by Wilbur Smith
Juba, the little Dove how she had changed since those far-off days. Now she was the senior wife of Gandang, one of the great indunas "of the Matabele nation, brother of King Lobengula himself, and she had borne him twelve sons, the eldest of whom was Bazo, the Axe, himself an and una Four of her younger sons had died in front of the Maxim machine guns at the Shangani river and the Bembesi crossing.
Nevertheless, as soon as that brief cruel little war had ended, Juba had returned to Khami Mission and to Robyn.
Now she smiled back at Robyn. Her face was a glossy full moon, the silky black skin stretched tightly over the layers of fat. Her dark eyes sparkled with a lively intelligence, and her teeth were a perfect and unblemished white. On her vast lap, within the circle of her arms, each as thick as a man's tigh, she held Robyn St. John's only son.
Robert was not quite two years old, a thin child, without his father's rugged bone structure but with the same strange yellow-flecked eyes. His skin was sallow from regular doses of anti-malarial quinine.
Like many infants born of a mother on the verge of menopause, there was a quaint old-fashioned solemnity about him, like a little old gnome who had already lived a hundred years. He watched his mother's face as though he had understood each word she uttered.
Robyn closed her eyes again, and the twins who had perked up at the prospect of a final amen glanced at each other, and slumped with resignation.
"Dear Lord, Thou know est of the great experiment upon which Thy humble servant will embark before this day ends, and we are certain of Your understanding and protection during the dangerous days ahead."
Juba's understanding of the English language was just sufficient to follow this injunction, and the smile faded from her face. Even the twins looked up again, both of them so troubled and unhappy that when Robyn sounded the long awaited "Amen', neither of them reached for the platters or jugs.
"Victoria, Elizabeth, you may begin," Robyn had to prompt them, and they chewed dismally for a while.
"You never told us it was to be today," Vicky spoke up at last.
"The young girl from Zama's kraal is a perfect subject, she started her chills an hour ago, I expect her fever to peak before sundown." "Please, Mama." Elizabeth jumped up from her seat and knelt beside Robyn with both arms around her waist, her expression stricken.
"Please don't do it." "Now don't be a silly girl, Elizabeth," Robyn told her firmly. "Return to your seat and eat your food." "Lizzie is right." Vicky had tears in her green eyes. "We don't want you to do this. It's so dangerous, so horrible." Robyn's expression softened a little, and she placed one narrow but strong brown hand on Elizabeth's head. "Sometimes we have to do things that frighten us. It's God's test of our strength and faith." Robyn stroked the lustrous dark hair back from Elizabeth's forehead. "Your grandfather, Fuller Ballantyne-" "Grandfather was touched," Vicky cut in quickly. "He was crazy mad."
Robyn shook her head. "Fuller Ballantyne was a great man of God, there were no limits to his vision and courage. It is only the mean little people who call- such men mad. They doubted him, as they now doubt me, but as he did, I shall prove the truth," she said firmly.
The previous year Robyn had, in her professional capacity as Medical Superintendent of Khami Mission, submitted a paper to the British Medical Association in which she set out the conclusions of twenty years" study of tropical malarial fever.
At the beginning of the paper she had scrupulously acknowledged the work of Charles Louis Alphonse Laveran who was the first to isolate the malarial parasite under microscopic examination, but then Robyn had gone on to postulate that the periodic paroxysms of chill and fever that characterized the disease were coincident with the segmentation of these parasites in the patient's bloodstream.
The august members of the British Medical Association were well aware of Robyn's reputation as a political trouble stirrer a radical who flew in the face of their conservative convictions. They had never forgiven nor forgotten that she had impersonated a man to attend medical school and had desecrated their exclusive masculine preserve by obtaining her medical qualification under false colours. They recalled with.pain the furore and scandal that she had conjured up when the governors of St. Matthew's Hospital, London, where she had received her training, had attempted, quite reasonably, to revoke her doctorate.
Sourly they had looked on as she published a series of highly successful books, culminating in the infamous Trooper Hackett of Matabeleland, a vicious attack on the Company in which a great deal of the association's funds were invested.
Naturally the honourable members of such an august body were above such mundane emotions as envy and malice, so none of them had grudged her the princely royalties from her publications, and when some of Robyn's outrageous theories on tropical diseases had finally been proven accurate, and after they had been brought under pressure by Oliver Wicks who was Robyn's champion and editor of the Standard, they had magnanimously retracted their previous refutations. Nevertheless, when Dr. Robyn St. John, previously Codrington, nee Ballantyne, finally succeeded in hoisting and hanging herself on her own audacity and presumption, the members of the British Medical Association would not be numbered amongst the company of her mourners.
