A Falcon Flies (48 page)

‘We will have to let them go,' Jan Cheroot lamented in the darkness, his yellow face a pale blob at Zouga's shoulder.

‘Yes,' Zouga agreed. ‘This time we must let them go.' But somehow he knew there would be another time. The feeling that the old bull was part of his destiny was still strongly with Zouga. Yes, there would be another time, of that he was certain.

T
hat night for the first time Zouga ate the hunter's greatest delicacy: slices of elephant heart threaded on to a green stick with cubes of white fat cut out from the chest cavity, salted and peppered, and roasted over the slow coals of the camp fire, eaten with cold cakes of stone-ground corn and washed down with a mug of tea, steaming hot, bitter, strong and unsweetened. He could not remember a finer meal, and afterwards Zouga lay down on the hard earth, covered by a single blanket and protected from the chill of the wind by the huge carcass of the old bull, and slept as though he also had been struck down, without dreams, without rolling over even once in his sleep.

In the morning, by the time they had chopped out one of the tusks and laid it under the msasa trees, they could already hear the singing of the porters as the main body of the caravan filed along the narrow ledge, rounding the shoulder of the mountain and then came up on to the slope.

Robyn was a hundred paces ahead of the standard-bearer, and when she reached the carcass of the bull she stopped.

‘We heard the gunfire last evening,' she said.

‘He's a fine old bull,' Zouga told her, indicating the freshly chopped tusk. It was the unbroken right-hand ivory, taller than Zouga, but a third of its length had been buried in the skull. This portion was smooth, unblemished white, whereas the rest of it was stained by vegetable juices.

‘It will weigh almost a hundred pounds,' he went on, touching the tusks with the toe of his boot. ‘Yes, he's a fine old bull.'

‘Not any more, he isn't,' Robyn told him quietly, watching Jan Cheroot and the gunbearers hacking away at the enormous mutilated head. Little chips of white bone flew in the early sunlight, as they whittled away the heavy skull to free the second tusk. Robyn watched the butchery for a few seconds only before going on up the slope towards the crest.

Zouga was irritated and angry with her, for she had detracted from his own vaulting pleasure in his first elephant hunt. So, an hour later when he heard Robyn calling to him from higher up the slope, he ignored her cries. However, she was persistent, as always, and at last with an exclamation of exasperation, he followed her up through the forest. She came running down to meet him, with the unrestrained infectious joy of a child shining on her face.

‘Oh Zouga.' She seized his hand, and began to drag him impetuously up the slope. ‘Come and see, you must come and see.'

The old elephant road crossed the saddle, through a deep pass, guarded on each hand by grey buttresses of rough grey rock and as they took the last few paces over the highest point a new and beautiful world opened below and ahead of them. Zouga gasped involuntarily, for he had not anticipated anything like this.

Low foothills fell away from beneath their feet, regular as the swells of the ocean, covered with stately trees whose trunks were tall and grey as the oaks of Windsor Park, and then beyond the hills the undulating lightly forested grasslands, golden as fields of ripe wheat, spread to a tall blue horizon. There were streams of clear water meandering through the glades of pale grass, where herds of wild game drank or lazed upon the banks.

There were buffalo everywhere Zouga looked, black bovine shapes, standing shoulder to shoulder in dark masses under the umbrella branches of the acacia trees. Closer at hand a troop of sable antelope, that loveliest of all antelope, jet black above but with snowy bellies, their long symmetrical curve of horn extended backwards almost to touch the haunches, followed the herd bull in long file to the water, pausing unafraid to stare curiously at the interlopers, forming a frieze of stately, almost Grecian, design.

The endless stretch of land was dotted with hills like ruined natural castles of stone, seeming to have been built in past aeons by giants and ogres from mammoth blocks of stone, and tumbled now in fantastic shapes, some with fairy turrets and spires, others again flat topped, geometrically laid out as though by a meticulous architect with plumb-line and theodolite.

This lovely scene was lit by a peculiar pearly luminosity of the morning light, so that even the furthest hills, probably more than a hundred miles distant, were sharply silhouetted through the sweet clear air.

