A Falcon Flies (66 page)

They would bury him the following morning, but until then they would keep up the haunting cries of mourning.

Jan Cheroot scraped coals from the fire and began to grill the kebab of liver and fat and heart over them, ‘They will be useless until they have buried him, and we must still cut the tusks.'

‘I owe Matthew a night of mourning at least,' Zouga whispered. ‘He stood the bull down. If he had run with the second gun . . .' Zouga broke off, and groaned as a fresh stab of pain transfixed his shoulder. Using his good left hand, he scratched under the skin blanket on which he lay, moving the lumps of stone which had caused the discomfort.

‘He was good – stupid, but good,' Jan Cheroot agreed. ‘A wiser man would have run.' He turned the kebab slowly over the coals. ‘It will take all day tomorrow to bury him and then cut the tusks from both elephants. But we must march the day after that.'

Jan Cheroot had killed his bull down on the plain, under the outspread branches of a giant acacia. Looking through the low opening of the hut Zouga could see the carcass of his own bull lying on its side not twenty feet away. Already it was swelling with trapped gas and the upper legs thrust out stiffly above the grey balloon of the belly. The tusks were unbelievable. Even as he stared at them Zouga thought they must be a fantasy of his exhaustion and agony. They were as thick as a girl's waist, and the spread of them must have been twelve feet from tip to tip.

‘How much will they weigh?' he asked Jan Cheroot, and the Hottentot looked up and shrugged.

‘I have never seen a bigger elephant,' he admitted. ‘We will need three men to carry each of them.'

‘Two hundred pounds?' Zouga asked, the conversation distracted him from the agony in his shoulder.

‘More,' Jan Cheroot decided. ‘You will never see another like him.'

‘No,' Zouga agreed. ‘That is true. There will never be another like him.' Deep regret blended with his pain, making it more intense. Regret for the magnificent beast and sorrow for the brave man who had died with him.

The pain and the sorrow would not let him sleep that night, and in the dawn when they gathered in the rain to bury Matthew, Zouga strapped his damaged arm into a bark sling and had two men help him to his feet, then he walked unaided but slowly and stiffly up the slope to the grave, using a staff to balance himself.

They had wrapped Matthew's body in his fur blanket and placed his possessions with him, his axe and spear, his food bowl and beer calabash, to serve him on the long journey ahead.

Singing the slow mournful song of the dead, they packed the rock over and around him so that the hyena would not dig him out. When they had finished, Zouga felt drained of strength and emotion. He staggered back to his hut and crawled under the dank blanket. He had only that day to gather his strength for the march that must be resumed in the dawn. He closed his eyes, but could not sleep for the thud of the axes into bone as Jan Cheroot supervised the chopping of the tusks from the casket of the old bull's skull.

Zouga rolled on to his back, and once again a loose rock chip dug into his aching body. He reached back and pulled it from under the blanket, was about to throw it aside when something caught his attention and he arrested the movement.

The rock was as white and as crystalline as the candied sugar that Zouga had loved so as a boy, a pretty little fragment, but that was not what had stopped his hand.

Even in the subdued light of the hut, the thin irregular seam of metal that wavered uncertainly between quartz crystals flicked a pin-prick of bright gold into his eyes. Zouga stared at it numbly, twisting the lump of quartz to catch the light and make it twinkle. There was a sense of unreality about the moment, as there always is when something sought for and longed for is at last held in the hand.

He found his voice at last, a hoarse croak through his swollen, blistered, powder-scorched lips, and Jan Cheroot came almost immediately.

‘The grave,' he whispered urgently, ‘Matthew's grave, it was dug so swiftly in such rocky soil.'

‘No,' Jan Cheroot shook his head. ‘It was there. There are other holes like it along the ridge.'

Zouga stared at him for a long moment, his face lopsided with the scabbed and stitched wound, his one eye a mere slit in the puffed and bruised flesh. He had let himself sink low from the wound. It had been under his nose and he had almost missed it. He started to drag himself out of his blanket.

‘Help me!' he ordered. ‘I must see them. Show me these holes.'

