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Authors: Chris Ryan

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BOOK: Tenth Man Down
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‘Here, in the village.’
‘How far?’
‘Two minutes’ walk. Three minutes.’
‘What’ll he do?’
Joss shrugged. ‘How do I know? Consult the spirits for a remedy.’
I shot Mart a glance. ‘What d’you reckon?’
‘Better go. There’s nothing I can do for the kid. As long as we handle him gently, a short carry won’t hurt. This crowd could turn nasty any moment.’
‘Right, then. You carry him. Phil and me’ll come with you as escort.’
Joss put a hand on the mother’s shoulder, restraining her, and said something to her while Mart took the boy from her. So we set off in an amazing procession, Mart leading, the mother wailing at his elbow, myself and Phil immediately behind with Joss, then half the village. Some of the people had oil lamps, and several were carrying torches of burning reed bundles. Any moment, I thought, these grass huts are going on fire, and the whole village will be up in smoke.
Above the hubbub, I shouted, ‘Hadn’t somebody better warn the guy we’re coming?’
‘He knows,’ Joss called back. ‘The drums have told him.’
As we advanced between huts huddled under mango trees, I liked the feel of things less and less. The crowd was so hostile that I was glad we had pistols on our belts. I was happy to have Phil with me, too. In the flickering light, with his close-cropped dark head and hollow cheeks, he looked quite dangerous. The impression wasn’t misleading, either: he was the most hawkish member of the team, always keen to get out there and top somebody.
‘Whatever happens,’ I shouted to Mart, ‘we’re going in with the boy. I’m not leaving him alone with the witch doctor. I want to see what gives.’
In less than three minutes we were outside a big, circular hut with a thatched verandah running round it. The crowd dropped back and fell silent as we approached over beaten earth, leaving us alone outside the open doorway. The hut was pitch dark, but I was aware of movement and rustling noises inside, as if someone was making rapid preparations. Then a lamp flared, a curtain was drawn aside, and a voice said something in Nyanja.
‘Go inside,’ said Joss quietly. ‘The mother must hold the child.’
Mart handed over his burden. I think he felt the same as I did: that we’d better do what we were told. Phil was more sceptical. Even though he said nothing, I could sense him seething with indignation just behind me. But when the woman stepped forward, we all followed.
The air inside was full of a powerful smell, half animal, half acrid human sweat. A single, primitive oil lamp flickered on the ground to our right. Towards the back of the hut there was a kind of cubicle, walled in with hanging black material, wide enough to accommodate two standing figures. The left-hand one was ordinary: a man dressed in normal, scruffy clothes, bare-headed, bare-footed, using both hands to hold a book open in front of his chest. It was the right-hand figure that made me catch my breath: a tall man, six foot at least, dressed in a blood-red robe that reached almost to the ground, with a zebra skin slung over his left shoulder and diagonally across his chest. On his head was a hat like a big muffin, also of zebra skin. His face was dead white, covered in paint or ash, so that his mouth and eye sockets showed up black on a pale background. In his left hand he was flicking what looked like an animal tail vertically up and down, and in his right he held a curved black horn.
‘The tail is from giraffe, horn from buffalo,’ Joss whispered in my ear.
I could see how scared the mother was from the way she cringed in front of the doctor, especially when he began to grunt and moan and whisk his giraffe tail with a faster, jerking motion. But the helper spoke sharply, obviously ordering her to come closer, and she moved forward a step, so that the boy in her arms was only a couple of feet from the hissing hair.
As the witch doctor’s hand flew up and down, and shadows leapt about the grass roof like huge bats, the mask of a face began to twitch and gibber in a high-pitched, squeaky voice, letting out staccato bursts of sound that reminded me of machine-gun fire. I shot a sideways glance at Mart and saw his eyes switch from the doctor to his helper and back. Phil was still behind me.
Suddenly, the helper spoke, in a normal voice, and Joss translated for us: ‘The spirits are talking.’
‘What are they saying?’
Joss relayed the question, but all he got for a reply was an irritable shake of the head.
‘Eh,’ I muttered to Mart. ‘The helper guy’s a fraud. He’s pretending to read from that book, but it’s that dark he can’t see a bloody word.’
‘Fucking ridiculous!’ muttered Phil, but Mart, who was closer to the acolyte, said, ‘Fuck me, it’s a bible.’
I stared at the tattered edges. Sure enough, one title page was hanging open towards us, and the flickering light was strong enough for me to make out, in big type, THE BOOK OF DANIEL.
The gibbering outbursts rose even higher. The witch doctor’s eyes were tight shut. His head was rolling on his shoulders. Beads of sweat flew off his forehead. There was a touch of red about his lips. Blood? No, it was crimson froth. He was chewing something, leaves or roots or berries. Suddenly a shudder ran through his body and he stood stock still, holding the narrow end of the horn to his right temple. For a few seconds he remained motionless and silent. Then his lips moved and the twittering broke out again, this time in a steady stream.
The helper began to interpret.
‘He says evil spirits have come into the boy,’ Joss translated. ‘The trouble is in his head . . . His brain is damaged . . . He has bad pressure in his head . . . He is very sick.’
I bit back the impulse to say, ‘We know that,’ and asked, ‘What can he do about it? Can he give him anything?’
‘Wait, there is something else.’
The
sin’ganga
rolled his head and gibbered, the acolyte interpreted, Joss translated. ‘The boy will die. There is no medicine for this condition.’
There followed a pause of maybe half a minute, during which I found I was holding my breath. Then came the message. ‘His spirit is leaving him now.’
The mother, who’d been standing still and quiet, gave a sudden hoarse cry and sank to the ground, decanting the child out of its blanket on to the earth at the witch doctor’s feet.
