She's only a child, Anna marvelled, yet they treat her like a woman, no, no, more than that even, they are beginning to treat her like an equal. That was truly astonishing.
Here were these men according to a young girl the respect that thousands of other women, Emmeline Pankhurst and Annie Kenney at their head, had been burning property, throwing themselves under racehorses, hunger-striking and enduring prison sentences to obtain, so far unsuccessfully.
Centaine made the men listen to her, and very often she made them do what she wanted, although she was not above using the sly sexual tricks to which women over the ages have been forced to resort; Centaine achieved her ends by adding logic, cogent argument and force of character. These, combined with an appealing smile and level look from dark, fathomless eyes, seemed irresistible. For instance, it took her a mere five days to get Major Wright to rescind his order confining her to ADeck.
Although Centaine's days were filled to the last minute, she never for a moment lost sight of the ultimate destination. Each day her longing for first sight of the land where Michael had been born, and where his son would be born, became stronger.
However busy she was, she never missed the noonshot, and a few minutes before the hour she would race up the companion-way to the bridge and arrive in a swirl of her uniform skirts, gabbling breathlessly, Permission to enter the bridge, sir? And the officer of the watch, who had been waiting for her, would salute.
Permission granted. You are only just in time, Sunshine. Then she would watch fascinated as the navigating officers stood on the wing of the bridge with the sextants raised and made the noonday shot of the sun, and then worked out the day's run and the ship's position and marked it on the chart.
There you are, Sunshine, 17'23 south. One hundred and sixty nautical miles north-west of the mouth of the Cunene river. Cape Town in four days time, God and the weather permitting. Centaine studied the map eagerly. So we are already off the South African coast? No, no! That is German West Africa; it was one of the Kaiser's colonies until the South Africans captured it two years ago. What is it like, jungles? Savannahs? No such luck Sunshine, it's one of the most Godforsaken deserts in the entire world.
And Centaine left the chartroom and went out on to the wing of the bridge again and stared into the east, towards the great continent that still lay far below her watery horizon.
Oh, I can barely wait to see it at last!
This horse was an animal of the desert, its distant ancestors had carried kings and Bedouin chieftains over the burning wastes of Arabia. Its blood-lines had been taken north by the crusaders to the colder climes of Europe, and then hundreds of years later they had been brought out to Africa again by the colonial expedition of Germany and landed at the port of Uideritzbucht with the cavalry squadrons of Bismarck. In Africa these horses had been crossed and recrossed with the shaggy hardy mounts of the Boers and the desert-forged animals of the Hottentots until this animal emerged, a creature well suited to this rugged environment and to the tasks to which it was committed.
It had the wide nostrils and fine head of its Arabian type, broad spatulate hooves to cover the soft desert earth, great lungs in its barrel chest, pale chestnut coloration to repel the worst of the sun's rays, a shaggy coat to insulate it from both the burning noon heat and the crackling cold of the desert nights, and the legs and heart to carry its rider to far milky horizons and beyond.
The man upon his back was also of mixed blood-lines and, like his mount, a creature of the desert and the boundless land.
His mother had come out from Berlin when her father had been appointed second-in-command of the military forces in German West Africa. She had met and, despite her family's opposition, married a young Boer from a family rich only in land and spirit. Lothar was the only child of that union, and at his mother's insistence had been sent back to Germany to complete his schooling.
He had proved a good scholar, but the outbreak of the Boer War had interrupted his studies. The first his mother had known of his decision to join the Boer forces was when he arrived back in Windhoek unannounced. Hers was a warrior family, so her pride was fierce when Lothar had ridden away with a Hottentot servant and three spare horses to seek his father who was already in the field against the English.
Lothar had found his father at Magersfontein with his uncle Koos De La Rey, the legendary Boer commander, and had undergone his initiation to battle two days later when the British tried to force the passage through the Magersfontein hills and relieve the siege of Kimberley.
Lothar De La Rey was five days past his fourteenth birthday on the dawn of the battle, and he killed his first Englishman before six that morning. It had been a less difficult target than a hundred springbok and running kudu had offered him before.
Lothar, one of the five hundred picked marksmen, had stood to the parapet of the trench that he had helped dig along the foot of the Magersfontein hills. The idea of digging a trench and using it as cover had at first repelled the Boers, who were essentially horsemen and loved to range fast and wide. Yet General De La Rey had persuaded them to try this new tactic, and the lines of advancing English infantry had walked unsuspectingly on to the trenches in the deceptive early light.
Leading the advance towards where Lothar lay was a powerful, thickset man with flaming red muttonchop whiskers. He strode a dozen paces ahead of the line, his kilts swinging jauntily, a tropical pith helmet set at a rakish angle over one eye and bared sword in his right hand.
At that moment the sun rose over the Magersfontein hills, and its ripe orange light flooded the open, featureless veld. it lit the ranks of advancing highlanders like a stage effect, perfect shooting light, and the Boers had paced out the ranges in front of their trenches and marked them with cairns of stones.
Lothar took his aim on the centre of the Englishman's forehead, but like the men beside him was held by a strange reluctance, for this seemed not much short of murder. Then, almost at its own volition, the Mauser jumped against his shoulder and the crack of the shot seemed to come from very far away. The British officer's helmet sprang from his head and spun end over end. He was driven back a pace and his arms flew open. The sound of the bullet striking the man's skull came back to Lothar, like a ripe watermelon dropped on to a stone floor. The sword flashed in the sunlight as it fell from the soldier's hand, then with a slow, almost elegant pirouette, he sank into the low coarse scrub.
Hundreds of highlanders had lain pinned in front of the trenches all that day. Not a man of them dared lift his head, for the waiting rifles in the trenches a hundred paces from where they lay were wielded by some of the finest marksmen in the world.
The African sun burned the backs of their knees below I the kilts until they swelled, and the skin burst open like over-ripe fruit. The wounded highlanders cried for water and some of the Boers in the trenches threw their water bottles towards them, but they fell short.
