it.
At the very edge of the cliff, in the shade of palms that had somehow survived the cyclone, the local village chief, a tiny wizened man they called Phophopho, sat with his entourage of three younger men and an Italian woman, who I quickly realized was there to act as translator. As Pat and I tentatively approached, Chief Phophopho’s big white eyes fell on me. He gestured that I should sit.
“What seems to be the problem?” I began.
The chief said something to which his entourage heartily agreed. I turned to the translator.
“First,” the Italian woman explained, “we drink.”
The old chief motioned and the barman appeared with glasses of wine, which he duly passed around. I lifted mine to drink, but the chief’s eyes opened wide and I stopped. Around the table, he and the entourage drained their glasses. Then, after a little nod of instruction, Pat and I did the same.
“On to business,” declared the translator. “You understand why you have been called to this meeting?”
“Actually,” I said, “I haven’t quite—”
The chief cut me off, speaking rapidly in his own language, Xitswa.
“Your creature—the big dog named Brutus—has been accused of theft. The women of the village reported seeing him in their maize, grazing it down to stubs. Do you deny it?”
I flashed a look at Pat.
“I know what happened here,” he whispered. “I took them out to graze, roped them off so they wouldn’t wander. It’s those grooms—they fell asleep …”
It would not have been the first time. Watching a horse eat is not the most captivating activity, and between that and the fierce Mozambican sun, it was all too easy to drift off. I had caught the grooms at it once before, curled up in the shade of some baobab while Echo untied a knot and wandered off. Brutus, I supposed, had had enough of the tough yellow grass he was grazing and, taking advantage of the slumbering grooms, stepped daintily over the rope and off to tastier pastures.
“The big dog wantonly ignored the village women’s cries. They banged tin pots, shooed him away, told him in no uncertain terms that the maize did not belong to him—but he heeded none of their warnings.”
“Well, of course not,” I began. “He’s a horse.”
“A thief is still a thief.”
I whispered to Pat from the corner of my mouth, “Where is Brutus?”
“He was at the stables this morning.”
“Looking well fed?”
“He didn’t look as worried as usual …”
“He has been placed under arrest in absentia, awaiting his sentence,” the Italian woman went on, translating Chief Phophopho’s words. “If he cannot answer for himself, you must.”
“Well,” I began, “quite clearly he can’t answer for himself.”
Upon hearing the translation, the chief’s face broke into a broad smile.
“Then perhaps,” said the translator, “we should let the negotiations begin.”
Remembering the last time somebody had accused our horses of theft and the bitter price they had exacted, I steeled myself. I still had no idea what had become of Pink Daiquiri and Ramazotti—but if Chief Phophopho was framing Brutus to take some of our horses for himself, he was in for a shock. I would not let it happen again.
I pitched across the table, angling myself to look the old chief in the eye. “What are you asking for?”
The old man smiled again.
“Everything has its cost,” said the translator. “The chief would like you to pay for the villager’s crops.”
Suddenly, all the memories of Pink Daiquiri and Ramazotti evaporated. I laughed, long and loud. Perhaps it was the wine, perhaps it was the searing heat, perhaps it was just the ridiculous idea that Pat and I should be living here, on this beautiful stretch of coast, with barely enough money to rub two coins together—but it seemed laughter was all that I had.
The chief named his price. I looked, out of the corner of my eye, at Pat. He simply gave an enormous shrug.
“It’s yours,” I said.
Upon hearing the translation, the chief stood and threw his arms open wide.
“I’ll go and get you your money,” I said, turning to leave.
“No,” the translator smiled, her face a tiny imitation of Chief Phophopho’s big grin. “You must not go yet.” She smiled. “First, we drink.”
That night, still bewildered and wondering where the next tourists were coming from to pay for Brutus’s adventure, Pat and I walked up to the stables. Roped up, Brutus was happily chewing on a bundle of dried grass. As I approached, he turned to face me. His face creased in exactly the same way it had when he was a tiny foal, as if pleading that he had done nothing wrong.
