A Falcon Flies (44 page)

C
amacho left fifteen of his men well back off the crest, in a tumble of rock that looked like a ruined castle, and whose caves and overhangs gave shade and concealment. They would sleep, he knew, and he grudged it to them. His own eyelids were drooping as he lay belly down in cover, on the other side of the ridge watching the caravan making camp.

He had only two of his men with him to help him mark the sentries and
scherms
, the watch fires and the tent sites. They would be able to lead the others in, even in the complete darkness before the moon, if that should become necessary. Camacho hoped not. In the dark mistakes could be made, and it needed only a shot or a single shout. No, they would wait for the moon, he decided.

The Englishman had come into camp earlier, just before the caravan halted. He had the Hottentot with him, and they both hobbled stiffly like men who had made long, hard marches. Good, he would sleep soundly, was probably doing so already, for Camacho had not seen him in the last hour. He must be in the tent beside the woman's. He had seen a servant carrying a steaming bucket of water to her.

They had watched the Hottentot Sergeant set only two sentries. The Englishman must be feeling very secure, two sentries merely to watch against lions. They would probably both be fast asleep by midnight. They would never wake again. He, personally, would cut one of them. He smiled in anticipation, and he would send a good knife to cut the other.

The remaining Hottentots had built their usual lean-to shelter and thatched it in a rudimentary fashion. There was no chance of rain, not at this season and not with that unblemished eggshell-blue sky. It was almost two hundred paces from the tents, a groan or a whimper would not carry that far. Good, Camacho nodded again. It was working out better than he had hoped.

As always, the two tents were set close together, almost touching. The gallant Englishman guarding the woman, Camacho smiled again, and felt his drowsiness lifting miraculously as his groin charged once more. He wished the night away, for he had already waited so long.

Night came with the dramatic suddenness of Africa, within minutes the valley was filled with shadows, the sunset made its last theatrical flare of apricot and old gold light and then it was dark.

For an hour more Camacho could see the occasional dark figure silhouetted by the flames of the camp fires. Once the sound of singing carried softly and sweetly to the ridge, and the other camp sounds, the clank of a bucket, the thud of a log thrown on the fire, the drowsy murmur of voices, showed that the routine was unaltered, and the camp completely unaware.

The noises faded and the fires died. The silence and the darkness was disturbed only by the piping lament of a jackal across the valley.

The star patterns turned slowly across the sky marking the passage of the hours, and then gradually paled out before the greater brilliance of the rising moon.

‘Fetch the others,' Camacho told the man nearest him, and rose stiffly to his feet, stretching like a cat to relieve numbed muscles. They came silently, and gathered close about Camacho, to listen to his final whispered instructions.

When he finished whispering, he looked from one to the other in turn. Their faces in the bright moonlight had the pale greenish hues of freshly exhumed corpses, but they nodded their agreement to his words, and then followed him down the slope, dark silent shapes like a troop of wolves; they reached the dry watercourse in the gut of the valley, and split into their prearranged groups.

Camacho moved up the newly beaten path towards the camp. He carried his knife in his right hand and his musket in the other, and his feet made a barely audible brushing sound through the short dry grass. Ahead of him, beneath the outspread branches of a mukusi tree, he could make out the shape of the sentry, where he had been placed six hours before. The man was asleep, curled like a dog on the hard earth. Camacho nodded with satisfaction and crept closer. He saw the man had pulled a dark blanket over his head. The mosquitoes had bothered him also, Camacho grinned and knelt beside him.

With his free hand he felt softly for the man's head through the blanket, then the hand stilled. He gave a little grunt of surprise, and jerked the blanket aside. It had been arranged over the exposed roots of the mukusi tree to look like the shape of a sleeping man, and Camacho swore quietly but with great vehemence.

