The Covenant: A Novel Read online

  When assembled, the arrow was so frail that of itself it could scarcely have killed a small bird, yet so cleverly engineered that if properly used, it could cause the death of an elephant. It represented a triumph of human ingenuity; any being who had the intellect to devise this arrow could in time contrive ways to build a skyscraper or an airplane.

  When the final tip was in place—handled with extreme care, for if it accidentally scratched a man, he would die—Gumsto used hand signs to direct his hunters to close in, but as they did so he detected one last avenue down which the rhino might escape if it saw the hunters. Ordinarily he would have placed one of his practiced men at that spot, but they were required elsewhere, so perforce he turned to his son, and with deep apprehension said, ‘Keep him from running this way.’

  He prayed that Gao would perform well, but he had doubts. The boy was going to become a fine hunter; of that there was no doubt. But he was slow in mastering the tricks, and occasionally Gumsto had the horrifying thought: What if he never learns? Who, then, will lead this clan? Who will keep the children alive on the long marches?

  Gumsto had been right to be apprehensive, for when the rhinoceros became aware of the hunters, it galloped with great fury right at Gao, who proved quite powerless to turn the beast aside. With a contemptuous snort it broke through the circle of hunters and galloped free.

  The men were not hesitant to condemn Gao for his lack of bravery, since they were hungry and the escaped rhino could have fed the entire clan, and Gumsto was appalled, not at his son’s poor performance in this particular hunt, but at the grave danger his clan faced. Twice recently he had sensed his age—a shortness of breath and a weakness at unexpected moments—and the safety of his people weighed heavily upon him. The inadequacy of his son reflected on him, and he was ashamed.

  In sore irritation he abandoned the rhinoceros and concentrated on a herd of little springbok. Assuming full control of his men, he brought them to a spot from which they could take good aim at two animals, but neither was hit. Then Gumsto himself stalked another and lodged his arrow in the lower part of the beast’s neck.

  Nothing visible happened, for the arrow’s weight was quite inadequate to kill the beast; all it accomplished was to deposit the tip beneath the tough outer skin, where the poison would be free to disseminate. And now the excellence of this arrow manifested itself, for the springbok, feeling the slight sting, found a tree against which to rub, and had the arrow been of one piece, it would have been dislodged. Instead, it came apart at one of the collars, allowing the shaft to fall free while the poisoned tip worked its way ever deeper into the wound.

  The springbok did not die immediately, for the effect of the poisoned arrow was debilitating rather than cataclysmic, and this meant that the men would have to track their doomed prey for most of that day. During the first hours the springbok scarcely knew it was in trouble; it merely felt an itching, but as the poison slowly took effect, strength ebbed and dizziness set in.

  At dusk Gumsto predicted, ‘Soon he goes down,’ and he was right, for now the springbok could scarcely function. Even when it saw the hunters approach, it was powerless to leap aside. It gasped, staggered, and took refuge beside a tree, against which it leaned. Pitifully it called to its vanished companions, then its knees began to crumble and all was confusion as the little men ran up with stones.

  The butchering was a meticulous affair, for Gumsto had to calculate exactly how much of the poisoned meat to toss aside; not even the hyenas would eat that. The first concern of the hunters was to save the blood; to them any liquid was precious. The liver and gizzard were ripped out and eaten on the spot, but the chunks of meat were taboo until taken back to camp and ritually apportioned so that every member of the clan could have a share.

  Gumsto could not be proud of his accomplishment. Instead of bringing home a huge rhinoceros, he had produced only a small springbok; his people were going to go hungry, but what was worse was that at the tracking only he had foreseen which way the animals were going to move, and this was ominous. Since the clan knew nothing of agriculture or husbandry, it lived only on such meat as their poisoned arrows killed, and if those arrows were not used properly, their diet would be confined to marginal foods: tubers, bulbs, melons, rodents, snakes and such grubs as the women might find. This band had better develop a master-hunter quickly.

  Normally, the son of a leader acquired his father’s skills, but with Gao this had not happened, and Gumsto suspected that the deficiency was his: I should not have allowed him to drift into peculiar ways.

