The Sound of Thunder (6 page)

Without looking up Sean began transferring the stacks of sovereigns to his pockets. He was smiling a little. The end to a perfect evening, he decided.

Satisfied that the money was secure Sean looked up at Horse Odour and turned that smile full upon him.

“Come along then, laddie,” he said.

“It will be a pleasure.” Horse Odour shoved his chair back and stood up.

“It will indeed,” agreed Sean.

Horse Odour led down the back-stairs into the yard, followed by Sean and the entire clientele of the canteen. At the bottom he paused, judging Sean’s footstep on the wooden stairs behind him-then he spun and hit, swinging his body into the punch.

Sean rolled his head, but it caught him on the temple and he went over backwards into the crowd behind him. As he fell he saw Horse Odour jerk back the tail of his jacket and bring out the knife. It shone dull silver in the light from the canteen windows skinning knife, curved, eight inches of blade.

The crowd scattered leaving Sean lying on the stairs, and Horse Odour came in to kill him, making an ugly sound, bringing the knife arching down from overhead, a clumsy, unprofessional blow.

Only slightly stunned, Sean followed the silver sweep of the knife with ease and the. man’s wrist slapped loudly into Sean’s open left hand.

For a long moment the man lay on top of Sean, his knife-arm helpless in Sean’s grip, while Sean assessed his strength-and with regret realized it was no match. Horse Odour was big enough, but the belly pressed against Sean’s was flabby and large, and the wrist in Sean’s hands was bony without the hard rubbery give of sinew and muscle.

Horse Odour started to struggle, trying to wrestle his knife arm free, the sweat de wed on his face and then began to drip it had an oily, unpleasant smell like rancid butter that blended poorly with the odour of the horses.

Sean tightened his grip on the man’s wrist, at first using only the strength of his forearm.

“Aah! ” Horse Odour stopped struggling. Sean brought in the power of his whole arm, so he could feel his shoulder muscles bunching and writhing.

“Jesus Christ! ” Shrieking, as bone cracked in his wrist, Horse Odour’s fingers sprang open and the knife thumped on to the wooden stairs.

Still holding him, Sean sat up, then came slowly to his feet.

“Leave us, friend.” Sean flung him backwards into the dust of the yard. He was breathing easily, still feeling cold and detached as he looked down and watched Horse Odour scrabbling to his knees, nursing his broken wrist.

Perhaps it was the man’s first movement towards flight that triggered Sean-or perhaps it was the liquor he had drunk that twisted his emotions, aggravated his sense of loss and frustration and channelled it into this insane outburst of hatred.

Suddenly it seemed to Sean that here before him on the ground was the source of all his ills-this was the man who had taken Ruth from him.

“You bastard!” he growled. The man sensed the change in Sean and scrambled to his feet, his face turning desperately from side to side as he sought an avenue of escape.

“You filthy bastard! ” Sean’s voice rose, shrill with the strength of this new emotion. For the first time in his life Sean craved to kill. He advanced upon the man slowly, his fists opening and closing, his face contorted and the words that spilled from his mouth no longer making sense.

A great stillness had fallen upon the yard. In the shadows the watchers stood, chilled with the dreadful fascination of it. The man was frozen also, only his head moved and no sound came from his open lips-and Sean closed in with the weaving motion of a cobra in erection.

At the last moment the man tried to run, but his legs were slack and heavy with fear-and Sean hit him in the chest with a sound like an axe swung against a tree-trunk.

As he fell Sean went in after him, straddling his chest, roaring incoherently with only a single word recognizable-the name of the woman he loved. In his madness he felt the man’s face breaking up under his fists, felt the warm spatter of blood thrown into his own face and on to his arms, and heard the shouts of the crowd.

“He’ll kill him!”

“Get him off ” “For Chrissake give me a hand-he’s as strong as a bloody OX. Their hands upon him, an arm locked around his throat from behind, the shock as someone hit him with a bottle, the press of their bodies as they swarmed over him.

With men clinging to him, two of them riding his back and a dozen others on his arms and legs, Sean came to his feet.

” Pull his legs out from under him. ” “Get him down, man. Get him down.

With a convulsive heave Sean swung the men on his arms into violent collision with each other. They released him.

