Running was a familiar tribal custom further south and east, she knew. No one would have looked twice at a Masai or a Zulu running across the veldt. But here the girls were followed by cheers, whistles and hoots from Matadi, Yoruba and Kikuyu farmers whose traditions were rooted in fields and forests. Only the boys from the orphanage, out working in the fields with the farmers, looked on silently. And, if the truth be told, a little jealously.
Anastasia and her girls were dressed in clothing suited to their efforts — and again this broke with tribal traditions. Instead of the modest traditional costume of buba and iro, such as Celine, in fact, was wearing in the parliament building away downriver, they were dressed in loose trousers and vests. The trousers were light, baggy and modest. The vests were high-necked and sleeved to the elbow. When the girls set out, they could have been going to church. The trouble was, of course, that a lot of the water they used to rehydrate their bodies came out again, almost instantly, as perspiration. And, try as she might, Anastasia could not overcome the fact that after a couple of miles the trousers moulded themselves to straining buttocks and pumping thighs, while the vests effectively became as revealing as layers of body paint.
This evening, in an attempt to spare the girls’ blushes, Anastasia led them through the cultivated fields first, with the sun setting warmly on their backs, then she swung right off the beaten track and down southwards towards the river. Here, although the soil was fertile, the jungle was thickest. As the sun sank into the tops of the trees far down the delta itself, and the moon began to rise behind her left shoulder across the wide expanse of the river, she led the girls back towards the orphanage, past the township clustered around it and the enhanced landing and docking facilities that had so recently been built there. But it was more than the gathering cool of the evening that made her skin rise into goosebumps, her nipples clench to firm points beneath the soaking cling of her green vest. Suddenly Ado and Esan were at either shoulder.
‘Someone’s watching us,’ whispered Esan.
‘I feel it,’ gasped Anastasia.
‘I don’t like it,’ hissed Ado.
Anastasia could see her point. Everyone who watched them usually was open — and noisy — about it. This was something else. This was someone watching them in secret from somewhere in the nearby jungle. Her mind suddenly flooded with fears about the news that had arrived from several quarters — not least from Robin on Skype — that the Army of Christ was back.
Automatically, Anastasia picked up the pace, looking around carefully — hopefully without giving her suspicions away to whoever was spying on her and her girls. Let it not be Odem, she prayed. We are not ready for the Army of Christ! A worm of self-doubt gnawed at her, whispering, We will never be ready for the Army of Christ. But all she could see was the jungle through whose edge they were running. The slope down to the river on her left. The river, occasionally visible through the trees and the undergrowth. The darkness of the gathering shadows in between.
Without conscious thought, she began to push right, up a slight incline, towards the brightness of the first fields — empty now as everyone had trooped back to town for their evening meals. But even deserted fields would be better than the shadows, she thought. A little breeze sprang up, running down towards the coast. It was a furnace-hot wind, locally called Karisoke’s Breath, which often blew just after sunset. Today it made the branches overhead heave and sway, filling the jungle with sinister hissing whispers. And, abruptly, there in her imagination, stepping straight out of her nightmares came Ngoboi.
Ngoboi danced in the gathering darkness at the edge of her vision — never clear when she looked directly at him. But as she ran uphill, fighting to get her little command out of the sinister, watching jungle, he swirled and capered before her. She could see the flash of his raffia skirts as they twirled out of sight behind bushes and trees. She could hear the beat of his dancing feet in the pounding of her heart. The deadly magic of his devilish song in the blood rushing through her ears and in the wind rustling through the trees.
Anastasia and her girls were running full-tilt and very near at the edge of panic, when she burst out of the jungle by the river’s edge and plunged on to the new slipway. The ghostly, taunting presence of Ngoboi was replaced by the unexpected bustle of two huge hovercraft unloading what looked like hundreds of soldiers, their transport and their kit. Anastasia did not hesitate. As though the reality of what lay before her was just the product of another feverish dream, she pounded relentlessly into the middle of it. Until suddenly somebody tall and unbelievably familiar straightened and turned to confront her. It might as well have been Ngoboi for all the credence her reeling brain was willing to give what her staring eyes could see.
‘Privyet, Nastia,’ Ivan said in that familiar voice, in those familiar terms that took her back to her childhood before the nightmares began. ‘Hi, Nastia.’
‘Vernis!’ she spat. ‘Get back!’ And she began to add, ‘Ya nenaviju tebya!’ I hate you!’ But somehow it came out as ‘Ya lublu tebya!’ — the exact opposite — instead. Then, like the heroine of the romantic fiction that she so despised, she fainted dead away.
If it had been a romance, Ivan would have caught her and carried her tenderly to safety in his strong but gentle arms. It was not. So she went down like a pile of bricks at his feet. Had the slipway been made of concrete, she would have done herself serious damage. But it was just a rough-hewn slope of red riverbank.
So it was, as Robin observed to Richard later, the mud and not the man that saved her.
Mission
‘Ivan! My God, what have you done to her?’ cried Robin, simply horrified.
At first glance it looked as though Anastasia had been shot in the head. The side of her face and the T-shirt that clung to her like a coat of paint were liberally splattered with a thick red mess. Her short hair hung in mud-thick, red rats’ tails. Her mouth gaped and her eyelids flickered, showing nothing but white between the trembling lashes.
‘Nothing!’ snarled the Russian angrily. ‘The silly little zaychek keeled over the moment she saw me. This is red mud, not blood. But I couldn’t think of anywhere else to bring her, except to you.’ He held her out a little helplessly, like a child with a broken toy. There was more than anger in his eyes. There was pain and confusion. And Robin suddenly started feeling sorry for him.
She looked across her cabin at the bed which was only just large enough to accommodate Richard and herself. It was made up with a pristine, perfectly starched white cotton sheet. She closed her eyes, closed the case she had just put on it and swung it on to the floor. ‘Put her down here, Ivan,’ she said wearily. ‘Then go and get a medic. And Richard. In the meantime, leave her to me.’