Thus, they read the first part of Robyn's latest paper on malarial fever with mild alarm. Her theory on the coincidence of parasite segmentation and patient temperature-change could only add lustre to her reputation. Then, with mounting joy, they came to the second part, and realized that once more she had placed herself and her reputation in jeopardy. Since Hippocrates had first described the disease, in the fifth century Bc, it had been an uncontested fact that malaria, as its name applied, was transmitted by the foul airs of swampy ground and poisonous nights. Robyn St. John postulated that this was fallacy, and that it was transmitted from a sufferer to a healthy victim by the physical transfer of blood. Then, incredibly, her paper went on to suggest that the carrier agents were the flying mosquitoes that were usually associated with the swamps and marshy ground where the disease proliferated. As proof, Robyn cited her discovery, by microscopic examination, of the malarial parasite in the stomach contents of the insects.
Offered such an opportunity, her peers in the British Medical Association had been unable to resist the temptation to embark on an orgy of derision. "Doctor St. John should not allow her penchant for lurid fiction to intrude upon the sacred grounds of medical research," wrote one of her more charitable critics. "There is not the remotest shred of evidence that any disease can be transferred in the blood, and to look to the agency of flying insects to affect this mischief is not far removed from belief in vampires and werewolves." "They scoffed at your grandfather also." Robyn's chin was up now as she addressed her family, and in this mood the strength and determination of her features were daunting. "When he refuted their belief that yellow jack was an infectious or a contagious disease, they challenged him to provide proof." The twins had heard this piece of family history a dozen times before, so they both paled in anticipatory nausea.
"He went into that fever hospital where all those eminent surgeons were gathered, and he collected a crystal glass of the yellow vomit from one of the patients who was dying of the disease, and he toasted his fellow surgeons with the glass and then he quaffed it down in front of them all." Vicky covered her own mouth, and Elizabeth gagged softly and turned icy pale.
"Your grandfather was a courageous man, and I am his daughter," Robyn said simply. "Now eat up your lunch. I expect you both to assist me this afternoon." Behind the church stood the new ward that Robyn had built since the death of her first husband in the BMatabele war. It was an open-sided go down with low waist-high walls. The thatched roof was supported on upright poles of mopani. In hot weather the breeze could blow through the structure unhindered, but in the rains or when it turned cold, then woven grass mats could be unrolled to close in the walls.
The sleeping-mats were laid out in rows upon the clay floor, no attempt being made to separate families, so that heal
thy spouses and offspring were camped with the sick and suffering. Robyn had found it better to turn the ward into a bustling community rather than have her patients pine to death. However, the arrangement was so congenial and the food so good, that it had been difficult to persuade patients to leave after their cure had been effected, until Robyn had hit upon the ruse of sending all convalescents, and their families, to work in the fields or at building the new wards. This had dramatically reduced the clinic's population to manageable proportions.
Robyn's laboratory stood between the church and the ward. It was a small rondavel with adobe walls, and a single window. Shelves and a workbench ran around the entire curved inside wall. In pride of place stood Robyn's new microscope, purchased with the royalties of Trooper Hackett, and beside it her working journal, a thick leather-bound volume in which she was now noting her preliminary observations.
"Subject. Caucasian female at present in good health. she wrote in her firm neat hand, but she looked up irritably with pen poised at Juba's tragic tone and mournful expression.
"You swore on oath to the great King Lobengula that you would care for his people after he was gone. How can you" honour that promise if you are dead, Nomusa?" Juba asked in Sindebele, using Robyn's Matabele praise name "Nomusa Girl Child of Mercy".
"I am not going to die, Juba," Robyn snapped irritably. "And for the love of all things holy, take that look off your face." "It is never wise to provoke the dark spirits, Nomusa." "Juba is right, Mama," Vicky supported her. "You have deliberately stopped taking quinine, not a single tablet in six weeks, and your own observations have shown the danger of blackwater fever is increased-" "Enough!" Robyn slapped the table with the flat of her hand. "I will listen to no more." "All right," Elizabeth agreed. "We won't try and stop you again, but if you become dangerously ill, should we ride into Bulawayo to fetch General St. John?" Robyn threw her pen onto the open page so the ink splattered and she leaped to her feet.
"You will do no such thing, do you hear me, girl? You will not go near that man." "Mama, he is your husband," Vicky pointed out reasonably.
"And he is Bobby's father," Elizabeth said quickly.
"And he loves you," Vicky gabbled it out before Robyn could stop her.
Robyn was white-faced and shaking with anger and some other emotion that prevented her speaking for a moment, and Elizabeth took advantage of her uncharacteristic silence. "He is such a strong-2
"Elizabeth!" Robyn found her voice, and it rang like steel from the scabbard. "You know I have forbidden discussion of that man." She sat back at the desk, picked up the pen and for a long minute the scratching of her nib was the only sound in the room, but when she spoke again, Robyn's voice was level and businesslike. "While I am incapacitated, Elizabeth will write up the journal she has the better handwriting. I want hourly entries, no matter how grave the situation." "Very well, Mama." "Vicky, you will administer treatment, but not before the cycle has been established beyond any chance of refutation. "I have prepared a written list of instructions for you to follow, should I become insensible." "Very well, Mama." "And me, Nomusa?"Juba asked softly. "What must I do?" Robyn's expression softened then, and she laid her hand on the other woman's forearm.