  He remembered his son’s behavior at their first big hunt together; when other lads were hacking up the carcass, Gao was preoccupied with cutting off the tips of the horns, and Gumsto realized then that there might be trouble ahead.

  ‘You’re collecting them to hold colors?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes. I need seven.’

  ‘Gao, our clan has always had some man like you, showing us the spirits of the animals we seek. Every band has, and we treasure the work they do. But this should come after you’ve learned to track and kill, not before.’

  Wherever the San people had traveled during the preceding two thousand years, they had left behind on rocks and in caves a record of their passage: great leaping animals crossing the sky with brave men pursuing them, and much of the good luck the San hunters had enjoyed stemmed from their careful attention to the spirits of the animals.

  But before prayers, before obeisance to the animal spirits, before anything else on earth, the band must eat, and for a lad of sixteen to be delinquent in the skills of obtaining food was worrisome.

  And then a shameful thought crept up on Gumsto: If Gao turns out to be a proficient hunter, he will be entitled to Naoka. As long as he remains the way he is, I face no trouble from that quarter. That exquisite woman was reserved for a real man, a master-hunter, and he himself was the only one available.

  So when the meager portions of meat were distributed, he asked his wife airily, ‘Have you talked with the widow Kusha about her daughter?’

  ‘Why should I?’ Kharu growled.

  ‘Because Gao needs a wife.’

  ‘Let him find one.’ Kharu was the daughter of a famous hunter and took nonsense from no one.

  ‘What’s he to do?’

  Kharu had had enough. Rushing at her husband, she shouted for all to hear, ‘It’s your job, worthless! You haven’t taught him to hunt. And no man can claim a wife till he’s killed his antelope.’

  Gumsto weighed carefully what to say next. He was not truly frightened of his tough old wife, but he was attentive, and he was not sure how he ought to broach this delicate matter of moving Naoka into his ménage.

  How beautiful she was! A tall girl, almost four feet nine, she was exquisite as she lay in the dust, her white teeth showing against her lovely brown complexion. To see her flawless skin close to Kharu’s innumerable wrinkles was to witness a miracle, and it was impossible to believe that this golden girl could ever become like that old crone. Naoka was precious, a resonant human being at the apex of her attractiveness, with the voice of a whispering antelope and the litheness of a gazelle. Desperately Gumsto wanted her.

  ‘I was thinking of Naoka,’ he said carefully.

  ‘Fine girl,’ Kharu said. ‘Gao could marry her if he knew how to hunt.’

  ‘I wasn’t thinking of Gao.’

  He was not allowed to finish his line of reasoning, for Kharu shouted across the narrow space, ‘Naoka! Come here!’

  Idly, and with the provocative lassitude of a young girl who knows herself to be desirable, Naoka rolled from the hip on which she had been resting, adjusted her bracelets, looked to where Kharu waited, rose slowly, and delicately brushed the dust from her body, taking special care with her breasts, which glowed in the sun. Picking her way carefully, she stepped the few feet into Kharu’s quarters.

  ‘Good wishes,’ she said as if completing a journey of miles.

  ‘Are you still grieving?’ Kharu asked.
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  ‘No.’ The girl spoke with lovely intonation, each word suggesting others that might have been said. ‘No, Kharu, dearest friend, I’m just living.’ And she squatted on her haunches, knees and thighs tightly flexed, her bottom just off the ground.

  ‘That’s a poor life, Naoka dear. That’s why I called.’

  ‘Why?’ Her face was a placid mask of innocence.

  ‘Because I want to help you find a husband.’

  Disdainfully the girl waved her right arm, indicating the bleak settlement: ‘And where do you expect to find me a husband?’

  ‘My son Gao needs a wife.’

  ‘Has he spoken to Kusha? She has a baby daughter.’

  ‘I wasn’t really thinking of Kusha … or her daughter.’

  ‘No?’ the girl asked softly, smiling at Gumsto in a way to make him dizzy.

