From the Heart of Darkness (24 page)

Only then did he peer through the tent flap.

*   *   *

Vettius leaped sideways, kicking at the giant's knee. The ragged hobnails scored his opponent's calf, but the giant's deceptively swift hand closed on the Roman's outer tunic. For a heartsick instant the heavy fabric held; then it ripped and Vettius tumbled free. The giant lunged after him. Vettius backpedaled and, as his enemy straightened, launched himself across the intervening space. The heel of his outstretched boot slammed into the pit of the giant's stomach. Again the iron nails made a bloody ruin of the skin. The titan's breath whooshed out, but its half-ton bulk did not falter at the blow. Vettius, thrown back by the futile impact, twisted away from the giant's unchecked rush. The creature's heels grazed past, thudded with mastodontic force. The soldier took a shuddering breath and lurched to his feet. A long arm clawed for his face. The Roman staggered back, barely clear of the spade-like talons. The monster pressed after him relentlessly, and Vettius was forced at last to recognize what should have been hopelessly obvious from the first: he could not possibly kill the giant with his bare hands.

A final strategem took shape. With desperate purpose Vettius began to circle and retreat before his adversary. He should have planned it, measured it, but now he could only trust to luck and the giant's incredible weight. Backed almost against a corner post, he crouched and waited. Arms wide, the giant hesitated—then rushed in for the kill. Vettius met him low, diving straight at his opponent instead of making a vain effort to get clear again. The Roman's arms locked about the great ankles and the giant wavered, then began to topple forward. As he fell his taloned fingers clamped crushingly on Vettius' ribs.

The unyielding basalt altar met the giant's skull with shattering force. Bone slammed dense rock with the sound of a maul on a wedge. Warm fluids spattered the snow while the Sarmatians moaned in disbelief. Hydaspes knelt screaming on the ground, his fists pummeling terror from a mind that had forgotten even the invocation it had just completed. The earth began pitching like an unmastered horse. It split in front of the wizard where the tooth had been planted. The crack raced jaggedly through the crowd and beyond.

“Lucius!” Dama cried, lifting the corner of the tent.

The soldier pulled his leg free from the giant's pinioning body and rolled toward the voice, spilling endwise the only Sarmatian alert enough to try to stop him. Dama dropped the tent wall and nodded toward the front, his hands full of crossbow. “There's horses waiting out there. I'll slow them up.”

Vettius stamped on a hand that thrust into the tent.

“Get out, damn you!” the merchant screamed. “There aren't any more weapons in here.”

A Sarmatian rolled under the furs with a feral grimace and a dagger in his hand. The soldier hefted a full case of books and hurled it at his chest. Wood and bone splintered loudly. Vettius turned and ran toward the horses.

The back flap ripped apart in the haste of the Sarmatians who had remembered its existence. The first died with a dart through his eye as Dama jerked the cocking handle of his weapon. The next missile fell into position. The merchant levered back the bow again. At full cock the sear released, snapped the dart out into the throat of the next man. The Sarmatian's life dissolved in a rush of red flame as the bolt pricked his carotid to speed its load of poison straight to the brain. The third man stumbled over his body, screamed. Two darts pinged off his mail before one caught the armpit he bared when he threw his hands over his face.

Relentless as a falling obelisk, Dama stroked out the full magazine of lethal missiles, shredding six screaming victims in the space of a short breath. The entrance was plugged by a clot of men dying in puling agony. Tossing his empty bow at the writhing chaos behind him, Dama ran through the front flap and vaulted onto his horse.

“We'll never get clear!” Vettius shouted as he whipped his mount. “They'll run us down in relays before we reach the Danube.”

Wailing Sarmatians boiled around both ends of the tent, shedding helmets, weapons—any encumbrance. Their voices honed a narrow blade of terror.

“The control,” Dama shouted back as the pair dodged among the crazy pattern of wagon tongues. “He used his own mind and a monkey's to control something not quite a man.”

“So what?”

“That last tooth didn't come from a man. It didn't come from anything like a man.”

