Bloodlines (30 page)

I went up first, holding the highest rung I could reach, bearing my whole weight on my arms and hands, and pulling my feet up behind me. When my feet were firmly perched, I reached up with my arms to the next rung and pulled my feet up another level, until I had no sense of where the ground was, or of how far up I had climbed. He held my ankle firmly when I hesitated, shining the light up so that I could see the ladder above me, and I forced myself not to look down, or to wonder whether the single vine was strong enough to hold us both. Eventually, I reached the platform and pulled myself up to lie rigid in the darkness.

The platform was about six feet long, and slightly less wide, about as big as a good-sized bed, made of thick branches lashed together, and cradled in a nest where three huge limbs forked away from the main trunk. When we were both sitting together, Khabazela turned on the flashlight briefly so that we could see the extent of our limited world, and as he did so, pointing it at the trunk, I saw something that made my blood congeal.

“Look,” I whispered, and pointed at what the light reflected—two narrow, vertical eyes. Snake eyes. As I watched, a triangular head emerged slowly, a thick head, with speckled blotches on its flat top, the sides brightly colored green and orange.

“Don’t move,” he whispered.

I couldn’t have moved if I’d wanted to—but I watched the puff adder rear its body so that I could see its pale underbelly. As I listened to the deep hiss of warning and danger, I was aware of a wide open mouth, of fangs, and then the whole platform trembled as the huge snake struck. And then it was gone. The flashlight clattered to the platform, its light reflecting the rictus of pain on Khabazela’s face as he lay on his side, his hands already forming a tourniquet below his knee, and just above the bite on his calf.

“So, Michaela Green,” he whispered, drawing himself up to a sitting position. He grinned through the pain—but all I saw was a death mask. “What would your father the dentist, who took a bullet out of my thigh and saved my life, tell you to do now?”

His question was rhetorical—we both knew what my father would have told me to do, and we both knew that I had no choice. I thought of leaving his dead body alone on the platform; of climbing down in terror from the tree to find my way alone through the tangled nightmare below; of returning alone to seek refuge with Lungile; of losing him, living alone; being abandoned. But even as the images rolled in rapid succession through my mind I was refusing them, moving rapidly to his pack to find his knife, which I opened and wiped on my shirtsleeve. There was no water—no fire to sterilize the metal.

He removed one hand from his leg to take the flashlight from me, and he held it while I tore the leg off his trousers. The bite was on the back of his calf, halfway up and deep in the muscle tissue. I wound the fabric around his thigh just above the knee, thinking that it would give us a few more inches—and a little more time—to prevent the venom from traveling through the blood stream, then twisted the cloth around a small piece of wood as tightly as I could until it bit into his flesh, and he grunted in discomfort. I pushed him into a lying position and on to his side so that I could get to the back of his leg, bent him forward and guided his hand to the tourniquet.

“Can you hold it in place?”

“Yes,” he said. “Go.”

The circle of light on his calf revealed two deep, blooded punch holes, the skin around them already pinkish and swollen. I hesitated—there was only one right way to do this, and so many ways to get it wrong. What if I didn’t cut deep enough? Too deep?

“No time to think, Michaela; this is a time to act.” His voice was firm. “Cut deep, and draw out the poison. I will be fine.”

I did it. Stuck the knife blade into his calf until it scratched the bone, sawed down through the muscle, wiping blood away so that I could see where I was cutting. When I had an inch long incision, I pulled it out and made another incision at ninety degrees. It was a perfect X running right between the punch holes, and I knelt down and opened my mouth to his flesh. With my tongue I felt the sharp outlines of the incision and tasted the salt warmth of his blood, and I shuddered at the thought of what I was doing.

I sucked at the wound until my mouth was full and I turned from him and spat out over the edge of the platform. Then I took a deep breath as I returned to my work, and sucked again and when my mouth was full of blood, instead of rising and spitting I let it dribble from my lips, taking care not to swallow. The tourniquet did its job and finally the flow staunched, and I had to work hard to get any blood at all. When my lips were numb and my tongue and cheeks ached from the effort, I stopped. He was shivering, muttering under his breath, his hand tightly cramped over the tourniquet. I helped him release it, covered the wound with a piece of pants leg and tied it loosely round with two strips of cloth.

