Guarding the Princess - By Loreth Anne White Page 0,35
the jeep slow, then stop. She swung round in the seat, instantly worried.
“Look...over there,” he said softly, pointing into the distance.
About a hundred yards out, as if materializing from the interplay of shadow and light in the trees, two graceful giraffes stood side by side, looping their necks around each other. Brandt cut the engine.
Heat pressed down, the engine ticking as it cooled. The sounds of the bush seemed to rise from nowhere to envelop them—the slight rustle of grasses, the clicking of grasshoppers. The faint chorus of a million birds that exploded suddenly into the sky, swarming in unison, alighting on a tree, then bursting up from the branches in a riot of movement as the flock moved to another tree.
Dalilah shaded her eyes, and as she watched the towering animals swinging their necks, everything else seemed to slip into the far reaches of her mind. No Manhattan. No Haroun. No looming wedding. She felt a shift in Brandt’s energy, too, and glanced up into his face. He met her gaze for a brief moment, and Dalilah saw something dark and hungry. But his eyes narrowed abruptly and he turned away. That’s when it really hit Dalilah—Brandt was fighting an attraction to her. He was angry with himself for overstepping the line, and with her for enabling him.
“Two males,” he said, nodding toward the animals. “You can tell by the lack of hair on top of their horns—they rub them smooth by fighting. And see over there?” He pointed, and Dalilah was conscious of the golden hairs on his strong, tanned forearm. “In the trees to the right—there’s the female they’re fighting over.”
“That’s fighting?”
He nodded.
They watched for a few seconds longer as the giraffes, torsos pressed together, did a sidestepping movement, like a dance, gangly legs moving in perfect choreography. Then suddenly, the giraffe with the darker markings swung his neck down low then slammed it hard up into the other male’s neck. A slapping sound carried over the veldt.
Dalilah’s stomach clenched. The light-colored giraffe seemed stunned by the blow and stumbled as it tried to sidestep away from the aggressor. But the larger, darker giraffe stepped in time with him, keeping his torso pressed against his opponent.
“The one on the left, the lighter-colored, younger male is trying to get away now,” Brandt explained as the older one looped his neck down again and swung it hard up against the other animal with another resounding crack.
Dalilah gritted her teeth, her hand fisting.
The younger giraffe staggered and its long legs buckled slowly under its body. It hit the ground in a puff of red dust, the tawny rise of its torso just visible through the gold grasses. The older giraffe hovered above the fallen animal, leg raised, hoof poised to kick, his head held high. When the fallen animal struggled to stand, the old male kicked hard, and its opponent went back down.
They waited. Grasshoppers clicked. Heat shimmered. “What’s going to happen?” she whispered.
“The young male will die if it’s fallen flat and can’t get up,” Brandt explained. “These animals have hearts as heavy as a human head, so they can pump blood all the way up those long necks, but lying down too long will send too much blood to their brains and they’ll pass out and die. It’s why they sleep standing up.”
She swallowed, a strange desperation clawing up inside her. So much beauty in this land, even in this graceful fight. Yet it was combat. Harsh and deadly. Over a female, the right to mate. To create life.
The palette of this bushveldt—the stark reality of it, was just so in-your-face raw, life and death at its purest.
Hunt or be hunted, kill or be killed.
Just as she and Brandt were being hunted now, and could be killed.
When the fallen giraffe failed to get up, Brandt started the ignition and they began to move away. Dalilah turned in her seat, hoping. But he didn’t rise from the grass.
“You okay?” he said gently.
She bit her lip, nodded, thinking that even while on the run, Brandt had stolen a moment to stop and point those animals out to her, that he’d stayed to appreciate this world he inhabited, this Africa that she, too, loved. Curiosity about him deepened within her.
“Your name, Brandt,” she said quietly. “It comes from an Afrikaans word, doesn’t it?”
“Dutch. It means burned, or to burn.”
“Figures,” she said with a wry twist of her mouth.