by Wilbur Smith
The Askari saw her also. Their rigid, well-spaced line crumpled as all of them ran to head her off. Suddenly the ground between Rosa and the edge of the bush was clear. Now there was a chance – just the smallest chance that she could get the child away. She flung the window open and dropped through it to the earth.
One moment she hesitated and glanced towards the confusion of running men away on her right hand. In that moment she saw one of the Askari catch up with the old woman and lunge forward with his bayonet. Nanny reeled from the force of the blow in her back. Involuntarily her arms were flung wide open, and for a fleeting second Rosa saw the point of the bayonet appear miraculously from the centre of her chest, as it impaled her.
Then Rosa was running towards the wall of bush and scrub fifty yards ahead of her, while Maria howled in her arms. The sound attracted the attention of the Askari. One of them shouted a warning, and then the whole pack was after her in full tongue.
Rosa’s senses were overwrought by her terror, so finely tuned that it seemed the passage of time was lagging. Weighed down by the child, each pace she took dragged on for ever, as though she waded through waist-deep water. The long night-dress around her legs hampered her, and there was rough stone and thorn beneath her bare feet. The wall of bush ahead of her seemed to come no closer, and she ran with the cold hand of fear squeezing her chest and cramping her breathing.
Then into her line of vision from the side came a man, an Askari, a big man bounding towards her with the long loping gallop of a bull baboon, cutting across her line of flight, his open mouth an obscene pink pit in the shiny black of his face.
Rosa screamed and swung away from him. Now she was running parallel to the edge of the bush and behind her she heard the slap of feet upon the earth, closing fast, and the babbling chorus of the pursuit.
A hand snatched at her shoulder, and she twisted away from it, feeling the stuff of her night-gown tear beneath the clutching fingers.
Blind with terror she stumbled a dozen paces back towards the burning homestead. She felt the vast waves of heat from it in her face and through her thin clothing – and then a rifle butt struck her in the small of the back, and a bright burst of agony paralysed her legs. She dropped to her knees, still holding Maria.
They ringed her in, a palisade of human bodies and gloating, blood-crazed faces.
The big one who had felled her with the rifle butt stooped over her and before she recognized his intention, he had snatched Maria from her arms and stepped back again.
He stood laughing, holding the child by her ankles, letting her swing head downwards, so her tiny face was suffused with blood, scarlet in the light of the flames.
‘No, please, no!’ Rosa crawled painfully towards the man. ‘Give her back to me. My baby. Please give her back,’ and she lifted her arms towards him.
The Askari dangled the child tantalizingly in front of her, retreating slowly as she crawled towards him. The others were laughing, hoarse sensual laughter, crowding around her, faces contorted with enjoyment, and polished ebony black with the sweat of excitement, as they jostled each other for a better view of the sport.
Then with a wild yell, the Askari swung Maria high, whirled her twice above his head as he pivoted to face the bungalow – and threw Maria up towards the burning roof.
The tiny body flew with the looseness of a rag doll through the air, her night-dress fluttered as she dropped and struck the roof, rolled awkwardly down the slope of it with her clothing blooming into instant flame, until she reached a weak spot in the burning thatch. It sucked Maria in like a fiery mouth and blew a belch of sparks as it swallowed her. At that instant Rosa heard the voice of her child for the last time. It was a sound she was never to forget.
For a moment the men about her were hushed, and then as though wind blew through trees, they moved a little with a sound that was half sigh, half moan.
Still kneeling, facing the burning building which was now a pyre, Rosa slumped forward and lifted her hands to cover her face as though in prayer.
The Askari who had thrown the child snatched up his rifle from where it lay at his feet and stood over her. He lifted it above his head the way a harpooner holds his steel with the point of the bayonet aimed at the base of Rosa’s neck where her hair had fallen open to expose the pale skin.
In the moment that the Askari paused to take his aim, Herman Fleischer shot him in the back of the head with the Luger.
‘Mad dog!’ the Commissioner shouted at the Askari’s corpse. ‘I told you to take them alive.’
Then, breathing like an asthma case from the exertion of his run to intervene, he turned to Rosa.
