A Falcon Flies (38 page)

The steam launch
Helen
had long ago departed on the flood of the river, making good at least twenty knots with the current pushing her, so she would already be back in Quelimane.

‘All the arrangements have been made,' Zouga told her, and she had to be satisfied with that.

O
n the last day Robyn allowed Juba to accompany her to the cemetery for the first time, and both of them were laden with gifts. Bolts of trade cloth and a thirty-five-pound bag of ceramic beads, the most sought-after scarlet
sam-sam
variety.

It was as much as she dare ask from the expedition's stores without arousing Zouga's ire and interest.

She had thought of telling Zouga of Sarah and the child, but had wisely decided against it.

Zouga's reaction to finding a half-brother of mixed blood was too terrible to contemplate. Zouga had acquired his opinions on caste and colour in the hard school of the Indian army, and to find that his own father had trespassed against these iron rules would be too much of a shock. Instead, Robyn had mentioned that she had met one of her father's former servants, who tended their mother's grave over the years. The gift would have to be in proportion to these services.

Sarah and her child were waiting by the grave, and she accepted the gifts with a gracious little curtsy and her palms held together at the level of her eyes.

‘We leave tomorrow,' Robyn explained, and saw the immediate regret in Sarah's eyes, followed by acceptance.

‘It is God's will,' and Robyn could almost hear her father saying it.

Juba and the child soon became involved in collecting the pods from a kaffir boom tree nearby and stringing together the pretty scarlet lucky beans, each with its little black eye at the end to make necklaces and bracelets. The two of them, girl and boy, made a delightfully uninhibited pair, their laughter and shrill happy voices a pleasant background to the talk under the acacia tree.

Robyn and Sarah had become friends in the short time they had known each other. Her father had written in his
Missionary Travels
that he preferred the company of black people to white, and certainly all the evidence seemed to point that way. It seemed that Fuller Ballantyne had done nothing but squabble with his own kind. Contact with other white men seemed to bring out in him all the pettiness, suspicion and jealousy of his complex nature; while he had spent the greater part of his life with black men, and received from them trust and honour and lasting friendships. His relationship with Sarah was only a natural extension of those feelings, Robyn realized. She contrasted these feelings with those of her brother, and knew that he could never cross the dividing line. A black man could possibly earn Zouga's liking and even his respect, but the gulf was too wide. For Zouga they would always be ‘those people', and she guessed that he could never change in that. If he lived on in Africa for another fifty years, he would never learn to understand them, while she, within weeks, had made real friendships. She wondered if, like her father, she would come one day to prefer them to her own kind. It didn't seem possible now, but she recognized in herself the capacity for adjustment and change.

Beside her, Sarah was speaking, so softly, so shyly that Robyn had to make an effort to tear herself away from her own thoughts and ask:

‘What was that you said?'

‘Your father, Manali, will you tell him about the boy when you find him?'

‘He did not know?' Robyn was stunned, and Sarah shook her head.

‘Why did you not go with him then?' Robyn demanded.

‘He did not wish it. He said the journey would be too hard, but in reality, he is like an old bull elephant who does not like to stay too long with his cows but always must follow the wind.'

C
amacho Pereira towered above the wiry little tribesmen, checking off their names against the camp register. This evening he wore a jerkin of kudu skin that was decorated with fancy stitching and trade beads, and unfastened down the front to expose bulging hairy chest and the flat belly with its ridged muscles like the patterns in the sand of a windswept beach.

‘We feed them too much,' he told Zouga. ‘Fat nigger is lazy nigger.' He chuckled when he saw Zouga's expression, for that word had already been the cause of dissension. Zouga had forbidden him to use it, particularly in front of the expedition's black servants, for some of them it was the only word of English they understood. ‘Feed small, kick heavy and they work hard,' Camacho went on with relish.

Zouga ignored these gems of philosophy. He had heard them before, many times. Instead he turned to the captains of divisions, and watched them finish the rationing.

