Sunset at Sheba (29 page)

Kitto’s lip curled. There wasn’t much to recommend either of them, he decided, both of them weak in morals and guts, neither of them measuring up to what Kitto regarded as a standard measure for decency. He shrugged and glanced up at Sheba again where he could see the black shapes of vultures hovering in the first streaks of light. Satisfied, he turned and moved to where Sergeant Hadman was standing by the pom-pom.

‘I think we’ll start now, Sergeant,’ he said, nodding. ‘Think you can drop me a few shells by those two spires?’

The sergeant nodded to the brightly-painted one-pound shells alongside him. ‘Just been waiting the order, sir,’ he said. ‘That guy’ll keep his head down all right when the hardware starts dropping round him. We’ll have him outa there, toot sweet, you see.’

The crack of the gun made them jump, though they were all expecting it, from Kitto standing behind the weapon with Hoole, to Romanis and the men crouching among the rocks at the foot of Sheba, and the Kaffirs pushing the last of the equipment into the lorry.

They saw the first ranging shot burst viciously a few yards short of the two tall rocks, and the vultures who were hovering there wheeled and rose, floating easily among the topmost crags of the kopje. The sergeant turned to the gun crew and barked a short order, and the second shell burst directly on the rocks and the third just behind. They could see the livid greenish-yellow stain of the lyddite where they struck, marking the rocks in a garish streak, the oily cloud of smoke still drifting slowly like wraiths among the fissures, the flung fragments of stone whirling in erratic arcs over the smouldering grass which had been set alight by the explosions.

‘Think that’s found it, sir,’ Hadman said. ‘That’s one for his nob, all right!’

‘Keep them going,’ Kitto said. ‘Keep his head down.’

He lowered his glasses and walked deliberately out from behind the rocks where the gun was stationed, in full view from the top of Sheba.

‘By Jesus, that’s a cool ‘un,’ the sergeant said admiringly.

Kitto stood waiting for a second, then he called out: ‘We’ll try it now, Romanis,’ he said.

He waved towards the armoured car and the Lewis gun began to rave towards the slopes, traversing the rocks, backwards and forwards along the line where they suspected their target lay. Bullets set the dust leaping everywhere, shredding the fleshy leaves of the cactus and sending the small stones flying.

Kitto watched for a while as the pom-pom shells flashed and sang among the granite spears and the Lewis bursts started little avalanches of dust, then he nodded towards Romanis and the men at the foot of the slope.

The movement forward was made slowly at first, uneasily, the men worming their way warily round the rocks, spread out on a wide front that would make shooting difficult, while the little gun dropped its shells tidily among the spires ahead of them every time they moved. Occasionally, one of the advancing troopers loosed off his rifle at an imagined target, but there was no reply, and as they gained confidence, they began to climb faster and faster until in the end, carried away by excitement, they were scrambling round the rocks, panting, cheering, indifferent to any possible danger.

Kitto saw the leaders reach a point just below the spires of rock, and they crowded together there for a moment, casting about like hounds after a scent. The slower climbers joined them, and one of them shouted and started waving, and a few of those who had gone beyond, stopped and turned back. Soon there was a whole group of them clustered together.

‘Jesus Christ,’ the sergeant said contemptuously from behind the gun, ‘the sons-of-bitches’ll never learn! They’ll need to do better’n that if they come up against De Wet. Look at ‘em, huddling together like a lot of sheep. If there was some guy with his wits about him, he could pick ‘em all off without shifting his position. One shell’d bowl the lot over.’

The waving and shouting grew more general, and there was an urgency about Romanis’ lanky figure as he swung his arms.

Kitto smiled. ‘They’ve found him, Hoole,’ he said, staring up at the waving men. ‘You must have got him with your first shots, sergeant. Good shooting.’

‘Thank you, sir.’

‘I’d better go and identify him. You can limber up, now. We’ll be moving off immediately.’

‘Thank you, sir.’

They had all of them been so occupied with the shooting and the men scrambling up the hill, they had none of them seen the horseman who climbed out of the fold of ground behind their position. He wore the badge of Ackermann’s troops, and his shaggy horse was as dust-caked as himself, its flanks raked into bloody streaks by his spurs. As Kitto started off up the first of the slopes in the direction of the waving men, the rider clattered past the cars, sawing at his mount’s mouth, and swung round in a tight circle by the gun where he leapt from the saddle and confronted the sergeant.

‘What in the name of God are you fooling about at here, man?’ he demanded furiously.

The sergeant looked up at the thin-faced tired-eyed officer beside him and snapped to an instinctive salute.

‘Where’s Mr O’Hare?’

‘Plummerton Sidings, sir,’ Hadman said. ‘They sent him in there yesterday with the other wounded.’

‘Wounded? What in the name of Heaven do you mean? Who the hell are you fighting? What’s going on up there?’

The sergeant gestured mutely towards Sheba but the officer bit off his reply.

‘Didn’t you get the message we sent last night? You should have been up with the column by now instead of acting the goat here. De Wet’s out in force and hitting back and Ackermann wants his artillery up. God damn it, we lost him outside Waterbury last night, and that damn’ gun might have saved the day.’