What happened next, I’ll never be sure. I saw Mart go down on his knees to recover the boy, but then something soft brushed across my shoulders and a sudden draught put out the lamp. In the darkness I felt an intense chill close in on me.
Behind me, Phil gave a sharp exclamation of ‘Fucking hell!’ I heard a movement, looked round, and found he’d disappeared.
‘Phil!’ I said sharply. ‘Are you feeling anything?’
He didn’t answer.
‘Phil!’ I went. ‘Where are you?’
It was Mart who answered: ‘He’s back in the crowd.’
‘Did you feel anything just then?’
‘Cold,’ said Mart. ‘Freezing cold, horrible.’
‘I got it too,’ I told him. ‘It was deadly. How about pulling out?’
‘I’m okay.’ Mart sounded solid. ‘D’you want to?’
‘No, I’m okay to stay.’
That was what I said. But in fact I was shuddering and felt sick, as if gripped by fever. What surprised me most was that Phil had quit. Phil, the least scared of all our people, the toughest, the most punchy.
Through those unnerving seconds the twittering had kept up unabated. Then I heard Mart exclaim, ‘Shit! He’s gone!’
‘Who?’
‘The kid. No pulse. Breathing’s stopped. I’ll try mouth-to-mouth.’
‘No, for Christ’s sake!’ I told him. ‘If the people see you doing that, they’ll think you’re killing him.’
‘They think that anyway.’
‘Try it,’ I said. Then instantly I changed my mind and ordered, ‘Cancel that. Leave him!’
The crowd outside seemed to sense what had happened. The tide of voices swelled again. I heard more drums going in the distance, and at our feet the woman began to wail. Joss called out something in Nyanja, and a man came through from the back of the hut carrying another lamp.
Light showed that neither the witch doctor nor his assistant had moved. Both held exactly the same posture: the giraffe tail was still thrashing the air; spirit messages were still arriving. The woman was on the deck, with Mart on his knees beside her. Apart from Phil having vanished into the crowd, nothing had changed. Certainly there was nobody close behind me who could have flicked a garment or shawl over my shoulders.
The back of my neck was crawling. What was it that put the lamp out? What had produced that icy chill?
‘He says, white men must leave Kamanga,’ Joss translated.
‘Tell him we had nothing to do with the accident,’ I said. ‘It was a Kamangan driving the truck.’
‘He knows that. But he says white men bring evil to our country.’
‘We’re trying to help. The only reason we’re here is that your government invited us.’
That information produced a long pause. The witch doctor transferred the buffalo horn to his left hand and clawed at the air with his right, fingers spread, drawing in handfuls of air towards his head, as if plucking at the spirits who were talking to him. Several times he turned his hand slowly and brought it back towards his face, palm-first. But in the end his message was the same: ‘All white men must leave Kamanga.’
‘What happens if they don’t?’ Mart demanded.
‘They will die.’
‘All of them?’
Another pause, then, ‘Some.’
‘How many?’
‘To find this out, the
sin’ganga
needs to consult his bones.’
‘Okay, then,’ I agreed. ‘Tell him to do it.’
Later, I wished to hell I’d never issued the challenge. But at the time, in the heightened atmosphere of that stinking hut, one question seemed to lead on from another so fast that there was no time to think of possible consequences. Before I could start worrying, the acolyte was ordering the woman out, shooing her backwards as if she were a sheep.
‘She will have to pay for the consultation,’ said Joss.
‘It’s all right,’ I told him. ‘I’ll pay. How much is it?’
The answer came back, ‘Four thousand
kwatchas
. One dollar US.’
‘Okay. We’ll see to that.’
The woman rolled her dead child in its blanket and disappeared into the crowd with her pathetic burden. Wailing broke out, but the anger seemed to have given way to grief. The people began to move off, back into the middle of the village, leaving us alone.
The witch doctor was coming out of his trance. Convulsive shudders ran through his body, and he gave a few loud gasps. Red froth still hung around his mouth, but at last he opened his eyes and looked about, as if trying to get his bearings.
The acolyte, who’d disappeared into the blackness behind him, came out again into the light without his bible, holding a small, pear-shaped bag made of leather, with a draw-string gathering the neck. The witch doctor handed over his horn and giraffe tail, took the bag, then abruptly sank down on his haunches, his knees cracking as they bent. Then he started sweeping the flat of his right hand across the earth floor in front of him. Once again the helper stood at his master’s right shoulder.
A high-pitched humming started up, like the drone of bees. At first I thought it was coming from the helper, then I saw that the witch doctor had his lips pressed tight together as he produced the sound, which had a slight beat in it, so that it seemed to come and go. Shaking the bag, he tweaked the cord at the neck and shook out the contents. With a light, dry pattering about a dozen bones landed on the beaten earth. They were brown with age and use, and must have come from a small animal about the size of a hare.
After a few seconds’ scrutiny, he said something, speaking now in a normal voice, surprisingly deep.
‘Death,’Joss translated. ‘He sees death.’
‘Fucking roll on!’ went Mart under his breath.
‘We’ve had a death already,’ I said.
‘More now.’
‘Who?’
‘Wait.’
After a pause and more humming, the wrinkled old hands gathered the bones, shook them like dice and threw them again, harder than before, so that they clicked on each other and spread out over a wider area of earth. I saw that the man’s right-hand index finger was missing.
This time the pattern seemed to give an immediate answer.
‘Ten will die,’ Joss translated.
‘Ten what?’
‘Ten white persons.’
‘Men?’
‘And women. Either.’
‘Why ten?’
As the questions were relayed through our interpreter, the witch doctor never glanced in our direction, but kept his eyes down, fixed on the bones, his right hand, with its missing finger, stretched out downwards over them. There was a long silence before he gave his next answer.
BOOK: Tenth Man Down
2.54Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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