I spread the blanket over us both and turned off the flashlight, thinking how much of an intruder I was in this place of absolute darkness. Baboons moved around through the trees, rustling and thrashing branches as they swung from tree to tree, and their hoots and screeches cut through the darkness. The song of tree frogs, crickets and swarms of insects was so intense that it seemed to bounce off the night, and to make the blackness around me shimmer.

He was still muttering as I put my arms around him. He turned to me, shivering, and said something unintelligible as I lay beside him. All I heard was the word ‘close.’

“I didn’t understand,” I said softly into his ear. “Are you cold? Do you want to come closer to me?”

“Yes,” he mumbled, “closer. If the snake takes me in the night. Promise me.”

“Promise you what?”

“That you will bury me beside my King, Cetshwayo.”

“I promise,” I said. “But you’re not going to die in the night.” And I went to sleep, wondering if he would still be alive in the morning.

I woke stiff and freezing, to a cold, dull early morning light that made its way down through the forest ceiling. The platform was shaking. Beside me Khabazela was hot to the touch; he shuddered and gasped, and his skin was beaded with perspiration. His eyes were open and met mine when I looked at him.

“I need water,” he said through quivering jaws, and stopped to swallow. “I think this will pass. You got almost all the venom.”

He had lost blood—how much, I had no idea. But blood loss and fever sweats meant dehydration, and I had to find a way to clean his wound. Congealing pools of blood dotted the platform, and it was covered in ants and flying insects.

“Go further down the hill—there will be a stream at the bottom. Break branches as you go or you’ll never find your way back.” Then he waved me off and rolled himself into a fetal position under the blanket.

I took the knife and climbed back down to the forest floor. I didn’t notice until I began to clamber through the undergrowth that my arms and legs were scratched and bleeding. But as I scrambled and contorted my body over and under the twisted branches and vines, I reopened wounds from the previous night, and there was soon a cloud of bloodcrazed mosquitoes hovering around me. I snapped dead branches to mark my way, and when I finally reached the bottom of the hill stumbled into the stream that Khabazela had known would be there. I wondered how he had known—but I learned later that upwelling streams followed the gorges through all the valleys of the Nkandla.

The water ran clear, but was almost obscured by ferns and vines. I couldn’t reach it from the bank, and had to scramble into the middle of the stream, where I drank deep, stopping in mid-swallow as I realized that we had brought nothing in which to transport water. We were not supposed to have suffered snakebite; were not supposed to have one of us trapped on the platform, unable to fend for himself.

I looked around me for something to use as a water vessel. On the other side of the stream was a stand of tuberous plants with huge leaves—the largest was at least a yard long and two feet across. After several failed attempts I managed to wrap one into a cone without tearing it, but when I tried to fill it with water it collapsed under its own weight—and I realized that even if the leaf could bear the weight, I probably couldn’t. I needed something to give the leaf form and shape, something that would retain moisture until I could get it back up the hill.

My shirt.

I ripped it off, rinsed it and rang it out several times. Then I put it into the leaf cone and submerged the whole thing into the stream. When I raised it above the water, it was heavy, but it also maintained its shape. I knew I would lose some of it on the way back, but I had no choice. It was the best I could do.

The return journey up the steep hillside to the platform was interminable. I cradled the waterlogged leaf cone in one arm and followed my trail of broken branches, maneuvering myself up the hill one vine at a time. I interrupted a family of wild pigs rooting along the forest floor, broom-ended tails aloft, and they dispersed in front of me, snorting. Several times I thought myself lost and was about to panic and call out when I found the next broken branch and continued uphill. Eventually I located the tree, and had to stop and catch my breath at the bottom before attempting the climb. I grabbed the vine with my free hand and pulled myself up the makeshift ladder, bearing my weight on one arm each time I hoisted my feet from one rung to the next.

