by Wilbur Smith
‘Don’t shoot, Sergeant!’ There was another reason why he could afford no interference. There were a hundred men judging him now, men with whom he would march and work in the months and years ahead. He needed their respect.
‘Jee!’ sang the watchers, and Camacho was panting with rage. Again the blade in his right hand whispered like the wing of a swallow in flight, and this time Zouga overreacted, blundering back half a dozen paces, and then losing his balance for a moment he dropped on one knee and put a hand to the ground to steady himself. But as Camacho charged again, he rebounded to his feet and arched his hips aside, the way a matador swings out of the line of the bull’s run. In the hand that had touched the ground, Zouga held a handful of the coarse grey sand.
His eyes were locked to those of the Portuguese, it was the eyes not the knife hand that would signal Camacho’s intentions. They flickered left, while the hand feigned the other way, and Zouga moved in past the blade, and was ready again when Camacho rounded.
They faced each other, shuffling in a slow cycle that stirred wisps of pale dust around their feet. Camacho kept the knife low, and stirred it gently as though he was conducting a slow passage of music, but Zouga studying his eyes saw the first small nervous flickers of uncertainty.
He jumped in, launching himself off the right foot.
‘Jee!’ roared the watchers, and for the first time Camacho broke ground, falling back and then turning hurriedly as Zouga checked and feinted to his open side.
Twice more Zouga drove him back with threats, until it needed only a feint with his upper body to make Camacho scramble away. The watchers were laughing now, mocking shouts of glee every time he gave ground, and the rage that had flushed Camacho’s face had given way to fear, the angry purple mottling had chilled to white. Zouga was still watching his eyes, as they darted from side to side seeking an escape – but the knife kept weaving between them, bright and razor sharp, broad as three fingers and grooved along its length to break the suction of clinging wet flesh once it was buried.
Camacho’s eyes flickered away once more and Zouga moved, pulling the knife hand around as he crossed the man’s front, holding out his empty hand for the eyes to follow, keeping the other low and moving in as close to the knife as he dared, then at the moment that Camacho lunged, using the momentum of his avoiding turn, he hurled the handful of coarse sand into Camacho’s eyes – blinding him, and still in the same movement reversing his direction, and going straight in on the knife, chancing it all on locking the wrist before the man could see again.
‘Jee!’ the crowd roared as Camacho’s wrist slapped into Zouga’s palm, and he locked it down with all his strength.
Tears were already streaming from Camacho’s eyes, and his lids fluttered, grinding the sharp grains across the unseeing eyeballs. He could not judge nor meet Zouga’s weight as, still locked grimly to the wrist, he threw him off-balance. As Camacho went over, Zouga reared back, resisting with all his strength, holding the knife arm against the fall. Something went with a loud rubbery popping sound in Camacho’s shoulder and he screamed, as he sprawled again, face down, with the arm twisted up behind him.
Once again Zouga jerked viciously, and this time Camacho screeched like a girl and the knife dropped from his fingers. He made a feeble effort to snatch it with the other hand, but Zouga trod down on the blade with a booted foot, then scooped it up, released the damaged arm and stepped back holding the heavy weapon in his right hand.
‘Bulala!’ chanted the watchers. ‘Bulala! Kill him! Kill him!’ They wanted to see the blood, for that was the fitting end and they hungered for it.
Zouga stabbed the blade deeply into the trunk of the acacia tree and then wrenched against the steel. It snapped at the hilt with a crack like a pistol shot, and he dropped the hilt contemptuously.
‘Sergeant Cheroot,’ he said, ‘get him out of this camp.’
‘I should shoot him,’ the little Hottentot told him as he came up, and thrust the muzzle of the Enfield rifle into the fallen man’s belly.
‘If he tries to enter the camp again, you can shoot him. But now just get him out.’
‘Big mistake,’ Sergeant Cheroot’s pug face took on a theatrically mournful expression. ‘Always stamp on the scorpion – before he stings.’
‘You are hurt.’ Robyn was running towards him.