‘It's beautiful,' Robyn murmured, still holding Zouga's hand.

‘The kingdom of Monomatapa,' Zouga answered her, his own voice husky with emotion.

‘No,' Robyn answered softly. ‘There is no sign of man here, this is the new Eden.'

Zouga was silent, letting his eyes rove across the scene, searching for, but not finding, any evidence of man. It was a land untouched, unspoiled.

‘A new land, there for the taking!' he said, still holding Robyn's hand. They were as close, in that moment, as they had ever been or would ever be again, and the land awaited them, wide, limitless, empty and beautiful.

A
t last, reluctantly, he left Robyn at the head of the pass and went back through the grey rock portals to bring on the caravan. He found the second tusk removed, and both of them bound up with bark rope on to the carrying-poles of newly cut msasa wood, but the porters had laid aside their packs and were indulging in an orgy of fresh meat, and that most sought-after of African spoils, thick white globs of elephant fat.

They had cut a trapdoor into the belly of the elephant carcass, and pulled out the entrails, and these glistened in the early sunlight, huge rubbery tubes of purple and yellow guts, already swelling and ballooning with the trapped gases they contained.

Half a dozen porters, stripped mother-naked, had crawled into the interior of the elephant's carcass, disappearing completely from view and wading almost waist-deep in the clotting, congealing bath of trapped blood. They crawled out, painted with it from head to foot, eyes and grinning teeth startlingly white in the grisly shining wet red visages, their arms filled with tidbits of liver and fat and spleen.

These delicacies were hacked into pieces with the blade of an assegai and thrown on the glowing coals of one of half a dozen fires, then snatched up again, black on the outside and more than half raw within to be wolfed down with every appearance of ecstatic pleasure.

There would be no moving them until they were satiated, Zouga realized. So he left instructions to Jan Cheroot, himself already pot-bellied with the meat he had gorged, to follow as soon as the carcass had been either eaten or packed up for carrying, and taking the Sharps rifle returned back up the slope to where he had left Robyn.

He called for her, fruitlessly, for almost half an hour, and was really becoming concerned for her safety when her reply echoed off the cliffs, and looking upwards he saw her standing on a ledge a hundred feet above him, waving him to come up to her.

Zouga climbed up swiftly to where she stood on the ledge, and checked the rebuke that he had ready for her when he saw her expression. She was pale, a sickly greyish colour, under the gilding of the sun, and her eyes were reddened and still swimming with tears.

‘What is it, Sissy?' he asked with quick concern, but she seemed unable to reply, the words choking in her throat so she had to swallow thickly, and motion him to follow her.

The ledge on which they stood was narrow, but level – and was cut back under the cliff, forming a low long cavern. The cavern had been used before by other men, for the rocky roof was blackened with the sooty smoke of countless cooking-fires, and the back wall was decorated with the lyrically childlike paintings of the little yellow bushmen who over the centuries must have used this as a regular camp during their endless wanderings.

The paintings lacked both perspective and accurate form, but they captured the essential nature of all they recorded, from the graceful sweep of the giraffe's neck, to the bulky shoulders of the Cape buffalo with the mournful drooping horns framing the lifted nose.

The bushman artist saw himself and his tribe as frail, sticklike figures, with drawn bows, dancing and prancing about the quarry, and again, out of all proportion to the rest of the painting, each little man sported a massively erect penis. Even in the heat of the chase, such was the universal conceit of all male kind, Zouga thought.

Zouga was enchanted by the frozen cavalcade of man and beast which covered the walls of the cave, and he had already determined to camp here so that he could have more time to study and record this treasure house of primitive art, when Robyn was calling him again.

He followed her along the ledge until they reached the point where it ended abruptly, forming a balcony over the dreaming land ahead of them. Zouga's attention was torn between this fresh vista of forest and glade and the cave art at his shoulder, but Robyn summoned him again impatiently.

There were strata of multi-coloured rock running horizontally through the rock face of the cliff. The different layers of rock varied in hardness, and the erosion of a softer layer had formed the long low cavern beyond the ledge.

