A Falcon Flies (37 page)

‘What about the evidence of the trade to the south,' Zouga glanced across the clearing at the silent figure of Juba, waiting patiently by the entrance to Robyn's tent. ‘That girl is the living proof that a new trade is flourishing south of the Zambezi.'

‘Yes, but it seems to be nothing compared to the activity north of here.'

‘The northern trade has been fully documented. Father reached Marawi and followed the slave caravans down to the coast fifteen years ago, and Bannerman at Zanzibar has written a dozen reports on the Zanzibar market,' Zouga pointed out, nursing a precious tumbler of his fast-dwindling supply of whisky, and staring into the ashes of the fire. ‘Whereas nobody knows anything about the trade with the Monomatapa and the Matabele south of here.'

‘Yes, I acknowledge that,' Robyn admitted reluctantly. ‘However, in his
Missionary Travels
father wrote that the Lualaba was the source of the Nile and he would one day prove it by following it from its headwaters. Besides which, he has been seen in the north.'

‘Has he, though?' Zouga asked mildly.

‘That old man . . .'

‘…Was lying. Somebody put him up to it, and I don't need more than one guess,' Zouga finished.

‘How do you know he was lying?' Robyn demanded.

‘If you live long enough in India you develop an instinct for the lie,' Zouga smiled at her. ‘Besides why would father wait eight years
after
he disappeared to explore the Lualaba river. He would have gone there directly – if he had gone north.'

‘My dear brother,' Robyn's voice was stinging, ‘it would not be the legend of Monomatapa that makes you so stubbornly determined to go south of the river, would it? Is that gleam in your eye the gold?'

‘That is a mean thought,' Zouga smiled again. ‘But what does intrigue me is the determination of that great guide and explorer, Camacho Pereira, to discourage any journey to the south, and instead to lead us northwards.'

Long after Robyn had disappeared into her tent and the lantern within was extinguished Zouga sat on beside the fire, nursing the whisky in the tumbler and staring into the fading coals. When he reached his decision he drained the glass and stood up abruptly. He strode down the lines to where Camacho Pereira's tent stood at the furthest end of the camp.

There was a lantern burning within even at this late hour, and when Zouga called out, a squeak of alarm in feminine tones was quickly hushed with a man's low growl and a few minutes later Camacho Pereira pulled the fly aside and peered out at Zouga warily.

He had thrown a blanket over his shoulders to cover his nudity, but in one hand he carried a pistol and relaxed only slightly as he recognized Zouga.

‘I have decided,' Zouga told him brusquely, ‘that we'll go north, up the Shire river to Lake Marawi – and then on to the Lualaba river.'

Camacho's face shone like the full moon as he smiled.

‘That is very good. Very good – much ivory, we find your father – you see, we find him damn soon.'

Before noon the following day Camacho, with a great deal of shouting and swishing of the kurbash, marched a hundred strong healthy men into the camp. ‘I find you porters,' he announced. ‘Plenty porters – damn good, hey?'

T
he Christian girl Sarah was waiting beside the grave again when Robyn came down through the acacia forest the following afternoon.

The child saw her first and ran to greet her, he was laughing with pleasure, and Robyn was struck once again by the familiarity of his face. It was something she had known was so forcible that she stopped dead and stared at him, but could not recapture the memory before the boy took her hand and led her to where his mother waited.

They went through the little ritual of changing the flowers on the grave and then settled side by side on a fallen acacia branch. It was cooler in the shade and in the branches above their heads a pair of shrikes hunted little green caterpillars. The birds were black and white across the back and wings, but their breasts were a striking shade of crimson that glowed like the blood of a dying gladiator, and Robyn watched them with rare pleasure while she and Sarah talked quietly.

Sarah was telling her about her mother, how brave and uncomplaining she had been in the terrible heat of the Kaborra-Bassa where the black ironstone cliffs turned the gorge into a furnace.

‘It was the bad season,' Sarah explained. ‘The hot season before the rains break.' Robyn recalled her father's written account of the expedition in which he had laid the blame for the delays upon his subordinates, old Harkness and Commander Stone, so that they had missed the cool season, and entered the gorge in the suicide month of November.

