tendon stood out proud beneath the skin he severed it with the skill of a surgeon. Both of the bull’s back legs gave way under him and he sank helplessly on to his haunches, screaming his anguish to the pitiless sky and the triumphant African sun.
Hassan Ben Nader turned his back on the struggling animal and walked away unhurriedly. Osman jumped down from Sweet Water and embraced him. “Ridden like a man, and killed like a prince.” He laughed. “This very day you and I shall take the oath and eat the salt of brotherhood together.”
“You do me too much honour,” Hassan whispered, and fell to his knees in homage, ‘for I am your slave and your child, and you are my master and my father.”
They rested the horses in the shade and watered them from the skins while they watched the last struggles of their quarry. The blood spurted from the gaping arteries in the back of the bull’s legs, in rhythm with the pulse of his heart. The earth beneath his pads dissolved into a bath of mud and blood, until his crippled legs slipped and slid as he shifted his weight. It did not take long. The bright crimson flow shrivelled, and the lassitude of approaching death settled over him. At last the air rushed out of his lungs in a long, hollow groan and he toppled on to his side, striking the earth with a sound that echoed off the hills.
“Five days from now I will send you back here with fifty men, Hassan Ben Nader, to bring in these tusks.” Osman stroked one of the huge ivory shafts that thrust up into the air higher than his head. It would take that long for the cartilage that held them in the bony sockets of the skull to soften with decay so that the great shafts could be drawn out undamaged by careless axe strokes. They mounted and rode easily back along their own spoor to find the first beast that Osman had attacked. By this time he, too, would have bled to death from the terrible wound. It would be easy to track him down to the spot where he had fallen, for he must have left a river of blood for them to follow. They had not gone half a league before Osman held up a hand to halt them and cocked his head, listening. The sound that had alerted him came again from across the rocky ridge over which the other band of aggagiers had pursued the third bull. The intervening hills must have damped down the echoes so that they had not heard them before. The sound was unmistakable to these experienced hunters: it was the sound of an angry elephant, one that was neither crippled nor weakened by its wounds.
“Al-Noor has failed to kill cleanly,” said Osman. “We must go to his aid.”
He led them up the slope at a gallop, and as they crossed the ridge the sounds of conflict were loud and close. Osman rode towards them, and found a dead horse lying where it had been struck down, its spine shattered by a blow from the bull’s trunk. The aggagier had died upon its back. They rode past them without drawing rein, and found two more dead men. At a glance Osman read the signs: one had been unhorsed in the face of the charging animal. The hooked, red-tipped thorns of the kit tar had plucked him from the saddle as he had tried to escape the bull’s charge. The other dead man was his blood-brother, and he had turned back to save him. As they had lived so they died, their blood mingled and their broken bodies entwined. Their horses had run free.
The elephant trumpeted again. The sound was closer now, and sharper. It rang out from a forest of kit tar not far ahead. They slammed their heels into the flanks of their mounts and galloped towards the kit tar As they approached, a rider broke at full gallop from out of the thorn barrier into the open. It was al-Noor on his grey, which was in the extremes of terror and exhaustion. Al-Noor wafc almost naked: his jibba had been ripped from his body by the thorns and his skin was lacerated as though it had been clawed by a wild beast. The grey was staggering, throwing out its hoofs sloppily at each stride, and was too far gone to see and avoid the ant bear burrow in its path. It stumbled and almost went down, throwing al-Noor over its head, then ran on, leaving its rider stunned, in the track of the great bull elephant that burst out of the thorn forest behind him. This was the patriarch bull, whose tracks had first astounded them. There was blood on one back leg but too high and too far forward to have struck the tendon. Al-Noor had inflicted a flesh wound that did not slow or impede the animal. As he came on, he held his head high to keep his long tusks clear of the thorn scrub and stony earth. They extended from his lip twice as far as a tall man could reach with both arms spread wide. They were as thick as a woman’s thigh with almost no taper from lip to tip.