‘Fräulein, my apologies,’ he doffed the slouch hat with ponderous courtesy, and spoke in German that Rosa did not understand. ‘We do not make war on women and babies.’
She did not look up at him. She was crying quietly into her cupped hands.
– 39 –
‘Early in the year for a bush fire,’ Flynn muttered. He sat with an enamel mug cupped in his hands and blew steam from the hot coffee. His blanket had slid down to his waist.
Across the camp-fire from him Sebastian was also sitting in a muddle of bedding, and cooling his own pre-dawn mug of coffee. At Flynn’s words he looked up from his labour, and out into the dark south.
False dawn had paled the sky just enough to define the hills below it as an undulating mass that seemed much closer than it was. That way lay Lalapanzi – and Rosa and Maria.
Without real interest Sebastian saw the radiated glow at one point along the spine of the ridge; a fan of pink light no larger than a thumb-nail.
‘Not a very big one,’ he said.
‘No,’ agreed Flynn. ‘Hope she doesn’t spread though,’ and he gulped noisily at his mug.
As Sebastian watched it idly, the glow diminished, shrinking into insignificance at the coming of the sun, and above it the stars paled out also.
‘We’d best get moving. It’s a long day’s march and we’ve wasted enough time on this trip already.’
‘You’re a regular bloody fire-eater when it comes to getting your home comforts.’ Flynn feigned disinterest, yet secretly the thought of returning to his grand-daughter had strong appeal. He hurried the coffee a little and scalded his tongue.
Sebastian was right. They had wasted a lot of time on the return trip from the Mahenge raid.
First, there was a detour to avoid a party of German Askari that one of the native headmen had warned them was at M’topo’s village. They had trekked upstream for three days before finding a safe crossing, and a village willing to hire canoes.
Then there was the brush with the hippo which had cost them almost a week. As was usual practice, the four hired canoes, loaded to within a few inches of freeboard with Flynn, Sebastian, their retinue and loot, had slipped across the Rovuma and were hugging the Portuguese bank as they headed downstream towards the landing opposite M’topo’s village when the hippo had disputed their passage.
She was an old cow hippo who a few hours earlier had given birth to her calf in a tiny island of reeds, separated from the south bank by twenty feet of lily-padded water. When the four canoes entered this channel in line astern with the paddlers chanting happily, she took it as a direct threat to her offspring and she threw a tantrum.
Two tons of hippo in a tantrum has the destructive force of a localized hurricane. Surfacing violently from under the leading canoe, she had thrown Sebastian, two gun-boys, four paddlers, and all their equipment, ten feet in the air. The canoe, rotted with beetle, had snapped in half and sunk immediately.
The mother hippo had then treated the three following canoes with the same consideration, and within the space of a few minutes, the canal was clogged with floating debris, and struggling, panic-stricken men. Fortunately they were no more than ten feet from the bank. Sebastian was first ashore. None of them, however, was very far behind him, and they all took off like the start of a cross-country race over the veld, when the hippo emerged from th
e river and signified that, not satisfied with wrecking the flotilla, she intended chopping a few of them in half with her guillotine jaws.
A hundred yards later she abandoned the pursuit, and trotted back to the water, wiggling her little ears and snorting in triumph. Half a mile farther on the survivors had stopped running.
They camped there that night without food, bedding or weapons, and the following morning, after a heated council of war, Sebastian was elected to return to the river and ascertain whether the hippo was still in control of the channel. He came back at high speed to report that she was.
Three more days they waited for the hippo and her calf to move away. During this time they suffered the miseries of cold nights and hungry days, but the greatest misery was inflicted on Flynn O’Flynn whose case of gin was under eight feet of water – and by the third morning he was threatening delirium tremens again. just before Sebastian set off for his morning reconnaissance of the channel, Flynn informed him agitatedly that there were three blue scorpions sitting on his head. After the initial alarm, Sebastian went through the motions of removing the imaginary scorpions and stamping them to death, and Flynn was satisfied.
Sebastian returned from the river with the news that the hippo and her calf had evacuated the island, and it was now possible to begin salvage operations.