I scooped up a handful of horse cubes and ambled over to palm them into his mouth. Perplexed at first, he quickly gobbled them up.
“Brutus,” I said, putting my arms around him and remembering the first time I ever saw him, huddled up to Jade on John Crawford’s farm, “you are worth every penny.”
As Jonathan and the grooms fanned out around the pasture, driving in stakes and raising a rope around its edges, Pat and I rode to the head of the column and gently brought the horses to a standstill. Beneath me, Vaquero seemed to be able to sense the lush grass in the field the grooms were roping off and urged me to take him there. In the year since Chimoio he had grown into himself, shedding some of the gangliness of his youth, and though his eye still wandered, and though his teeth still seemed too big for his jaws, there was something refined—almost handsome—about the dappled gray gelding he had become.
“Soon,” I whispered, and I looked over to see Pat in Shere Khan’s saddle, riding up the column of more than thirty of our best horses, checking to make sure that all was well.
Brutus’s little adventure had taught us two things: first, that Brutus was not to be trusted when within sight of a stretch of lush maize; and, second, that grazing in our new part of the world was always going to be a problem. We had run out of grazing, and although we could buy maize from the market in Vilanculos it was important to find fresh ground for the horses. So we divided the herd into two groups, bringing one group here, where we could leave the horses until the rains came and grazing improved.
We were thirty kilometers outside of Vilanculos, and it seemed too perfect to be true. At the bottom of the pasture, the grasses grew thick around the edges of a natural lake of crystal clear water. With enough water and grass here to nourish the herd for weeks on end, it seemed as if we had walked into a desert oasis.
In a fit of joy, a horse thundered past me and cantered into the middle of the field. On Fleur’s back, there sat Kate. She lifted a hand and waved at me from the center of the field, then she drew Fleur back around and trotted back in my direction. Kate had graduated from the University of Stellenbosch in South Africa and had been staying with us in Vilanculos while she planned her next move. To my shame, there was no room for her at the little rondavel that Pat and I now called home. Though it had one of the most perfect views on the planet, mere yards from the placid waters of the Bazaruto bay, our room was scarcely big enough for our two single beds, pushed together with a big mosquito net to cloak us, and the water basin out back. As Jay did when he came down from Gorongosa, Kate was staying in the kitchen area. She had been with us four months, but, though she loved the horses and was quite brilliant at entertaining the tourists we took out for rides, I could tell that her heart wasn’t in it. Mozambleak, she called it. Vilanchaos. She had her sights set on following Paul to London, and I could not blame her.
We shepherded the horses into the field and roped off the entrance. Bewildered at their good luck, the herd fanned out and instantly started to graze. Marquess and Fleur drifted down to the banks of the lake, while Shere Khan remained in the middle of the field, surveying the herd for a long time after they had all dropped their heads to eat, like the queen that she was.
“If only this was at our doorstep,” Pat said.
We milled around the herd and, when we heard the noise of a truck drawing around beyond the rope, set off to join it.
The last thing I saw as we climbed aboard to make the drive home was Vaquero, watching me with a mischievous glint in his eye, turning the grass between oversize teeth.
In Vilanculos, we rose with the dawn. Down at the stables, some of the local grooms were preparing horses for the day’s ride. Duke and Black Magic were already saddled up when Pat and I arrived, with Fanta and Viper, the little purebred Arabian, waiting dutifully in the wings.
Today we rode down the coast, through rich coconut plantations, and to the local fishing village, where families of local Mozambicans had, from time immemorial, set out at dawn in their sailing dhows to cast their nets into the pristine waters of the bay. Our clients were a South African couple and their daughter who were on a whistle-stop tour of the east African coast. As Kate helped them sort out chaps and riding hats, I checked the stirrups and girths of each horse and prepared to climb into Duke’s saddle.
“There’ll be fresh coconut waiting at the other side,” Kate said to the couple’s daughter, helping adjust her stirrup straps. The girl was in Lady’s saddle, the preening little pony the perfect size for her. “And matapa. Have you tried matapa? It’s made from cassava leaves. I’ll let you in on a secret …” Kate paused, then she whispered into the girl’s ear, “It’s disgusting …”
The little girl was thrilled.