  ‘I’ve been thinking of you,’ Kharu said, adding quickly, ‘Now if you married Gao …’

  ‘Me?’ the girl said in what seemed astonishment. Appealing to Gumsto, she added, ‘I’d never be the proper wife for Gao, would I?’

  ‘And why not?’ Kharu demanded, rising.

  ‘Because I’m like you, Kharu,’ the girl said quietly. ‘The daughter of a great hunter. And I was the wife of a hunter, not quite as good as Gumsto.’ She flashed a look of power at the little man, then added, ‘I could never marry Gao. A man who has not yet killed his eland.’

  For this terrible dismissal she had chosen a freighted word: eland. The clan coexisted with the antelope, finding in them their physical and spiritual needs. They divided the breed into some twenty categories, each its own distinguished unit with its own terrain and individual habits. Any hunter ignorant of the variations of the antelope was ignorant of life.

  There were the elegant little klipspringers, not much larger than a big bird; the small impala with black stripes marking their rumps; and the graceful springbok that could leap as if they had wings. There were the duiker, red and short-horned, and a universe of middle-sized animals: steenbok, gemsbok, blesbok and bushbuck, each with a different type of horn, each with its distinctive coloring.

  These prolific animals of the middle range the hunters stalked incessantly; they provided much food. But there were four larger antelope that fascinated the little men, for one of these animals would feed a clan: the bearded wildebeest that trampled the savanna in their millions; the lyre-horned nyala; the huge kudu with its wildly twisting horns and white stripes; and rarest of all, the glorious sable with its enormous back-curved horns, so enchanting that hunters sometimes stood transfixed when they chanced to see one. Beast of beauty, animal of wonder, the sable appeared only rarely, as an apparition, and men at their campfires would often recall where and when they had seen their first. Not often was a sable killed, for the gods had given them perceptiveness beyond normal; they kept to the darker groves and rarely appeared at exposed watering holes.

  That left the animal which the hunters treasured above all others: the giant eland, taller than a man, a remarkable beast with horns that twisted three or four times from forehead to tip, a tuft of black hair between the horns, a massive dewlap, and a distinctive white stripe separating forequarters from the bulk of the body. To the hunters this stately animal provided food to the body, courage to the heart and meaning to the soul. An eland was walking proof that gods existed, for who else could have contrived such a perfect animal? It gave structure to San life, for to catch it men had to be clever and well organized. It served also as spiritual summary to a people lacking cathedrals and choirs; its movements epitomized the universe and formed a measuring rod for human behavior. The eland was not seen as a god, but rather as proof that gods existed, and when, after the hunt, the meat of its body was apportioned, all who ate shared its quintessence, a belief in no way unusual; thousands of years after the death of Gumsto, other religions would arise in which the ritual of eating of a god’s body would confer benediction.

  So Naoka, faithful to the traditions of her people, could laugh at old Kharu and reject the idea of a marriage with Gao: ‘Let him prove himself. Let him kill his eland.’

  It was now obvious to Kharu that unless she made it possible for her son Gao to qualify as a hunter, and thus marry Naoka, that young woman was going to steal Gumsto, who showed himself pathetically eager for the theft. It became advisable for the old woman to encourage hunts, but to do this she must ensure an abundant supply of poison for the arrows. That had always been her responsibility, and she was prepared to find a new supply now.

  Like her husband, she was deeply worried about the safe continuance of her clan, and she saw that to protect it she must instruct other women in the collecting of poisons, but none had demonstrated any special skill. Clearly, Naoka was the one on whom the clan must depend in the future, and it was Kharu’s job to induct her, regardless of the fear in which she held her.

  ‘Come,’ she muttered one morning, ‘we must replenish the poison.’ And the two women, so ill-matched and so suspicious of each other, set forth upon their search.

  They walked nearly half a day toward the north, two women alone on the savanna with always the chance of encountering a lion or a rhinoceros, but driven by the necessity of finding that substance which alone would enable the band to survive. So far they had found nothing.

  ‘What we’re looking for is beetles,’ old Kharu said as they searched the arid land, ‘but only the ones with two white dots.’ In fact, they were not looking for adult beetles, only for their larvae, and always of that special breed with the white specks and, Kharu claimed, an extra pair of legs.

