Sunset at Sheba (13 page)

Kitto glanced at his grinning face, and brushed away the aside in his eagerness to get on.

‘How close are we?’ he demanded. ‘How far behind?’

‘Four-five hours, I reckon,’ Le Roux said. ‘That’s all. Looks as though they had their midday meal here.’ He indicated the top of the broken ant-heap on the far bank and the flattened, muddy dust where someone had thrown away the dregs of a cup of coffee.

‘Right!’ Kitto made up his mind quickly. ‘We’ll stop here for an hour or two to eat and rest the horses. There’s water, and we might pick up some fresh meat. There’s always game near water. Romanis, send a couple of men upstream to watch the pools. There are always guinea fowl or duiker in the reeds. If they’ve gone north we’ll keep the motors on this side of the river till we find ‘em, and let the horses go over the other side. If they’ve turned west again we’ll have to get the cars across somehow. Pick up some rations and get on ahead, Le Roux.’

‘I’ll take a couple of men to flank me and cut north and get up close to ‘em,’ Le Roux said. ‘They’re goin’ to be surprised, man, when they see me - especially the woman!’

‘Cut that out,’ Kitto snapped and Le Roux grinned wolfishly, his expression suggesting all sorts of indecencies.

A man whooped as Le Roux called his name, and Winter shivered a little, his head aching. Le Roux’s attitude seemed to go with loot and pillage and all the other horrors of war.

The scout was waving, whirling his horse on its haunches in a showy pirouette.

‘Trek ons,’
he shouted.
‘Tot siens.’

Followed by his companions, he scrambled up the opposite bank of the stream and vanished over the ridge, the hoof beats dying away across the veld.

By this time someone had kicked a heap of dust together and poured petrol on it and a fire was already winking, a thin wisp of blue smoke spiralling upwards in slow curls to the sky. The Kaffirs began to break sticks and unpack the cars, and a few famished men were already squatting in a gulley at the top of the bank, cooking bacon and beans in a mess tin.

The horses, unkempt and exhausted by the chase, were glad of a roll and the chance to get what nourishment they could from the withered grass, and the Army Service Corps mechanics and drivers were humping petrol tins and cans of muddy water from the stream for the radiators. Winter could see one of them with his head in the bonnet of the Napier, cursing with a soft weary persistence.

Kitto and Romanis had a blanket spread on the ground, a map unfolded on it, held down at the corners by binoculars, compass and a couple of stones, and were on their hands and knees staring at it. One of the Kaffirs brought them a meal of potted meat, sardines and biscuits, and they sat back, brushing away the flies, and began to eat.

Winter watched them, eating himself. In his nostrils was the aromatic smell of coffee, mingling in the breathless air with the horse smells of leather and sweat and hot human flesh, laying over the scent of wet soil, the crushed thyme tang of the smashed karroo bushes and the night perfume of flowers along the bank. Beyond the river, the brown kopjes had already melted into violet islands with topaz tops and farther up the stream he heard the hoarse cry of a heron and the sharp whistle of a still-questing kingfisher above the monotonous buzzing of legions of cicadas in the dry grass and scrub. Over his head, the turquoise sky was studded with the first brilliant stars. He looked up to find Kitto and Romanis alongside him.

‘What’s worrying you?’ Romanis asked. ‘You look as doleful as a shop with the shutters up.’

‘I don’t know,’ Winter said thoughtfully. ‘Nothing, I suppose. Everything. I find I don’t like this damned business, Kitto. I was wrong to suggest it.’

Kitto stared at him, puzzled, unable in his forthright directness to understand his fears. ‘Is it so wrong to serve your country?’ he said. ‘That’s all we’re doing, isn’t it?’

Winter shrugged, ‘All right, then, we thought right and acted wrong.’

Kitto’s face wore the contempt of a man who knows what he wants out of life for one who doesn’t, the contempt of a man who had never been actuated by the deviousness of intrigue, and had always seen his objectives clearly before him, unmarred by any doubts.

‘If one boy,’ he said, ‘one Yid whose record shouts out loud that nobody will miss him anyway, if he’s unfortunate enough to be in the way, then we have to harden our hearts and get rid of him - for the good of the whole. I’m fighting for unity, one land, not a couple of Crown colonies and a bunch of piddling little republics.’