I had one foot in the stirrup and was about to swing my leg over when a car rumbled into the stable, through overhanging bush, and Jonathan stepped out. With a simple gesture of the hand, he got Pat’s attention.
I was leading Duke on a little walk, waiting for Kate to saddle up and the tourists to be ready, when Pat called over.
“It’s Echo,” he said. “He’s gone. You’ll have to ride this one alone, Mandy. I’ll go and find him.”
“You know where he’ll be?”
Pat grinned. “Halfway back to the Bvumba.”
I shook my head. He had a very long way to go.
Hours later, Pat found Echo calmly walking along the side of the road with Evita and Jazman at his side. Driving them back to the grazing land, he found two of the grooms asleep in the sun, and a length of rope lying coiled in the grass like a snake. Somebody, it seemed, had untied it from the tree around which it had been wound. The telltale teeth marks around the end told him the culprit had not been human.
Pat looked up, his eyes settling on Echo. The silvery horse looked almost smug, standing in the shadow of Shere Khan.
“Did you see him do it, Shere Khan?”
Shere Khan made no response, her nose held haughtily aloft.
“You two are too much trouble,” Pat began, turning to Echo and Jazman. “You can’t stay here. I think we’ll need a truck …”
That night I returned from the ride through the fishing village, belly full of fresh crab and cassava leaves, to find three horses back from the grazing fields. Echo, Jazman, and Evita were tethered in the shade at the far end of the stable.
I brought Duke around as Kate and the grooms brought Black Magic, Lady, and the other horses we had been riding back in on lead ropes.
“They’re too much trouble to leave in the grazing fields,” Pat said, grinning as he put his arms around Echo. “This one unties the knots, so this one”—he thrust a thumb in Jazman’s direction—“can slip away.”
“What about poor little Evita?” I said, swinging out of Duke’s saddle.
“I don’t know,” said Pat. “I just don’t trust her out there; she’s so much like Brutus.”
Brutus looked up, the creases deepening around his eyes.
At the start of the summer, just as the sun was flexing its muscles for months of searing heat, we drove out to the airport to wish Kate a fond farewell. She was bound for London. She would be able to see her brother and visit Granny Beryl in St. Ives—but, more than anything, she would be able to make a life for herself. Lifting her bags from the Land Rover was bittersweet. Pat and I stood at the edge of the airstrip as the tiny plane jerked awkwardly into the air. We watched as it dwindled and disappeared. Our children were grown and gone out into the world, and we had reached our final home.
We drove back along the bustling main street of Vilanculos, where the markets were overflowing and street hawkers mobbed us each time we stopped. At last, turning from the main highway, we wove our way through the local villages to reach the coast and our own little hut.
Jonathan was waiting in the garden, two of the beach dogs who roamed the sands basking in the sun at his feet.
“Pat,” he began, “I think you’d better come.”
In the stable, one of our local grooms, Luka, stood holding Vaquero and another small gelding.
“What are they doing here?”
“They are not good, boss,” said Luka, summoning up his few words of English.
I did not have to get close to Vaquero to know that he was throwing a temperature. Pat ran a hand up and down his muzzle, but Vaquero simply let out a low, despondent snort. His eyes, usually a little wild and roaming, looked dark, discolored even, and his flanks had a sheen of sweat. I ran my hand down his haunch. When I brought it back, it was dripping wet.
The gelding at his side was much the same. His chest rose and fell heavily, a succession of rapid breaths.
Pat screwed up his eyes, as if weighing up the symptoms. “African horse sickness, perhaps?”
African horse sickness was endemic across southern Africa, and Vaquero was showing the classic symptoms of its most vicious strain. With his fever, the strange rattle he made when he breathed, and his downcast eyes and lack of engagement, it was little wonder that African horse sickness was on the tip of Pat’s tongue.
Pat looked at the other horses contentedly waiting in the stable yard.