Leaning on Jan Cheroot's shoulder, stooped to favour his shoulder, he dragged himself along the ridge in the rain, and when at last he was satisfied, he limped back to the hut and used the last feeble light of that day to scrawl in his journal, holding it in his lap and bowing over it to protect the pages from the drip of rain through the rough thatching, using his left hand so the writing was barely decipherable.

‘I have named it the Harkness Mine, for this must be very similar to the ancient workings that old Tom described. The reef is white sugar quartz and runs along the back of the ridge. It would appear to be very narrow but rich, for there is visible gold in many of the samples. My injury prevents me crushing and panning these, but I would estimate values well in excess of two ounces of fine gold to the ton of quartz.

‘The ancient miners have driven four shafts into the hillside. There may be more that I overlooked, for they are heavily overgrown and an attempt has been made to refill the shafts, possibly to conceal them.

‘The shafts are large enough to admit a small man crawling on hands and knees. Probably they used child-slaves in the diggings and the conditions of labour in these rabbit warrens must have been infernal. In any event they were only able to go down as far as the water table, and without sophisticated machinery to pump the flooded working, they would have been abandoned. This is probably what happened here at the Harkness Mine and there is almost certainly a great amount of gold-bearing ore to be recovered by modern methods.

‘The rock dump on which stands my rude hut is composed almost entirely of the gold matrix, awaiting crushing and refining, and the miners were probably driven away by an enemy before they could complete their labours.

‘I am couched upon a mattress of gold, and like King Midas all around me is the precious metal. Like that unfortunate King, there seems to be little profit in it for me that I can perceive at this moment—'

Zouga paused, and laid his pen aside, warming his icy hands at the smoky fire. He should have felt wildly elated. He picked up his pen once again. He sighed and then wrote tortuously,

‘I have a huge store of ivory, but it is spread across this land, buried in small caches. I have fifty pounds and more of native gold in ingot and nugget, and I have discovered the mother lode of untold fortune, but it cannot buy me a pound flask of gunpowder nor an unguent for my grievous injuries.

‘I will not know until tomorrow if I have the strength remaining to me to continue the march to the south, or if I am destined to remain here with Matthew and the great elephant as my only companions.'

J
an Cheroot shook him awake. It took a long time. Zouga seemed to be swimming up from great depths through cold and murky water, and when at last he surfaced, he knew immediately that his gloomy prophecy written in the journal the previous evening had become reality. There was no feeling or strength in his legs. His shoulder and arm were bound rock hard with spasmed muscle.

‘Leave me here,' he said to Jan Cheroot, and the Hottentot heaved him to a sitting position, snarling at him when Zouga cried out at the agony of each movement, and forced him to drink the steaming hot soup made from elephant marrowbones.

‘Leave one gun with me,' Zouga whispered.

‘Here.' Jan Cheroot ignored the order and instead made him take the bitter white powder. Zouga gagged on the quinine.

It took two porters to get him on his feet.

‘I am leaving that stone.' Jan Cheroot pointed to the packaged statute. ‘We cannot carry both of you.'

‘No!' Zouga whispered fiercely. ‘If I go, the bird must go with me.'

‘How?'

Zouga shrugged off their hands.

‘I will walk,' he said. ‘Carry the bird.'

T
hey made less than five miles that day, but the following day the sun emerged again to cheer them on. Once it warmed Zouga's abused muscles, he could increase the pace.

That night he logged ten miles in his journal when they camped in open grassland. In the dawn Zouga was able to crawl from his blankets and gain his feet unaided. His injuries still stiff, he used the staff to leave the thorn
scherm
by its single gate and limp to the periphery of the camp. When he urinated his water was a dark amber colour from the fever and the quinine, but he knew now that he was going to be able to continue the march.

He looked up at the sky. It would rain again soon. They should start at once. He was about to turn back to the camp and rouse the porters when movement in the tall grass caught his attention.

For a moment he thought it might be a troop of wild ostrich passing the camp, then suddenly he realized that the whole plain was alive with swift but stealthy movement, the fluffy grass tops rustling and nodding with the passage of many bodies, only now and again there was a brief glimpse of ruffled plumes above the grass. The movement spread swiftly around both sides of the small camp, where Zouga's men still slept.