‘It’s a scratch.’ Zouga unwound the bandanna from around his throat and pressed it to the wound in his hip as he strode away towards his tent, forcing himself not to favour it with a limp. He had to get away quickly for the reaction was on him, he felt dizzy and nauseated, the wound stung abominably, and he did not want anybody to see that his hands were trembling.
‘I reset the shoulder,’ Robyn told Zouga as she bound up his hip wound. ‘I don’t think there is anything broken, and it went in again very neatly – but you,’ she shook her head, ‘you won’t be able to march with that. Every step will pull against the stitches.’
She was right, it was four days before the march could begin, and Camacho Pereira put that time to good use. He had left an hour after Robyn reset his dislocated shoulder, four paddlers taking a dugout canoe down the Zambezi with the current. When they would have pulled into the bank to make camp, Camacho snarled at them from the bows where he crouched, hugging the injured arm, that even after being set and strapped into a sling, still ached so fiercely that it lit little white sparks of agony behind his closed eyelids every time he tried to doze.
He also would have liked to rest, but his hatred drove him onwards, and the dugout canoe arrowed down current under a fat yellow moon that paled slowly at the coming of the new day.
Camacho went ashore on the south bank of the Zambezi at noon at the small native village at Chamba, a hundred miles below Tete.
He paid off the crew of the dugout and he hired two bearers to carry his rifle and blanket roll. Then he set off again immediately along the network of narrow foot paths that crisscross the entire African continent like the blood vessels of a living body, laid down by wandering men and migrating animals over the centuries.
Two days later he reached the Hyena Road that runs from the mountains of Dismay, Inyangaza, to the sea. The Hyena Road was a secret track. Although it paralleled the old road from the coast to Vila Manica, it kept forty miles north of it, following the course of the Pungwe river so that there would be water for the multitudes who unwillingly used the road on their long, last journey from their homeland to other lands, other continents.
Vila Manica was the last outpost of the Portuguese administration in East Africa. A decree by the Governor in council forbade any man, black or white, Portuguese or foreigner, to journey beyond that clay-walled fort towards the haunting range of mountains with the chilling name. It was for this reason that the Hyena Road had been secretly opened by enterprising men, and pushed up through the dense forests of the lower slopes to the bleak and open grasslands atop the mountains.
The march from Chamba to the Pungwe river was a hundred and fifty miles. To make it in three days with the agony of a healing shoulder was good going, and once they reached it, the temptation to rest was almost irresistible. But Camacho kicked his two bearers to their feet and drove them with stinging words and lash along the deserted road towards the mountains.
The road was twice as wide as any of the other footpaths they had followed to reach it, wide enough for a double column rather than the Indian file that was the usual order of African travel. Although the surface had been beaten hard by the passage of thousands of bare feet, it was a source of satisfaction to Camacho that the road had clearly not been used for many months, except by the occasional herd of antelope, and once, perhaps a week before, by an old bull elephant, whose huge piles of dung had long dried out.
‘The caravan has not passed yet,’ Camacho muttered, as he scanned the trees ahead for the shapes of the vultures and searched without success for the sly skulking shapes of hyena in the undergrowth beside the road.
True there were human bon
es scattered along the route, here and there the thick knuckle of the thigh bone that had defied even the iron jaws of the scavengers, or other splintered fragments that they had overlooked, but even these were dried out and bleached white. They were the debris of the previous caravan that had passed this way three months before.
He had reached the road in time, and now he hurried along it, pausing now and then to listen or to send one of the bearers up a tree to search ahead.
However, it was two days later that they heard the first faint sound of many voices, and this time Camacho himself climbed to the highest fork of one of the umsisa trees beside the track, and peering ahead he saw the vultures circling, a wide slow wheel of tiny black specks turning against the silver and blue ranges of cloud, as though caught in a hidden vortex of the high heavens.
