A Falcon Flies (12 page)

Then he looked up at the man on the stoep of the building. He carried a double-barrelled shotgun in the crook of his arm, and both hammers were at full cock. He was so tall that he had to stoop beneath the angle of the roof, but he was thin as a blue-gum tree, as though the flesh and fat had been burned off his bones by ten thousand tropical suns.

‘Do I have the honour of addressing Mr Thomas Harkness?' Zouga called over the clamour of the dog pack.

‘I ask the questions here,' the lean giant bellowed back. His beard was as white as the thunderhead clouds of a summer's day on the highveld and it hung to his belt buckle. Hair of the same silver covered his head and flowed down to the collar of his leather jerkin.

His face and his arms were burned to the colour of plug tobacco, and were speckled by the raised blemishes like little moles and freckles, where years of the fierce African sun had destroyed the upper layers of his skin. The pupils of his eyes were black and bright as drops of fresh tar, but the whites were smoky yellow, the colour of the malarial fevers and the pestilences of Africa.

‘What is your name, boy?' His voice was strong and deep. Without the beard he might have been fifty years of age, but Zouga knew with certainty that he was seventy-three. He carried his one shoulder higher than the other and the arm on that side hung at an awkward angle to the joint. Zouga knew that a lion had chewed through the shoulder and through the bone of the upper arm, before Harkness had been able to reach his hunting knife on his belt with the other hand and stab it between the forelegs, up into the heart. That had been forty years before and the injury had become the Harkness hallmark.

‘Ballantyne, sir.' Zouga shouted to make himself heard above the dogs. ‘Morris Zouga Ballantyne.'

The old man whistled once, a fluting double note that stilled the dogs and brought them back around his legs. He had not lowered the shotgun and a frown puckered his sharp features.

‘Fuller Ballantyne's pup, is it?'

‘That's right, sir.'

‘By God, any son of Fuller Ballantyne's is good enough for a charge of my buckshot in the rump. Don't cock your butt when you get back on that horse, boy, for I'm a man who tempts very easily.'

‘I've ridden a long way to see you, Mr Harkness.' Zouga smiled that frank and wining smile of his, standing his ground. ‘I'm one of your greatest admirers. I've read everything that has ever been written about you and everything you have written yourself.'

‘I doubt that,' Harkness growled, ‘they burned most of mine. Too strong for their lily livers.' But the hostile glint in his eyes turned to a twinkle and he cocked his head as he studied the young man before him.

‘I have no doubt that you're as ignorant and arrogant as your Daddy, but you've got a fairer turn of speech.' And he stared again at the toes of Zouga's boots, and let his gaze move up slowly.

‘Priest,' he asked, ‘like your Daddy?'

‘No, sir, soldier.'

‘Regiment?'

‘13th Madras Foot.'

‘Rank?'

‘Major.'

Harkness' expression eased with each reply until his gaze once more locked with Zouga's.

‘Teetotal? Like Your Daddy?'

‘Perish the thought!' Zouga assured him vehemently and Harkness smiled for the first time as he let the muzzles of the shotgun droop until they pointed at the ground. He tugged at the long spikes of his beard for a moment, then reached a decision.

‘Come.' He jerked his head and led the way into the house. There was one huge central room, the high ceiling of dried reed stems kept it cool and the narrow windows kept it gloomy. The floor was of peach-pip shells set into a plaster of mud and cow-dung and the walls were three-foot thick.

Zouga paused in the threshold and blinked with surprise at the collection of strange articles that covered the walls, were piled on every table and chair, and packed to the rafters in the dark corners.

There were books, thousands of books, cloth and leatherbound books, pamphlets and journals, atlases and encyclopaedias. There were weapons, assegai of Zulu, shield of Matabele, bow of Bushman with its quiver of poisoned arrows and, of course, guns – dozens of them in racks or merely propped against the walls. There were hunting trophies, the beautiful zigzag-striped hide of zebra, the dark bush of the lion's mane, the elegant curved horn of harrisbuck, teeth of hippopotamus and warthog, and then the long, yellow arcs of ivory thicker than a woman's thigh and taller than a man's head. There were rocks, piles of rocks that glittered and sparkled, crystal rocks of purple and green, metallic nodules, native copper redder than gold, hairy strands of raw asbestos – all of it covered with a fine layer of dust and piled untidily wherever it had fallen.