“Let’s get them away from the herd,” he began. “Come on, Vaquero, this way …”
It was only a short walk along the beach from the stables to our rondavel home, but rather than risk weakening Vaquero and the other gelding, we loaded them into a truck and took them along the back road, running parallel to the bay. Once we arrived at the rondavel, we opened up the back. Inside, Vaquero and the other gelding shifted uneasily. It seemed to take an age to coax them out.
Pat strode into the open kitchen area beside our hut and opened one of the fridges, powered by a noisy generator, that we kept there.
“One of those times you wish you were in Zimbabwe,” he muttered, darkly, “with a vet on the other end of the phone …”
After rifling around, he produced a box of medication and returned to where Vaquero and the other gelding were standing. There was no treatment for African horse sickness, but we could deal with the symptoms. After administering shots to both horses, he went in search of antibiotics and, promising Vaquero he would be well again soon, gave him a good pat.
We sat with them through the afternoon, listening to the rasp of every breath, waiting for some sign that the medication might soothe their fevers. Vaquero looked at me with the same roaming eyes I remembered from that day in Chimoio when I had tried to trade him away. You can’t get rid of me that easily, he seemed to have been saying. I found myself wishing he would say the same thing today.
The next morning, Vaquero and the gelding showed no signs of recovery. Pat stayed to nurse them, even though there was nothing he could do. I tried to push them from my mind as I took riders along the beach, north through sweeping red dunes and across an undulating expanse of crimson sand. In Duke’s saddle, I led them on a canter along the sweeping bay, but it was late in the afternoon by the time we were trotting back toward the stable, up through the mangrove flats and sandy beach road.
When I arrived, it was to find the stable area empty but for a groom who indicated the next door plot. Here in the plot, Pat tended to Marquess and Arizona; a little farther along, Jonathan was standing with Tequila’s sister, Kahlua.
I rode Duke into the plot. Instantly, Pat looked up.
“It wasn’t just Vaquero and the gelding. We had to bring Marquess and these others in from the fields, too. They have the same symptoms.”
I pushed Duke a little farther but saw the caution in Pat’s eyes and reined him in. That was why the rest of the herd had been roped off out in the bush; this plot was under quarantine now.
“Same symptoms?” I asked, looking at Marquess.
Pat nodded.
“That isn’t all, Mandy. It’s Vaquero.” Pat stalled, his face a mask of stone. “Mandy, he’s gone.”
Long after midnight, starlight bathed the trees.
Pat and I drew the truck off the road and into the bush. Once we were far enough from the road, we killed the lights and stepped out. In front of us lay a great maw in the hard earth. A shovel was propped by its side.
When I had gotten back to the rondavel, Vaquero and the other gelding were lying, stiff and cold. Pat had covered them in sheets, but something compelled me to take a look. I stepped forward and lifted a corner, just enough that I could see Vaquero’s head, his eyes still open, his tongue still lolling out. Pat said he had been the first to go. He simply took a deep breath, held it in his chest, and then he was gone. The other gelding followed only moments later, the two gone together to join that ancient herd in the sky.
“What was it?” I asked, knowing we had no answer. “We should have a vet here, Pat.”
“We’ll send for one. Fly one up from South Africa.”
I beat a retreat from Vaquero’s cold cadaver, unable to look at his glassy eyes staring. No longer would they roam around their orbits. No longer would they glimmer at me knowingly, as if sharing some mischievous joke.
“What are we going to do with him, Pat?”
“You’re thinking of Grey, aren’t you?”
Now we stood at an open grave in the dead of night, as Jonathan and Luka helped us lower Vaquero down to lie, his legs entangled with those of the gelding he had died alongside. There was no time for sentiment. There was no time to say any words or lament the loss. By the light of the stars, we poured the dirt over poor Vaquero and knew we would never see him again.
As we drove back to snatch a few hours’ sleep before embarking on another day’s riding, I told myself that, at least in death, Vaquero was safe. No local Mozambican would be there to dig up his body and butcher him for a fire.
I told myself all that, but it wasn’t nearly enough to quell the ache in my gut.
