A Falcon Flies (61 page)

His boots had been resoled more than once with the rawhide peeled from the inner surface of an elephant's ear, and his belt and webbing, the sling of his elephant gun renewed with uncured buffalo hide.

He made a strange gaunt figure, for hard hunting had burned all the fat and loose flesh from his body and limbs. His height was enhanced by his leanness and the breadth of his bony shoulders tapering sharply to his waist. The sun had burned his skin dark, yet bleached his hair and beard to white gold. His pale hair hung to his shoulders, and he tied it at the back of his neck with a leather thong. He kept his beard and whiskers trimmed neatly, using scissors to cut and the heated blade of his hunting knife to singe them.

The sense of well-being from his superb physical condition, together with the vaunting anticipation of a successful outcome to his search drove him onwards so that the days seemed too short for him and yet when the night fell he lay down on the hard earth and slept the deep dreamless refreshing sleep of a child, to awake again long before the dawn's first glimmering, impatient for what the new day would bring forth.

However, the time was passing. After each hunt, the powder bags were lighter, and though he dug the spent musket balls from the carcasses of his victims and recast them, there was always wastage.

The precious little store of quinine dwindled as swiftly, and the rains were coming. No white man could survive the rains without ammunition and quinine. Soon he would have to abandon the search for the ruined city with its idols decked in gold. He would have to march to beat the rains, south and west, five hundred miles or more, if his observations were still accurate, to cut his grandfather's road and follow it down to the mission station at Kuruman, which was the nearest outpost of European civilization.

The later he left it, the harder would be the march when he made it. Hard and fast, stopping for nothing, neither elephant nor gold, until he was out into the drier, safer land to the south.

The thought of leaving depressed him, for he knew with a certain deep gut feeling that there was something here, very close to where he now lay, and it irked him terribly that the oncoming rains would frustrate his search. But then he consoled himself that there would be another season, and he knew with the same deep gut certainty that he would return. There was something about this land – an insistent, irritating sound interrupted his thoughts. He pushed the cap up from his eyes and looked into the dense branches of the marula tree under which he lay. The harsh cries were repeated, and the drab little bird that uttered them hopped agitatedly from branch to branch, flirting its wings and tail with a sharp whirring. The bird was the size of a starling, its back dull brown and its chest and belly a muddy yellow.

Zouga rolled his head and saw that Jan Cheroot was awake also.

‘Well?' he asked.

‘I haven't tasted honey since we left Mount Hampden,' Jan Cheroot answered. ‘But it's hot, and perhaps the bird is a liar, perhaps he will lead us to a snake or a lion.'

‘He only leads you to a snake if you cheat him of his share of the comb,' Zouga told him.

‘So they say,' Jan Cheroot nodded and then they were silent, considering the effort involved in following the honey guide, and weighing it against the possible rewards. The bird will very often lead a badger or a human being to a wild hive, and wait for its share of the wax and honey and bee grubs. The legend is that if his payment is not made, then next time he will lead the man who cheated him to a venomous snake or a man-eating lion.

Jan Cheroot's sweet tooth got the better of him. He sat up and the bird's cries were immediately shriller and more excited. It flashed away across the clearing to the next tree, flitting wings and tail noisily, calling them impatiently, and when they did not follow it darted back to the branches above them and continued its display.

‘All right then, old fellow,' Zouga agreed resignedly, and stood up. Jan Cheroot took an axe from Matthew and the clay fire-pot in its plaited bark carrying net.

‘Make camp here,' Jan Cheroot told the bearers. ‘We will bring you honey to eat tonight.'

Salt and honey and meat, the three greatest delicacies of the African bush. Zouga felt a twinge of guilt at wasting so much of the time that remained to him on this frivolous side-journey, but his men had worked hard and travelled fast and honey would revive their flagging spirits.

The little brown and yellow bird danced ahead of them, burring and rattling with a sound like a shaken box of Swan Vestas, darting from tree to bush, turning immediately it settled to make sure they were following.

For almost an hour it led them along a dry river course, and then it turned and crossed a rocky ridge of ground. At the saddle, they looked down into a heavily wooded valley bounded by the familiar rocky kopjes and hillocks.