Something scaly, savage and huge towered over the wreckage of the tent. It cocked its head to glare at the disappearing riders while scrabbling with one stubby foreleg to stuff a black-robed figure farther into its maw. Vettius twisted in his saddle to stare in amazement at the coffin-long jaws gaping twenty feet in the air and the spined backfin like that of no reptile of the past seventy million years.

The dragon hissed, leaving a scarlet mist of blood to hang in the air as it ducked its head for another victim.

OUT OF AFRICA

Forty years of African sunlight glinting along Sir John Holborn's gun barrels had bleached his eyes so that even after long retirement from hunting they were the frosty gray of bullets cast when the lead was too hot. The chill of those eyes softened when they turned from the heavy rifle over the mantle to his young grand-nephew.

“Go ahead,” Sir John urged. “Pick it up. I wasn't much older than you when I took my first elephant.”

Randall carefully lifted the double rifle from its pegs and hefted it. “It's so big!” he marvelled.

Holborn chuckled and took the weapon himself. “Has to be big, lad, or the return of the rifle would break your shoulder.” While his thoughts slipped into the past, the old hunter glanced around his trophy room. From the far wall projected the massive head and forequarters of a bull elephant, mounted as if trumpeting. With a single fluid motion, Holborn spun and trained the rifle on the gape of the beast's mouth where a shot would penetrate straight to the brain. Chuckling again, he turned back to the boy and opened the rifle's double breech.

“See lad,” he said, “this is an eight-bore. A round lead ball to fit this barrel would weigh two ounces, and the cylindrical bullets I used were a good deal heavier. You couldn't put such power in a smaller rifle.”

“My father shoots elephant,” Randall said doubtfully, “and his rifle isn't that big.”

“Aye, your father says there's been no need for old cannons like this since 1890 and nitro powder,” Holborn agreed. “Well, maybe it did go out of date fifteen years ago; but if I went to Africa again, this is the rifle I'd carry there. Your father may be right to say his .450 express rifle will kill anything on the continent—but will it
stop
anything, that's what I want to know. Your Latin is fresher than mine. Do you remember a tag about Africa…?”

“‘Always something new out of Africa,'” the boy suggested, translating Pliny's words for the old man.

“That's it,” Holborn agreed, “and it's true, too. If you ever hunt Africa, don't make the mistake of thinking you know all about her. She'll kill you sure if you think that.”

“Why did you stop hunting, Uncle John?” Randall asked curiously, gazing in wonder at the trophies of five continents on the walls around him.

“Um,” the old hunter grunted, letting the rifle cradle naturally in the crook of his left arm. “For some hunters, there's one chance for a real trophy. After that, it's all the same whether you took it or missed. Gordon-Cummings had his when he bagged a rhino with five feet of horn, while Meyerling muffed an easy shot at an elephant he swore carried a quarter ton of ivory. When you've had that shot, the fire goes out of the sport, and it's never the same again. And I, I had my shot.…”

Randall could see the old man's mind focusing on the past. “Tell me about it, Uncle John,” he pleaded.

“Perhaps I should, lad,” Holborn replied. “I shan't be around much longer to keep the story, and perhaps some day—but no matter. My last hunt was on the Kagera River, west and north of Lake Victoria. The country was all papyrus swamp.”

“But what could you do in that?” the boy asked in puzzlement.

“Hunt hippo, lad,” Holborn replied with a laugh, “and very political hippo they were. That was in '92, you see, and—well, it's an old story and doesn't matter much any more. Our relations with the Kaiser were a good deal better then, and it occurred to some gentlemen in London and Berlin that King Leopold was showing himself quite unfit to rule the Congo Basin. Perhaps Britain and Germany could do better, they thought. Well, nothing came of it, of course … but negotiations got to the point that the Foreign Office thought they'd like to have a man on the ground. They contacted me because no eyebrows would raise at the news Sir John Holborn was back in the bush again. And so there I was, in German East Africa where it borders Uganda and the Congo.

“There were hippos in the river. Even if I hadn't cared to try them, I had to keep up the pretence of being strictly a hunter. It was difficult, though, because none of the local boys would so much as guide me into the swamps around their village. They were afraid of the
jimpegwes
that lived there, they said.