In the days that followed, more and more horses came in, showing similar symptoms to Vaquero’s. Soon, Marquess followed him into the ground. Then Arizona. Drummer Boy. Ratz. Roulette and Aurora. Sabi Star. Comet. At dusk, we walked through the stables and listened as the terrible rasp began in our horses’ throats. Engulfing their lungs. Eyes drooped, sweat shimmered—and, one after another, the horses we had rescued from Mugabe’s war began to die.
Pat stood with Shere Khan, while I ran my hand through Fleur’s mane. November had turned into a cruel, scorching December. It had been three nights since the last death, but those nights had been fitful. The bush between our rondavel and the stable was now an unmarked graveyard, haunted by the ghosts of our herd. When I closed my eyes, I could see the graves picked out across the backs of my eyes, like sparkling stars in a planetarium.
On the other side of Shere Khan, a figure crouched with his ear pressed up against California’s chest. A little case was open at his side, with vials of blood placed carefully within.
“Any idea, Allan?”
Allan had arrived on the morning’s plane, along with a family of French riders for whom we would have to paint on smiles and pretend our world was not falling apart. He was a tall South African with brown dreadlocks, who had been a veterinarian with his own practice in Rustenburg. Now, as he crouched between Shere Khan and California, his face betrayed nothing. My insides churned; his, I knew, was a practiced face, designed to put his own clients at ease. I felt as if I could see straight through it to some yawning horror on the other side.
“We’ll know more when we’ve done some tests. It isn’t African horse sickness. I can promise you that.”
He stood up, closed his case, and ran his hand along Shere Khan’s mane.
“She really is a beautiful horse,” he began. Shere Khan flicked her mane dismissively. “And she knows it, doesn’t she?”
Allan flew back to Johannesburg the very next day, but it seemed an interminable wait for the laboratory results to come through. At last, as one dusk drew over Vilanculos in the deep of December, the phone rang.
“Tell me you have a cure,” I began.
Allan’s tone was somber. “I’d love nothing more, Mandy, but … I can’t tell you what the cure is when I can’t tell you what’s wrong with your horses.”
His voice trailed off, but I had no words to replace it.
“How many have died, Mandy?”
“Ten,” I uttered.
“I’m sorry …”
He seemed broken too, but there was no way he could understand just how we felt.
“What can we do?” I breathed, not daring to dream there might be an answer.
“There are other things we could look for,” Allan began, “but I’d need more samples …”
“We can do it,” I cut in. “Pat can draw more blood …”
“Not blood,” Alan interjected. “It has to be tissue.”
“Tissue?”
“Mandy, we’d need a slice of brain.”
All we could do was wait for another of our dearest horses to die.
Early in the morning, I was kneading the sleep from my eyes when Jonathan appeared, looking ragged and starved of sleep, to bring the news. With the steam from my tea beading on my face, I saw him whisper to Pat. Then, he turned to walk back along the beach, the gentle susurration of waves behind him.
“Who is it, Pat?”
“Fleur,” Pat breathed.
We brought her to the rondavel to die. There had been too much death in those stables. On the same grass where Vaquero had breathed his last, Fleur lay down. We brought her water, but by fall of night she was too weak to stand and drink. Instead, I lay with her head in my lap, listening to each stuttering breath, brushing back the sweat that beaded in her mane and trickled down her muzzle.
When death came, it came suddenly. She opened her eyes, seemed to be desperately searching for something; in that moment, I knew that she understood. Her forelegs gave tiny, almost imperceptible kicks; she breathed in, exhaled softly—and then Fleur was gone.
“She was so frightened,” I breathed as I lifted her head from my lap and, my body numb, took Pat’s hand to stand.
“So am I,” Pat admitted.
It fell to Pat to conduct the grisly business. I could not bear to see it done. While he was readying Fleur’s body, I headed for the airport to organize the tissue sample’s delivery to Allan in South Africa. Yet, as I explained what we needed to the relevant authorities, their faces turned to stone: there was no way, I was told by the airline operator, that they could transport such a thing on their planes, not without a veterinary license, and that might take many months to receive. I left with tears in my eyes. There had to be another way.
