by Wilbur Smith
It was a lance in the pride of the Oldsmiths, and Sebastian rose to the defence. By the time they returned to Lalapanzi, the discussion needed about six hot words to reach the stage of single combat.
Rosa heard them coming. Flynn’s bellow carried across the lawns. ‘I’ll not have my grandson called a pewling, milksop name like that!’
‘Francis is the name of kings and warriors and gentlemen!’ cried Sebastian.
‘My aching buttocks, it is!’
Rosa came out on to the wide veranda and stood there with her arms folded over the beautiful bulge that housed the cause of the controversy.
They saw her and started an undignified race across the lawns, each trying to reach her first to enlist her support for their respective causes.
She listened to the pleadings, a small and secret smile upon her lips, and then said with finality, ‘Her name will be Maria Rosa Oldsmith.’
Some time later Flynn and Sebastian were together on the veranda.
Ten days before the last rains of the season had come roaring in from the Indian Ocean and broken upon the unyielding shield of the continent. Now the land was drying out; the rivers regaining their sanity and returning, chastened, to the confines of their banks. New grass lifted from the red earth to welcome the return of the sun. For this brief period the whole land was alive and green; even the gnarled and crabbed thorn trees wore a pale fuzz of tender leaves. Behind each pair of guinea-fowl that clinked and scratched on the bottom lawns of Lalapanzi, there paraded a file of dappled chicks. Early that morning a herd of eland had moved along the skyline across the valley, and beside each cow had trotted a calf. Everywhere was new life, or the expectation of new life.
‘Now, stop worrying!’ said Flynn, as his impatient pacing brought him level with Sebastian’s chair.
‘I’m not worrying,’ Sebastian said mildly. ‘Everything will be all right.’
‘How do you know that?’ challenged Flynn.
‘Well …’
‘You know the child could be stillborn, or something.’ Flynn shook his finger in Sebastian’s face. ‘It could have six fingers on each hand – how about that? I heard about one that was born with …’
While Flynn related a long list of horrors, Sebastian’s expression of proud and eager anticipation crumbled slowly. He rose from his chair and fell into step beside Flynn. ‘Have you got any gin left?’ he asked hoarsely, glancing at the shuttered windows of Rosa’s bedroom. Flynn produced the bottle from the inside pocket of his jacket.
An hour later, Sebastian was hunched forward in his chair, clutching a half-full tumbler of gin with both hands. He stared into it miserably. ‘I don’t know what I’d do if it was born with …’ He could not go on. He shuddered and lifted the tumbler to his lips. At that instant a long, petulant wail issued from the closed bedroom. Sebastian leapt as though he had been bayoneted from behind, and spilled the gin down his shirt. His next leap was in the direction of the bedroom, a direction Flynn had also chosen. They collided heavily and then set off together at a gallop along the veranda. They reached the locked door and hammered upon it for admission. But Nanny, who had evicted them in the first instance, still adamantly refused to lift the locking bar or to give them any information as to the progress of the birthing. Her decision was endorsed by Rosa.
‘Don’t you dare let them in until everything is ready,’ she whispered huskily, and roused herself from the stupor of exhaustion, to help Nanny with washing and wrapping the infant.
When at last everything was ready, she lay propped on the pillows with her child held against her chest, and nodded to Nanny. ‘Open the door,’ she said.
The delay had confirmed Flynn’s worst suspicions. The door flew open, and he and Sebastian fell into the room, wild with anxiety.
‘Oh, thank God, Rosa. You’re still alive!’ Sebastian reached the bed and fell on his knees beside it.
‘You check his feet,’ instructed Flynn. ‘I’ll do his hands and head,’ and before Rosa could prevent him, he had lifted the infant out of her arms.
‘His fingers are all right. Two arms, one head,’ Flynn muttered above Rosa’s protests and the infant’s muffled squawls of indignation.
‘This end is fine. Just fine!’ Sebastian spoke in rising relief and delight. ‘He’s beautiful, Flynn!’ And he lifted the shawl that swaddled the child’s body. His expression cracked and his voice choked. ‘Oh, my God!’
