The Burning Shore - Smith Wilbur - Страница 70

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Centaine gulped with revulsion and then told herself, If you don't drink, you'll be dead by morning, you and Michel's son, both. She made a tiny incision in the stomach wall, and immediately the thick white curds of milk oozed from it.

Centaine closed her eyes and placed her mouth over the slit. She forced herself to suck the hot curdled milk. Her empty stomach heaved and she choked with an involun tory retching reflex, but she fought and at last controlled it.

The curds had a slightly fishy taste but were not altogether repulsive.

After she had forced down the first mouthful, she thought it tasted a little of the goat's-milk cheese that Anna made, strong with rennet.

She rested after a while, and wiped the blood and mucus from her mouth with the back of her hand. She could almost feel the fluid soaking back to replace that lost by her body tissues, and new strength seemed to radiate through her exhausted body.

She hurled another rock at the hyena, and then drank the rest of the thick curdled milk. Carefully she slit open the tiny empty stomach sac, and licked up the last drops.

Then she threw the empty membrane to the hyena.

I will share it with you, she told the snarling beast.

She skinned the carcass, cutting off the head and the rudimentary limbs, and threw those to the hyena also.

The big doglike carnivore seemed to have resigned itself.

It sat on its haunches twenty paces from Centaine, with its pointed ears pricked up and a comically expectant expression, waiting for the scraps she threw it.

Centaine cut as many log narrow strips of the bright red seal meat as she could get off the skeleton, and wrapped them in the canvas of her headdress. Then she retreated and the hyena rushed forward to lick up the spilled blood from the rocks and to crush the small skeleton in its ugly, over-developed jaws.

At the top of the headland the wind and wave action had cut a shallow overhang from the compacted sandstone, and it had provided a shelter for others before Centaine. She found the scattered ashes of a long-dead cooking fire on the sandy floor of the cave, and when she scratched in the dirt, she turned up a small triangular flint scraper or cutting tool, similar to those for which she and Anna had hunted on the hillock behind the chAteau at Mort Homme. It gave her a peculiarly nostalgic pang to hold the scrap of flint in the grubby palm of her hand, and when she felt self-pity overcoming her, she placed the sliver of stone in the pocket of her blouse, and forced herself to face harsh reality rather than mope over bygone days in a far-off land.

Fire, she said, as she examined the dead sticks of charcoal, and she laid out the precious scraps of seal meat on a rock at the mouth of the cave to dry in the wind and went back to gather an armful of driftwood.

She piled this beside the ancient hearth and tried to remember everything she had ever read about making fire.

Two sticks, rub them together, she muttered.

It was a human need so basic, so taken for granted in her life until then, that now the lack of fire with its warmth and comfort was an appalling deprivation.

The driftwood was impregnated with salt and damp.

She selected two pieces, not having the vaguest notion of the qualities of the wood she required, and she set about experimenting. She worked until her fingers were raw and hurting, but she could not induce a single spark or even a wisp of smoke from her scraps of wood shavings.

Depressed and despondent, she lay back against the rear wall of the rock shelter and watched the sun set into the darkening sea. She shivered with the chill of the evening breeze and wrapped the canvas shawl more securely around her shoulders; she felt the small lump of flint press into her breast.

She noticed how tender her nipples had become recently, and how her breasts had begun to swell and harden, and she massaged them now. Somehow the thought of her pregnancy gave her renewed strength, and when she looked southwards, she saw Michel's special star hanging low on the horizon where a sombre ocea was blending into the night sky.

Achernar, she whispered. Michel- and as she SAID -his name her fingers touched the flint in her pocket agaiN it was almost as though it was Michel's gift to her, AND her hands shook with excitement as she struck the fliNT against the steel blade of the clasp knife, and the whitE

sparks flared in the darkness of the rocky shelter.

She worried the threads of canvas into a loose BaLl.

mixed with fine wood shavings, and struck flint and steeL over it. Although each attempt produced a shower OF bright white sparks, it took all her care and persistANCE before at last a wisp of smoke rose from the ball of kiNDLING

and she blew it into a tiny yellow flame.

She grilled the strips of seal meat over the coals. they tasted like both veal and rabbit. She savoured each bitE and after she had eaten, she anointed the painful blisters that the sun had raised on her skin with seal FAT She set aside the remaining strips of cooked meat FOR the days ahead, built up the fire, wrapped the caNVAS

around her shoulders and settled herself against the wall of the shelter with the club beside her.

I should pray- and as she began, Anna seemed verY close, watching over her as she had so often before wheN

Centaine, the child, knelt beside her bed with haNDS Clasped before her.

Thank you, Almighty God, for saving me from the se and thank you for the food and drink you have provide(but- The prayer petered out, and Centaine felt recrimnations rather than gratitude pressing to her lips.

Blasphemy. She almost heard Anna's voice and shE

ended the prayer hastily.

And, oh Lord, please give me the strength to face what ever further trials you have in store for me in the dayahead, and if it please you, give me also the wisdom to see your design and purpose in heaping these tribulations upon me. That was as much of a protest as she would risk, and while she was still trying to decide on a suitable ending for the prayer, she fell asleep.

Al When she awoke, the fire had died down to embers, and she did not at first know where she was or what had woken her. Then her circumstances came back to her with a sickening rush, and she heard some large animal out in the darkness just beyond the opening of the shelter.

It sounded as though it was feeding.

Quickly she piled driftwood on the fire and blew up a flame. At the edge of the firelight she saw the lurking shape of the hyena and she realized that the package of cooked seal meat that she had so carefully wrapped in a strip of canvas the previous evening was gone from the rock beside the fire.

Sobbing with rage and frustration, she picked up a flaming brand and hurled it at the hyena.

You horrible thieving brute! she screamed, and it yelped and galloped away into the darkness.

The seal colony lay basking on the rocks below her shelter in the early morning sunlight, and already Centaine felt the first stirrings of the hunger and the thirst that the day would bring.

She armed herself with two stones, each the size of her fist, and the driftwood club, and with elaborate stealth crawled down one of the gulleys in the rocks, attempting to get within range of the nearest members of the colony.

However, the seals fled honking before she had covered half the distance and they would not emerge from the surf again while she was in sight.

Frustrated and hungry, she went back to the shelter.

There were spots of congealed white seal fat on the rock beside the hearth. She crushed a knob of charcoal from the dead fire to powder and mixed it with the fat in the palm of her hand, then she carefully blacked the tip of her nose and her cheeks, the exposed areas which had been burned by the sun the previous day.

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