The sergeant stared up at Sheba helplessly.

‘Who’s in charge here, Sergeant?’

‘Major Kitto, sir.’

‘Kitto? So this is where the bloody old fool’s been, is it? Still fighting his bloody Dhanzis, I suppose! Ackermann’s been looking for him all over the place.’

The sergeant scratched his head and the officer glared at him.

‘Did
he
get the message, Sergeant?’

The sergeant swore explosively. ‘By God, sir, he musta! He musta got it last night. Someone came into camp. I saw him with me own two eyes. The old son-of-a-bitch musta had it all this time and didn’t pass it on.’

The officer turned away. ‘Never mind it now, Sergeant. We’ve work to do. They’re still watching De Wet near Waterbury and he’s finished if we get there in time. I’ll attend to Mr Bloody Kitto later. Get moving, while I call the rest of the men in.’

Kitto paused as he reached the twin spires of rock, and turned just in time to see the horseman ride up to the gun and dismount. As he began his gesturing harangue with the sergeant, Kitto guessed immediately that he was a messenger from the distant Ackermann in search of his missing gun.

Kitto frowned. His actions were going to take some explaining away under the circumstances, he knew, but he was aware of no uneasiness. In his own mind, he felt he had been right to do as he had done. No soldier worth his salt would quibble about his hitting out at someone who had hit at the army. The battle at Sheba would speak for itself. It was his excuse and it was his answer.

He stared down at the officer who was now climbing up the slopes after his men, noticing his infuriated face and the angry jerking of his legs. Then he shrugged and turned away to where Romanis was beckoning him.

The soldiers opened out to let him come through, and it was then he saw for the first time the body sprawled among the rocks, and realised that the battle at Sheba wasn’t going to help him much after all, for the figure in the shabby shrunken suit was not Sammy Schuter, as he had confidently expected, but Francis Winter.

He lay on his side, as though embracing the ground, in that eager way that Kitto had seen so often with corpses, his left arm across him, clutching at the blackened wound in the right side of his chest. As Kitto approached, the flies which were crowding on a pool of drying blood rose, buzzing and loathsome. Then one of the troopers stepped forward with a thin blanket he had found higher up the slope.

‘It’s Winter,’ Romanis said, and Kitto nodded, suddenly sickened.

Winter had defeated him in the end. As treacherous, as spineless and as morally useless as the boy for whom he had given his life, he had cheated all along on every moral ground he could think up and now, here, he had committed the ultimate act of perfidy, accusing him still from the shadows he’d gone to.

They’d blame the whole thing on him, Kitto decided resentfully - the tracking which had become a headlong chase, the death of Plummer, all the wounding and killing, the delaying of the gun when it was needed up north, everything, the sunset of Offy’s empire even, which would certainly crumble now that it hadn’t Offy’s sure hands to hold it together. It was probably cracking already, like some toppling edifice. Already, they would know of his death in Johannesburg and Kimberley and Cape Town, and all the greedy financial vultures whom Kitto, in his bleak conception of honesty, hated, would come to pick up the pieces and see what they could get out of it.

When they’d finished, there would be precious little left, and nothing at all for Kitto, except a damaged reputation. His incredible awful luck had caught up with him again, he thought bitterly, that appalling luck which had dogged him ever since the day in Dhanziland thirty years before when he had become famous overnight. It never crossed his mind for a moment that courage alone had never been enough.

He squared his shoulders, sure of himself in his self-righteous sense of honour. There would be inquiries, he thought bitterly, and a lot of people to offer censures and reprimands, most of them people who didn’t know soldiering and had never tried it. It was the old, old story all over again. If he’d been successful, nobody would have worried, and facts might even have been hushed up. Because he was unsuccessful, he would disappear into the limbo of the defeated, the soldier who hadn’t managed to do what he’d set out to do. History always remembered the heroes and forgot the hard-working unknowns of Thermopylae and Trafalgar and Waterloo.

Kitto straightened up, the everlasting subaltern, arrogant, sure of himself, honest in his conception of duty, unafraid of the consequences and unashamed of his actions. He nodded at the man with the blanket and pointed with his crop.

‘Better bring him down,’ he said.

He looked round at Sheba, now bright and glaring in the full light of day, staring about him almost as though he were a conqueror. It was here on Sheba that the sun had set on Offy Plummer’s empire as surely as if some vast plot to destroy it had been hatched among these rocky krantzes. And with it into the shadows had gone Winter and Offy and Kitto’s laggard career. The sun had gone down on the lot of them.

He faced down the slope, his thin handsome face set and unafraid. Romanis and Hoole were watching him silently, knowing what he was thinking, but there was no indication of uneasiness about him as he flicked at his riding boots and set off to meet the angry-eyed officer who was climbing up to meet him.

The sun peered higher, flaming in crimson and gold behind the eastern folds of land and throwing dagger-like glints across the horizon, then it seemed to float abruptly above the curve of the earth and flooded the veld with a miraculous liquid amber, reaching down at last to the escarpment at the bottom of Sheba and touching everything with light.