"Juba, you must understand that I am not reneguing on my promise to take care of your people. What I will accomplish with this work is a final understanding of a disease that has ravaged the Matabele and all people of Africa since the beginning of time. Trust me, dear friend, this is a long step towards freeing your people and mine of this terrible scourge." "I wish there was another way, Nomusa." "There is not." Robyn shook her head. "You asked what you should do to help, will you stay with me, Juba, to give me comfort?" "You know I will," Juba whispered, and hugged Robyn to her. Robyn seemed slim and girlish in that vast embrace, and Juba's sobs shook them both.
The black girl lay on her sleeping-mat against the low wall of the ward. She was of marriageable age, for when she cried out in delirium and threw aside the fur kaross, her naked body was fully matured, with a wide fertile spread of hips and hard-thrusting nipples to her breasts, but the heat of fever was burning her up. Her skin looked as brittle as parchment, her lips were grey and cracked, and her eyes glittered with the unnatural brilliance of the fever that was rushing down upon her.
Robyn pressed her hand into the girl's armpit, and exclaimed, "She is like a furnace, the poor child is at the climax," and she pulled her hand away and covered her with the thick soft kaross. "I think this is the moment. Juba, take her shoulders. Vicky, hold her arm, and you, Elizabeth, bring the bowl." The girl's bare arm protruded from under the kaross, and Vicky held her at the elbow while Robyn slipped a tourniquet of whiplash leather over her forearm and twisted it up until the blood vessels in the Matabele girl's wrist swelled" up, purple black and hard as unripe grapes.
"Come on, child," Robyn snapped at Elizabeth, and she prof erred the white enamel basin and drew back the cloth that covered it. Her hand was trembling.
Robyn picked up the syringe. The barrel of brass had a narrow glass inset running down its length. Robyn detached the hollow needle from the nipple at the end, and at the same time with the thumb of her free hand she pumped up the veins in the girl's wrist with a stroking motion, and then pierced the skin with an angled stab of the thick needle. She found the vein almost immediately, and a thin jet of dark red venous blood shot from the open end of the needle and pattered onto the clay floor. Robyn fitted the syringe nipple into the needle, and slowly withdrew the plunger, watching intently as the fever-hot blood flowed into the brass barrel and showed through the glass inset.
"I am taking two cubic centimetres," she murmured, as the line of moving red reached the graduation stamped in the brass, and she jerked the needle from the girl's skin and staunched the blood that followed it with the pressure of her thumb, dropped the syringe back into the bowl, and released the loop of the tourniquet.
"Juba," she said, "give her the quinine now and stay with her until she starts to sweat." Robyn rose with a swirl of skim, and the twins had to run to keep up with her as she crossed to her laboratory.
As soon as they were in the circular room, Robyn slammed the door. "We must be quick," she said, unbuttoning the cuff of her leg-of mutton sleeve, and rolling it high. "We must not allow any organisms in the blood to deteriorate." And she offered her arm to Vicky who looped the tourniquet around it and began twisting it up tightly.
"Make a-note of the time" Robyn ordered.
"Seventeen minutes past six," said Elizabeth, standing beside her and holding the enamel basin, while she stared with a controlled horror at the blue veins under the pale skin of her mother's arm.
"We will use the basilic vein," Robyn said in a matter-of fact tone, and took a fresh needle from the case on the desk. Robyn bit her lip at the prick, but went on probing gently down towards her own swollen vein until suddenly there was an eruption of blood from the open end of the needle, and Robyn grunted with satisfaction and reached for the charged syringe.
"Oh Mama!"cried Vicky, unable to restrain herself longer. "Do be quiet, Victoria." Robyn fitted the syringe into the needle, and without any dramatic pause or portentous words, expelled the still hot blood from the fever struck Matabele girl into her own vein.
She withdrew the needle, and rolled down her sleeve in businesslike fashion.
"All right," she said. "If I am right and I am we can expect the first paroxysm in forty-eight hours." The full-sized billiard table was the only one in Africa north of the Kimberley Club, and south of Shepheard's Hotel in Cairo. It had been transported in sections three hundred miles from the railhead, and Ralph Ballantyne's bill for cartage had been 1112. pounds However, the proprietor of the Grand Hotel had recouped his costs a dozen' times over since he had set up the massive slate top on its squat teak legs in the centre of his saloon bar.
The table was a'source of pride to every citizen of Bulawayo.
Somehow it seemed to symbolize the transition from barbarism to civilization, that
subjects of Queen Victoria should be striking the ivory balls across the green baize on the same spot where a few short years previously a pagan black king had conducted his grisly "smelling-out" ceremonies and gruesome executions.
The crowd of spectators in the bar room, that lined all the walls and even stood on the long bar counter for a better view of the game, were nearly all men of substance, for they had won their grants and gold claims by riding into this land in Doctor Jim's conquering column.