The sentry had chosen the wrong time to sneak away from his post. He was probably back in the lean-to shelter snoring happily on a mattress of dry grass. They would get him with the others, when they cleaned out the shelter. Camacho went on up the slope into the camp. In the moonlight the canvas of the tents shone ghostly silver, a beacon on which his lust could concentrate. Camacho slipped the sling of the musket over his shoulder as he hurried forward, towards the left-hand tent, and then checked as another dark figure emerged from the shadows, the knife in his right hand instinctively came up and then he recognized his own man, one of those whom he had sent to cut the Englishman's throat.

The man nodded jerkily, all was well so far and they went forward together, separating only as they approached the two tents. Camacho would not use the fly opening of the woman's tent – for he knew it would be laced closed, and if there were any surprises they would be at the entrance. He slipped around the side of the tent, and stooped to one of the hooded ventilator openings. He ran the point of the blade into it and then drew it upwards in a single stroke. Although it was heavy canvas, the blade had been whetted expertly, and the side wall split with only a whisper of sound.

Camacho stepped through the opening, and while he waited for his eyesight to adjust to the deeper darkness of the interior, he fumbled with the fastening of his breeches, grinning happily to himself as he made out the narrow collapsible cot and the little white tent of the muslin mosquito net. He shuffled towards it slowly, careful not to trip over the cases of medical stores that were piled between him and the cot.

Standing over the cot, he ripped the muslin netting aside violently, and lunged full length on to the cot, groping for the woman's head to smother her cries, the loose ends of his belt flapping at his waist, and his breeches sagging around his hips.

For a moment he was paralysed with shock at the fact that the cot was empty. Then he groped frantically over every inch of it, before coming to his feet again and hoisting his breeches with his free hand. He was confused, disconnected, and wild ideas flashed through his mind. Perhaps the woman had left the cot to answer a call of nature, but then why was the fly carefully laced closed. She had heard him and was hiding behind the cases, armed with a scalpel, and he swung round panicking to lash out with the knife, but the tent was empty.

Then the coincidence of the missing sentry and the empty cot struck him with force, and he felt deep and urgent concern. Something was happening that he did not understand. He charged for the rent in the canvas, tripped and sprawled over one of the cases and rolled on to his feet again, nimble as a cat. He ran out, clinching his belt and looking about him wildly, unslinging his musket and only just preventing himself from calling aloud to his men.

He ran to the Englishman's tent, just as his man came running out of the long dark tear in the canvas side, brandishing his knife, his face pale and fearful in the moonlight. He saw Camacho, screamed and struck out at him wildly with the long silver blade.

‘Silence, you fool,' Camacho snarled at him.

‘He's gone,' the man panted, craning to stare about into the deep shadows that the moon cast under the trees. ‘They've gone. They've all gone.'

‘Come!' snapped Camacho, and led him at a run down towards the lean-to that the Hottentot musketeers had built.

Before they reached it they met their companions running towards them in a disorderly bunch.

‘Machito?' somebody called nervously.

‘Shut your mouth,' Camacho growled at them, but the man blurted on.

‘The
scherm
is empty, they have gone.'

‘The Devil has taken them.'

‘There is nobody.'

There was an almost superstitious frenzy of awe on them all, the darkness and the silent empty camp turned them all into cowards. Camacho found himself, for once, without an order to give, uncertain of what to do. His men crowded around him helplessly, seeming to take comfort from each other's physical presence, cocking and fiddling with their muskets and peering nervously into the shadows.

‘What do we do now?' A voice asked the question that Camacho had feared, and somebody else threw a log from the pile on to the smouldering watch fire in the centre of the camp.

‘Don't do that,' Camacho ordered uncertainly, but instinctively they were all drawn to the warmth and comfort of the orange tongue of flame that soared up brightly, blowing like a dragon's breath.

They turned their backs towards it, forming a half circle and faced outwards into the dark which in contrast to the flames was suddenly impenetrably black.

It was out of this darkness that it came. There was no warning, just the sudden thunderous burst of sound and flame, the long line of spurting muzzle flashes, blooming briefly and murderously, and then the sound of the striking balls in their midst, like a handful of children's marbles hurled into a mud puddle, as the musket balls slogged into human flesh.