Two of them, their arms floury to the elbows, dipped into the bags of meal and doled it out to the shrinking line of porters. Each man had his calabash or chipped enamel basin to receive the scoop of stone-ground red-brown grain. Then one of the other captains slapped a split and smoked river fish on top of the pile. The fish looked like Scotch Kippers, but their odour punched like a prize-fighter. Weevils, maggots and all, they were a delicacy that the porters would miss once they left the river.

Pereira suddenly hauled a man out of the line and hit him a lusty clout across the back of the head with the stock of his kurbash.

‘He come twice, try for double,' he explained cheerfully, and took a playful kick at the man as he ran. If it had landed it would have knocked him off his feet, but all the porters had come to anticipate Camacho's flying boots.

Zouga waited until the last porter had been rationed, then he called to the captains.

‘
Indaba
! Tell the men,
indaba
.'

It was the call to council, to discuss affairs of consequence, and the whole camp left the cooking fires and came hurrying, agog with excitement.

Zouga paced up and down before the ranks of intent squatting black men, drawing out the moment, for he had come quickly to realize the African love of the theatrical. Most of them could understand the basic Nguni which Zouga now spoke with some fluency, for many of them were Shangaans or Angoni.

Now he spread his arms to his audience, paused for a second and then announced portentously.

‘
Kusasa isufari
, tomorrow the march begins!'

There was a hive murmur of comment and excitement, and then one of the captains rose from the front rank.

‘
Phi
?
Phi
? Where? Which way?'

Zouga lowered his arms, and let the suspense build up for a few moments, and then he stabbed out towards the far blue southern hills with a bunched fist.

‘
Laphaya
!That way!'

They roared with approval, just as they would have done if Zouga had pointed north or west for that matter. They were ready to go now. The direction was not important. The captains of divisions, the indunas, were shouting out the translation to those who had not understood and the first roar of the crowd settled to a boisterous rumble of comment and speculation, but it died away suddenly, and Zouga turned quickly.

Camacho Pereira had stepped beside Zouga, and his face was swollen and dark with rage. This was the first time he had heard Zouga's intention to go southwards so that when he started to speak, it was so forcefully that droplets of spittle flew from his lips. He was using one of the local dialects, and speaking so swiftly that Zouga understood only a word here and there. The sense was unmistakable, however, and he saw the shock on the faces of the men who squatted before them.

Camacho was warning them of the dangers beyond the southern hills. Zouga heard the word ‘Monomatapa' and knew that he was speaking of the terrible armies of the legendary empire, merciless legions whose favourite sport was to cut off a man's genitals and force him to eat them himself. The shock of the listening black faces was changing swiftly to terror and Camacho had been speaking for only a few seconds, a minute more and nothing would induce the caravan to march, two minutes more and most of his porters would have deserted by morning.

There was nothing to be gained by arguing with the Portuguese except an unseemly shouting match, which would be watched with interest by the entire assembled camp. One thing that Zouga had learned was that the Africans, like the Asians he had come to know well in India, were immensely respectful of a victor and impressed by success. He could demonstrate neither qualities by becoming embroiled in an undignified wrangle in a language that none of the spectators could understand.

‘
Pereira
!' he snapped, in a tone that cut through the Portuguese's torrent of words, and for an instant stilled them. Zouga had the Englishman's peculiar sense of fair play which made him warn an enemy before an attack. As the Portuguese turned to face him, Zouga swung in towards him with two light steps and he flicked his left hand at Camacho's eyes, forcing him to throw up both hands to protect his face. As he did so, Zouga slammed his fist into his belly, just under the ribs, with a force that doubled him in the middle, his breath whooshing out of his gaping mouth in an agonized explosion of sound and his hand dropping to cover his injured belly, leaving his face open for the next blow.

It was a short chopping left-handed shot that took Camacho cleanly under the right ear, on the hinge of the jaw. The plumed beaver hat spun off his head. His eyes rolled up into his skull, leaving the whites glaring madly, and Camacho's knees gave way under him. He pitched forward, making no effort to cushion his fall and dropped face down on to the grey sandy soil.