Zouga stared uncomprehendingly, leaning on his staff, still muzzy with sleep and fever and anchored by his injuries, he did not move until the swift encircling movement had been completed, and then the stillness and silence descended again so for a moment he believed he had been imagining phantoms.

Then there was a soft fluting whistle, like a blast on Pan's pipe, sweet and hauntingly melodious in the dawn, and immediately there was movement again, an encroaching movement, like a strangler's hand upon the throat. Zouga saw the ostrich plumes clearly now, snowy white and dead black they swayed and danced above the grass tops, and immediately afterwards he saw the war shields, long oval shields of dappled black and white cowhide. The long shields – the Matabele.

Dread was a cold, heavy lump under his ribs, yet instinct warned him that to show it would mean death, just when he had once again believed in life.

There were a hundred, he calculated swiftly as he glanced around the closing ring of warriors. No, there were more than that, at least two hundred Matabele
amadoda
in full war plumage, only the plumes and their eyes showing above the tops of the long dappled shields. The grey dawn light glinted on the broad-bladed stabbing spears, held underhand so the points protruded beyond the ring of shields. The ring was unbroken, shield overlapped shield, the encircling horns of the bull, the classic tactics of the Matabele, the finest and most ruthless warriors that the continent of Africa had ever spawned.

‘Here Mzilikazi's border impis kill all travellers,' Tom Harkness had written.

Zouga drew himself up and stepped forward, holding up his one good arm with the palm extended towards the ring of shields.

‘I am an Englishman. A commander of the great white Queen, Victoria. My name is Bakela, son of Manali, son of Tshedi – and I come in peace.'

From the ranks stepped a man. He was taller than Zouga and his tossing ostrich plumes turned him into a giant. He swept aside his shield, and he was lean and muscled like a gladiator. On his upper arms he wore the tassels of cow tails, each one awarded him by his King for an act of valour. The cow tails were thick bunches, layer upon layer. His short kilt was of spotted civet cat tails, and there were more cow tails bound around his calves just below the knees. He had the handsome smooth moon-face of the true Nguni, with a broad nose and full sculptured lips. His bearing was noble, the carriage of his head proud.

He looked at Zouga slowly and with grave attention. He looked at his tattered rags, at the untidy bindings that held his damaged arm, the staff on which he leaned like an old man.

He studied Zouga's singed beard, and powder-burned cheeks, the blisters on his lips and the black scabs that clung obscenely on his swollen discoloured cheek.

Then the Matabele laughed. It was a deep musical laugh, and then he spoke.

‘And I,' he said, ‘am Matabele. An Induna of two thousand. My name is Gandang, son of Mzilikazi, son of the high heavens, son of Zulu, and I come with a bright spear and a red heart.'

R
obyn Ballantyne realized within the first day's march that she had seriously miscalculated her father's strength and resilience when she made the decision to try for the coast. Perhaps Zouga had divined instinctively what she a trained physician should have known. That thought made her angry with herself. She found that since parting with Zouga her hostility and sense of rivalry towards him had, if anything, increased. It made her angry that he should have given the correct advice.

By noon of that first day Robyn had been forced to call a halt and to go into camp. Fuller Ballantyne was very weak, weaker than he had been when first she found him. His skin was burning hot and dry to the touch. The movement of the litter, the jolting and bumping over uneven ground had aggravated Fuller's leg. It was grotesquely swollen, and so tender that he screamed and fought at the lightest touch upon the discoloured skin.

Robyn had one of the bearers begin work on a cradle of green twigs and bark to place over the leg and keep the fur blanket off it, and then she sat by the litter applying a damp, cool cloth to her father's forehead and speaking to little Juba and the Mashona woman, not expecting nor receiving advice from them, but taking comfort from the human contact.

‘Perhaps we should have stayed at the cave,' she fretted. ‘At least he would have been more comfortable there, but then for how long could we have stayed?' She spoke her thoughts aloud. ‘The rains will be on us soon. We could not have stayed, and even if we march as slowly as this, we will still be trapped here by them. We simply must increase the pace – and yet I do not know if he can survive it.'