When I got back to the rondavel, Pat’s work was done. He was scrubbing his hands, though I could still see the red stains in the webbing of his fingers. We sat down and thought about our options. I can barely remember the moment it occurred to me, but there was a very simple way of getting the tissue sample into South Africa. A slice of brain matter was simply a slice of meat. We would put it inside a sandwich and ask one of our clients to deliver it to a wonderful lady named Meryl who kindly offered to rush the samples to the veterinary department. She would be waiting for our clients when they stepped off the plane on the other side.
Pat looked at me, his eyes glowing with the absurdity of it all.
“Only Africa would make us do a thing like that.”
I couldn’t help but laugh.
That night, we buried what was left of our beloved Fleur on the edge of a cliff under a baobab tree with a view of the sea. Back at the rondavel, I took down a chopping board and laid out two slices of bread. Like some mad scientist engaged in a midnight experiment, I cut two pieces of plastic film to the exact shape and size of the bread, and laid one on top of each slice. Then, I picked out the cold, gelatinous slices of Fleur’s brain from the refrigerator and laid them on the plastic. Even after I had set them down, I thought I could feel a tingling on my fingers, and I hoped that Fleur might forgive us.
After laying another piece of plastic film on top of one slice of brain, I closed up the sandwich and wrapped it in yet more plastic, hoping that it might remain fresh throughout the short flight. Then, I joined Pat outside the rondavel.
“Eleven dead already,” I said. “He has to find something, Pat.”
Pat nodded, refusing to give me any crude consolation. Then he left to see our most recent clients and their illicit sandwich off into the skies.
In December, Mozambique baked. Jay had come to Vilanculos to spend Christmas with us, but this year there would be no celebrations. We spent Christmas Day in the stables. In the evening, we left Jay to look over the horses while Pat and I joined our clients for a braai on the beach. I filled my plate with steak and the rich South African sausage we called boerewors, but it took me an hour to poke it down.
“You have to eat,” Pat whispered to me, as the sounds of revelry crowded us from all sides.
“I’m not hungry.”
“You look like a rake.”
From somewhere, there came the sound of a guitar. People were dancing in the sand, and a chorus of voices rose to join the song.
I wanna be in the cavalry, if they send me off to war
I want a good steed under me, like my forefathers before
I want a good man when the bugles sound and I hear those cannons roar
I wanna be in the cavalry, if they send me off to war
Now that the party had started, the singing did not stop. The guitar was passed around and more songs poured into the night. Over the ocean, the starlight sparkled, and I could tell from the gleeful look in their eyes that our clients would remember this Christmas for the rest of their lives.
“Do you ever get bored of it?”
It took me a moment to register the question.
“Mandy,” one of the clients asked, bouncing his exhausted daughter on his knee, “do you ever just wake up and realize how lucky you are, to be here, to have all of this … this beauty, all around you?”
I felt Pat’s leg tense against mine underneath the table.
“Every morning,” I said, through a painted smile. “Darling, it’s like that every single time I wake up.”
Early in the New Year, Pat picked up the phone, a call from pathologists at Onderstepoort Veterinary Institute. I had been bickering with Jay outside but heard him conversing in a low whisper. When he finally hung up, he came down the rondavel step and sank down to sit there, kneading the phone in his hands.
I broke from my argument with Jay. “Was it Allan?” I began.
Pat shook his head.
“It was Onderstepoort. They’ve found out what’s killing the horses. We took them straight into it.” He paused. “They’re poisoned, Mandy. It was in their grazing. Crotalaria …”
“Crotalaria?”
“Sun hemp,” Pat said, flinging his arms back. Realization seemed to be dawning. “It must have been out in the field, along that lake. They didn’t know. They ate it. And now …”
Sun hemp had been introduced to Mozambique during the country’s earliest days as a Portuguese colony, as part of an attempt to enrich nitrogen in the country’s soils. Grown properly and harvested at the right time it is a wonderful plant, perfect as food for livestock; but when it is seeding, the plant is toxic. Horses are usually so intelligent and watchful. Instinct drives them away from toxic plants. Instinct drives them to graze on the rich grasses that they need. Instinct takes care of them where their owners cannot. But instinct cannot protect a horse forever. Perhaps the instincts of our own herd had somehow been scrambled by their long flight from home. Perhaps the sun hemp in the field seemed too good to turn down.
