'I thought all graves were human.'
'The dippers were really sacred and symbolic things which were put in the grave of a bull which had been specially slaughtered and buried with elaborate ritual. The dippers are ritual urns and were cursed against being used by humans. It's known as a beast burial ceremony. The eggheads talk themselves into knots about them — all sorts of theories about their being relics of the bull cult of the Hamitic peoples of the Nile Valley, and so on endlessly. Yet here we have the same thing at The Hill, thousands of miles away, and not a trace of a link anywhere in Africa between. I think differently about them. You see, my. . my heart tells me otherwise.'
I was still mystified, unable to equate anything she was saying with ourselves.
'I've put myself pretty ruthlessly in the mental dock since you left,' she went on. 'I couldn't just laugh you off, or the things which began our love. But I did ask myself whether I had allowed my emotions to run away with me.' She added, apparently at a tangent: 'But I know she did it for great love'
We both understood whom she meant but I repeated the word, to hear her explanation.
'She?'
'Our queen, Guy.' Now the answers tumbled out. 'When I saw it I realized that I had to have a ring like hers for our love too. I understood deep down that it was she who had offered the sacrifice.
''Saw what, Nadine?'
'In all the other graves the bodies are buried in the traditional way: in a sitting position, arms flexed, chin on knees, facing north. Not she. She.. she..
'What are you trying to say?'
'She had them lay her body out- in the love-making position. She must have died after the king and she believed she was going to him again. They were both in their prime and it was their faith that they would meet again in the next world. And she expected him to make love to her. All the things the stuffy old professors call funerary urns aren't that at all. They're for her perfumes, her powders and her cosmetics. She wanted him to find her in death as he had done in life: beautiful, perfumed, lying waiting for his love. It was a lover's grave, Guy. Now do you understand about the ring? And the occasion when I had decided you should hear this from me?'
The picture of her standing in the trench flooded back to me. I was overwhelmed. I said the first thing that came to mind.
'What has all this to do with sacrifice?'
She started to reach out her hand to me but hesitated at the barrier still between us. Her words became a torrent.
'I should really thank you for what you did by walking out, Guy. You taught me to understand her. When a woman's heart cries out as mine did — and as hers must have done — it looks round for some physical thing to break in sympathy. It's just got to tell — the world, God, anyone — it's breaking. You've got to say it somehow or go mad. Her king went away in death and her heart burst. It's as if I had inherited her grief along with her ring. When a heart bleeds, there must be blood. I know. She found release in sacrifice. The difference between us is that I don't, like her, have to crash the barrier of death. That's why I'm here and I thank God I can still reach out and touch you.'
She choked and got up and went quickly to the stone parapet, staring in the direction of The Hill. I rose and went to her. Had I remained sitting, however, the invader could never have got past my gun and perhaps we might not have been drawn into the subsequent turmoil of events. ·
She said very slowly and deliberately. 'Since — you — went — away — '
The strange timbre of her voice was like the sound of bells muted by grief.
Four short, simple, terrible words, my darling: "since you went away":
I did not see, only sensed him. I wheeled round, every nerve taut. I saw the flicker of his shadow vanish into the cave. He had slipped past our backs.
I leapt for Rankin's Mauser and worked a bullet into the breech.
A voice commanded. 'Dika! Dika!'
Nadine and I swung towards the doorway.
'A charming fancy, don't you think?' said a mocking hidden voice. 'You have to dissect a hyena before you can tell its sex. My Dika could be male or female, I don't know. And Sappho's Dika — what was she? But I suspect that lesbianism is not unknown among hyenas either.'
He came forward so that I could make out the outline of his figure but not his face.
'I don't see any poetic wreaths or garlands for Dika but it's a pretty snug hideout you've got here. Without Dika I would never have found it.'
CHAPTER EIGHT
'Step forward!' I ordered, keeping the rifle trained on the newcomer. 'And stop talking crap. We're not a couple of gays.'
I was furious at the intrusion. That bare moment with Nadine might never come again.
'What the devil do you want? Who are you?'
Some quick calculation told me that, whoever he was, he couldn't have put down at the landing-strip some five miles away then made his way to the command-post in the time that had elapsed since we heard the aircraft engine. Moreover, if he had landed near The Hill in the sand and half-dark he had taken fantastic risks. Anyway, I did not believe it possible. His immediate discovery of the hidden command-post also added to my suspicions. All this, plus the off-beat introduction left me very uneasy. I was grateful for Rankin's Mauser.
Instead of obeying me he rapped out, 'Don't shoot! It's harmless if you leave it alone!'
One of the biggest hyenas I have ever seen slunk past me returning from the back of the cave to its master. I switched the gun from the man to the animal, following it all the way and ready to blast it. Except for lifting a lip in a silent snarl as it passed, it went to the stranger like a dog to heel. Before I could reply the off-beat, bantering tone came out of the darkness again. It also had a strident quality which later was to become inseparable in my mind from the manner of the man.
'Whatever is the lowest of four-legged creatures, the hyena must run it pretty close, don't you think? Yet look how this one responds to a little kindness — just like a pet. One could almost say that the quality of mercy is not strained but distilled.
'Cut out the bull,' I retorted. 'If you're anything to do with the guard, say so, because I've much to tell you.'
I waved him forward with the gun and he came leading the hyena, a twist of its mane in his fingers.
Nadine shone a torch on the pair. He had a thinnish, somewhat elongated face which was dark with beard stubble. His narrow eyes were close together, his hair long. His lips were thin and leathery-looking beneath a prominent nose and receding forehead, and the eyebrows continued unbroken across the bridge of his nose. He held his head to one side as if he had a crick in the neck. He appeared to be about my own age. 'I apologize for the intrusion but the blame is really Dika's — you must have something very attractive in here, a dead buck perhaps? Dika couldn't restrain herself, or should I say himself or itself, once we reached the area of the fire. She took off nose to ground.
It was a barrage of words; with the hindsight of later events. I know it covered a tight nervousness on his part as he realized that he had reached the end of his road.
I wasn't in the mood for this sort of thing. 'Your pet smells human blood,' I snapped. 'There's an injured man back there. The sooner you move that brute out, the better.'
'Allow me to introduce myself.' His speech was too correct to be mother-tongue English, yet he was not South African. The slight pseudo-bow and stiffening, however, betrayed his German origin.
'Von Praeger. Doctor Manfred von Praeger.'
His tension further revealed itself in the manner in which he tugged at Dika's mane; I found myself revolted at the way the creature rubbed against him with a kind of brutish affection. The relationship put my teeth on edge. He waited, as if he expected us to reciprocate with our names, at the same time shooting me a penetrating glance. Before I could stop her Nadine asked, 'Are you a medical doctor?'