‘Then when the rains came, the fever came with it,' Sarah went on. ‘It was very bad. The white men and your mother became sick very quickly.' Perhaps her mother had lost much of her immunity to malaria during the years in England while she waited for her husband's summons. ‘Even Manali himself became sick. It was the first time I had seen him sick of the fever. He was filled with the devils for many days,' the expression described vividly the delirium of malarial fever, Robyn thought. ‘So he did not know when your mother died.'

They were silent again. The child, bored by the interminable talk of the two women, threw a stone at the birds in the acacia branches above their heads, and with flash of their marvellous crimson breasts the two shrikes winged away towards the river, and again the child engaged Robyn's attention. It was as if she had known that face all her life.

‘My mother?' Robyn asked, still watching the child.

‘Her water turned black,' said Sarah simply. The blackwater fever – Robyn felt her skin prickle. When malaria changed its course, attacking the kidneys and transforming them into thin-walled sacks of clotted black blood that could rupture at the patient's smallest movement. The blackwater fever, when the urine changed to dark mulberrycoloured blood, and few, very few victims, ever recovered.

‘She was strong,' Sarah went on quietly. ‘She was the last of them to go.' She turned her head towards the other neglected graves. The curly pods of the acacia were scattered thickly over the unadorned mounds. ‘We buried her here, while Manali was still with his devils. But later, when he could walk he came with the book and said the words for her. He built the cross with his own hands.'

‘Then he went away again?' Robyn asked.

‘No, he was very sick, and new devils came to him. He wept for your mother.' The thought of her father weeping was something so completely alien that Robyn could not imagine it. ‘He spoke often of the river that had destroyed him.'

Through the acacia trees there were glimpses of the wide green river, and both their heads turned towards it naturally.

‘He came to hate that river as though it was a living enemy that had denied him a road to his dreams. He was like a man demented, for the fever came and went. At times he would battle with his devils, shouting his defiance the way a warrior
giyas
at the enemy host.' The
giya
was a challenge dance with which the Nguni warrior baits his adversary. ‘At other times he would speak wildly of machines that would tame his enemy, of walls that he would build across the waters to carry men and ships up above the gorge.' Sarah broke off, her lovely dark moon face stricken with the memory, and the child sensed her distress and came to her, kneeling on the earth and laying his dusty little head in her lap. She stroked the tight cap of curls with an absentminded caress.

With a sudden little chill of shock Robyn recognized the child. Her expression changed so drastically that Sarah followed the direction of her gaze, looking down with all her attention at the head in her lap, then up again to meet Robyn's eyes. It did not really need words to pass, the question was posed and answered with silent exchange of feminine understanding, and Sarah drew the child towards her with a protective gesture.

‘It was only after your mother . . .' Sarah began to explain and then fell silent, and Robyn went on staring at the little boy. It was Zouga at the same age, a dusky miniature Zouga. It was only the colour of his skin which had prevented her from seeing it immediately.

Robyn felt as though the earth had lurched beneath her feet, then it steadied again and she felt a strange sense of release. Fuller Ballantyne was no longer the god-like figure hewn from unforgiving, unbending granite that had overshadowed her entire life.

She held out both her hands to the child and he went to her unhesitatingly, trustingly. Robyn embraced him, and his skin was smooth and warm as she kissed him. He wriggled against her like a puppy, and she felt a deep glow of affection and of gratitude to the child.

‘He was very sick,' said Sarah softly, ‘and alone. They had all gone or died, and he was sad, so that I feared for his life.'

Robyn nodded understanding. ‘And you loved him?'

‘There was no sin in it, for he was a God,' said Sarah simply.

‘No,' thought Robyn with intense relief. ‘He was a man, and I,his daughter,am a woman.'

In that moment she knew that she never need again feel shame and guilt for her body and the demands and desires which sprang from it. She hugged the child who was proof of her father's humanity, and Sarah smiled with relief.

