Sunset at Sheba (22 page)

The driver of the armoured car watched the operations from his seat with absorbed attention, then, obviously thinking it might be more interesting to take part himself, he climbed into the box-like body and reached for the frying-pan shape of the Lewis.

Sammy saw the lieutenant in charge walk slowly towards the pom-pom, watched by the horsemen he had brought with him and the few figures still crouching at the bottom of Sheba. He waited until he stopped and began to point to the face of the kopje, then he raised the Mauser slowly. For a while, he stared along the barrel, then he blinked quickly against the strong glare and, remembering to aim short because of the telescopic effect of firing over rocks, squeezed the trigger. He saw the bullet kick up the dust just in front of the officer and, finding his exact range, he raised the rifle a fraction, and fired again.

As O’Hare heeled over, his knee smashed by the bullet, there was a sudden flurry of movement among the horsemen. The few who had dismounted leapt to the saddle hurriedly, and the whole bunch of them moved away in a cloud of dust, and all the standing men dived for shelter.

O’Hare, who had fallen on his side, had dragged out a revolver from a holster on his belt and fired a couple of useless, hopeless shots towards Sheba, then one of the gun crew ran towards him and, hoisting him over his shoulder, stumbled with him towards Babylon and out of sight. Immediately the man in the rear of the armoured car, which stood beyond the gun, the sun painting wavering lines of heat over its metal sides, swung the Lewis gun round, his hand flashing over the cocking handle. Then, as Sammy fired again, he toppled backwards out of sight, reaching for a broken shoulder, the gun slowly tilting until it came to a stop, cocked ridiculously upwards. As he fell, another Army Service Corps man appeared from behind Babylon, sprinting for the vehicle in an attempt to rescue his charge.

Sammy’s foresight followed him, moving slowly. He knew he could kill the man as easily as pulling the trigger and as simply, but he was suddenly sickened with killing. As the man swung open the door to the driver’s seat, Sammy hit him in the hip so that he fell out again at once on his back in the dust, staring at the sky, and beating the ground with his fist in his pain. Sammy could still see the three men who had remained with the pom-pom, trying now to crouch down behind the inadequate shield, twisting brass wheels in an effort to raise the barrel. One of them had a grip of the spade tail and was trying to swing the gun round.

They seemed to have some idea where he was now and, as one of them pointed, Sammy calmly smashed his arm with a bullet and, pumping the bolt of the rifle, followed it up with another which plucked at the clothing of the man at the tail of the gun and sent him diving for cover. As he lay behind the gun, his foot was still protruding, and Sammy put a bullet through his ankle which sent him rolling out into the open, moaning with pain. The gun remained silent, its barrel half-slewed round towards him, the one unwounded member of its crew crouching out of sight behind the shield.

Winter knelt behind the rocks at the foot of Babylon, among the groups of swearing men, staring with haunted eyes across the dazzling strip of red earth towards the little pom-pom and the improvised armoured car, obsessed with the unholy loneliness of guilt that all the shooting and the maiming he was witnessing had sprung from a suggestion of his own.

What exactly he had been expecting he didn’t know -perhaps to hear the crack of the gun and the chatter of the Lewis echoing round the crags of Sheba, perhaps to see stones and little landslides come rolling down the slopes as the bullets and the shells hit, perhaps to see a slim figure stepping out from behind its sheltering boulders, its hands empty, a rifle on the ground beside its feet in surrender, perhaps even a body sprawled among the rocks while the blood blackened in the sun and the flies came from nowhere and clustered, ugly and obscene, on smashed limbs and torn flesh.

But there was none of this. In two or three minutes of fantastic shooting, both the car and the gun had been silenced as effectively as if they had been hit by a shell from some heavier armament.

Perhaps the knowledge that there was only one man up there on Sheba had blinded O’Hare in his youth and inexperienced enthusiasm to the accuracy of a Boer-trained plainsman who could hit a field rat in the eye or a duiker at five hundred yards without ruining the good eating flesh of the body, but certainly the hidden boy had shrewdly assessed the value of the car and the gun and with a few sparing shots had levelled off the discrepancy between their fire-power by his pure skill. Like all the rest of them, from O’Hare moaning with the pain of his shattered knee, to Kitto biting his lip in fury, Winter knew that until darkness fell again there would be no chance of changing anything. The deadly accuracy of the boy above them, who could see every movement in the open from his eyrie among the rocks, had reduced them all to impotency.