‘ “The brittle rights of primitive peoples must shiver to pieces on the rocks of a more advanced society,”
‘ Winter quoted with a smile. ‘That’s what Offy said when they made him Administrator of Dhanziland. He pinched it, I think. From Rhodes or Shepstone or someone like that. But all it ever meant was that Offy felt he’d a right to spit in the eye of everybody who didn’t fit in with his plans. I still think it might have been wiser to recruit the boy, not chase him. He’s got courage and it’s a rare commodity not to be squandered through mismanagement. I think we set about this affair the wrong way.’

He sat back, chewing at a biscuit, aware of the weakness of his protest compared with the virile hatred that was clearly growing in the minds of the pursuers for someone few of them knew but who had managed by his cunning to bring them all to this far pass of weariness and frustration.

Kitto glanced round him at the men who were unsaddling and rubbing down the horses with handfuls of dry grass.

Someone had started playing a mouth organ and one of the Boer troopers was singing in a throaty baritone -

‘Vat jou goed en trek, Ferreira,
Vat jou goed en trek
-’

The song came over the small noises of the camp, the crunching of heavy boots on the stones, the chink of harness, the rustle of a thorn bush on the slopes, the splash of a horse moving through the stream.

‘Don’t worry,’ he said sharply, ‘I can handle it all right. I was with Makepeace in Dhanziland and Jameson’s mob when they rode up to Bulawayo. I’ve seen more damn’ fighting than most people
dream about,
and I’ll handle this business properly. I’ve
got
to.’

There was a curious hint of loneliness in his voice behind the boastfulness, a rare crack in his ferocious military pride that revealed his sense of failure over the years. ‘Time moves too damn’ fast,’ he said. ‘Before you know where you are, you’re too old. This is my last chance. I shan’t be around next time.’

Somewhere beyond his words, Winter heard a tormenting certainty that somewhere, somehow, his life and his luck had slipped through his fingers, ungrasped. And with it, Winter sensed a frightened awareness that this chance he was groping for now had turned out to be bigger than
he
was, something he was going to be rid of only with difficulty. Behind the bold, resourceful Kitto, Winter knew, there seemed now to be another man, suddenly puzzled, uncertain and a little hurt, and Winter tried to take advantage of it.

‘This isn’t what Offy wanted, Kitto,’ he persisted. ‘We’re beginning to look like a pack of hounds.’

Kitto turned his handsome, sun-lined countenance towards him and the other Kitto had vanished again as quickly as it had come. With the heroic legend of the youthful Hector Stark Kitto behind him, he was always a little more real than the real thing.

‘You’re not facing facts, Winter,’ he said sternly.

Winter shrugged, realising Kitto was probably right. He
never had
faced facts. For a moment, he sat still, thinking of all the things he had always dreamed of that had never materialised, all the ambitions that had ended like a lot of damp fireworks when he had met Offy Plummer. He fished in his pocket for a cigarette, conscious of having made his protest and failed to convince anyone.

He pushed it out of his mind hurriedly, knowing it would end in emptiness and the incredible fatigue of frustration, and Kitto turned away and stopped, one foot on the bank, looking like Napoleon before Austerlitz.

‘There’s only one important thing for us now,’ he said. ‘And that’s winning the war. As far as I’m concerned this became an affair for soldiers long ago.’

Sammy Schuter had been moving faster for some time now. Trailed by Polly who was trying hard to ride as he did, relaxed and easy, he had long since left the bed of the stream. They had camped the night among the broken country on the way back towards Plummerton Sidings and were now heading through the line of kopjes leading to Sheba.

Polly sat on the bony shaft-horse, drooping with weariness, and stared curiously ahead at Sammy who had dismounted and was standing in the track, coated with red-yellow powder, a dust-caked figure with a stubble of beard on his face. He had set off in front of her, circling a small group of buck he had seen, and as she had followed him she had heard the report of the old Martini-Henry and moved slowly in the direction of the sound.

He was standing now, way up in front of her, the carcass of a buck by his feet, his slender horseman’s body somehow incomplete without the Argentino, staring at something in the track. Polly dug her heels into the grey and moved forward, jangling and clattering like a tinker as the cooking pots around her rattled together.

‘What is it, Sammy?’ she asked.

Sammy looked up, and she saw the pale eyes in the young-old face were hard as ice. He pointed to a pile of horse-droppings at his feet and stirred them with his boot.

‘Still warm,’ he said. ‘Not more than a couple of hours old, I’d say. I found a dead fire out there too.’