When I reached the platform he was still shaking, and hot to the touch. Water dripped from the bottom of the cone as I held it over his face. He squeezed the base and caught the stream of water in his open mouth, and I found myself grinning with a sense of accomplishment so intense that I can still taste it today. When he had drunk what he needed, I unwrapped his leg and washed the snake bite and the incisions. There was no way of knowing whether it was infected; it was still swollen and discolored. But the water helped to reduce his fever, and as the shivering decreased, he became more alert.

“Thank you, my Zulu lady,” he murmured, turning to look at me. “Today you have become a Zulu.”

“Khabazela,” I said softly, turning from him to hide my face.

Although he had told me that he loved me, this was the first time he had addressed me in his own language; the first time he had called me his lady. His Zulu lady. Many times since then I have wondered why his words touched me so deeply; wondered what it was—still is—that makes me so want to be what I am not, and can never be.

“Time to eat something, Khabazela,” I said, breaking one of the cold yams into pieces.

We ate together in silence. When we were through, he reached out and touched me, and he smiled.

“Now I will tell you a story,” he said. “It will pass the time, and take your mind off worrying about me. I told you that we would be in good company here, because this is where King Cetshwayo came to find refuge. Remember?”

“Yes, I do. And do you remember that you made me promise last night that I would bury you beside him? Well, I would have been happy to oblige,” I said. “But I have no idea where he’s buried.”

“So Lungile has not shown you Cetshwayo’s grave.”

“No—she hasn’t shown me anything. How would she know where it is?”

He drew back from me, and although I didn’t know why, it was clear that I had misspoken.

“You have not discovered yet that very little is as it seems,” he said gently. “Even though Lungile and her family give us hospitality and protection, you see her only with your western eye. You see an illiterate farmer who lives in a grass hut, and wears a garment around her waist made of cow stomach. But if you could see through Zulu eyes, you would see a woman born into the Shezi clan; you would know that her grandfathers were spear makers to the Zulu kings. You would see a woman who lives her history every day.”

The effort of speaking exhausted him, and he paused to take a deep breath.

“As a Shezi, Lungile is the custodian of King Cetshwayo’s grave. Each day she goes to the grave site. She keeps it clear of weeds and overgrowth, and makes sure the cattle stay away; she guards it and watches over it. And every day when she tends her duties, she carries the history of her people into the future.”

He stopped and we looked at each other, and from across a vast distance he reached out his hand and took mine.

“I would like to bring together our two impossible worlds,” he said.

“Yes.” Doubt filled me, and in the midst of it, a surge of hope that what he proposed was indeed achievable—and that perhaps we might make it happen ourselves. “Me, too.”

“If it is to happen at all, it will be one person at a time.” He paused, and his expression softened. “You may love me,” he said gently, “but only when you have learned to see through both eyes will you understand us. And only then will you and I be able to make ourselves useful here.” He caressed my hand, and looked into my eyes with an unstated question. “If we are to try and live this,” he said, “we will live in the shadows, and in secret; in the darkened courtyard between the back door of the main house and the servants’ quarters; in the invisible places between the lines of the law.”

It was the first time Mandla—Khabazela—gave me any indication that he had been thinking of the future, or that he had even considered a future that included me. For my part, I had been too shocked and bereaved by the course my life had taken to even think beyond tomorrow. But now that he had raised the issue, I was terrified by his suggestion, and by the questions it raised. How would we live? Where? What pretense could we concoct that would be both believable to the outside world, and acceptable to us? A clandestine affair, made up of occasional brief encounters, was one thing—but living together in secret and carrying the knowledge of a relationship that could be shared with no one, was another thing entirely.

I shook my head, and we sat together high up on a swaying platform in the middle of a dim forest lit by greenish light that seeped into the treetops as smoke seeps out from the reed walls of a hut. Like two children in a world of make believe, with my back resting against the tree, and with his head in my lap, he told me about Cetshwayo, the last of the great Zulu warrior kings, who was forced to watch as the British dismantled the Zulu nation. And when he died in 1884—poisoned at the hands of his rivals, or by the British, no one knows for sure—his body was hurriedly transported from Eshowe, where he died, to the Nkandla Forest. On the back of an ox cart he was carried across thirty kilometers of trackless
veld
and thrust into the ground without ceremony. They left the ox cart atop his grave as a marker, where it served its purpose for close to a century. Its remains were still there.