The silence lasted only a second, and then a shout went up from the watchers. Most of them had felt Camacho's boots or his kurbash, and they hugged one another happily. The trepidation that Camacho's little speech had raised was completely lost in wonder at the swiftness and the effect of those two blows. Most of them had never seen a man strike with a bunched hand, and the novelty of this form of combat impressed and delighted them.

Casually, Zouga turned his back on the prone figure. Not a trace of anger showed on his face, in fact he was smiling slightly as he strolled down the front rank of men and lifted one hand to quieten them.

‘There are soldiers who travel with us,' he told them, in a low voice that yet reached clearly to every one of them, ‘and you have seen them shoot.' He had made sure they had, and that news of the prowess in weapons of Sergeant Cheroot's men would travel ahead of them.

‘You see that flag?' He flung one hand dramatically at the red and white and blue jack floating above the main tent on its improvised flag pole. ‘No man, no chief nor warrior dare …'

‘Zouga!' shrieked Robyn. To the terrible urgency of her tone Zouga reacted instantly, spinning aside with two dancing paces, and the crowd exploded with a single word, a deep drawn out ‘Jee!'

It is a blood-chilling sound, for it is the cry with which an African warrior encourages himself or another in the fatal moments of a battle to the death.

Camacho's stroke had been aimed at the small of Zouga's back. He was a man who had fought with the knife many times before, and he had not taken the more tempting target between the shoulder blades, where the point could turn against the ribs. He had gone for the soft area above the kidneys, and even with Robyn's warning, Zouga was not quite quick enough. The point raked his hip, slitting the cloth of his breeches in a six-inch rent, beneath which skin and flesh opened cleanly and the bright blood spread swiftly to the knee.

‘Jee!' The deep sonorous chant of the watchers as Camacho reversed the stroke of his extended right hand, cutting sideways at Zouga's belly. The blade twinkled and hissed like an angry cobra, ten inches of tempered steel, and Zouga threw up his hands and sucked in his belly muscles as he jumped back. There was a sharp tug as the point caught in his shirt, but it did not touch the skin.

‘Jee!' again as Camacho lunged. His face was bloated and mottled with purple and white, the eyes squinting with rage and the after-effects of the blow to his jaw. Zouga felt the sting of the wound on his hip pulling open as he swayed back out of the path of the blade, and the stronger flood of warm blood down his leg.

He paused out of range of the knife for Zouga had heard the snap of a weapon being cocked and from the corner of his eye he saw Sergeant Cheroot levelling the Enfield, waiting for a clean shot at the Portuguese.

‘No! Don't shoot!' Zouga called urgently. He did not relish a bullet in his own belly, for he and Camacho were dancing close together, with the weaving point of the knife seeming to bind them to each other.

‘Don't shoot, Sergeant!' There was another reason why he could afford no interference. There were a hundred men judging him now, men with whom he would march and work in the months and years ahead. He needed their respect.

‘Jee!' sang the watchers, and Camacho was panting with rage. Again the blade in his right hand whispered like the wing of a swallow in flight, and this time Zouga overreacted, blundering back half a dozen paces, and then losing his balance for a moment he dropped on one knee and put a hand to the ground to steady himself. But as Camacho charged again, he rebounded to his feet and arched his hips aside, the way a matador swings out of the line of the bull's run. In the hand that had touched the ground, Zouga held a handful of the coarse grey sand.

His eyes were locked to those of the Portuguese, it was the eyes not the knife hand that would signal Camacho's intentions. They flickered left, while the hand feigned the other way, and Zouga moved in past the blade, and was ready again when Camacho rounded.

They faced each other, shuffling in a slow cycle that stirred wisps of pale dust around their feet. Camacho kept the knife low, and stirred it gently as though he was conducting a slow passage of music, but Zouga studying his eyes saw the first small nervous flickers of uncertainty.

He jumped in, launching himself off the right foot.