Sunset at Sheba (10 page)

Sammy saw her agitation. ‘It’s not going to be much,’ he said reassuringly. ‘Rain, that’s all. We’ll keep going.’

She stared at him, a driven feeling inside her. ‘Sammy, I’m getting sick of keeping going,’ she said, pleading with him to show mercy. ‘We’re not even heading in the right direction now.’

‘We will. When we get away from that lot in the motors.’

‘Are they
still
following?’

Sammy nodded. ‘They’re right there.’

Polly found herself staring backwards again, touched with a feeling of uneasiness once more. She herself had still seen no signs of their pursuers, but she knew Sammy well enough to know he was making no mistake. It was an eerie sensation to be travelling in that vast wide void of sun and dust and to know that every step was being watched, every twist in the track followed by people who were making no attempt to pass them.

‘You’re certain they’re the same bunch,’ she asked.

Sammy nodded. ‘Same bunch all right,’ he said. ‘Kitto I’ve seen once. And Le Roux’s there. He’s casting big circles on that chestnut of his, looking for our tracks. I’ve seen him several times. I dunno what they’re up to, Poll. Can’t see why they don’t bother to come up with us. They’re faster than us and they’ve got no reason to sit behind us, just watching us and pressing us. They sure as hell aren’t after De Wet, not the way they’re hanging on to
our
trail. All I can think is that they’re seeing us off the premises and they want us to go west.’

Polly stared back again over the uninhabited veld. ‘You’re sure they’re there?’ she asked.

Sammy nodded and indicated the fold in the distance they had just crossed. ‘Saw ‘em when we crossed the bit of higher ground there an hour or two back,’ he said.

‘I didn’t see anything.’

‘You don’t look right. You get used to seeing. Just a speck or two that shouldn’t be there. Then you can see it’s moving, and if you hang on to it hard, you can make out what it is.’

She stared at him curiously. ‘You’re not natural,’ she commented.

Sammy glanced up at the sky then, he grinned at her. ‘I’m going to fool ‘em,’ he said. ‘This is just what I’ve been waiting for. When this lot comes down, Poll, it’ll wipe out all our tracks. Every bit. If we can keep goin’, we can maybe throw ‘em off the scent. I’m going to turn north.’

She stared, twisting on the seat of the cart. ‘North?’ she said. ‘That’s back where we came from?’

He nodded. ‘That’s right. They’re shoving us out west all the time at the moment, and we’re gettin’ no nearer where we want to go anyway, so we might as well make a proper job of it and go north for a bit.’

‘But that’s going to put days on the journey.’ She gaped at him, sick with disappointment.

Sammy shrugged. ‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘Maybe not. What’s the odds? We’re getting nowhere going in this direction. When they’ve got west of us, I’ll double back behind ‘em and head south. They’ll lose us altogether then. The rain’ll cover our tracks. I don’t like people sitting on my tail all the time, do you?’

‘No,’ she admitted, ‘I don’t. Especially when I don’t know why. All the same, I don’t want to go back where I come from, Sammy.’ There was an appeal in her voice, a plea to him not to let her down. ‘I’d got myself all worked up about Kimberley, Sammy. I’ve been looking forward to something a bit different, where a girl’s got a bit of pride, a bit of dignity.’

Sammy looked up at her suddenly, his pale eyes bright. ‘You going to do the same in Kimberley as you did in Plummerton, Poll?’ he asked cautiously.

She shook her head. She had long since made up her mind about that. She had no intention after enduring all this just to go back to where she had started.

‘A girl needs to think of the future,’ she said. ‘You can’t look far ahead with that kind of life. A girl sometimes thinks she’d like to get married. Have a man about the house.’

Sammy said nothing for a while, his eyes still quartering the horizon.

‘It was no job for a decent woman, anyway,’ he pointed out.

‘Men have got to have women,’ she said, not excusing herself, and he became silent again.