He kicked his right leg free, and those on his other leg let go and scattered. Reaching over his shoulders he plucked the men off his back and stood alone, his chest swelling and subsiding as he breathed, the blood from the bottle gash in his scalp trickling down his face and soaking into his beard.

“Get a gun!” someone shouted.

“There’s a shotgun under the bar.” But no one left the circle that ringed him in, and Sean glared around at them his eyes staring wildly from the plane of glistening blood that was his face.

“You’ve killed him!” a voice accused him. And the words reached Sean through the madness, his body relaxed slightly and he tried to wipe away the blood with the open palm of his hand. They saw the change in him.

“Cool down, mate. Fun’s fun but the hell with murder.

“Easy, now. Let’s have a look what you’ve done to him.

Sean looked down on the body, and he was confused and then suddenly afraid. The man was dead-he was certain of it.

“Oh, my God!” he whispered, backing away, wiping at his eyes ineffectually and smearing blood.

“He pulled a knife. Don’t worry, mate, you’ve got witnesses. ” The temper of the crowd had changed.

“No,” Sean mumbled; they didn’t understand. For the first time in his life he had abused his strength, had used it to kill without purpose. To kill for the pleasure of it, to kill in the manner in which a leopard kills.

Then the man moved slightly, he rolled his head and one of his legs flexed and straightened. Sean felt hope leap within him.

“He’s alive! ” I

“Get a doctor.

Fearfully Sean approached and knelt beside the man, he un knotted the scarf from around his own throat and cleaned the bloody mouth and nostrils.

“He’ll be all right-leave him to the Doc.

The doctor came, a lean and laconic man chewing tobacco.

In the yellow light of a hurricane lamp he examined and prodded while they crowded close about him craning to see over his shoulders.

At last the doctor stood up.

“All right. He can be moved. Carry him up to my surgery.”

Then he looked at Sean. “Did you do it?”

Sean nodded.

“Remind me not to annoy you.”

“I didn’t mean to-it just sort of happened.

“Is that so? ” The doctor shot a stream of yellow tobacco juice into the dust of the yard. “Let’s have a look at your head. ” He pulled Sean’s head down to his own level and parted the sodden black hair.

“Nicked a vein. Doesn’t need a stitch. Wash it and a little iodine. ” “How much, Doc, for the other fellow?” Sean asked.

“You paying?” The doctor looked at him quizzically.

“Yes.”

“Broken jaw, broken collar-bone, about two dozen stitches and a few days in bed for concussion,” he mused, adding it up.

“Say two guineas.”

Sean gave him five. “Look after him, Doc.”

“That’s my job.” And he followed the men who were carrying Horse Odour out of the yard.

“Guess you need a drink, mister. I’ll buy you one,” someone offered. The whole world loves a winner.

“Yes,” agreed Sean. “I need a drink.”

Sean had more than one drink. When MbeJane came to fetch him at midnight he had a deal of difficulty getting Sean up on to the back of the horse. Halfway to the camp Sean slid off and subsided into the mud, so Mbeiane loaded him sideways-head and arms hanging over to port and legs dangling starboard.

“It is possible that tomorrow you will regret this,” Mbejane told him primly as he unloaded him beside the fire and rolled him still booted and bloody into his blanket.

He was correct.

In the dawn as Sean cleaned his face with a cloth dipped in a mug of hot water, regarding its reflection in the small metal mirror, the only fact that gave him the faintest satisfaction was the two hundred-odd sovereigns he had salvaged from the night’s debauch.

“Are you sick, Pa?” Dirk’s ghoulish interest in Sean’s condition added substantially to Ins evil temper.

“Eat your breakfast. ” Sean’s tone was calculated by its sheer malevolence to dry up further questioning.

“There is no food.” Mbenjane fell into the fkmiliar role of protector.

“Why not?” Sean focused his bloodshot eyes upon him.

“There is one among us who considers the purrhase of strong drink, and other things, more important than food for his son. ” From the pocket of his jacket Sean drew a handful of sovereigns. “Go!” he ordered. “Buy food and fresh horses. Go quickly so that in my grave illness I may not be afflicted with the wisdom of your counsel. Take Dirk with you.

