A Falcon Flies (28 page)

‘The Hyena Road,
Ndlele umfisi
.' It was the first time that Robyn had heard the name spoken. It conjured up an image of a dark trail through the forests, beaten by tens of thousands of bare feet, with the loathsome eaters of dead flesh slinking along beside it, chuckling and shrieking their inane chorus.

‘Those that died, and those that fell and could not rise again were released from their chains and dragged to one side. The
fisi
have grown so bold along the road, that they rushed out of the bushes and devoured the bodies while we passed in full sight. It was worst when the body still lived.'

Juba broke off and stared unseeingly at the bulkhead across the cabin. Slowly her eyes filled with tears, and Robyn took her hand and held it in her lap.

‘I know not how long we followed the Hyena Road,' Juba went on, ‘for each day became as the one before it, and as the one that followed it, until at last we came to the sea.'

Afterwards Zouga and Robyn discussed the girl's story.

‘She must have gone through the kingdom of Monomatapa, and yet she says there were no towns nor signs of occupation.'

‘The slavers might have avoided contact with Monomatapa's people.'

‘I wish she had seen and remembered more.'

‘She was in a slave caravan,' Robyn pointed out. ‘Survival was her only concern.'

‘If only these damned people could even read a map.'

‘It's a different culture, Zouga,' and he saw the spark in her eye, and sensed the drift of the conversation and turned it aside swiftly.

‘Perhaps the legend of Monomatapa is only a myth, perhaps there are no gold mines.'

‘The important thing about Juba's story is that the Matabele are dealing in slaves, they have never done so before.'

‘Nonsense!' grunted Zouga. ‘They are the greatest predators since Genghis Khan! They and all the Zulu splinter tribes – the Shangaan, the Angoni and the Matabele. War is their way of life, and plunder is their main crop. Their whole nation was built on a system of slave-taking.'

‘But they have never sold them before,' said Robyn mildly. ‘At least as far as we know from all that grandfather and Harris and the others have written.'

‘The Matabele never found a market before,' Zouga replied reasonably. ‘Now they have at last made contact with the slavemasters, and found an opening to the coast. That was all it lacked before.'

‘We must witness this, Zouga,' Robyn spoke with quiet determination. ‘We have to bear witness to this terrible crime against humanity and carry word back to London.'

‘If only the child had seen evidence of the Monomatapa, or the gold mines,' muttered Zouga. ‘You must ask her if there were elephant.' He pored over the Harkness map, lamenting the blank spaces. ‘I cannot believe that it does not exist. There is too much evidence.' Zouga looked up at his sister. ‘One other thing – I seem to have forgotten almost every word of the language that mother taught us, except some of the nursery rhymes and lullabies.

‘
Munya, mabili zinthatu, Yolala umdade wethu
,'* he

* ‘One, two, three,

Go to sleep my little sister,' recited, and then chuckled and shook his head. ‘I shall have to study it again, you and Juba will have to help me.'

T
he Zambezi comes to the sea through a delta of vast swampland, and a hundred confused shallow channels spread out for thirty miles down the low featureless coastline.

Floating islands of papyrus grass break free from the main pastures which blanket the waters of the delta and are carried out to sea on the dirty brown water. Some of these islands are many acres in extent and the roots of the plants so entangled that they can support the weight of a heavy animal. On occasions small herds of buffalo are trapped and carried twenty miles out to sea before the action of the waves smashes up the islands and plunges the great bovine animals into the water, prey for the big sharks which cruise the tainted estuary waters for just such a prize.

The muddy smell of the swamps carries far from the land when the wind is right, and the same wind carries strange insects with it. There is a tiny spider no bigger than the head of a wax Vesta which lives in the papyrus banks of the delta. It spins a gossamer web on which it launches itself into the breeze in such numbers that the gossamer fills the sky in clouds, like the smoke from a raging bushfire, rising many hundreds of feet and eddying and swirling in misty columns that are touched by the sunset into shades of pink and lovely pale mauve.

The river pours a muddy brown effluent into the sea, silt enriched with the bodies of drowned animals and birds, and the huge Zambezi crocodiles join the shark packs at the feast.