Behind him, Winter could hear the horses moving restlessly on their pickets, as though the excitement and the mounting fury of their riders had got into them too. The conversation among the crouching soldiers was desultory and fierce at the same time, with the warped indignation of thwarted men.

‘The bastard, not giving us a chance at him!’

‘He’s using soft-nosed bullets, did you hear?’

‘Need a linseed poultice to draw that guy outa there,’ Sergeant Hadman commented severely, standing by O’Hare, his feet apart and squinting critically at Sheba.

‘Knew we shouldn’t have tried it,’ O’Hare was muttering between his gritted teeth. ‘Knew we ought never to have joined in.’

Kitto stormed across to him. ‘Can’t you get that damned gun firing?’ he snapped.

O’Hare pushed himself upright with his hands, brushing aside the trooper who was trying to bandage the shattered knee. The hero-worship was gone from his face now, leaving only a disillusioned bitterness with Kitto. ‘If you want the bloody gun to fire, man,’ he snapped back, ‘go and fire it yourself!’

He called Hadman across to him. ‘For God’s sake, get those men over there out of the sun, sergeant,’ he said. ‘Use a white flag if necessary. Get ‘em under cover.’

Hadman gave him a salute like the kick of a horse and Winter watched the extraordinary spectacle of a small army of almost fifty men, several cars, an armoured vehicle and a gun appealing for mercy from a single boy with a rifle.

There was no shooting after Hadman shoved up a white tablecloth he had obtained from among O’Hare’s belongings, no sign of hostility while he superintended the removal of the injured from the shelter of the gun and the armoured car. But as they turned away, Hadman reached down a great brown fist without thinking for the starting handle of the armoured car and immediately a bullet struck the steel plate guarding the bonnet, and whirled away across the veld, buzzing on a high-pitched uneven note. The sergeant dropped the handle as though it were red-hot and ran after the wounded for the shelter of the rocks.

‘By Christ,’ he said as he ducked into shelter. ‘He’s well named. He’s sure enough a sweet shooter.’

Kitto was standing over the grimacing O’Hare now, frustrated and furious, a bitter sourness of disappointment in his throat.

‘I’d like to call for volunteers to work that gun,’ he was demanding.

‘Not damn’ likely,’ O’Hare said through his gritted teeth. ‘I’ve had enough of my men injured for you and your mad-headed schemes, Major. Leave the gun where it is for a moment, man. We should never have tried to fight it from there. We’ll try to bring it in with horses soon. It might be done. Then you can pin him down with a few shells over the top of Babylon if you like.’

As he watched Kitto gesturing angrily, Winter became aware of Polly alongside him, crouching close to him as though she drew comfort from his presence as her only apparent ally. Her face was pale and strained, and he was startled at the change in her. The old, painted raucous Polly he had known in Plummerton had disappeared, and in her place was a taut, strained, girl with an unmade-up face, a suddenly rather plain girl, clutching a torn frock across her breast, her native resourcefulness broken down by the extraordinary circumstances in which she had become involved. More than once he’d seen her rid herself of some persistent drunk with complete confidence but here, caught up in murder and battle and the smell of cordite, she was suddenly younger and frightened, a girl with a heart, and with emotions unexperienced by the ribald woman from the bawdy house behind the Theophilus Street bars.

‘Mr Winter,’ she said tremulously, ‘can’t you stop ‘em?’

Winter shook his head, feeling inadequate and out of his depth in the battle-line.

‘Polly, this is war now,’ he said hopelessly. ‘It became war the minute the first shot was fired. The politicians have retired to the sideline here just as much as they have in Europe.’

She seemed to crouch nearer to him, seeking comfort and reassurance. ‘What’ll happen then, Mr Winter?’ she asked.

‘God knows, Poll,’ he said. ‘I don’t. This thing’s growing bigger with every hour. The longer it goes on, the less chance we have of stopping it.’

‘Do you think I did wrong coming down, Mr Winter? Should I have stayed up there with him?’ She was clearly uncertain now, troubled within herself at her treachery.

‘I don’t think it would have made much difference either way, Polly.’

