Assegai

The Nandi redoubled his efforts and tried to scream, but Leon held the lock on his throat and the sounds he uttered were muffled. The dying man’s violent struggles worked the blade around in his chest cavity as Leon twisted and sawed it. Suddenly the Nandi convulsed and dark red blood spouted from his mouth. It splattered over Leon’s arm and droplets blew back into his face. The Nandi heaved once, then went slack in his grip.

Leon held him for a few seconds longer to make certain he was dead, then released the body, pushed it away and stumbled back to where he had left Manyoro. ‘Come on,’ he croaked, and they went forward again, Manyoro clinging to him, staggering and lurching.

Suddenly the ground gave way under them and they rolled down a steep mud bank into a shallow stream. There, the smoke was thinner. With a lift of relief Leon realized they had come in the right direction: they had reached the stream from the spring that ran to the south of the boma.

He knelt in the water and scooped handfuls into his face, washing his burning eyes and scrubbing the Nandi’s blood off his hands. Then he drank greedily, Manyoro too. Leon gargled and spat out the last mouthful, his throat rough and raw from the smoke.

He left Manyoro and scrambled to the top of the bank to peer into the smoke. He heard voices but they were faint with distance. He waited a few minutes to regain his strength and reassure himself that no Nandi were close on their tracks, then slid down the bank to where Manyoro crouched in the shallow water.

‘Let me look at your leg.’ He sat beside the sergeant and took it across his lap. The field dressing was soaked and muddy. He unwrapped it and saw at once that the violent activity of the escape had done damage. Manyoro’s thigh was massively swollen, the flesh around the wound torn and bruised where the shaft of the arrow had worked back and forth. Blood oozed out from around it. ‘What a pretty sight,’ he muttered, and felt gently behind the knee. Manyoro made no protest but his pupils dilated with pain as Leon touched something buried in his flesh.

Then Leon whistled softly. ‘What do we have here?’ In the lean muscle of Manyoro’s thigh, just above the knee, a foreign body lay under the skin. He explored it with a forefinger and Manyoro flinched.

‘It’s the point of the arrow,’ he exclaimed, in English, then switched back into Kiswahili. ‘It’s worked its way right through your leg from back to front.’ It was hard to imagine the agony Manyoro was enduring, and Leon felt inadequate in the presence of such suffering. He looked up at the sky. The dense smoke was dissipating on the evening breeze and through it he could make out the western tops of the escarpment, touched with the fiery rays of the setting sun.

‘I think we’ve given them the slip for now, and it will soon be dark,’ he said, without looking into Manyoro’s face. ‘You can rest until then. You’ll need your strength for the night ahead.’ Leon’s eyes were still burning with the effects of the smoke. He closed them and squeezed the lids tightly shut. But not many minutes passed before he opened them again. He had heard voices coming from the direction of the boma.

‘They are following our spoor!’ Manyoro murmured, and they shrank lower under the bank of the stream. In the banana plantation the Nandi called softly to each other, like trackers following blood, and Leon realized that his earlier optimism was groundless. The pursuers were following the prints of his boots: under their combined weight, they would have left a distinctive sign in the soft earth. There was nowhere for him and Manyoro to hide in the stream bed so Leon drew the bayonet from his belt and crawled up the bank until he lay just below the lip. If the searchers looked down into the stream and discovered them he would be close enough to spring out at them. Depending on how many there were he might be able to silence them before they raised a general alarm and brought the rest of the pack down on them. The voices drew closer until it seemed that they were on the very edge of the bank. Leon gathered himself, but at that moment there was a chorus of distant shouts from the direction of the boma. The men above exclaimed with excitement, and he heard them run back the way they had come.

He slid down the bank to Manyoro. ‘That was very nearly the last chukka of the game,’ he told him, as he rebandaged the leg.

‘What made them turn back?’

‘I think they found the body of the man I killed. But it won’t delay them long. They’ll be back.’

He heaved Manyoro upright, draped the other man’s right arm over his shoulder and, half carrying and half dragging him, got him up to the top of the far bank of the stream.

The halt in the stream bed had not improved Manyoro’s condition. Inactivity had stiffened the wound and the torn muscles around it. When Manyoro tried to put weight on it the limb buckled under him and he would have collapsed had Leon not caught him.