“Now I hadn't heard the word before, but it was clear enough from the natives' description what they meant. After all, only three big animals live in the swamps: the kob and lechwe antelopes that can walk on the marshes with their broad, spreading hooves; and the hippo that browse the edges of the reed mats and keep channels open between them. When the natives said the jimpegwe was a big animal that ate reeds and had a terrible temper, they had to mean some sort of hippo.

“Some sort—that was the key. All the natives agreed the the jimpegwe was bigger than imkoko, as they called the hippo. They said in fact that it killed hippos that wandered into its territory. As I heard about how big and terrible the jimpegwe was, I began to dream of surprising the world with a breed of hippo as much bigger than the known variety as the white rhino is bigger than the black. That would put it in a class with the elephant, you know. After a day of hearing those stories while I tried to hire guides and bearers, I knew I'd have to get into the swamp if it meant lugging my own kit.

“Which is very nearly what it did mean, as it turned out. The local natives accompanied me to the edge of the swamp, but nothing I could offer would bring them further. I couldn't entirely blame them. They had no reason to trust my eight-bore, and hippos can be very dangerous indeed. I've seen a native bitten in half by an old bull he'd harpooned. The hippo spat out the pieces, of course, but the beast's diet was of no concern to the poor fellow by then.

“In any case, only the three boys I'd brought from the Coast would go in with me. I needed them to clear a path.

“I travelled as lightly as I could, carrying some biscuit and a water bottle besides rifle, compass, and six extra shells. Even so, it took us over an hour to cut through the reeds to what seemed a likely stand beside an open channel that zig-zagged between the reed mats.

“The swamp had an eerie feel to it. The papyrus shot up straight stalks fifteen feet in the air, where they tufted into bracts like bomb-bursts. There were no taller trees in sight to give a sense of direction, since the reeds were growing on top of the water itself. They had built up thick pads of vegetation over the centuries. Beneath that, I knew, the water might be ten feet deep. The quiver of the mat reminded me of that fact every time a breeze touched the papyrus bracts. The channel itself was covered with the poisonous green of swamp cabbage, so bitter that not even the hippos will eat it. The heat and insects were as unpleasant as anywhere else in Africa, but this swamp had as well an oppressive miasma of age that went beyond all lesser annoyances. After an hour of waiting, the realization grew on me that this swamp was unchanged since Cheops built his pyramid. Even a million years before that, the same swamp had squatted here like a cancer on the heart of Africa.

“There was no disguising its evil. Even on the Nile then, the papyrus sometimes swallowed steamers and held them till the passengers had all starved … and the Nile was like the Serpentine compared to the Kagera.

“The boys and I didn't have the swamp to ourselves. There were hootings and splashings from the interior, no telling how far away. Still, nothing came down the channel beside us. The reeds shuddering overhead cut off vision except toward the open water. I began to feel as I had when tracking a wounded buffalo through heavy brush. By mid-afternoon, I thoroughly regretted the whole expedition. I had determined to go on with the Queen's business the next day, leaving that damnable swamp.

“One of the boys touched me then, but I'd already heard the sounds. We had found our jimpegwe. Something big had begun browsing at our reed pad, splashing and making the whole island tremble. It was downwind of us and only a few hundred yards away, though I wasn't particularly worried. No hippo on earth could plow straight through a mat of papyrus. No matter how irrascible the jimpegwe was, it had to approach us by open water where I'd have a clear shot.

“The jimpegwe scented us, all right. There was a loud splash and a bellow the like of which I never heard before or since. The reed mat began to shiver. To my horror, I realized that the sound I heard was that of a heavy body tearing its way through the four-foot thick pad of interlaced vegetation to get to us. The boys and I both knew then that whatever the jimpegwe was, it was no hippo.

“The boys panicked and tried to run back down the path we had cut that morning. They were too blind with fear to choose their footing. Their legs stabbed down into the mat as deep as their hips, and as soon as they struggled free, covered with squirming red leeches, they did the same thing again.

“I stood my ground, though all I could see were the swaying reeds a foot in front of my face. Sixty is no age to begin running through swamps. Besides, the noise told me that the jimpegwe was crashing through the pad much faster than I could have run anyway.