Black Joke
found the first of these hideous creatures ten miles from land, wallowing in the low swells like a log, the rough scales glittering wetly in the sunlight until the gunboat approached too closely and the reptile dived with a lash and swirl of its powerful ridged tail.

Black Joke
steamed obliquely across the multiple mouths of the river, none of which offered passage for a vessel of her size. She was headed further north for the Congone channel which was the only passage upriver to the town of Quelimane.

Clinton Codrington planned to enter it the following morning, after having lain hove-to during the night off the mouth. Robyn knew that she must remove the stitches from the wound under his armpit, though she would have liked to leave them a few days longer. They must come out before she left the gunboat at Quelimane.

She decided to use the same opportunity to give him the answer for which he had waited so patiently. She knew it was going to be painful for him to hear that she would not marry him, and she felt guilty that she had so encouraged him. It was alien to her nature to inflict suffering on another, and she would try to tell him as gently as possible.

She ordered him to her cabin for the removal of the horsehair stitches, seating him on the narrow bunk naked to the waist, with his arm raised. She was delighted with the way the wound had healed, and proud of the neatness of her work. She cooed over each knot as she snipped it with the pointed scissors, then seized it with the forceps and gently tugged and worried it free of his flesh. The stitches left twin punctures, one on each side of the raised purple welt of the scar and they were clean and dry. Only one of them leaked a single drop of blood which she swabbed away gently.

Robyn was training Juba as her assistant, teaching her to hold the tray of instruments, and receive the discarded and soiled dressings or instruments. Now she stood back and appraised the healed wound, without looking at Juba.

‘You may go now,' she said quietly. ‘I will call you when I need you.'

Juba smiled like a conspirator, and murmured, ‘He is truly beautiful, so white and smooth,' and Robyn blushed pinkly, for that was exact!y what she had been thinking. Clinton's body, unlike that of Mungo St John, was hairless as a girl's but finely muscled, and the skin had an almost marble sheen to it.

‘His eyes are like two moons when he looks at you, Nomusa,' Juba went on with relish, and Robyn tried to frown at her but her lips kept puckering into a smile.

‘Go swiftly,' she snapped, and Juba giggled.

‘There is a time to be alone,' and she rolled her eyes lewdly. ‘I shall guard the door, and hardly listen at all, Nomusa.' Robyn found it impossible to be angry when the child used that name, for it meant ‘the daughter of mercy', and Robyn found it highly acceptable. She would have had difficulty picking a better name for herself, and she was smiling as she hurried Juba from the cabin with a gentle slap and a push.

Clinton must have had some idea of the exchange, for he was buttoning his shirt as she turned back to him, and looking embarrassed.

She drew a deep breath, folded her arms and began.

‘Captain Codrington, I have thought unceasingly of the great honour you have done me by inviting me to be your wife.'

‘However,' Clinton forestalled her, and she faltered, the prepared speech forgotten, for her next word would indeed have been, ‘However'.

‘Miss Ballantyne, I mean Doctor Ballantyne, I would rather you did not say the rest of it.' His face was pale and intense, he really was beautiful now, she thought, with a pang. ‘That way I can still cherish hope.'

She shook her head vehemently, but he lifted a hand.

‘I have come to realize that you have a duty, to your father and the poor unhappy people of this land. I understand and deeply admire that.'

Robyn felt her heart go out to him, he was so good and so perceptive to have understood that about her.

‘However, I feel sure that one day, you and I shall . . .'

She wanted to spare him pain.

‘Captain,' she began, shaking her head again.

‘No,' he said. ‘Nothing you say will ever make me abandon hope. I am a very patient man, and I realize that now is not the time. But I know in the depths of my soul that our destiny binds us together, even if I must wait ten or fifty years.'

A time-span of that magnitude no longer frightened Robyn. She relaxed visibly.

‘I love you, my dear Doctor Ballantyne, nothing will ever alter that, and in the meantime I ask only your good opinion, and friendship.'

‘You have both,' she said, with truth and relief. It had been a great deal easier than she had expected, yet strange that a shadow of regret lingered.