“What happens now, Pat?”
“You don’t want to know.”
Pat stood, strode toward the Land Rover. I hurried after.
“Pat, I want to …”
“They die, Mandy,” Pat said, slamming his fists against the car door. “It stays in their system. There’s no expunging it. There’s no cure. It’s already in them. It’s already killing them, bit by bit. It bides its time and it festers and, when it’s ready, it shuts them down.” Pat’s face was strained, even though he had checked his tears. “Every last one of those horses we took to graze in that field is going to die.”
At least, now that we knew it was not a contagious disease, the horses could live as one herd again. Princess and Evita, Rebel and Philippe, Black Magic and Jade, even Lady and Duke, who had come all the way from Two Tree—we were now certain that they would survive, for they had never been near the poisoned land.
In the afternoon, we went riding with a British family based in South Africa. As I tacked up Echo and Evita, I stroked their ears and told them how lucky they were. If Echo had not abetted Jazman in his great escape by nimbly untying the knots in the rope, and Evita not followed them, we would have left them in the fields, and they too might have feasted on the sun hemp. Were it not for their mischievous ways, they might be dead already, under the sand with Vaquero, Fleur, and the rest.
I looked across the stable and saw Pat tacking up the regal Shere Khan. She looked down her long nose at him, as lofty and statuesque as ever. Yet I could see the look in Pat’s eyes. Shere Khan had cantered in those fields. She had turned the grass in her teeth; she had kept her lofty eyes on the rest of her herd. She had been there throughout, and there seemed little hope that she had not eaten the poisonous vegetation like all of her friends.
We had taken more than thirty horses out to graze on the poisoned land. Almost all of them were already gone. When the twenty-ninth passed away, the new year was here and three months had already passed—but, Allan had told us, the Crotalaria poison could linger in a horse’s system for six months or more, waiting for the cruelest moment to spring its deadly trap.
Shere Khan, the queen of the herd, was living on borrowed time.
I was standing on the beach, Brutus’s lead rope in one hand and Lady’s in the other, when I saw Pat urge Shere Khan into a gallop. Beyond him lay the sweeping azure sea; beneath him, the undulating golden sand. I thought I had never seen such a majestic sight, but, when he turned her toward me and reined her down, I saw that he was trembling.
“What is it, Pat?”
It took a moment for him to find the words. “I can feel it in her chest, Mandy. It’s coming. It’s already here.”
Daylight lasted for long hours this deep into summer, and as the sun set in the west, somewhere over our old home in Zimbabwe, Pat and I walked Shere Khan gently out of the stables. Behind us, Lady, Black Magic, Brutus, and the other survivors watched. I have always thought that they understood exactly what was happening that night; that this was the very last time they would see their queen in the living world.
We led Shere Khan slowly along the beach, listening to the gentle lap of waves at the water’s edge. The light was soft, the palms swayed, a single sailing dhow bobbed out on the bay. Along the beach, we met Jay and, together—Pat holding Shere Khan’s lead rope, knowing he would never ride her again—we came to our little rondavel.
Shere Khan’s breathing was labored, but it was not until the morning came that we could fully hear the death rattle in her breast. Her tongue began to loll; a sheen of sweat shimmered across her beautiful hide, as if she had spent the day galloping through the fierce Mozambican heat; and by the middle of the next afternoon something had dimmed in her eyes. It was terrifying to see that knowing intelligence flicker and fade. Not once had we seen Shere Khan look so diminished. She was arrogant, confident, an imperious mare who knew she was more beautiful than anyone else—but now the knowing was gone from her eyes. She looked at us, but it was as if she were on the other side of a veil. Death was claiming her from the inside out.
We stayed with her through the long night.