Protesting mildly and talking about crocodiles, Sebastian was stripped naked and coaxed into the water. On his first dive, he retrieved the precious case of gin.
‘Bless you, my boy,’ Flynn murmured fervently as he eased the cork out of a bottle.
By the following morning Sebastian had recovered nearly all their equipment and booty, without being eaten by crocodiles, and they set off for Lalapanzi on foot.
Now they were in their last camp before Lalapanzi, and Sebastian felt his impatience rising. He wanted to get home to Rosa and baby Maria. He should be home by evening.
‘Come on, Flynn. Let’s go.’ He flicked the coffee grounds from his mug, threw aside his blanket, and shouted to Mohammed and the bearers who were huddled around the other fire.
‘Safari! Let us march.’
Nine hours later, with the daylight dying around him, he breasted the last rise and paused at the top.
All that day eagerness had lengthened his stride, and he had left Flynn and the column of heavily laden bearers far behind.
Now he stood alone, and stared without comprehension at the smoke-blackened ruins of Lalapanzi from which a few thin tendrils of smoke still drifted.
‘Rosa!’ Her name was a harsh bellow of fear, and he ran wildly.
‘Rosa!’ he shouted as he crossed the scorched and trampled lawns.
‘Rosa! Rosa! Rosa!’ the echo from the kopje above the homestead shouted back.
‘Rosa!’ He saw something amongst the bushes at the edge of the lawn, and he ran to it. Old Nanny lying dead with the blood dried black on the floral stuff of her night-gown.
‘Rosa!’ He ran back towards the bungalow. The ash swirled in a warm mist around his legs as he crossed the stoep.
‘Rosa!’ His voice rang hollowly through the roofless shell of the house, as he stumbled over the fallen beams that littered the main room. The reek of burned cloth and hair and wood almost choked him, so that his voice was husky as he called again.
‘Rosa!’
He found her in the burnt-out kitchen block and he thought she was dead. She was slumped against the cracked and blackened wall. Her night-gown was torn and scorched, and the snarled skeins of hair, that hid her face, were powdered with white wood ash.
‘My darling. Oh, my darling.’ He knelt beside her, and timidly touched her shoulder. Her flesh was warm and alive beneath his fingers, and he felt relief leap up into his throat, blocking it so he could not speak again. Instead, he brushed the tangle of hair from her face and looked at it.
Beneath the charcoal smears of dirt her skin was pale as grey marble. Her eyes, tight closed, were heavily underscored with blue, and rimmed with crusty red.
He touched her lips with the tips of his fingers, and she opened her eyes, But they looked beyond him; unseeing, dead eyes. They frightened him. He did not want to look into them, and he drew her head towards his shoulder.
There was no resistance in her. She lay against him quietly, and he pressed his face into her hair. Her hair was impregnated with the smell of smoke.
‘Are you hurt?’ he asked her in a whisper, not wanting to hear the answer. But she made no answer, lying inert in his arms.
‘Tell me, Rosa. Speak to me. Where is Maria?’
At the mention of the child’s name, she reacted for the first time. She began to tremble.
‘Where is she?’ more urgency in his voice now.
She rolled her head against his shoulder and looked across the floor of the room. He followed the direction of her gaze.
Near the far wall an area of the floor had been swept clear of debris and ash. Rosa had done it with her bare hands while the ash was still hot. Her fingers were blistered and burned raw in places, and her arms were black to the elbows. Lying in the centre of this cleared space was a small, charred thing.
‘Maria?’ Sebastian whispered, and Rosa shuddered against him.
‘Oh, God,’ he said, and lifted Rosa. Carrying her against his chest, he staggered from the ruins of the bungalow out into the cool, sweet evening air, but in his nostrils lingered the smell of smoke and burned flesh. He wanted to escape from it. He ran blindly along the path and Rosa lay unresisting in his arms.
– 40 –
The following day Flynn buried their dead on the kopje above Lalapanzi. He placed a thick slab of granite over the small grave that stood apart from the others, and when it was done he sent a bearer to the camp to fetch Rosa and Sebastian.