T
here was no further opportunity to speak privately, for Clinton was fully occupied with bringing
Black Joke
into the treacherous channel, with its shifting banks and uncharted shoals guarding the mouth. The channel meandered twenty miles through the mangrove forests to the port of Quelimane on the northern bank.

The heat in the delta was rendered scarcely bearable by the humid effluxion of mud and rotting vegetation that rose from the mangrove forests. The weird shapes of the mangroves fascinated Robyn and she stood by the rail and watched them slide past. Each tree stood clear of the slick chocolate-coloured mud on its pyramid of roots, like the multiple legs of a grotesque insect reaching up to join the thick pulpy stem which in turn extended upwards to the roof of poisonous green foliage. Amongst the roots skittered the purple and yellow fiddler crabs, each of them holding aloft a single disproportionately huge claw, and waving it in menace or ponderous greeting at the passing vessel.

Black Joke
's wake spread across the channel, flopping wavelets on the mud banks and startling the small green and purple night herons into laborious flight.

Around a bend in the channel the decaying buildings of Quelimane came into view, dominated by the square towers of the stucco church. The plaster was falling away in unsightly chunks and the whitewash was streaked and splotched with grey and green mould, like a ripening cheese.

This port had once been one of the most busy slave ports on the entire African coast. The Zambezi river had acted as a highway to the interior for the slave-masters, and the Shire river, its major tributary, led directly to Lake Marawi and the highlands which had been the mother lode from which hundreds and thousands of black slaves had poured.

When the Portuguese, under British pressure, had signed the Brussels Agreement, the barracoons at Quelimane and Lourenc¸o Marques and Mozambique Island had been closed down. However, the slaving dhow that
Black Joke
had intercepted proved that the abominable trade still flourished covertly along the Portuguese coast. That was typical of these people, Clinton Codrington thought.

Clinton curled his lip with distaste. In the many hundred years since their great navigators had opened up this coast, the Portuguese had clung to the narrow unhealthy strip of the littoral, making only one half-hearted effort to penetrate the interior and since then, lying here like their disintegrating buildings and crumbling empire, content with the bribes and extortions of petty officialdom and their seraglios of women, tolerant of any crimes or evil as long as there was a little dash or profit in it.

As he worked
Black Joke
in towards the quay, he could see them gathering already, gaudy vultures, in their fool's motley of uniform, tarnished gold braid and ornate swords sported by even the lowliest customs officer.

There would be endless forms and declarations unless he was firm, and always the open palm and the leering wink. Well, this time there would be none of that. This was a ship of the Queen's Navy.

‘Mr Denham,' Clinton called sharply, ‘issue pistols and cutlasses to the anchor watch, and nobody comes aboard without the express permission of the officer of the watch.'

He turned away to shake hands briefly with Zouga; they had found little in common during the voyage and the parting was cool.

‘Never thank you enough, sir,' said Zouga briskly.

‘Only my duty, Major.' But already Zouga's eyes were following Sergeant Cheroot as he assembled his men on the foredeck. They were in full marching order, eager to be ashore after the tedious voyage.

‘I must see to my men, Captain,' Zouga excused himself and hurried forward.

Clinton turned to Robyn and looked steadily into her green eyes.

‘I beg a small token of remembrance,' he said quietly.

In response to his request she reached up and took one of the cheap paste earrings from her lobe. As they shook hands, she slipped the little ornament into his palm, and he touched it briefly to his lips before slipping it into his pocket.

‘I will wait,' he repeated, ‘ten or even fifty years.'

B
lack Joke
had come up-channel on the flood, unloaded the mountainous stores of the Ballantyne Africa Expedition on to the stone quay during slack water, and two hours later thrown off her mooring ropes and swung sharply across the ebb, pointing her high bows down the channel.

From his position on the quarterdeck, Clinton Codrington stared across the widening gap at the slim, tall figure in long skirts standing on the very edge of the quay. Beyond her, her brother did not look up from his lists as he checked the stores and equipment. Sergeant Cheroot stood armed guard with his little pug-featured Hottentots, and the idlers and watchers kept well clear.