The room smelled of skins and dogs and damp, of stale brandy and fresh turpentine, and there were stacks of new canvases already stretched in their wooden frames, while other canvases stood on their easels with the subjects sketched in charcoal outline, or partly blocked in with bright oil paint. On the walls were hung some finished pictures.

Zouga crossed to examine one of them while the old man blew into a pair of glass tumblers and polished them on his shirt-tail.

‘What do you think of my lions?' he asked, as Zouga studied a huge canvas entitled ‘Lion Hunt on the Gariep River. Feb. 1846'.

Zouga made an appreciative sound in the back of his throat. Zouga was himself a dauber and scribbler, but he considered that the meticulous reproduction of the subject was the painter's duty, while these paintings had a guileless, almost childlike joy in every primitive line. The colours also were gay and made no pretence to imitate nature, while the perspectives were wildly improbable. The mounted figure with the flowing beard in the background dominated the pride of lions in the foreground. Yet Zouga knew that these strange creations had remarkable value. Cartwright had paid ten guineas for a fanciful landscape. Zouga could only believe it was a fad amongst the colony's fashionable set.

‘They say my lions look like English sheepdogs.' Harkness glowered at them. ‘What do you think, Ballantyne?'

‘Perhaps,' Zouga started, then saw the old man's expression change. ‘But tremendously ferocious sheepdogs!' he added swiftly, and Harkness laughed out loud for the first time.

‘By God, you'll do!' He shook his head as he half-filled the tumblers with the dark brown local brandy, the fearsome ‘Cape Smoke', and brought one glass to Zouga.

‘I like a man who speaks his mind. Rot all hypocrites.' He raised his own glass in a toast. ‘Especially hypocritical preachers who don't give a damn for God, for truth or for their fellow men.'

Zouga fancied that he recognized the description, but raised his glass. ‘Rot them!' he agreed, and managed to suppress a gasp as the liquor exploded in his throat and sizzled behind his eyes.

‘Good,' he said hoarsely, and Harkness wiped his silver moustache, left and right, with his thumb before he demanded,

‘Why have you come?'

‘I want to find my father, and I think you may be able to tell me where to search.'

‘Find him?' fulminated the old man. ‘We should all be extremely grateful he is lost, and pray each day that he remains that way.'

‘I understand how you feel, sir,' Zouga nodded. ‘I read the book that was published after the Zambezi expedition.'

Harkness had accompanied Fuller Ballantyne on that illfated venture, acting as second-in-command, expedition manager and recording artist. He had been caught up in the squabbling and blame-fixing that had marred the enterprise from the beginning. Fuller Ballantyne had dismissed him, accusing him of theft of the expedition stores, trading on his own account, artistic incompetence, neglecting his duties to hunt for ivory, and total ignorance of the countryside and its trails, of the tribes and their customs and had included these accusations in his account of the expedition, implying that the blame for the expedition's failure could be laid on Thomas Harkness' uneven shoulders.

Now even mention of that book brought the colour to the sun-raddled face and made the white whiskers twitch.

‘I crossed the Limpopo for the first time in the year that Fuller Ballantyne was born. I drew the map that he used to reach Lake Ngami.' Harkness stopped and made a dismissive gesture. ‘I might as well try and reason with the baboons barking from the tops of the kopjes.' Then he peered more closely at Zouga.

‘What do you know about Fuller? Since he sent you home to the old country, how often have you seen him? How much time have you spent in his company?'

‘He came home once.'

‘How much time did he spend with you and your mother?'

‘Some months – but he was always in Uncle William's study writing, or he was up at London, Oxford or Birmingham to lecture.'

‘But you, nevertheless, conceived a burning filial love and duty for the sainted and celebrated father?'

Zouga shook his head. ‘I hated him,' he said quietly. ‘I could hardly bear the days until he went away again.'

Harkness tilted his head on one side, surprised, speechless for a moment, and Zouga drank the last few drops of liquor in the glass.