  It was impossible to explain how, over a period of more than ten thousand years, the women and their ancestors had isolated this little creature which alone among beetles was capable of producing a poison of remorseless virulence. How had such a discovery been made? No one remembered, it had occurred so very long ago. But when men can neither read nor write, when they had nothing external to distract their minds, they can spend their lives in minute observation, and if they have thousands of years in which to accumulate folk wisdom, it can become in time wisdom of a very high order. Such people discover plants which supply subtle drugs, and ores which yield metals, and signs in the sky directing the planting of crops, and laws governing the tides. Gumsto’s San people had had time to study the larvae of a thousand different insects, finding at last the only one that produced a deadly poison. Old Kharu was the repository of this ancient lore, and now she was initiating young Naoka.

  ‘There he is!’ she cried, delighted at having tracked down her prey, and with Naoka at her side, watching attentively, she lay prone, her face a few inches from earth: ‘Always look for the tiny marks he leaves. They point to his hiding place below.’ And with her grubbing stick she dug out the harmless larva. Later, when it had been dried in the sun, pulverized and mixed with gummy substances obtained from shrubs, it would convert into one of the most venomous toxins mankind would discover, slow-acting but inevitably fatal.

  ‘Now my son can kill his eland,’ Kharu said, but Naoka smiled.

  Only two tasks remained before the imperiled clan was free to embark upon its heroic journey: Gumsto must lead his men to kill a ritual eland to ensure survival; and his wife must seek out the ostriches. Gumsto attacked his problem first.

  On the night before the hunt began, he sat by the fire and told his men, ‘I have sometimes followed an eland for three days, hit him with my arrow, then tracked him for two more. And when I stood over his fallen body, beautiful and slain, tears sprang from my eyes, even though I had tasted no water for three days.’

  The effect of this statement was ruined when Kharu growled, ‘We’re not interested in what you did. What are you going to do this time? To help your son kill his eland?’ Gumsto, staring lasciviously at Naoka, ignored the question, and was profoundly excited when the girl winked at him, but on the hunt his desire to find an inheritor of his skills drove him to work with Gao as never before.

  ‘In tracking, you notice
everything, Gao. This touch here means that the animal leans slightly to the right.’

  ‘Is it an eland?’

  ‘No, but it is a large antelope. If we came upon it, we’d be satisfied.’

  ‘But in your heart,’ Gao said, ‘you would want it to be an eland?’

  Gumsto did not reply, and on the fifth day he spotted an eland spoor, and the great chase was on. Avidly he and his men trailed a herd of some two dozen animals, and at last they spotted them. Gumsto explained to his son which of the animals was the most likely target, and with caution they moved in.

  The delicate arrows flew. Gumsto’s struck. The eland rubbed itself against a tree, and the poison collected by Kharu and Naoka began to exert its subtle effect. One day, two days, then a moonless night settled over the savanna and in darkness the great beast made a last effort to escape, pushing its anguished legs up a small hill, slowly, slowly, with the little men always following, never rushing their attack, for they were confident.

  At dawn the eland swayed from side to side, no longer in control of its movements. The fine horns were powerless; the head lowered; and a violent sickness attacked its innards. He coughed to clear himself of this undefined pain, then tried to gallop off.

  The animal stumbled, recovered, and got to the top of the sandy rise, turning there to face his pursuers. When he saw Gumsto charging at him with a club, he leaped forward to repel this challenge, but all parts of his body failed at once, and he fell in a heap. But still he endeavored to protect himself, lashing out with his hooves.

  And so he lay, fighting with phantoms and with the shadows of little men, defending himself until the last moment when rocks began smashing down upon his face and he rolled in the dust.

  With intense passion Gumsto wished to utter some cry that would express his religious joy in slaying this noble beast, but his throat was parched and he could do nothing but reach down and touch the fallen eland. As he did so he saw that Gao had tears for the death of this creature, and with a wild leap he caught his son’s hands and danced with him beside the eland.