When they came, they found him standing alone by Maria’s grave under the marula trees. His face was puffy and purply red. The thinning grey hair hung limply over his ears and forehead, like the wet feathers of an old rooster. His body looked as though it was melting. It sagged at the shoulders and the belly. Sweat had soaked through his clothing across the shoulders, and at the armpits and crotch. He was sick with drink and sorrow.
Sebastian stood beside Rosa, and the three of them took their silent farewell of the child.
‘There is nothing else to do now,’ Sebastian spoke huskily.
‘Yes,’ said Flynn. He stooped slowly and took a handful of the new earth from the grave. ‘Yes, there is.’ He crumbled the earth between his fingers. ‘We still have to find the man who did this – and kill him.’
Beside Sebastian, Rosa straightened up. She turned to Sebastian, lifted her chin, and spoke for the first time since he had come home.
‘Kill him!’ she repeated softly.
PART TWO
– 41 –
With his hands clasped behind his back, and his chin thrust forward aggressively, Rear-Admiral Sir Percy Howe sucked in his lower lip and nibbled it reflectively. ‘What was our last substantiated sighting on Blücher?’ he asked at last.
‘A month ago, sir. Two days before the outbreak of war. Sighting reported by S.S. Tygerberg. Latitude 0°27”N. Longitude 52°16”E. Headed south-west; estimated speed, eighteen knots.’
‘And a hell of a lot of good that does us,’ Sir Percy interrupted his flag-captain and glared at the vast Admiralty plot of the Indian Ocean. ‘She could be back in Bremer-haven by now.’
‘She could be, sir,’ the flag-captain nodded, and Sir Percy glanced at him and permitted himself a wintry smile.
‘But you don’t believe that, do you, Henry?’
‘No, sir, I don’t. During the last thirty days, eight merchantmen have disappeared between Aden and Lourenço Marques. Nearly a quarter of a million tons of shipping. That’s the Blücher’s work.’
‘Yes, it’s the Blücher, all right,’ agreed the Admiral, and reached across the plot to pick up the black counter labelled ‘Blücher’, that lay on the wide green expanse of the Indian Ocean.
A
respectful silence held the personnel of the plotting room South Atlantic and Indian Oceans while they waited for the great man to reach his decision. It was a long time coming. He stood bouncing the ‘Blücher’ in the palm of his right hand, his grey eyebrows erect like the spines of a hedgehog’s back, as his forehead creased in thought. A full minute they waited.
‘Refresh my memory of her class and commission.’ Like most successful men Sir Percy would not hurry a decision when there was time to think, and the duty lieutenant who had anticipated his request, stepped forward with the German Imperial Navy list open at the correct page.
‘“Blücher. Commissioned August 16, 1905. ‘B’ Class heavy cruiser. Main armament, eight nine-inch guns. Secondary armament, six six-inch guns.”’
The lieutenant finished his reading and waited quietly.
‘Who is her captain?’ Sir Percy asked, and the lieutenant consulted an addendum to the list.
‘“Otto von Kleine (Count). Previously commanded the light cruiser Sturm Vogel.”’
‘Yes,’ said Sir Percy. ‘I’ve heard of him,’ and he replaced the counter on the plot, keeping his hand on it. ‘A dangerous man to have here, south of Suez,’ and he pushed the counter up towards the Red Sea and the entrance to the canal, where the tiny red shipping lanes amalgamated into a thick artery, ‘– or here,’ and he pushed it down towards the Cape of Good Hope, around which were curved the same red threads that joined London to Australia and India. Sir Percy lifted his hand from the black counter and left it sitting menacingly upon the shipping lanes.
‘What force have we deployed against him so far?’ and in answer the flag-captain picked up a wooden pointer and touched in turn the red counters that were scattered about the Indian Ocean.
‘Pegasus and Renounce in the north. Eagle and Plunger sweeping the southern waters, sir.’
‘What further force can we spare, Henry?’
‘Well, sir, Orion and Bloodhound are at Simonstown,’ and he touched the nose of the African continent with the pointer.