“Ten can tars a side!” Hassan shouted, amazed. This was a legendary animal, with almost two hundred pounds of ivory curving out on each side of his great grey head. Still dazed al-Noor rose shakily to his feet and stood, swaying drunkenly, with blood and dust coating his face. His back was turned to the charging bull, and he had lost his sword. The bull saw him, squealed again, and rolled his trunk back against his chest. Al-Noor turned. When he saw death descending upon him he raised his right hand, index finger extended as a sign that he died in Islam, and cried, “God is great!” It was his moment of acceptance. He stood without fear to meet it.
“For me and for Allah!” Osman called to his mare, and Sweet Water responded with her last reserves of strength and speed. She dashed in under the vaulted arch of tusks, Osman flat on her neck. The bull’s trunk was rolled. There was no target for his blade. He could only hope to draw the charge off the man. The bull’s gaze was so focused on al-Noor that he was unaware of the horse and rider coming in from the flank until they flashed past, so close that Osman’s shoulder glanced off one of the tusks. Then they were gone, like the darting flight of a sunbird. The bull wheeled aside, forsaking the standing man and following the more compelling focus of his rage. He charged after the horse.
“O beloved of Allah,” al-Noor shouted his gratitude after the emir who had saved him, ‘may God forgive all your sins.”
Osman smiled grimly as the words floated to him above the murderous trumpeting, the clash of hoofs and bursting thorn scrub. “God grant me a few more sins before I die,” he shouted back, and led the bull away.
Hassan and the other aggagiers rode in his wake, shouting and whistling to attract the bull’s attention, but he held on after Sweet Water. The mare had run hard but she was not yet spent. Osman looked back under his arm and saw that the bull was coming on apace, so swiftly that neither Hassan nor any other could get into position to attack his vulnerable back legs. He looked ahead and saw that he was being driven into a trap. Sweet Water was running into a narrow open lead between dense stands of the kit tar thorn, but her path was blocked by a solid wall of thorn. Osman felt her check under him. Then she turned her head, gazed back at her beloved rider, as if seeking guidance, and rolled her eyes until the red linings showed. White froth splattered from the corners of her mouth.
Then horse and rider ran into the kit tar which closed round them in a green wave. The thorns hooked into hide and cloth like eagle’s talons, and almost at once Sweet Water’s graceful run was transformed into the struggles of a creature caught in quicksand. The bull thundered down upon them, its mighty progress unchecked by the kit tar
“Come, then, and let us make an end.” Osman called the challenge, dropped the reins and kicked his feet out of the stirrups. He stood up, tall, upon the saddle, facing back over Sweet Water’s rump, his eyes on the level of the bull’s. Man and beast confronted each other over a rapidly dwindling gap.
“Take us if you are able,” Osman called to the bull, knowing how the sound of his voice would infuriate the animal. The bull flattened his ears against the sides of his skull, and rolled the tips in rage and aggression. Then he did what Osman had been waiting for: he unrolled his trunk and reached out to seize the man and lift him high off the back of his horse.
Balancing to Sweet Water’s violent lunges and struggles, Osman held the long blade poised, and as the serrated grey trunk was about to close round his body, he struck. The steel whickered in flight, and dissolved into a silver blur of light. The stroke was full, and seemed to meet no resistance: the steel sliced through hide, flesh and sinews, as though they were mist. It severed the trunk close to the lip as smoothly as the guillotine blade takes off a condemned man’s head.
For an instant there was no blood, just the sheen of freshly exposed flesh and the gleam of nerve ends and white tendons. Then the blood burst forth, engulfing the great grey head in a crimson cloud as the arteries erupted. The bull screamed again, but now in agony and dismay. Then he lurched to one side as he lost his balance and sense of direction.
Osman dropped back into the saddle and guided Sweet Water with his knees, steering her out of the arc of the bull’s blood-dimmed eyesight. The animal blundered in a wide uncertain circle as Hassan rode in behind him to make the cut in the back of his left leg. Then he jumped back into the saddle, leaving the bull anchored by his crippled leg. Osman slipped down from Sweet Water’s back and, with another stroke of his blade, cut through the other hamstring.
The heart blood pumped from the terrible wounds in his back legs and trunk, but the bull remained upright for as long as a mullah might take to recite a single sura of the Koran. Osman Atalan and his aggagiers dismounted and stood at their horses’ heads to watch his death throes and pray for him, praising his might and courage. When at
