Angus yelled: ‘Come any closer he won’t have a head, you fucks. Amy – grab all the car keys. And get the case with the bloods. David – get a gun and get to the car – get in the Land Rover -’

Again the men glanced at each other, confused, angry, and helpless. A few seconds, and Amy was done, brandishing a fistful of car keys in her hand.

‘Angus. I got them! And the bloods.’

‘Go to the car! David!’

Obedient, suppressing his fears, he raced to the car and jumped up and sat at the wheel. His burned, painful hand was poised on the key. Ready to flee the first moment Angus was safe.

The Scotsman was pulling the deadweight of Miguel closer to the Land Rover. Muzzle of the gun still close to his temple. Amy was in the seat next to David, watching. Ready to go. To escape. Ready.

But Miguel was stirring from his torpor, whatever the effect of the euphorbia smoke, it was wearing off – he was fitfully struggling in Angus’s grip; David could see in the headlights – Miguel was trying to wriggle free.

‘Angus!’

The scientist had the muzzle on Miguel’s head, at the temple. David knew what was going to happen. Angus Nairn’s face was set with grim satisfaction.

David watched, appalled, as Angus pulled the trigger: a point-blank execution.

But his grip was unsure: at the last possible moment, Miguel writhed, violently. Again he was the jentilak, the giant of the forest, unkillable, legendary: Angus got off a shot, and blood spat from Miguel’s head, but it was a wound, just a wound in the scalp. The Wolf was alive, and down, and free. And signalling his men.

The first shot of a rifle zinged the morning air. David slammed the gears – then another shot spat against metal, with a chiming crack. The car door swung open and Amy grabbed at Angus – who leapt into the back seat: David floored the pedal, churning the sand, and then at last the wheels got a grip and they lurched forward, picking up speed. Faster. And faster.

The rear window smashed into a hundred shards as a bullet zapped the glass; Angus fired back, through the jagged void, random shots; one and two and three. One man seemed to fall, a squat figure: Enoka. Dead.

Angus screamed: ‘Go!’

Swinging the car, wildly, David shouted: ‘But where -’

‘There!’

They jerked over a hillock at speed, a tongue-chomping vault into the air – then crashed into the sand and raced onwards, rattling everyone and everything: sliding in the gravelly dust, fishtailing. David gripped the wheel as they veered left and right through the dry river plains – slaloming between the camelthorns -

‘David!’

Amy was screaming.

A huge elephant loomed ahead – they were going to crash into the elephant – the slow grey beast was crunching a branch in its mouth; it turned and looked at them, maudlin and pitying -

David tugged the wheel just in time and the car tilted, at speed, and he knew they were going to flip, right over, and pancake. They were going to be crushed, but then the car slammed back onto all four wheels and they raced ahead.

‘The river. Take the river!’

It was an order from Angus. David obeyed.

The car slashed down the mudslide and cracked along the river bed, the wheels churned and the ducks and geese and weaver birds squawked and flailed. David crunched at the gears and accelerated. The big white car was fast and new.

For ten, twenty, thirty, minutes they scythed down the river road. Oryx, drinking placidly from the water, looked up at the noise, and fled. Springboks pronked in fear as the car came splashing over boulders and careering around riverine bends, dangerously fast.

‘This way!’

Angus pointed; David took a fork along a dryer river bed. He grabbed the chance to check behind, once more – and his hopes climaxed: they really were doing it.

They’d escaped.

David felt an urge to sob in horror and scream in triumph at the same time. He did neither. He drove. Silent. The car was silent. They pulled over for a few minutes and Amy found ointment in the car’s first aid box, and she anointed his half-burned hand. As she did he looked at her. She was not crying, but her eyes were clouded, she was subduing her terror. The car started, they continued their escape.

The sun was up, already hot. David tried to get a grasp of his own fear, his own terror.

Why? Why was Miguel even there? Always he kept finding them. It was like they were being hunted by Death itself: sleek, brutal and merciless. Otsoko. The Wolf. Relentless.

He thought of the smell of his own clothes burning. He was silent. Amy clutched his arm. Also silent.

An hour of river driving ended – Angus ordered a change of direction; David nodded, and spun the wheel hard to the right – and they growled up onto proper dry land. Rocks and sand. They drove on, and on. No one spoke.

They were driving due south. There wasn’t any road. The relative lushness of the Damara riverlands was devolving into pure and tormented aridity. Sand dunes rose on either side.

Angus was the first to properly speak. It felt like a day since anyone had really spoken.

‘We’re in the Namib Naukluft,’ he said. ‘We’re back in real desert. This stuff goes on for hundreds of miles.’

David gazed out at the enormousness of the wasteland. Great dunes, almost ice-creamy in consistency, were skirling dust from their soft and orangey crests; between them were flat dusty saltpans burned into eerie whiteness; and then, stark and black, the spars of dead trees. They looked like trees in a very bad dream.

Enough. David shivered himself out of his reverie. The bad images crowding his mind were too awful to bear. And yet, amidst the cacophony of horror, something was rhyming: there was a harmony here, a frightening but authentic harmony.

He pieced together the images in his mind: Miguel eating the flesh of Alphonse. Old man Garovillo’s stuttering confession in the Cagot House: ‘Miguel bears the true shame of the Cagots.’ And then the horror of the body liquor in the cellars beneath the house.

What if the ancient, now liquified corpses had been sealed in an airtight vault, not to prevent infection, but…to store them?

As food?

Taking a sip of water, he asked the scientist. Straight.

‘Angus, were the Cagots…’

‘What?’

‘Were they…cannibals?’

Amy stared across the car, white and horrified.

39

For a kilometre or more, Angus was silent. David tried again. More silence. For the third time, David asked the question. This time Angus cleared his throat and said, with an uncharacteristic tinge of nerves in his voice, like he was choked on desert dust:

‘What makes you say that?’

David didn’t want to say: I saw Miguel cutting up your boyfriend. But he felt he had no choice. Prefacing his answer with a warning, he told the Scotsman. About Miguel in the night. And then the events in the Cagot House. The body liquor of the stored and decomposed bodies.

Angus stared out of the car window, at the desolation of the great Namib. Then he said, without turning:

‘Yes, of course. And that’s why the smoke trick worked.’

Amy interrupted.

‘Sorry? What?’

‘It seems…somehow cruel. Discussing it. The Cagots are almost dead. Why heap this ordure on their grave?’

‘But -’

‘But now you’ve guessed. Now you’ve actually…witnessed…I might as well be fucking honest. Yes it’s true. Miguel is cannibalistic. Because he’s a Cagot. Part of their cursed genetic inheritance.’ He leaned forward. ‘The Cagots were cannibals.’

Amy shook her head.

‘Please…please explain.’

‘They were accused in early medieval times of eating human flesh, and the reputation stuck. Of course it could have been nonsense, like the Jewish blood libel – yet it was true. They really were…the Serpent Seed, the Curse of Cain. A race apart, a breed of cursed people. All of it true.’