‘What’s wrong?’ Flynn asked sharply.
‘You were right, Flynn. He’s deformed.’
‘What? Where?’
‘There!’ Sebastian pointed. ‘He hasn’t got a what-ye-ma-call-it,’ and they both stared in horror.
It was many long seconds before they realized simultaneously that the tiny cleft was no deformity but very much as nature had intended it.
‘It’s a girl!’ said Flynn in dismay.
‘A girl!’ echoed Sebastian, and quickly pulled down the shawl to preserve his daughter’s modesty.
‘It’s a girl,’ Rosa smiled, wan and happy.
‘It’s a girl,’ cackled Nanny in triumph.
Maria Rosa Oldsmith had arrived without fuss and with the minimum of inconvenience to her mother, so that Rosa was on her feet again within twenty-four hours. All her other activities were conducted with the same consideration and dispatch. She cried once every four hours; a single angry howl which was cut off the instant the breast was thrust into her mouth. Her bowel movements were equally regular and of the correct volume and consistency, and the rest of her days and nights were devoted almost entirely to sleeping.
She was beautiful; without the parboiled, purple look of most new-borns; without the squashed-in pug features or the vague, squinty eyes.
From the curly cap of silk hair to the tips of her pink toes, she was perfection.
It took Flynn two days to recover from the disappointment of having been cheated out of a grandson. He sulked in the arsenal or sat solitary at the end of the veranda. On the second evening Rosa pitched her voice just high enough to carry the length of the veranda.
‘Don’t you think Maria looks just like Daddy – the same mouth and nose? Look at her eyes.’
Sebastian opened his mouth to deny the resemblance emphatically but closed it again, as Rosa kicked him painfully on the ankle.
‘She is the image of him. There’s no doubting who her grandfather is.’
‘Well, I suppose … If you look closely,’ Sebastian agreed unhappily.
At the end of the veranda, Flynn sat with his head cocked in an attitude of attention. Half an hour later Flynn had sidled up to the cradle and was studying the contents thoughtfully. By the following evening he had moved his chair alongside and was leading the discussion with such remarks as, ‘There is quite a strong family resemblance. Look at those eyes – no doubt who her Granddaddy is!’
He interspersed his observations with warnings and instructions, ‘Don’t get so close, Bassie. You’re breathing germs all over her.’ ‘Rosa, this child needs another blanket. When did she have her last feed?’
It was not long before he started bringing pressure to bear on Sebastian.
‘You’ve got responsibilities now. Have you thought about that?’
‘How do you mean, Flynn?’
‘Just answer me this. What have you got in this world?’
‘Rosa and Maria,’ Sebastian answered promptly.
‘Fine. That’s just great! And how are you going to feed them and clothe them and … and look after them?’
Sebastian expressed himself well satisfied with the existing arrangements.
‘I bet you are! It isn’t costing you a thing. But I reckon it’s about time you got up off your burn and did something.’
‘Like what?’
‘Like going and shooting some ivory.’
Three days later, armed and equipped for a full-scale poaching expedition, Sebastian led a column of gun-boys and bearers down the valley towards the Rovuma river.
Fourteen hour
s later, in the dusk of evening, he led them back.
‘What in the name of all that’s holy, are you doing back here?’ Flynn demanded.
‘I had this premonition.’ Sebastian was sheepish.
‘What premonition?’
‘That I should come back,’ muttered Sebastian.
He left again two days later. This time he actually crossed the Rovuma before the premonition overpowered him once more, and he came-back to Rosa and Maria.
‘Well,’ Flynn sighed with resignation. ‘I reckon I’ll just have to go along with you and make sure you do it.’ He shook his head. ‘You’ve been a big disappointment to me, Bassie.’ The biggest disappointment being the fact that he had hoped to have his granddaughter to himself for a few weeks.
‘Mohammed,’ he bellowed. ‘Get my gear packed.’
– 33 –
Flynn sent his scouts across the river and when they reported back that the far bank was clear of German patrols, Flynn made the crossing.