Mbejane examined the money, and grinned.

““The night was not wasted.

When they had gone back to Frerr, Dirk trotting beside the huge half-naked Zulu and his voice only fading at a distance of a hundred yards, Sean poured himself another mug of coffiee and cupping it in his hands he sat staring into the ash and pink coals of the fire. He could trust Mbejane to use the money with care, he had the bargaining patience peculiar to his race that could if necessary devote two days to the purchase of a single ox. These things did not concern Sean now.

Instead he went over the events of the previous night. Still sickened by his display of murderous rage, he tried to justify it.

Taking into account the loss of nearly all he owned, the accumulation of years of hard work that had been stripped from him in a single day; the hardship and uncertainty that had followed. And finally he had reached the flash point when liquor and poker-tensed nerves had snapped the last reserve in him and translated it all into that violent outburst.

But that was not all, he knew he had avoided the main issue.

Ruth. As he came back to her a wave of hopeless longing overwhelmed him, a tender despair such as he had never experienced before. He groaned aloud, and lifted his eyes to the morning star which was fading on the pink horizon as the sun came up behind.

For a while longer he wallowed in the softness of his love, remembering the way she walked, the dark serenity of her eyes and her mouth when she smiled and her voice when she sang until it threatened to smother him in its softness.

Then he sprang to his feet and paced restlessly in the grass beside the fire. We must leave this place, ride away from it-go quickly. I must find something to do, some way to keep from thinking of it, something to fill my hands which ache now from the need to hold her.

Along the road, going north to Colenso, a long column of infantry filed past him in the dawn. He stopped his pacing and watched them.

Each man leaned forward against his pack and the rifles stood up behind their shoulders.

Yes, he thought, I will go with them. Perhaps at the place to which they march I can find what I could not find last night. We will go home to Ladyburg, riding hard on fresh horses. I will leave Dirk with my mother, then come back to this war.

He began to pace again impatiently. Where the hell was Mbejane?

From the heights above, Sean looked down on Ladyburg. The village spread in a neat circle around the spire of the church. He remembered the spite as beacon-bright in its cladding of new copper, but nineteen years of weather had dulled it to a mellow brown.

Nineteen years. It did not seem that long. There were goods yards around the station now, a new concrete bridge over the Baboon Stroom, the blue gums in the plantation beyond the school were taller, and the flamboyants that had lined the main street were gone.

With a strange reluctance Sean turned his head and looked out to the right, across the Baboon Stroom, close in against the escarpment, to where he had left the sprawling Dutch gabled homestead of Theumskraal with its roof of combed yellow thatch and the shutters of yellow-wood across the windows.

It was there, but not as he remembered it. Even at this distance he could see the walls were flaking and mottled with patches of dampness; the thatch was shaggy as the coat of an aftedale; one of the shutters tilted slightly from a broken hinge; the lawns were brown and ragged where the bare earth showed through. The dairy behind the house had crumbled, its roof gone and the remains of its walls jutted forlornly upwards to the height of a man’s shoulder.

“Damn the little bastard!” Sean’s anger flared abruptly as he saw the neglect with which his twin brother had treated the lovely old house. “He’s so lazy he wouldn’t get out of a bed he’d peed in. ” To Sean it was not just a house. It was the place his father had built, which had sheltered Sean on the day of his birth and through the years of his childhood. When his father died under the Zulu spears at Isandlawana, half the farm and the house had belonged to Sean; he had sat in the study at nights with the logs burning in the stone fireplace and the mounted buffalo head above it throwing distorted, moving shadows up on to the plaster ceiling. Although he had given his share away-yet it was still his home. Garry, his brother, had no right to let it decay and fall apart this way.

“Damn him!” Sean voiced his thoughts out loud-then almost immediately his conscience rebuked him. Garry was a cripple, his lower leg shot away by the blast of a careless shotgun. And Sean had fired that shotgun. Will I never be free of that guilt, how long must my penance continue? He protested at the goad of his conscience.

That is not your only trespass against your brother, his conscience reminded him. Who sired the child he calls his son?

Whose loins sowed the seed that became man-child in the belly of Anna, your brother’s wife?