Immediately men were hurled lightly about by the heavy lead slugs, and the little band about the watch fire was thrown into struggling, shouting confusion.

One of them flew backwards, at a run, doubled in the middle where a ball had taken him low in the belly. He tripped over the burning log and fell full length into the blazing watch fire. His hair and beard flared like a torch of pine needles and his scream rang wildly through the tree tops.

Camacho himself threw up his musket, aiming blindly into the night from whence the Englishman's voice was chanting the ritual infantry orders for mass volley fire.

‘Section One. Reload. Section Two. Three paces forward. One round volley fire.'

Camacho realized that the devastating blast of close range musketry that had just swept them would be repeated within seconds. With mild derision Camacho had watched on many a hot afternoon as the Englishman drilled his double line of red-jacketed puppets, the front rank levelling and firing on command, then the second rank taking three paces forward in unison, stepping through the gaps in the first rank and in their turn levelling and firing. The same evolutions which, when magnified ten thousand times, had broken the charge of French cavalry up the slope at Quatre Bras, now filled Camacho with unutterable terror, and he flung up his musket and fired it unsighted into the darkness, in the direction of the cool, precise English voice. He fired at the same instant as one of his own men who had been knocked down by the first volley scrambled to his feet only lightly wounded, directly in front of Camacho's musket muzzle. Camacho shot him cleanly between the shoulder blades at a range of two feet, so close that the powder burn scorched the man's shirt. It smouldered in little red sparks as he sprawled at full length on his face once more, until the glowing sparks were quenched by the quick flow of the man's heart blood.

‘Fool!' Camacho howled at the corpse, and turned to run. Behind him the English voice called, ‘Fire!'

Camacho threw himself down on to hard earth, howling again as his hands and knees sank into the hot ash of the watch fire and he felt his breeches char and his skin blister.

The second volley swept over his head, and around him more men were falling and screaming, and Camacho rebounded to his feet at a dead run. He had lost both his knife and musket.

‘Section One, three paces forward, one round volley fire.'

The night was suddenly filled with running, shouting figures, as the porters burst out of their encampment. There was no direction or purpose in their flight. They ran like Camacho, driven by gunfire and their own terrible panic, scattering away into the surrounding bush, singly and in small groups.

Before the command ordering the next volley of musket fire, Camacho ducked behind the hillock of porters' packs, which had been piled close to the Englishman's tent and covered with waterproof tarpaulin.

Camacho was sobbing with the agony of his scorched hands and knees, and with the humiliation of having walked so guilelessly into the Englishman's trap.

He found his terror giving way to bitter and spiteful hatred. As little groups of terrified porters stumbled towards him out of the darkness, he drew one of the pistols from his belt and shot the leader in the head and then leapt up howling like a demented ghost – they ran and he knew they would not stop until, miles away in the trackless wilderness, they dropped with exhaustion, easy prey for lion or hyena. It gave him a moment's sour satisfaction, and he looked around for some other damage he could wreak.

The pile of stores behind which he crouched and the dying fire in front of the Englishman's deserted tent caught his attention. He snatched a brand from the fire, blew it into flame and tossed it flaring brightly on to the high canvas-covered pile of stores and equipment, then flinched as another volley crashed out of the darkness, and he heard the Englishman's voice.

‘As a line of skirmishers, take the bayonet to them now, men.'

Camacho jumped down into the dry river-bed, and blundered through the crunching sugary sand to the far bank, where he scrambled thankfully into the dense riverine bush.

At the re-assembly point on the ridge there were three of his men already waiting, two of them had lost their muskets and all three were as shaken and sweaty and breathless as Camacho himself.

Two more came in while they regained their breath and power of speech. One was badly hit, his shoulders shattered by a musket ball.

‘There won't be any others,' he gasped, ‘those little yellow bastards caught them with bayonets as they were crossing the river.'