by Wilbur Smith
‘Where is it?’ she asked, and with a single movement he had unclinched and lowered the light duck trousers that were all he wore on his lower body.
‘Where?’ she asked, and realized that her voice croaked, and she could not go on with the question, for suddenly it dawned upon her that she had been the victim of a carefully planned ruse, and she was in a potentially dangerous position.
‘Is that where it hurts?’ she found her voice was still a husky whisper.
‘Yes,’ his voice was a whisper also, and he made a slow stroking movement. ‘You can fix, maybe.’ He took a step towards her.
‘I can fix, certainly,’ she said softly, and her hand dropped on to the array of surgical instruments. She actually experienced a twinge of real regret, for it was a superior example of nature’s art, and afterwards she was relieved that she had selected a needle probe – and not one of the razorlike scalpels that she had reached for.
The instant before she stabbed, he realized what was about to happen and an expression of utter terror blanched his swarthy, handsome face. He tried frantically to return it to whence it had come, but fear had slowed his hand.
He screamed like a teenage girl as the probe plunged into him, and kept on screaming as he spun around on the same spot as though one foot had been nailed to the ground. Now he was using both hands to hold himself, and once again, with cool professional interest, Robyn noticed the quite miraculous change that had taken place.
She advanced the probe once more into the ready position, and Camacho could no longer stand his ground. He snatched up his trousers, and with a last terrified howl, launched himself head-first into the tent pole. The collision checked him only a moment, and then he was gone, and Robyn found herself trembling violently and yet she was strangely elated. It had been an unusual and instructive experience. However, she would have to use her own personal code when describing it in her journal.
From that evening onwards the Portuguese kept well away from Robyn, and she was relieved not to have those hot dark eyes caressing her wherever she turned. She thought of telling Zouga of the incident, but decided that the embarrassment to both of them and the difficulty of finding the correct words was not worth it. Then there would be the extreme reaction which Zouga would almost certainly have, or that she expected he would have. She had learned never to expect the obvious reaction from her brother, behind the cool and reserved exterior she suspected there existed mysterious passions and dark emotions. After all, they were full-blooded brother and sister, and if she was so afflicted, why should he not be also?
On the other hand, she suspected that, like a cornered wild animal, the Portuguese could be a grave danger even to an experienced soldier and man of action like Zouga. She had a horror of forcing her brother into a position which might lead, if not to his death, then at least to serious injury. Besides which, she had effectively taken care of the man herself. He would be no further trouble, she decided comfortably, and she dismissed Camacho from her mind, and concentrated instead on the pleasure of the last few leisurely days of the voyage upstream.
The river had narrowed, and the flow was swifter,so that the rate of the convoy’s advance slowed even further. The banks provided an ever-changing panorama. Sitting under the awning, with Zouga sketching or writing beside her, she was able to call his attention to the new birds and trees and animals and to have the benefit of his knowledge, gathered to be sure mostly from books, but still wide-reaching and interesting.
The hills of the escarpment rose in a series of cockscombs, so two-dimensional that they seemed to be cut out from thin sheets of some opaque material that allowed the colours of the sunrise to glow through with a weird luminosity. As the sun rose higher, the colours washed out to ethereal eggshell blues, and finally faded altogether in the heat haze of midday, to reappear in the late afternoon in a new suit of totally different colours – pale pinks and ash of roses, ripe plum and delicate apricot.
The hills formed a backdrop to the forests that now ran in a narrow belt along the river banks. Tall galleries of trees, with spreading upper branches in which the troops of vervet monkeys frolicked. The trunks of these trees were daubed with multi-coloured lichens, sulphurous yellows, burnt oranges and the blues and greens of a summer sea. The tangled ropes of lianas, which as a child Robyn had called ‘monkey ropes’, dangled down from the upper branches to touch the surface of the river or cascade into the dense dark greens of the undergrowth.
Beyond this narrow strip of vegetation, there were occasional glimpses of a different forest on the higher, drier ground, and Robyn saw again with a sharp nostalgic pang the ugly and bloated baobab tree with its scrubby bare little branches topping the huge swollen stem. The African legends that her mother had repeated to her so often explained how the Nkulu-kulu, the great great one, had planted the baobab upside down, with its roots in the air.
Nearly every baobab had a nest of one of the big birds of prey in its bare branches, each a shaggy mass of dried twigs and small branches looking like a small, air-borne haystack. Often the birds were at the nest site, sitting on a lookout branch, with that typical raptorial stillness, or soaring above in wide circles, with only an occasional lazy flap of the spread wings, and the stiff tip-feathers feeling the air currents like the fingers of a concert pianist upon the ivory keys.
There was very little game along this part of the river, and the rare antelope rushed back into cover at the first distant approach – a pale blur of movement, with a mere fleeting glimpse of the tall corkscrew horns of a greater kudu, or the flirt of the white, powder-puff underside of a reedbuck’s tail.
The game close to the river had been heavily hunted, if not by the Portuguese themselves then by their armed servants, for nearly two hundred years.
When Zouga asked Camacho, ‘Do you ever find elephant on this part of the river?’ the Portuguese had flashed his smile and declared, ‘If I find heem, I keel heem.’