This layer of rock was a soapy green colour, where it had not been painted over by the bushmen artists or discoloured with the smoke of their fires, and here at the point overlooking the empire of Monomatapa someone had used a metal tool to scrape a smooth square plaque into the green soapstone. The freshly cut surface stood out rawly as though it had been done that very day, but the words gave the lie to that impression.

There was a simple Christian cross chiselled deeply into the stone, and below it the name and the date, the lettering very carefully cut and designed by an expert penman.

‘FULLER MORRIS BALLANTYNE'

Zouga exclaimed aloud at seeing his father's name, so clearly rendered by his father's own hand.

Despite the apparent freshness of the cut, the date was seven years previously – 20th July, 1853. After that single exclamation they were both speechless, staring at the inscription, each of them gripped by differing emotion – Robyn by a resurgence of filial love and duty, by a crushing desire to be with her father again after so many years, the vast empty place in her life aching more excruciatingly at the prospect of being soon filled. Her eyes refilled with tears, and they broke from her eyelids and ran down her cheeks.

‘Please, God,' she prayed silently, ‘lead me to my father. Dear God, grant me that I am not too late.'

Zouga's emotions were as strong, but different. He felt a corroding resentment that any other man, father or not, should have preceded him through these rocky gates into the kingdom of Monomatapa. This was his land, and he did not want to share it with another. Especially, he did not want to share it with that monster of cruelty and conceit that was his father.

He stared coldly at the inscription that followed the name and date, but inwardly he seethed with anger and resentment.

‘In God's Holy name.' The words were carved below his father's name.

It was typical of Fuller Ballantyne that he should carve his own name here with cross and credentials as the Lord's ambassador, as he had on trees and rocks at a hundred other places across the continent which he regarded as a personal gift from his God.

‘You were right, Zouga dear. You are leading us to him, as you promised. I should never have doubted you.'

If he had been alone Zouga realized that he might have defaced that inscription, scraped the rock bare with his hunting knife, but as he had the thought, he realized how futile it would be, for such an action would not wipe out the ghostly presence of the man himself.

Zouga turned away from the rock wall and its taunting plaque. He stared out over the new land – but somehow his heady pleasure in it had been dimmed by the knowledge that another man had passed this way ahead of him. He sat down with his feet dangling over the sheer drop to wait for Robyn to tire of staring at her father's name.

However, the caravan of porters came before she did that. Zouga heard the singing from the forested slope behind the pass long before the head of the line crossed the saddle. The porters had voluntarily doubled their own loads, and they struggled up the slope under the enormous weight of elephant meat and fat and marrow bones, bound up in baskets of green msasa leaves and bark rope.

If Zouga had asked them to carry that weight of trade cloth or beads, or even gunpowder, he would have had an immediate mutiny to deal with, he thought grimly, but at least they were carrying the tusks. He could see them near the head of the line. Each tusk slung on a long pole, a man at either end, but even here they had hung extra baskets of meat on the same pole as the tusk. The total weight must have been well over three hundred pounds, and they struggled up the slope uncomplainingly, even cheerfully.

Slowly, the caravan wound out of the forest and entered the gut of the pass, beginning to move directly under where Zouga sat, the figures of the porters and of Jan Cheroot's Hottentot musketeers foreshortened by the angle. Zouga rose to his feet, he wanted to order Jan Cheroot to camp just beyond the point where the pass debouched on to the foothills. From where Zouga stood, he could see a patch of green grass against the foot of the cliffs far below him, and a pair of pale grey herons hunting frogs in this verdant marshy area. There was certainly a spring, and with the meat upon which they had gorged, his servants would be burning with thirst by nightfall.

The spring would be a good place to camp, and it would allow him the following morning to copy and record the Bushman paintings in the cavern. He cupped his hands to his mouth to hail Jan Cheroot – when a crash like the broadside from a ship of the line filled the pass with thunder that echoed and bounced back and forth between the cliffs.

For many seconds Zouga could not understand what was happening for the thunderous bursts of sound were repeated, almost drowning the thin screams of his porters. They were throwing down their burdens and scattering like a flight of doves under the stoop of the falcon.