‘I never told anybody that before.' He seemed puzzled himself. ‘I hardly even admitted it to myself. I hated him for what he did to us, to me and my sister, but especially to my mother.'

Harkness took the empty tumbler from his fingers, refilled it and handed it back. He spoke quietly.

‘I also will tell you something that I have never told another man. I met your mother at Kuruman, my God, so long ago. She was sixteen or seventeen and I was nearly forty. She was so pretty, so shy and yet so filled with a special quality of joy. I asked her to marry me. The only woman I ever asked.' Harkness stopped himself, turned away to his painting, and peered at it. ‘Damned sheepdogs!' he snapped, and then without turning back to face Zouga, ‘So why do you want to find your father? Why have you come out to Africa?'

‘Two reasons,' Zouga told him. ‘Both good. To make my own reputation and my own fortune.'

Harkness swivelled to face him. ‘Damn me, but you can be direct.' There was a tinge of respect in his expression now. ‘How do you plan to achieve those very desirable ends?'

Zouga explained swiftly – the newspaper sponsorship, that of the Society for the Extinction of the Slave Trade.

‘You'll find much grist for your mill,' Harkness interjected. ‘The coast is still rife with the trade, despite what you'll hear in London town.'

‘I am also an agent for the Worshipful Company of London Merchants Trading into Africa, but I have my own goods to trade, and 5,000 cartridges for my Sharps rifle.'

Harkness wandered across the dim room and stopped before one of the gigantic elephant tusks propped against the far wall. It was so old and heavy that there was very little taper from root to tip, the point worn blunt and rounded. One third of its length was smooth and a clear lovely butter yellow colour, where it had been buried in the jaw of the beast, the rest of it was stained dark with vegetable juices and scarred from the battles and foragings of sixty years.

‘This one weighs one hundred and sixty pounds – its value in London is six shillings a pound.' He slapped it with his open palm. ‘There are still bulls like that out there, thousands of them. But take a tip from an old dog – forget your fancy Sharps, and use one of the ten-bore elephant guns. They throw a ball that weighs a quarter of a pound, and though they kick like the devil himself, they drive better than any of these new-fangled rifles.' There was a lightness in the worn old features, a sparkle in the dark eyes. ‘Another tip – get in close. Forty paces at the outside, and go for the heart. Forget what you'll hear about the brain shot, go for the heart—' He broke off suddenly and waggled his head, grinning ruefully. ‘By God, but it's enough to make a man want to be young again!'

He came back and studied Zouga directly, and a thought occurred to him with a suddenness that struck him like a physical blow, taking him so by surprise that he almost spoke it aloud.

‘If Helen had given me a different answer, you could be my son.' But he held back the words, and asked instead:

‘How can I help you, then?'

‘You can tell me where I can start to search for Fuller Ballantyne.'

Harkness threw up his hands, palms uppermost. ‘It's a vast land – so big that you could travel across it for a lifetime.'

‘That's why I have come to you.'

Harkness went to the long table of yellow Cape deal that ran nearly the full length of the room and with the twisted arm swept a clear space amongst the books and papers and paint pots.

‘Bring a chair,' he instructed, and when they sat facing each other across the cleared space, he recharged both their glasses and placed what remained in the bottle between them.

‘Where did Fuller Ballantyne go?' Harkness asked, and took a silver tress from the thick beard and began to twist it around his forefinger. The finger was long and bony and covered with the thick ridges of ancient scar tissue where the recoil of overheated or overcharged firearms had driven the trigger guard to the bone.

‘Where did Fuller Ballantyne go?' he repeated, but Zouga realized the question was rhetorical, and he said nothing.

‘After the Zambezi expedition, his fortune was exhausted, his reputation all but destroyed – and to a man like Fuller Ballantyne that was unbearable. His entire life had been an endless hunt for glory. No risk, no sacrifice was too great, his own or others. He would steal and lie – aye, even kill for it.'

Zouga looked up sharply, challenging.

‘Kill,' Harkness nodded. ‘Anybody who stood in his way. I have seen him, but that is another tale. Now we want to know where he went.'

Harkness stretched out and selected a roll of parchment from the cluttered table-top, checked it quickly and grunted with approval, as he spread it between them.