This expedition was a far cry from Sebastian’s amiable and aimless wandering in German territory. Flynn was a professional. They crossed in the night. They crossed in strictest silence and landed two miles downstream from M’topo’s village. There was no lingering on the beach, but an urgent night march that began immediately and went on in grim silence until an hour before dawn; a march that took them fifteen miles inland from the river, and ended in a grove of elephant thorn, carefully chosen for the kopjes and ravines around it that afforded multiple avenues of escape in each direction.
Sebastian was impressed by the elaborate precautions that Flynn took before going into camp; the jinking and counter-marching, the careful sweeping of their spoor with brushes of dry grass, and the placing of sentries on the kopje above the camp.
During the ten days they waited there, not a single branch was broken from a tree, not a single axe-stroke swung to leave a tell-tale white blaze on the dark bush. The tiny night fire fed with dry trash and dead wood was carefully screened, and before dawn was smothered with sand so that not a wisp of smoke was left to mark them in the day.
Voices were never raised above conversational tones, and even the clatter of a bucket brought such a swift and ferocious reprimand from Flynn, that on all of them was a nervous awareness, an expectancy of danger, a tuning of the minds and bodies to action.
On the eighth night the scouts that Flynn had thrown out began drifting back to the camp. They came in with all the stealth and secrecy of night animals and huddled over the fire to tell what they had seen.
‘ … Last night three old bulls drank at the water-hole of the sick hyena. They carried teeth so, and so, and so …’ showing the arm to measure the length of ivory, ‘ … apart from them, ten cows left their feet in the mud, six of them with young calves. Yesterday, at the place where the hill of Inhosana breaks and turns its arms, I saw where another herd had crossed, moving towards the dawn; five young bulls, twenty-three cows and …’
The reports were jumbled, unintelligible to Sebastian who did not carry a map of the land in his head. But Flynn, sitting beside the fire listening, fitted the fragments together and built them into an exact picture of how the game was moving. He saw that the big bulls were still separated from the breeding herds – that they lingered on the high ground while the cows had started moving back towards the swamps from which the floods had driven them, anxious to take their young away from the dangers that the savannah forests would offer once the dry season set in.
He noted the estimates of thickness and length of tusk. Immature ivory was hardly worth carrying home, good only for carving into billiard balls and piano keys. The market was glutted with it.
But on the other hand, a prime tusk, over one hundred pounds in weight, seven foot long and twice the thickness of a fat woman’s thigh, would fetch fifty shillings a pound avoirdupois.
An animal carrying such a tusk in each side of his face was worth four or five hundred pounds in good, gold sovereigns.
One by one Flynn discarded the possible areas in which he would hunt. This year there were no elephant in the M’bahora hills. There was good reason for this; thirty piles of great sun-bleached bones lay scattered along the ridge, marking the path that Flynn’s rifles had followed two years before. The memory of gun-fire was too fresh and the herds shunned that place.
There were no elephant on the Tabora escarpment. A blight had struck the groves of mapundu trees, and withered the fruit before it could ripen. Dearly the elephant loved mapundu berries and they had gone elsewhere to find them.
They had gone up to the Sania Heights, to Kilombera, and to the Salito hills.
Salito. was an easy day’s march from the German boma at Mahenge. Flynn struck it from his mental list.
As each of the scouts finished his report, Flynn asked the question which would influence his final decision.
‘What of Plough the Earth?’
And they said, ‘We saw nothing. We heard nothing.’
The last scout came in two days after the others. He looked sheepish and more than a little guilty.
‘Where the hell have you been?’ Flynn demanded, and the gun-boy had his excuse ready.
‘Knowing that the great Lord Fini would ask of certain matters, I turned aside in my journey to the village of Yetu, who is my uncle. My uncle is a fundi. No wild thing walks, no lion kills, no elephant breaks a branch from a tree but my uncle knows of it. Thus I went to ask him of these things.’
‘Thy uncle is a famous fundi, he is also a famous breeder of daughters,’ Flynn remarked drily. ‘He breeds daughters the way the moon breeds stars.’
