overstretched, was free of stria, and her belly swiftly shrank back into its greyhound profile. Only her breasts were swollen hard with copious milk, and Shasa gorged and grew like one of the desert plants after rain.
Then again there was the pool and its waters.
It is strange, H'ani told her, the nursing mothers who drink this water always grow children with bones as hard as rock and teeth that shine like polished ivory. It is one of the blessings of the spirits that guard this place. At noon the sun struck through one of the apertures in the domed roof of the cavern, a solid white shaft of light through the steam-laden air, and Centaine loved to bask in it, moving across the pool as the beam swung, to keep in its charmed circle of light.
She lay chin-deep in the seething green water, and listened to Shasa snuffling and mewing in his steep. She had wrapped him in the gemsbok skin and laid him on the ledge beside the pool where she could see him merely by turning her head.
The bottom of the pool was lined with gravel and pebbles. She scooped up handfuls of them and held them up in the sunlight, and they gave her a special kind of pleasure for they were strange and beautiful. There were veined agates, waterworn and smooth as swallows eggs, stones of soft blue with lines of red through them, or pink or yellow, and Jaspers and carnelians in a hundred shades of burgundy, shiny black onyx and tiger's eyes of gold barred with iridescent waves of shifting colour.
I will make a necklace, for H'ani. A gift to thank her, from Shasa! She began to collect the prettiest stones with the most interesting and unusual shapes.
I need a centrepiece for the necklace, she decided, and she dredged handfuls of gravel and washed them in the hot green waters, then examined them in the sunlight until at last she found exactly what she was searching f or.
It was a colourless stone, clear as water, but when it caught the sunlight it contained a captive rainbow, an internal fire that burned with all the colours of the spectrum . Centaine spent a long lazy hour in the pool, turning this stone slowly in the beam of sunlight to make it flash and sparkle, staring into its depths with delight, watching it explode into wondrous cascades of light. The stone was not large, only the size of one of the ripe mongongo fruit - but it was a symmetrical many-sided crystal, perfect for the centrepiece of the necklace.
She designed H'anils necklace with infinite care, spending many hours while Shasa nursed at her breast, arranging and rearranging her collection of pebbles until at last she had them in the order which most pleased her. Yet still she was not entirely satisfied, for the colourless central stone, so sparkling and regular in shape, made all the other coloured stones seem somehow drab and uninteresting.
Nevertheless, she began to experiment in stringing the pebbles in a necklace and here she immediately encountered problems.
One or two of the pebbles were so soft that by dint of persistent effort and many worn-out bone augers she was finally able to drill a stringing hole through them. Others were brittle and shattered, and others again were too hard. In particular, the sparkling crystal resisted her best efforts, and remained absolutely unblemished after she had broken a dozen bone tools upon it.
She appealed to O'wa for assistance, and once he understood what she was working on, he was boyishly enthusiastic. They experimented and met with failure a dozen times before they finally worked out a means of cementing the harder stones on to the plaited sansevieria twine with acacia gum. Centaine began to assemble the necklace, and almost drove O'wa to distraction in the process, for she discarded fifty lengths of twine.
This is too thick, she would say. This is not strong enough. And Uwa, who, when working on his own weapons and tools, was also a perfectionist, took the problem very seriously.
Finally Centaine unravelled the hem of her canvas skirt and by plaiting the threads with the sansevieria fibres, they had a string for the necklace that was fine and strong enough to satisfy both of them.
When the necklace was at last finished, O'wa's selfsatisfaction could not have been more overbearing had he conceived, planned and executed the project entirely on his own. It was a more of a pectoral than a necklace, with a single string around the back of the neck and the stones woven together in a plate-like decoration which hung on the breast with the big crystal in the centre, and a mosaic of coloured agates and jaspers and beryls surrounding it.
Even Centaine was delighted with her handiwork.
It's turning out better than I had hoped, she told O'wa, speaking in French and holding it up and turning it to catch the sunlight. Not as good as Monsieur Cartier, she remembered her father's wedding gift to her mother which he had allowed her to wear on her birthdays -but not too bad for a wild girl's first effort in a wild place! Th y made a little ceremony of the presentation, and H'ani sat beaming like a little amber-coloured hobgoblin while Centaine thanked her for being such a paragon of a grandmother and the best midwife of the San, but when she placed the gift around the old woman's neck it seemed too big and weighty for the frail wrinkled body.
Ha, old man, you are so proud of that knife of yours, but it is as nothing to this, H'ani told O'wa as she stroked the necklace lovingly. This is a true gift. Look you! Now I wear the moon and the stars around my throatV She refused to remove it. It thumped against her breastbone as she wielded her digging stick or stooped to gather the mongongo nuts. When she crouched over the cooking fires, it dangled between the empty pouches of her swinging dugs. Even in the night as she slept with her head cradled on her own bare shoulder, Centame looked across from her own shelter and saw the necklace shining on her chest, and it seemed to weigh the little old body down to the earth.
Once Centaine's preoccupation with the necklace was over, and her strength and vitality fully recovered after childbirth, she began to find the days too long and the rock cliffs of the valley as restrictive as the high walls of a prison.
The daily routine of life was undemanding, and Shasa slept on her hip or strapped to her back while she gathered the fallen nuts in the grove or helped H'ani bring in the firewood. Her menses resumed their course, and she itched with unexpected energy.
She had sudden moods of black depression, when even H'ani's innocent chatter irritated her, and she went off alone with the baby. Though he slept soundly through it all, she held him on her lap and spoke to him in French or English. She told him about his father and the chateau, about Nuage and Anna and General Courtney, and the names and the memories instilled in her a deep and undirected melancholy. Sometimes in the night, when she could not sleep, she lay and listened to the music in her head, the strains of Afda or the songs the peasants sang in the fields at Mort Homme during the vendange.
So the months passed and the seasons of the desert rotated. The mongongo tree flowered and fruited again, and one day Shasa lifted himself on to hands and knees and to the delight of all set off on his first explorations of the valley. Yet Centaine's mood swung more violently than the seasons, her joy in Shasa and her contentment in