He nodded towards the south-west where the veld shimmered in the rays of the sun.

‘He’s looking for us. He’s been ranging backwards and forwards. I found the tracks a mile or two away. He’s looking for our spoor. Judging by the way he’s heading, he’s somewhere behind us now. It’ll be Le Roux, I suppose. He’ll swing back east, I reckon, and pick up our spoor about where we camped, judging by the way he’s workin’.’

‘Could be someone shooting for the market,’ Polly pointed out without really believing what she said. ‘Maybe some prospector. We’re near enough to Plummerton now.’

He glanced up at her. ‘On his own?’ he asked. ‘There’s no prospecting here, Poll. No water. And he’s not shooting for the market. He’s got no cart with him. Where’ll he put the meat?’

He looked up at Polly and smiled a quick mischievous unexpected grin.

‘I’ll make him think,’ he said. ‘Get up ahead there beyond that clump of rocks at the bottom of the kopje.’ He indicated the low hillock, broken at its base by the mass of granite rocks like tombstones.

‘Keep going,’ he said. ‘Keep going behind the kopje so he won’t be able to see you. I don’t want him to swing off west or east. I want him to come straight through here.’

Polly looked down at him. The days in the sun had cut tiny lines at the corner of her eyes and bleached her lashes white, and the print frock already seemed faded.

‘What are you going to do, Sammy?’ she asked.

He scratched the stubble on his cheeks and fidgeted in his sweaty shirt. ‘I’m going to give him a surprise, whoever he is,’ he said. ‘We could use his hoss, maybe.’

Polly watched him, her face anxious. All the posturings and artificiality had gone from her long since and left her with her emotions undisguised.

‘Sammy,’ she asked, ‘wouldn’t it have been best to go where they wanted us to go?’

‘What? Into German South-West?
That’s
what they’re trying on now.’

Polly shrugged, body-weary, her mind stupefied by fatigue so that she couldn’t absorb the meaning of their increasing importance to the men just over the horizon behind them, couldn’t grasp its significance. ‘Perhaps internment wouldn’t be all that bad,’ she said. ‘Maybe they’d treat us all right.’

‘And maybe they wouldn’t.’

She seemed to droop in the saddle. ‘Sammy,’ she pleaded. ‘I’m getting awful tired. I can’t go on much longer.’

His face set. ‘Hang on, Poll,’ he encouraged her. ‘We can’t let them get away with this. It’s just not right, and we’ve not so far to go now.’

She tried a new approach. ‘Well, then,’ she begged, ‘can’t I stay with you? Don’t send me on, Sammy. Let me stay.’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘It’s not safe.’ His voice was gruff as he answered, and he tried not to look at her.

‘I’d like to,’ she pointed out.

‘It’s no job for a woman,’ he insisted. ‘I’ll look after meself all right.’

Her eyes grew soft and appealing. ‘I looked after you long enough in the past when Pa first brought you home,’ she said. ‘I’m older than you, remember.’

‘Two years,’ he pointed out.

‘Three,’ she persisted. ‘Let me stay, Sammy.’

‘No.’

‘Sammy -’ she paused, staring down at him. ‘I wouldn’t want anything to happen to you.’

‘Why not?’ He looked up quickly, irritatingly remote still.

‘Oh Lor’,’ - she groaned at his blindness - ‘why do you think I
always
looked after you, fixing your things whenever you appeared? - not seeing you for months and then having all your clothes washed and ready when you came home? I didn’t have to - especially the way you kept disappearing. Look what it let me in for.’

Sammy frowned. ‘What you getting at, Poll?’ he asked.

‘Dammit, you great clown, don’t you know I love you?’

He looked up at her sharply, then his eyes fell and he began to move his hand up and down the gun.

‘You loved lots of blokes,’ he said quietly.

‘Not like you. God help me, I don’t know when it started or why. I only know that you don’t worry for friends or your own flesh and blood as I used to worry for you, Sammy. You and me were brought up like brother and sister but no woman ever felt for her brother what I started to feel for you. Why’d you think I made an effort to put up with everything out here? I’m not a backvelder, Sammy, I’m a townie, but I’ve tried heavens hard to keep up with you so’s I could be near you.’

Sammy studied her for a long time, his pale eyes on her face. ‘Whyn’t you ever say?’ he asked.

‘It’s not my job to say,’ she pointed out, her head up, her eyes unashamed.