Assegai

The next morning at breakfast she acted as though nothing had changed. She snapped shrewishly at her handmaidens, was cruelly sarcastic to her secretary, and ignored Leon, not even acknowledging his polite greeting until she had finished her second cup of coffee. Then she stood up and announced, ‘Courtney, today I have a great desire to kill pigs.’

Leon had devised a series of small game drives, which gave the princess endless pleasure. He and the trackers would corner a sounder of warthog in a patch of thick scrub, then place the princess in a commanding position over the open ground beyond the thicket, and beat the pigs towards her. As soon as they broke from cover she would wade into them with the Mannlicher. She had trained Heidi, the prettier of her handmaidens, to reload the spare magazines. Each held six rounds, and the princess could change an empty one in an instant. She pressed the release catch and let it drop. Heidi caught it as it fell and reloaded it with her deft pink fingers, trained by relentless needlework since childhood. Then the princess would slip a fully charged magazine into the breech and keep shooting with barely a pause. Her rate of fire was almost as staggering as her accuracy. She could get off twelve shots in as many seconds. Often the warthog would not co-operate with the beaters: they might break from cover in an unexpected direction or double back through the line of beaters, not offering Her Royal Highness a single shot. When this happened she either flew into a coldly furious rage, railing at Leon and his team, or retreated into an icy silence from which she could only be drawn by the prospect of spilling more blood.

Late that afternoon Leon and his beaters, their ranks strengthened by the inclusion of Max Rosenthal, Ishmael and the skinners, managed to pull off their most spectacular battue of the safari. They drove twenty-three warthogs, boars, sows and piglets, past the princess and her loader. She managed to kill twenty-two. The one that escaped was a lean old sow that changed direction just as she fired. The bullet flew wide and the sow doubled back between the princess’s legs when she was least expecting it, sending her flying. She sat up with her skirts above her knees and her hat over her eyes. ‘You dirty little cheat!’ she screamed, as the sow disappeared into the thicket, tail held high and straight as a pennant.