A sentiment that was probably shared by nearly every traveller along this busy waterway, and which accounted for the timidity and scarcity of game in the area.
Camacho was reduced to firing at the roosting fish eagles on their fishing perches overhanging the water. These handsome birds had the same snowy white head, breast and shoulders of the famous American bald eagle, and a body of lovely dark russet and glistening black. When a shout of Camacho’s laughter signalled a hit, a bird would tumble untidily over its disproportionately large wings as it fell into the green water, reduced from imperial dignity to awkward and ungainly death by the strike of the lead bullet.
Within a few days Camacho had recovered from the peculiar, bow-legged and deliberate gait, with which he favoured the injury that Robyn had inflicted on him, and his laughter regained its ringing timbre. But there were other injuries that did not heal so readily, those to his pride and his masculinity. His lust had been changed on the instant to burning hatred, and the more he brooded upon it the more corrosive it became and the deeper his craving for vengeance.
However, his personal considerations would have to wait. There was still much important work for him to do. His uncle, the Governor of Quelimane, had placed great trust in him by assigning him to this task – and his uncle would be unforgiving of any failure. The family fortune was involved, and to a lesser extent the family honour, although this last was a commodity that through constant attrition had lost much of its lustre. However, the family fortunes had suffered considerably since Portugal had been forced to heed the Brussels Treaty. What was left to the family had to be protected. Gold before honour, and honour only when it does not affect the profits – this might have been the family motto.
His uncle had been perceptive, as always, in recognizing in this English expedition a further threat to their interests. It was, after all, headed by the son of a notorious troublemaker who could be expected to aggravate the enormous damage done by the father. Furthermore, nobody could be sure of the real objects of the expedition.
Major Ballantyne’s as
sertion that it was an expedition to find his missing father was, of course, utterly absurd. That explanation was much too simple and direct, and the English were never simple or direct. This elaborate expedition must have cost many thousands of English pounds, a huge sum of money, far beyond the means of a junior army officer, or the family of a missionary whose futile effort to navigate the Zambezi had ended in disgrace and ridicule, a sick old man who must have perished years ago in the uncharted wilderness.
No, there was another motive for all this activity – and the Governor wanted to know what it was.
It was, of course, possible that this was a clandestine reconnaissance by an officer of the British army ordered by his overbearing government. Who knew what outrageous designs they had upon the sovereign territory of the glorious Portuguese empire? The avarice of this impudent race of shopkeepers and tradesmen was scarcely to be believed. The Governor did not trust them, despite their traditional alliance with Portugal.
On the other hand, it might indeed be a private expedition, but the Governor never lost sight of the fact that it was led by the son of that notorious old busybody who had possessed the scavenging eye of a vulture. Who knew what the old devil had stumbled upon out there in the unknown land, a mountain of gold or silver, the fabled lost city of Monomatapa with all its treasures intact: anything was possible. Of course, the old missionary would have sent news of the discovery to his own son. If there was a mountain of gold out there, then the Governor would be very pleased to know about it.
Even if there were no new treasures to discover, there were certainly old ones to protect. It would be Camacho Pereira’s duty to steer the expedition away from certain areas, to prevent it stumbling on secrets known not even to the Governor’s masters in Lisbon.
Camacho’s orders were clear: distract the Englishman by accounts of the insurmountable difficulty of travel in certain directions, the swamps, the mountain ranges, the disease, the savage animals and even more savage men, and contrast that with the friendly people in pleasant lands, rich with ivory, that lay in other directions.
If this was unsuccessful – and Major Ballantyne had all the earmarks of arrogance and intractability peculiar to his nation – then Camacho was to use what other means of persuasion came to hand. This was a euphemism perfectly understood by both the Governor and his nephew.
Camacho had almost convinced himself that this was really the only sensible course of action. Beyond Tete there was no law, except that of the knife, and Camacho had always lived by that law. Now he savoured the thought. He had found the Englishman’s unconcealed contempt as galling as the woman’s rejection had been painful.
He had convinced himself that the reason for the attitude towards him of both brother and sister was his mulatto blood. This was a sensitive area of Camacho’s self-esteem, for even in Portuguese territories where miscegenation was almost universal practice, mixed blood still carried a stigma. He would enjoy the work ahead, for not only would it wipe out the insults he had suffered, but it would bring rich pickings, and even after they had been shared out with his uncle, and others, there would still be much profit in it for himself.
The equipment that the expedition carried represented, in Camacho’s view, a vast fortune. There were barge-loads of excellent trade goods. Camacho had taken the first opportunity to check secretly the contents of the packs. There were firearms, and valuable instruments, chronometers and sextants, and there was a forged-steel field-safe that the Englishman kept locked and guarded. The merciful God alone knew how many golden English sovereigns it contained, and if He did not know – then his good uncle the Governor knew less. It would make the division of spoils more in Camacho’s favour. The more he brooded upon it, the more he looked forward to the arrival at Tete, and the jump-off into the unexplored territory beyond.
To Robyn the tiny town of Tete marked her real arrival in Africa, and her return to the world for which she had trained so assiduously and yearned so deeply.