‘Indeed, my uncle Yetu is a man of fame.’ Hurriedly the scout went on to turn Flynn aside from this line of discussion. ‘My uncle sends his greetings to the Lord Fini and bids me speak thus: “This season there are many fine elephants on the Sania Heights. They walk by twos and threes. With my own eyes I have seen twelve which show ivory as long as the shaft of a throwing spear, and I have seen signs of as many more.” My uncle bids me speak further. “There is one among them of which the Lord Fini knows for he has asked of him many times. This one is a bull among great bulls. One who moves in such majesty that men have named him Plough the Earth.”’
‘You do not bring a story from the honey-bird to cool my anger against you?’ Flynn demanded harshly. ‘Did you dream of Plough the Earth while you were ploughing the bellies of your uncle’s many daughters?’ His eagerness was soured by scepticism. Too many times he had followed wild stories in his pursuit of the great bull. He leaned forward across the fire to watch the gun-bearer’s eyes as he replied, ‘It is true, lord.’ Flynn watched him carefully but found no hint of guile in his face. Flynn grunted, rocked back on his hams, and lowered his gaze to the small flames of the camp-fire.
For his first ten years in Africa, Flynn had heard the legend of the elephant whose tusks were of such length that their points touched the ground and left a double furrow along his spoor. He had smiled at this story as he had at the story of the rhinoceros who fifty years before had killed an Arab slaver, and now wore around his horn a massive gold bangle studded with precious stones. They said the bangle had lodged there as he gored the Arab. There were a thousand other romantic tales come out of Africa; from Solomon’s treasure to the legend of the elephants’ graveyard, and Flynn believed none of them.
Then he saw a myth come alive. One evening, camped near the Zambezi in Portuguese territory, he had taken a bird-gun and walked along the bank hoping for a brace of sand-grouse. Two miles from the camp he had seen a flight of birds coming in to the water, flying fast as racing pigeons, whistling in on backswept wings, and he had ducked into a thick bank of reeds and watched them come.
As they banked steeply overhead, dropping towards the sand-banks of the river, Flynn jumped to his feet and fired left and right, folding the lead bird and the second, so they crumpled in mid-air and tumbled, leaving a pale flurry of feathers to mark their fall.
But Flynn never saw the bir
ds hit the ground. For, while the double blast of the shotgun still echoed along the river, the reed-bed below where he stood swayed and crashed and burst open, then an elephant came out into the open.
It was a bull elephant that stood fourteen feet high at the shoulder. An elephant so old that his ears were shredded to half their original size. The hide that covered his body hung in folds and deep wrinkles, baggy at the knees and the throat. The tuft of his tail long ago worn bald. The rheumy tears of great age staining his seared and dusty cheeks.
He came out of the reed-bed in a shambling, humpbacked run, and his head was tilted at an awkward, unnatural angle.
Flynn could hardly credit his vision when he saw the reason why the old bull cocked his head back in that fashion. From each side of the head extended two identical shafts of ivory, perfectly matched, straight as the columns of a Greek temple, with not an inch of taper from lip to bluntly rounded tip. They were stained to the colour of tobacco juice, fourteen long feet of ivory that would have touched the ground, if the elephant had carried his head relaxed.
As Flynn stood frozen in disbelief, the bull passed him by a mere fifty yards and lumbered on into the forest.
It took Flynn thirty minutes to get back to camp and exchange the bird-gun for the double-barrelled Gibbs, snatch up a water bottle, shout for his gun-boys, and return to the river.
He put Mohammed to the spoor. At first there were only the round pad marks in the dusty earth, smooth pad marks the size of a dustbin lid; the graining on the old bull’s hooves had long been worn away. Then after five miles of flight there were other marks to follow. On each side of the spoor a double line scuffed through dead leaves and grass and soft earth where the tips of the tusks touched, and Flynn learned why the old bull was called Plough the Earth.
They lost the spoor on the third day in the rain, but a dozen times in the years since then, Flynn had followed and lost those double furrows, and once, through his binoculars, he had seen the old bull again, standing dozing beneath a grove of marula trees at a distance of three miles, his eroded old head propped up by the mythical tusks. When Flynn reached the spot on which he had seen the bull, it was deserted.