‘The bird is teasing us,' Jan Cheroot grumbled. ‘How much further will he make us dance?'

Zouga shifted his elephant gun to the other shoulder. ‘I think you are right,' he agreed, the valley ahead of him was forbidding, the floor choked with tall stands of the razor-edged elephant grass, higher than a man's head. It would be even hotter down there, and the dried seeds of the grass had arrowheads to them that could work themselves into the skin and cause festering little wounds.

‘It comes to me that I am not so fond of honey as I thought I was,' Jan Cheroot cocked his head at Zouga.

‘We will turn back,' he agreed. ‘Let the bird find another dupe. We, will look for a fat kudu cow on the way back, meat instead of honey.'

They started back down the ridge and instantly the bird flashed back, and renewed its entreaties above their heads.

‘Go and find your friend the
rattel
(honeybadger)!' Jan Cheroot shouted at it, and the bird's contortions became frantic. It dropped lower and lower, until it was in the branches barely an arm's length above their heads, and its cries were irritating and distracting.

‘
Voetsak
!' Jan Cheroot yelled at it. The bird's cries would alert all wild game for miles about to the presence of man, and thwart any chance of killing an animal for the night's meal. ‘
Voetsak
!' He stooped and picked up a stone to shy at the bird. ‘Go away and leave us, little sugar mouth.'

The name stopped Zouga in his tracks. Jan Cheroot had used the bastard Dutch, ‘
klein Suiker bekkie
', and now he drew back his right arm to hurl the stone.

Zouga caught his wrist. ‘Little sugar mouth,' he repeated, and the Umlimo's voice rang in his ears, that strange shimmering tone that he had memorized, ‘the seeker of sweetness in the treetops.'

‘Wait,' he told Jan Cheroot, ‘Do not throw.'

It was ridiculous, of course it was. He would not make himself ludicrous by repeating the Umlimo's words to Jan Cheroot. He hesitated a moment. ‘We have come so far, already,' he told the Hottentot reasonably, ‘and the bird is so excited that the hive cannot be far.'

‘It could be another two hours,' Jan Cheroot growled, but lowered his throwing arm. ‘That makes six hours back to camp.'

‘You don't want to grow fat and idle,' Zouga said. Jan Cheroot was lean as a whippet that had been coursing rabbit all season, and he had walked and run a hundred miles in the last two days. He looked pained at the accusation, but Zouga went on remorselessly, shaking his head in mock sympathy. ‘But when a man grows older, he cannot march as far or as fast, and he is slower with the women too.'

Jan Cheroot dropped the stone, and went back up the ridge at a furious pace with the bird flitting and screeching ecstatically ahead of him.

Zouga followed him, smiling at the little man and at his own folly in placing any store on the words of that naked witch. Still the honey would be welcome, he consoled himself.

An hour later, Zouga was convinced that Jan Cheroot had been correct. The bird was a liar, and they were wasting what remained of the day, but there would be no turning Jan Cheroot now, he had been deeply insulted by Zouga's gibes.

They had crossed the valley, blundering through the stands of elephant grass, for the bird did not pick one of the game trails to follow. It moved on a direct line, and as they followed, the grass seeds showered upon them, working their way down the backs of their shirts and the sweat of their bodies activated them, as the first rains should have done, so that they began to worm like living things, trying to pierce the skin.

The view ahead was cut off by the tall grass, and they reached the far side of the valley with little prior warning. Suddenly there was a smooth rock cliff looming over them, almost obscured by the tall leafy trees of the forest, and by its own covering of lianas and dense climbing plants. It was not a very high prominence, perhaps forty feet, but it was sheer. They stopped below it and peered upwards.

The wild beehive was almost at the top of the cliff. The honey guide fluttered triumphantly above it, twisting its head to look down at them with a single bright beadlike eye.

The rock below the opening to the hive was stained with a dark dribble of old melted wax and the detritus of the hive, but it was almost entirely masked by a lovely creeping plant. The stem of the plant climbed the cliff, branching and twisting and doubling on itself, its pale leaves a cool green, but its flowers a lovely shade of cornflower blue.

The bees leaving and returning to the hive caught the sunlight like golden dust-motes, but their trajectory was swift and straight through the hot still air.