For the first time in her life Robyn was able to face the fact that she loved her father, and she understood part of the compulsion that over the years had grown stronger rather than dwindling.

The longing she had felt for the father had been submerged completely by the awe and majesty of the legend. Now she knew why she was here, on the banks of this majestic river, on the very frontier of the known world. She had come not to find Fuller Ballantyne, but to discover rather the father and the self that she had never known before.

‘Where is he, Sarah, where is my father? Which way did he go?' she demanded eagerly, but the woman dropped her eyes.

‘I do not know,' she whispered. ‘I woke one morning and he was gone. I do not know where he is, but I will wait for him, until he returns to me and his son.' She looked up quickly. ‘He will come back?' she asked pathetically. ‘If not to me then for the child?'

‘Yes,' Robyn answered with certainty that she did not feel. ‘Of course he will come back.'

T
he selection of porters was a lengthy business, and after Zouga had signalled his choice with a slap on the shoulder, the men were sent to Robyn's tent to be examined for signs of disease or infirmity that might prevent them performing their duties. Then came the allocation of packs.

Although Zouga had already made up and weighed each pack, making sure that not one of them exceeded the stipulated eighty pounds weight, the newly engaged porters had to watch the loads reweighed publicly, and then there was interminable haggling over the size and balance of the burden that each of them would carry for months, perhaps even years ahead.

Although Zouga brusquely forbade Pereira to hasten the selection process with his kurbash, and entered goodnaturedly into the spirit of banter and bargain, he was, in fact, using the occasion to assess the spirit of his men, to pick out the malcontents who would sour that spirit in the hardships ahead, and also to select the natural leaders to whom the others turned instinctively for decision.

The following day when planning the order of march, Zouga used the knowledge he had gained in this way. To begin with, seven of the more obvious trouble-makers were given a
khete
of beads each and ordered out of the camp without explanation or apology. Then Zouga called out five of the brightest and best and made them captains of divisions of twenty porters each.

They would be responsible for maintaining the pace of the march, for preventing pilfering of the loads, making and breaking camp, distributing rations, and acting as the spokesmen of each division, presenting complaints to and transmitting orders from Zouga.

When the roll was complete there were one hundred and twenty-six names upon it, including Sergeant Cheroot's Hottentots, the porters who had come up from Quelimane, Camacho Pereira and the two principals – Robyn and Zouga himself.

It would be a slow and unwieldy caravan unless properly organized, that was bad enough – but on the march it would also be very vulnerable. Zouga gave much thought to defence of the column, and he and Sergeant Cheroot shared the last quarter bottle of whisky as they pooled their experience and planned the order of march.

Zouga, with a small party of local guides and personal bearers, planned to travel independently of the main caravan, reconnoitring the terrain ahead of the march, and making himself free to prospect and hunt as the opportunity arose. He would return most nights to rejoin the caravan, but would be equipped to spend many days out of contact.

Camacho Pereira with five of the Hottentot musketeers would lead the van of the main column, and even when Robyn chaffed him lightly, Zouga saw nothing ludicrous in Camacho marching under the Union Jack.

‘It's an English expedition, and we will carry the flag,' Zouga replied stiffly.

‘Rule, Britannia,' Robyn laughed irreverently, and Zouga ignored her and went on describing the order of march.

The divisions of porters would remain separate but closed up, and Sergeant Cheroot with the remainder of his musketeers would form the rearguard of the column.

There was a simple system of signals to control the movements of the column, a pre-arranged series of blasts on the kudu-horn trumpets would sound the ‘march' or ‘halt', the ‘close-up or ‘form square'.

For four days Zouga exercised the column in these evolutions and though proficiency would only come much later, at last he felt that they were ready to make a start, and he told Robyn so.

‘But how are we to cross the river?' she asked looking across at the north bank.

The river was half a mile wide, and the heavy rainfalls over millions of square miles had drained into it. The flow was swift and powerful. If they were going northwards to the Shire river and Lake Marawi they would need a flotilla of dugout canoes and many days to make the crossing to the north bank.