After a while, he nudged the Argentino ahead of the cart, studying the ground, and as he drew away there was a tremendous unheralded crash followed by a flash of lightning, and drops of rain as big as half-crowns began to pit the dusty track, rustling the dry tufts of grass. She saw him glance upwards, then he swung his horse back towards her as the drops began to fall more heavily and the sudden smell of rain-rinsed air came to her nostrils. As he reached the cart he leaned across, took the bridle of the bony old mare, and swung her round towards the north, while Polly scrambled into the back of the cart and dragged out the rubber ground-sheet they carried. Then, as he wheeled the horse round in a big curve, leaving the vanishing sun behind them, she began to jerk the canvas cover forward. Picking up the reins again, she cowered back underneath it in the well of the cart on their few belongings, staring out at the transformed veld, her mind too tired, her emotions too flattened, to care.

It arrived like an explosion and for an hour or more it came down on them, blotting out immediately all their tracks and blurring the veld to a grey blank wall. Sammy, an indistinct, rain-faded shape just ahead, seemed to ignore it, hunching lower in the saddle, the battered old hat low over his face, his collar turned up, ignoring the deluge and the weird frightening roar that seemed to strip the earth to its very bones.

There was a two-foot screen of spray over the ground now as mingled dust and splashes leapt up and long spears of rain dashed themselves to atoms, each one bursting with a little puff of dust from the powdery earth. Then the distinct puff and patter, as the rain struck the dried grass, sweeping aside the twigs and stalks, began to give way to a steady sweep and hiss, the trickling hurrying sound of water finding its lowest level, filling the folds and dongas to the height of a man’s head. The hoof prints and the wheel tracks filled with rain, became puddles, then their shallow crusts broke under the downpour and they joined each other and spread until the whole surface of the veld was a fine thin sheet which the greedy earth couldn’t soak up fast enough.

The smell of baked soil gave way to a purifying scent that was full of dust and damp, and the rain-scoured atmosphere seemed fresh suddenly, a new gloriously clarified air that gave a sense of rinsed earth in a newly-washed world.

With the whole veld asheen beneath their plodding hooves, Polly sat in oppressed silence, her hair in damp rats’ tails, the rain running down her back, awed by the fury of the storm, her head low on her shoulders to dodge the spray forced through the cover into the cart. Already little pools were forming alongside her on their belongings and the water ran in steady streams down the inside of the canvas.

The old grey horse between the shafts kept stopping and trying to turn aside, but she kept its head to the north, following the blurred shape of Sammy, who plodded doggedly ahead just in front.

Then, within an hour, the rain had stopped and the water was running off the land into the dongas and the ground was already drying again, steaming heavily in veils of mist with the damp scent of a hothouse, the sun greedily swallowing the moisture out of the earth, while the black column of rain moved ahead of them to the horizon.

Sammy swung his horse round as it slackened off and rode in a large circle round behind the cart, coming up on the other side, his clothes steaming.

‘Washed our tracks out clean, Poll,’ he called gaily. ‘Not a sign of ‘em. That’ll fool ‘em! We’ll head north a bit longer, then I’ll scout west and south and see if we can turn towards Kimberley again.’

Kitto’s column had started to straggle away from the cars in the blinding rain, losing touch with each other as they held their heads down to escape the lash of the weather. One or two of them had even swung round and turned from the storm, so that when it passed on, rolling in great iron-grey clouds to the south, they were scattered far across the veld in ones and twos and groups like the fragments of a broken necklace.

As the sun came out once more, they began to join up again, picking their way through the rivulets that were running in every hollow, making their way back towards the cars which were struggling across the muddy, uneven earth, their engines screaming, their wheels scattering sprays of red mud as they spun uselessly in the watery hollows.

Irritated by the delays the cars were causing, Kitto had exchanged seats with one of the troopers and was now mounted on a horse, scouring the ground with Le Roux, and cursing the rain which had obliterated the tracks. Behind the lorry the remains of the column rode in silence, strung out and weary, the steam rising from their clothes as the fury of the sun came on again.

Then the Napier, rolling into a hollow in the ground, up to its hubs in a pothole, came to an abrupt stop, its double rear tyres hissing on the shifting ground in a spray of flying mud. As Romanis sounded the klaxon in warning, the Rolls just ahead of it stopped, swung round and turned back, rocking over the stony ground. A rope was attached and for a while they struggled, the Rolls trying with a screaming engine to tow out the Napier, then Kitto galloped up, the flanks of his horse slashed with red mud. Sending Le Roux to bring in half a dozen of the stragglers, he began to curse Romanis for his carelessness.