‘Well, Sergeant, there is your hive,' Zouga said. ‘The bird did not lie.' He felt a deep sense of disappointment. Although he had told himself to place no store on the Umlimo's words, yet there had been a sneaking anticipation, the forlorn hope persisting against common sense, and now that sense had prevailed, there was this regret.

Zouga leaned his gun against the bole of a tree, shed his traps, and threw himself down to rest and watch Jan Cheroot making his preparation to rob the hive. Jan Cheroot cut a square of bark from a mukusi tree, and rolled it into a smoking tube. He filled it with wood pulp scraped from a dead tree trunk.

Then he swung the clay fire-pot on its carrying sling of bark rope, fanning it until the smouldering moss and wood chips that it contained burst into flame. He transferred fire to the smoking tube, and when it had fairly taken he hooked his axe over one shoulder and began climbing the interwoven branches of the flowering creeper up the sheer cliff.

The first of the defender bees buzzed fiercely about his head when he was a few feet from the opening to the hive, and pausing, Jan Cheroot lifted the bark tube to his mouth and blew a gentle stream of blue smoke towards his attacker. The smoke drove the insect away, and he resumed the climb.

Lying under the mukusi tree, idly swatting at the buffalo flies, picking at the grass under his shirt, and harbouring his disappointment, Zouga watched the Hottentot work.

Jan Cheroot reached the hive, and blew another stream of smoke over the hole in the cliff, stupefying the bees which had now formed a swirling defensive cloud about him. One of them darted in, despite the smoke, and stung him in the soft of the neck. Jan Cheroot swore bitterly, but he did not make the mistake of slapping at the attacker, or of trying to scratch away the barbed sting lodged in his flesh. He worked on calmly, unhurriedly, with the smoke tube.

Minutes later, the hive was sufficiently smoke-drugged to allow him to begin cutting away the screen of flowering branches that hid the entrance, and he balanced on a fork of the creeper, using both hands to swing the axe, perched like a little yellow monkey forty feet above where Zouga lay.

‘What the thunder . . .' He stopped after a dozen axe blows, and stared at the cliff face that he had exposed. ‘Master, there is devil's work here.'

The tone of his voice alerted Zouga, and he scrambled to his feet.

‘What is it?'

Jan Cheroot's body obscured the object of his amazement, and impatiently Zouga crossed to the foot of the cliff and climbed hand over hand up the serpentine stem of the creeper.

He reached Jan Cheroot's side and clung to a handhold.

‘Look!' Jan Cheroot exhorted him. ‘Look at that!' He pointed at the stone face that he had exposed with the axe.

It took Zouga a few seconds to realize that the entrance to the hive was through a geometrically perfect, sculptured aperture, one of a series which pierced the cliff face in a broad horizontal band, that seemed to extend unbroken in both directions along the cliff face. The decorated band was in chiselled stone blocks, arranged in a chevron pattern, a lattice work that was without question the work of a skilled stonemason.

The realization jolted Zouga so that he almost missed his hand-hold, and immediately afterwards he saw something else that up to that moment had been hidden by the dense covering of climbing plants and the thick coating of old outpouring wax from the beehive.

The entire cliff face was formed of perfect blocks of dressed stone, small blocks, so neatly fitted that they had appeared on casual inspection to be a solid sheet of rock. Zouga and Jan Cheroot were suspended near the top of the massive stone wall, forty feet high, so thick and long that it had seemed to be a granite hillock.

It was a monumental work of stonemasonry, to compare with the outer wall of Solomon's temple, a vast fortification which could only be the periphery of a city, a city forgotten and overgrown with trees and creepers, undisturbed over the ages.

‘
Nie wat
!' whispered Jan Cheroot. ‘This is a devil's place – this is the place of Satan himself. Let us go, master,' he pleaded. ‘Let us go far away, and very fast.'

T
he circuit of the walls took Zouga almost an hour, for the growth was thicker along the northern curve of the stone rampart. The wall seemed to be laid out in an almost perfect circle, and without openings. At two or three likely points, Zouga hacked away the growth and searched the foot of the wall, looking for a postern or a gateway. He found none.