‘They are naked,’ added Omar, and his terror ebbed and was replaced by an erotic interest as he watched the black columns move out into the shallows. Like the horns of a buffalo they circled one of the sandbanks, and though the chest-deep water hampered them, yet the manoeuvre was completed before the old bull hippopotamus woke from his gargantuan slumber to find himself surrounded.
He lumbered to his feet and glared about him with his piggy pink eyes. Five tons of solid flesh, clad in a thick grey hide, splotched with pink upon the belly. His legs were short and thick and powerful, and when he opened his jaws to bellow he exposed great yellow fangs of ivory which could bite a war canoe in half.
He broke into a cumbersome gallop, leaving deep hoof prints in the soft white sandbank, and he charged at the wall of black bodies that cut him off from the deep pool of the river. He entered the shallows, churning up a wake of foaming white water, while ahead of him the wall of black men solidified and thickened as the line bunched up to receive and absorb his charge.
The bull went into them at full gallop, and human bodies were flung about like chaff in a whirlwind. His jaws clashed as he chopped at them, and when he drove forward it seemed that nothing could stay such devastating power. He must burst through them and find safety in the deeps of the river. Yet they swarmed about him, from the sides and rear, and his charge slowed perceptively, although his bellows seemed louder and the champing of ivory tusks cutting through living flesh carried clearly to the watchers on the island.
Manatassi stood quietly, leaning forward slightly, with a small frown upon his scar-riven brow, and his eyes were yellow and watchful.
In the river the water creamed and flashed and sparkled. The bull’s bellows took on a new note, a hint of panic, and he was no longer visible beneath the swarming naked bodies. It was like a scorpion attacked by army ants, creatures only a small fraction of his size smothering him with their numbers. The sunlight glittered on the wet bodies, and the bull’s forward progress was arrested. He was transformed into a struggling ball of human bodies, while around him the water turned dark brown with blood, and the mauled bodies fell away like poisoned black ticks from the body of an ox. They floated down on the sluggish current, while others swarmed forward eagerly to replace them.
Now, miraculously, the striving knot of men and beast began to move towards the island; leaving the debris of death behind them, they moved slowly through the shallows.
They reached the island, and came from the water - 1,000, perhaps 2,000 men, carrying the exhausted but still struggling hippopotamus bodily from the river and up the bank. The bull slashed viciously from side to side, and all within reach of his jaws died, while the bull’s head and the inside of his mouth were clotted with the bright blood of his victims.
Leaving a thick trail of dead and terribly maimed men behind them, they carried the bull to where Manatassi stood waiting. The war captain came forward unsteadily. He was weak from loss of blood for he had lost one arm above the elbow, taken away by a single bite of those terrible jaws.
He handed a stabbing spear to his king. Manatassi walked forward, and while his men held down the terrified monster, he stabbed it in the throat. Finding the jugular vein with the first thrust, the bull died in a burst of dark blood and a cry that rang against the hills.
Manatassi stepped back and watched impassively as his men dispatched their wounded with swift mercy, and when the war captain came and knelt before him clutching the severed stump of an arm to his chest and begged for the honour at the hand of his king, a bright pride burned briefly in Manatassi’s eyes. He made the mercy stroke, crushing the man’s skull with a single blow of the iron claw, then he walked back, and smiled bleakly as he saw the sheikh’s amazement.
‘That is my answer,’ he said, and after a while Hassan asked, ‘What do you want of us?’
‘Two things,’ Manatassi replied. ‘An undefended passage of the river through your territory for my armies. You must forsake your pact of mutual defence with Opet - and I want iron weapons. My smiths will take another ten years to arm so many men. I want weapons from you.’
‘In return you will deliver to us the gold of Opet. and the mines of the middle kingdom?’
‘No!’ Manatassi snarled angrily. ‘You may take the gold. I have no use for it. It is a cursed metal, soft and useless. You may take all that Opet has, but,’ and he paused, ‘the mines of the middle kingdom will never be worked again. No more will men go down to die unnaturally in the earth.’
Hassan wanted to protest. Without the gold of the middle kingdom his own reason for existing would vanish. He could imagine the rage of the Chan Emperor denied his trade routes with the land of gold. Omar’s fingers warned him gently, their soft insinuating touch speaking clearly.
‘There will be another time to argue.’ And Hassan heeded the warning, he choked back the protest and instead he smiled at Manatassi.
‘You will have your weapons. I will see to it.’
‘When?’ demanded Manatassi.
‘Soon,’ promised Hassan, ‘as soon as my ships can return from the land across the eastern seas.’
Lannon had aged these last few years, Huy thought. Yet the change was flattering, the new lines that care had chiselled dispelled the prettiness from his features and had given him dignity. Around the mouth there was the same petulance, the pout of the spoiled child, but one had to look closely to find it.
His body was as young and hard as it ever had been, however, and as he stood now, stark naked in the bows, in the attitude of the harpooner, every muscle in his back and shoulders stood out clearly beneath the oiled skin. The sun had gilded his body to a dark honey gold and only his buttocks were a creamed ivory where his breech clout had protected them. He was a beautiful creature, favoured beyond all others by the gods, and Huy compared this body to his own and felt a despair within him.
Words began to form in his mind, a song to Lannon, an ode to his beauty. As he poled the skiff silently and smoothly over the still waters of the lake the words tumbled about in his mind, like wind-blown leaves, then they began to fall into patterns and the song was born.
In the bows Lannon signalled with his free hand without looking around, still poised, staring down into the waters and Huy turned the skiff with an expert thrust of the pole. Suddenly Lannon’s body unleashed its pent-up energy in a fluid explosive thrust, an uncoiling of tensed muscles as he hurled the long harpoon down through the surface. The water bulged and swirled, and the line coiled in the bottom of the skiff began tearing out over the side, hissing away into the water.
‘Ha!’ shouted Lannon. ‘A fair thrust! Help me, Huy!’ And together they jumped to the line, laughing with