He sat in the fork thirty feet above the ground, while the sound of voices grew stronger, became the sound of singing. This was no sound of joy, but a terrible mourning dirge, slow and heart-breaking, rising and fading as flukes of the breeze and folds of the ground blanketed the sound, but each time it came back a little stronger, until Camacho could make out far away the head of the column, like the head of a maimed serpent writhing out of the forest into an open glade a mile ahead.
He slid down the trunk of the umsisa, and hurried forward. There was an armed party ahead of the main column, five blacks dressed in the tatters of cast-off European-style clothing and carrying muskets, but at their head was a white man, a little man with a face like a vicious gnome, wrinkled and burned darkly by the sun. The thick drooping black moustache was laced with grey, but he stepped out with a bouncing elastic stride and he recognized Camacho from two hundred paces and snatched his hat off his head and waved it.
He shouted ‘Camacho!’ and the two men ran to embrace, and then hold each other at arm’s length, laughing with pleasure. It was Camacho who sobered first, the laughter changing to a scowl as he said,
‘Alphonse, my beloved brother, I have bad tidings – the worst possible.’
‘The Englishman?’ Alphonse was still smiling, he had a tooth missing from the front of his upper jaw, which made the cold humourless smile seem less dangerous than it really was.
‘Yes, the Englishman,’ Camacho nodded. ‘You know of him?’
‘My father sent a message. I know.’ Alphonse was the Governor of Quelimane’s eldest surviving son, full-blooded Portuguese by the lawfully wedded bride who had come out forty years previously from Lisbon, a pale sickly mail-order bride, who had borne three sons in swift succession, the first two of which had succumbed to malaria and infantile dysentery even before the appearance of the little wizened yellowed mite whom they had named Alphonse Jose Vila y Pereira, and expected to bury with his brothers before the end of the rains. However, it was the mother they had buried in the end, and the child had flourished at the breast of a black wet nurse.
‘He did not go north, then?’ Alphonse demanded, and Camacho dropped his eyes guiltily, for he was speaking to the eldest, full-blooded and legitimate son.
Camacho himself was a bastard and a half-breed, son of one of the Governor’s once beautiful mulatto concubines, now fat and faded and forgotten in one of the back rooms of the seraglio. He was not even recognized as a son, but had to bear the ignominious title of nephew. This in itself was enough for him to show respect for the other, but added to this Alphonse was as determined as their father had been at the same age, though even crueller and harder. Camacho had seen him sing a plaintive fado as he flogged a man to death, accompanying the traditional love song with the flute and percussion of the lash.
‘He did not go north,’ Camacho agreed uneasily.
‘You were told to see that he did.’
‘I could not stop him. He is English,’ Camacho’s voice croaked a little, ‘he is stubborn.’
‘We will speak again of that,’ Alphonse promised coldly. ‘Now, swiftly tell me where he is and what he plans to do.’
Camacho recited the explanation he had prepared, skirting delicately around the most offensive parts of the story, and dwelling on subjects such as the wealth that the Ballantyne expedition carried with it rather than his own brutal beating at the Englishman’s hands.
Alphonse had thrown himself down in the shade of a tree beside the track and listened broodingly, chewing at the straggling ends of his moustache, filling in for himself the conspicuous gaps in his half-brother’s recital, and speaking again only at the end.
‘When will he leave the valley of the Zambezi?’
‘Soon,’ Camacho hedged, for the unpredictable Englishman might already be half-way to the escarpment. ‘Although I cut him deeply, it may be he has had himself carried in a mushila (litter).’
‘He must not be allowed to enter the Monomatapa,’ Alphonse said flatly, and came to his feet with a single lithe movement. ‘The best place to do the business would be in the bad ground below the rim of the valley.’
He glanced back along the winding road. The head of the column was a mile away still, across a glade of open golden grass. The shuffling double rank of bowed creatures, yoked at the neck, did not seem human, though the singing was sad and beautiful.
‘I can spare fifteen men.’
‘It will not be enough,’ Camacho cut in swiftly.
‘It will be,’ said his brother coldly, ‘if you do the business in the night.’