“I’ll never forget coming back to Biri after I’d been in England,” I began, “and there she was. All those new horses you’d found … but she stood out, Pat. The most beautiful horse I’d seen.”
But Pat just sat in silence, one hand on Shere Khan’s trembling flank, her head propped in my lap.
In the morning, she was still with us. She took no water. She did not stand. We had clients to ride with this morning, but neither Pat nor I set out to meet them. In the rondavel, the phone rang and rang again. We let it go. There would be time enough for apologies later. This was our time now. This was Shere Khan’s.
In the middle of the morning, Shere Khan’s eyes rolled toward Pat. In that second, all of the old fire was there. Suddenly, she knew who she was. Suddenly, she understood that she was the queen, bigger, bolder, more intelligent, more beautiful than all the rest. She seemed to know where she should be—riding at the head of the herd, leading them on a thunderous gallop across these African sands.
But the moment was fleeting, and then the moment was gone. Shere Khan’s chest rose, and then she exhaled. Then, eyes still open and gazing at the blue African skies, she was still.
I looked up. It had been a long time since I last saw my husband cry, but his hands were tangled in Shere Khan’s ebony mane, and his tears flowed unchecked.
As soon as she was in the water, Black Magic performed an absurd belly flop and began to roll. A little farther along the beach, Brutus, seeing the preposterous fun Black Magic seemed to be having, attempted to do the same. Tentative at first—and still wearing his permanently worried expression—he only paddled. Then he too dropped down and rolled. I heaved on his lead rope, trying to encourage him to stand and come deeper into the water, but he steadfastly refused.
Along the shore, our other horses were coming in procession, their grooms on either side. At the head I saw Lady and Jade, Tequila and Echo tucked just behind, Philippe and Rebel on the edges, straining at their ropes to get to the water. At the end, Princess came with her daughter, Evita.
I saw the ghosts around them, too. There was Grey, cantering like a silvery streak; there was Deja-vous, whole again, her only scars the ones around her leg. There were Fleur and Marquess, who had come all the way from Two Tree together. I saw Arizona and California, plucked from a den of lions only to be led into the jaws of a crueler death. I saw Kahlua, trotting alongside her still-living brother, Tequila, as if they still belonged to the same herd. And, above them all, I saw Shere Khan, still a hand higher than the horses around her, still looking regally down her nose, still queen of her herd, even in that ethereal world.
One after another, we led the survivors into the water. Deep out, I sat in Brutus’s saddle, while Pat clung to Black Magic’s mane. The grooms led the herd around us, but Pat and I were suspended there, in the middle of the swirling azure waters.
We swam in circles, and when we turned, I saw a single horse’s head bobbing toward us, with Jonathan trailing behind as if it were he who was wearing the halter and lead rope. Pat and I slowed down. Princess was coming to see us.
We waited for her to reach us. I put my hand on her muzzle and Pat put his arms around her, careful not to touch the sensitive flesh of her withers.
“Do you remember,” Pat said, “the day you threw Resje and I chased you up through the Two Tree bush?”
If she remembered at all, it was part of a different world, like a false, distorted memory of childhood. I slipped from Brutus, kicked through the warm blue water, and rolled gently onto Princess’s back. Sitting high, I gazed around at what was left of our herd, playing as the Mozambican sun beat down.
I looked up. On the beach, I fancied I could see Shere Khan and the ghostly herd watching. I turned to call Pat, but when I looked again, they were gone. Now, only memories cantered along that beach.
“What do you think, Princess? Are we home?”
She took off, as if making for shore.
Once, I had thought home was forever. Once, I had thought Crofton was where I would grow old and die, a place to which my children and, one day, my grandchildren could always come back. Now, home was different. Princess and I rose out of the ocean and stood sunning ourselves where, moments ago, the ghostly herd had stood. I thought I could hear the thunder of hoofbeats as Shere Khan led them on one final canter.
Home, I knew now, was wherever our herd still survived.
I turned and watched Pat and Black Magic, gleaming like ebony, rise out of azure sea.
Home was Pat, and here he was.