As they harnessed horses to the front of the Napier, an aeroplane floated past overhead, a Union Defence Force Maurice Farman sent north to look for signs of De Wet, its open fuselage of struts and wire frail against the sun. Kitto stared at it as it banked and swung down to look at them, the goggled leather head of the pilot distinct above them. Several of the men waved and cheered as the machine roared overhead, then someone flapped a Union flag, and the machine turned away, the sun shining on the varnished surfaces of its wings.

‘By God,’ Kitto said. ‘I wish we’d got one of those gadgets.’

Winter, sitting on a boulder, watching the efforts of the cavalrymen to free the Napier, looked up at Kitto as he walked up and down, restless and fidgeting to be on the move. His anger seemed to be growing with each delay, and Winter sensed that, taking the place of his original enthusiasm for the chase, there was now a frustrated bitterness that he was being kept from what he conceived to be his duty. He had clearly hoped and intended that this, his first action of the new war -- a war in which he had promised himself he wouldn’t put a foot wrong and so recoup all the lost years in the wilderness - was to be a quick neat affair, as smooth and surgical as an operation, which could be recommended to his superiors for the skill with which it had been completed, a reminder to them of all of their years of neglect of him.

But, thwarted by the rain and by Sammy Schuter’s plainsman’s skill, bogged down, his quarry lost, his men growing resentful at the pace he was forcing, he was beginning to behave like an angry animal goaded by tormentors, his anger taking control of his good sense.

He came up to Winter, his clothes splashed and muddy, and stood in front of him, slashing at his boots with his crop. ‘They must have turned north somewhere during the storm to throw us off,’ he said bitterly. ‘They can’t be more than very far in front but they must have seen us somewhere and guessed we were following. It probably means they’re trying to contact De Wet, or why else would they dodge?’

‘Probably they dislike being dogged,’ Winter suggested.

‘Dirty little traitor,’ Romanis growled.

There was fury in his boy’s face, the disappointed fury of an angry schoolboy cheated of a win at games, and Winter shifted uneasily on his seat on the running board, disquieted again by his part in the affair, feeling he should protest, yet fully aware that the first germ of the idea had been put into Kitto’s mind by himself. Finally, he shrugged, trying to put it out of his head as something which concerned only Kitto and Offy Plummer. But it persisted in coming back to him, nagging at him, reminding him all the time of his own procrastination over the years and the protests he ought to have made ages before, not now when it was almost too late. Somewhere in the lifetime since he’d jolted up from the Cape in a dusty railway carriage, fresh out from England and with nothing to his name but his ability and a lot of hope, something had got lost, he realised, idealism perhaps, honesty even, for inevitably there had been a certain smothering of his conscience at times in his dealings with Offy’s affairs.

He rose and walked up and down for a while, pretending to stretch his legs, but in reality trying to hide from himself. The man who cheated always had a pigeon hole in his mind he could never quite close, and when it suddenly burst open, as it had a habit of doing, it had an unsettling effect that threw him out of gear for a while.

He threw away the cigarette and stood with his hands in his pockets, conscious of the grit down the collar of his shirt and at the corners of his eyes, then Romanis and Kitto moved towards him again, talking.

‘Offy’s damn’ lucky,’ Romanis was saying obsequiously to the older man, trying to deflect his anger from his own poor efforts with the Napier. ‘Having someone like you here to keep an eye on things.’

Winter began to intone gently, jeering at himself as much as at the boy.

‘Our Father which art in Plummerton
Offy be Thy name - ‘

- the words belonged to a blasphemous prayer he had once made up to chide himself. It had had great success at the time among the half-ashamed sycophants of Offy’s court.

‘ - Thy kingdom hum,
Thy will be done,
In the Sidings as well as in West - ‘

‘Cut that out, Winter,’ Kitto said, glaring at him, the stamp of a dogged belief in God on his face, a belief as fierce and unimaginative as his courage and his pride.

‘Sorry,’ Winter apologised. ‘I’m getting a little on edge, that’s all. Tired perhaps, sorry even - ‘

‘Sorry? What for?’

‘The fox, when the hounds are after him.’

‘Dammit, Winter,’ Romanis said, swinging round on him and sending the leather coat flirting out, still trying to placate Kitto. ‘You’re not going to start sticking up for a sickening white-gilled little smous, are you?’