‘Twenty men,’ Camacho pleaded. ‘He has soldiers with him, trained soldiers and he is a soldier himself.’
Alphonse was silent, weighing risk and advantage – but the worst part of the Hyena Road already lay behind the column, and each mile nearer the coast, the land was tamer, the risk diminished and the need for guards less pressing.
‘Twenty!’ he agreed abruptly, and turned to Camacho. ‘But not one of the foreigners must escape.’ Looking into his brother’s cold black eyes, Camacho felt his skin crawl. ‘Leave no sign, bury them deep, so the jackal and hyena do not dig them out. Use the porters to carry the expedition’s equipment to the place in the hills, and when they have done so, kill them also. We will bring it down with the next caravan to the coast.’
‘Si. Si. I understand.’
‘Do not fail us again, my beloved cousin-brother.’ Alphonse made the endearment a threat, and Camacho swallowed with a nervous little gulp.
‘I will leave as soon as I have rested.’
‘No,’ Alphonse shook his head. ‘You will leave immediately. Once that Englishman enters the land beyond the mountains, there will soon be no more slaves. It is bad enough that there has been no gold for twenty years and more, but if the river of slaves were to dry up, both my father and I would be displeased – very displeased.’
At Zouga’s order the long mournful blast of the kudu-horn trumpet shattered the silence of the utterly dark hour before the dawn.
The indunas took up the cry ‘Safari! We march!’ and they prodded the sleeping porters off their reed sleeping-mats. The camp fires had burned down to dim red mounds of coals smothered in the soft grey powder of their own ash. As fresh logs were thrown upon them they flared up in a false dawn that lit the underside of the umbrella-shaped acacia trees with wavering yellow light.
The smell of roasting ropoko cakes rose on tendrils of pale smoke straight into the windless dark sky. The muted voices became louder, more cheerful as the flames drove away the chills and the nightmares.
‘Safari!’ The cry was taken up, and the divisions assembled, ghostly figures in the gloom, emerging more clearly as the growing dawn light paled the sky and snuffed out the stars.
‘Safari!’ And the mass of men and equipment resolved itself and order grew out of chaos.
Like those long columns of big shiny black serowe ants that endlessly cross and re-cross the African earth, the stream of porters moved steadily away into the still gloomy forest.
As each of them passed Zouga and Robyn standing together at the gate of the thorn scherm, they shouted a greeting and executed a few prancing steps to demonst
rate their loyalty and enthusiasm – while Robyn laughed with them and Zouga called encouragement.
‘We no longer have a guide, and we don’t know where we are going.’ She took Zouga’s arm. ‘What is to become of us?’
‘If we knew, it would take all the fun out of it.’
‘At least a guide.’
‘While you thought I was hunting I went out as far as the escarpment which is further than that swaggering Portuguese ever went, further than any white man, except of course Pater, has ever been. Follow me, Sissy, I am your guide.’
She looked up at him now in the strengthening light of coming dawn.
‘I knew you were not hunting,’ she told him.
‘The escarpment is rugged and very broken, but I have examined two passes through the telescope that I think will go—’
‘And beyond that?’
He laughed, ‘We will find out.’ Then he squeezed her around the waist. ‘That is the whole fun of the thing.’
She studied his face with full attention for a few moments. The new full beard emphasized the strong, almost stubborn, lines of his jaw. There was a piratical devil-maycare lift to the corner of his lips, and Robyn realized that no man of conventional mind would have proposed and engineered this expedition. She knew he possessed courage, his exploits in India had proved that beyond doubt, and yet when she looked at his sketches and water colours and read the rough notes he was making for the book, she discovered a sensitivity and an imagination she had never before suspected. He was a difficult person to know and understand.
Perhaps she could have told him about Sarah and the child or even about Mungo St John, and that night in the main cabin of Huron, for when he laughed like this, the stern features softened with humour and humanity, and green lights sparkled in his eyes.
‘That’s what we are here for, Sissy, the fun of it all.’