‘I called him a murderer, Mr Winter,’ she went on, her eyes on the slopes of Sheba as though she were watching for Sammy. ‘I told him they’d hang him. And I enjoyed telling him. It all seemed so dreadful then. Especially when I saw Mr Plummer drop dead. But now, from down here it looks so different.’

She clutched at his hand. ‘It’s their faces, Mr Winter,’ she said. ‘It’s their faces. That Kitto’ - she shut her eyes - ‘and that Le Roux -’

She shuddered as she remembered how Le Roux had caught her in his strong arms as she had collapsed in the dust behind the shelter of his rock, and dumped her unceremoniously flat on her back, his hands roughly grasping at her clothes. She had been immediately surrounded by hard men with bitter faces full of lust, and a hatred that had frightened the facts out of her, so that she had told without intending to how much ammunition Sammy had, how much food and water, how he had used the scraps of yellow bandanna to give him the ranges.

Then Le Roux had twisted her arm and to stop him wrenching at the stuff of her dress, she had told them where the horses were, realising as she did so that with nightfall, they’d take them away and remove the only chance of escape that Sammy still had. It was only the heartlessness in their faces, the thirst for revenge, that had prevented the ultimate betrayal of telling them exactly where Sammy was hiding. Caught by a sudden fear for him, which was as unexpected as her earlier loathing had been, she had pretended she wasn’t certain, that everything looked different from below, that she was too shocked to be sure of anything.

‘It’s their faces,’ she said again, repeating it with a kind of wonder, as though she had never believed, even in her own hard life, how incredibly pitiless man could be when corroded by war.

‘All this talk of him being a Jew,’ she murmured. ‘As if it were a crime. He never seemed no different to me, Mr Winter. They look so wild. Like a pack of hounds after their prey.’

Winter glanced round him. What she said was right. There was vengeance now even in the features of O’Hare’s newcomers, and the cruelty that lay just below the civilised facade of every man. When it had all started at Plummerton Sidings, he remembered, there had been in the expressions of the troops around him only boredom and the indifferent unconcern of the private soldier doing a duty which only his superiors could explain.

‘Polly,’ Winter asked, turning to face her, ‘are you in love with young Schuter?’

She looked up at him quickly, her eyes big, just a plain pale-faced girl frightened by the terrifying things she had brought on them all.

‘I don’t know, Mr Winter,’ she said. ‘Honest, I don’t. There
was
a time when I thought I did. Only he vanished and ended up shooting for the market. That was when I changed my mind. Then when we came out here into the Wilderness, and I saw him looking after me, taking care of me, trying to help me, doing things I wanted to do, even though he didn’t want to do ‘em himself, I felt I’d been wrong. But this morning, when I saw Mr Plummer drop dead, I thought I hated his guts. I thought I could never look at him again without wanting to spit at him.’ She paused unhappily. ‘Now I’ve seen it from the other end,’ she went on quietly, ‘and I can see what he’s been up against, and what they’re wanting to do to him, now I can see their faces - like ravening wolves, Mr Winter - now I’m not so sure of myself again. All I want to see now is for it all to finish and for him to get away free where he deserves to be. He’s only behaving as he’s been brought up to behave. If they left him alone, he wouldn’t go back to Plummerton, he’d just go. I’d
make
him go.’

‘Where would he go, Poll?’

Polly shrugged. ‘He talked of going over towards the South-West,’ she said. ‘He thought he’d be safe there.’

‘He’d be safer still if he headed north into Bechuanaland. But it’s a long way.’

She managed a faint smile in which there was a trace of pride. ‘Not to
him,
Mr Winter,’ she said. ‘Not to Sammy.

Nowhere’s too far for Sammy. He knows the country like the back of his hand. He’s shot in the Salt Pans dozens of times. I know he has.’ Somehow she seemed to see a gleam of hope in his words and was snatching at it with both hands. ‘He knows it all - from the Orange River to Khama’s country. He’s crossed it all. He told me so. Only the other day. He’s carted his kills into Windhoek and those places dozens of times. He’s driven horses across the Kalahari for the German Army and up to Bulawayo. He knows it all right. If he could get out of here, he’d make it. I know he would. He knows all the water holes and where to find the game.’

Winter nodded. ‘I think you know a great deal more about that young man than you realise, Poll. I think you’ve been watching him and listening to him more than you knew.’