She was secretly glad that Zouga had used the unloading of the barges as an excuse not to accompany her.
‘You find the place, Sissy, and we’ll go there together tomorrow.’
She had changed back into skirts, for small and isolated as it was, Tete was still a backwater of civilized behaviour and there was no point in giving offence to the local inhabitants. Though she found the heavy folds about her legs annoying, she soon forgot them as she walked the single, dusty street of the village where her father and mother must have walked together for the last time, and peered at the mud-walled trading stores built haphazardly along a rough line with the bank of the river.
She stopped at one of these little dukas and found that the storekeeper could understand a mixture of her basic Swahili, English and Nguni language, enough anyway to direct her on to where the village street petered out in a mere footpath that meandered off into the acacia forest.
The forest was hushed in the heat of the noon, even the birds were silent and the mood weighed on Robyn, depressing her and awakening the memories of long-ago mourning.
She saw a flash of white amongst the trees ahead, and stopped, reluctant to go on to what she knew she would find. For a moment she was transported to girlhood again, to a grey November day standing beside her Uncle William waving upwards at the passenger decks of the departing ship, her eyes so dimmed with tears that she could not make out at the crowded rail the beloved face for which she searched, while the distance between ship and quay opened like the gulf between life and death.
Robyn shook the memory away and went on. There were six graves amongst the trees, she had not expected that, but then she recalled that there had been heavy mortality amongst the members of her father’s Kaborra-Bassa expedition, four of disease, one drowned and a suicide.
The grave for which she searched stood a little apart from the others. It was demarcated by a square of whitewashed river stones and at the head was a cross built of mortar. It also had been whitewashed. Unlike the other graves, it had been kept cleaned of grass and weed, and the cross and stones freshly painted. There was even a small bunch of wilted wild flowers standing in a cheap blue china vase. They were not more than a few days old. That surprised Robyn.
Standing at the foot of the grave she read the still fully legible lettering on the plaster cross:
In loving memory of
Helen
beloved wife of Fuller Morris Ballantyne.
Born August 4th 1814. Died of fever December 16th
1852.
God’s will be done.
Robyn closed her eyes and waited for the tears to come up from deep inside, but there were no tears, they had been shed long ago. Instead there were only the memories.
Little fragments of memory played over and over in her mind – the smell of strawberries as they gathered them together in Uncle William’s garden, standing on tiptoe to place one of the lush red fruit between her mother’s white teeth and then eating the half that was left especially for her; lying cuddled under her bedclothes as she listened drowsily to her mother’s voice reading aloud to her in the candlelight; the lessons at the kitchen table in winter, under the elm trees in summer and her own eagerness to learn and to please; her first pony ride, her mother’s hands holding her in the saddle, her legs too short for the stirrups; the feel of the soapy sponge down her back as her mother stooped over the iron hipbath; the sound of her mother’s laughter, and then at night the sound of her weeping beyond the thin partition beside her cot; then the final memory of the smell of violets and lavender as she pressed her face to her mother’s bodice.
‘Why must you go, Mama?’
‘Because your father needs me. Because your father has sent for me, at last.’
And Robyn’s own terrible consuming jealousy at the words, mingled with the sense of impending loss.
Robyn knelt in the soft cushion of dust beside the grave, and began to pray, and as she whispered, the memories came crowding back, happy ones and sad ones together, and she had n
ot felt so close to her mother in all the intervening years.
She did not know how long she had knelt there, it seemed an eternity, when a shadow fell across the earth in front of her and she looked up, jerked back to the present with a little gasp of surprise and alarm.
A woman and child stood near her, a black woman, with a pleasant, even pretty, face. Not young, in her middle thirties possibly, though it was always difficult to guess an African’s age. She wore European-style clothing, cast-offs probably, for they were so faded that the original pattern was hardly visible, but starched and fastidiously clean. Robyn sensed that they had been donned for the occasion.
Although the child wore the brief leather kilt of the local Shangaan tribe, he was clearly not a full-blooded African. He could not have been more than seven or eight years of age, a sturdy boy, with a head of dusty-coloured curls and oddly pale-coloured eyes. There was something vaguely familiar about him that made Robyn stare.
He carried a small bunch of the yellow acacia flowers in his hands, and smiled shyly at Robyn before hanging his head and shuffling his feet in the dust. The woman said something to him and tugged at his hand, and he came hesitantly to Robyn and handed her the flowers.
‘Thank you,’ she said automatically, and raised the bouquet to her nose. They were faintly, but sweetly perfumed.
The woman hiked her skirts and squatted beside the grave, removed the wilted flowers and then handed the little blue china vase to the boy. He scampered away towards the river-bank.
While he was gone the woman plucked out the first green sprouts of weeds from the mound of the grave and then rearranged the whitewashed stones carefully. The familiar manner in which she performed the chore left no doubt in Robyn’s mind that she was responsible for the upkeep of her mother’s grave.
Both women maintained a friendly, comfortable silence, but when their eyes met they smiled and Robyn nodded her thanks. The child came trotting back, muddy to the knees and slopping water from the vase, but puffed up with self-importance. He had clearly performed this task before.