A Falcon Flies

by Wilbur Smith

‘And the gold,’ she teased, ‘and the ivory.’

  ‘Yes, by God, the gold and ivory as well. Come on, Sissy, this is where it truly begins,’ and he limped after the column as its tail disappeared into the acacia forest, favouring his injured leg and using a freshly cut staff to move across the sandy earth. For a moment Robyn hesitated and then she shrugged aside her doubts and ran to catch up with her brother.

  That first day the porters were rested and eager, the valley floor flat and the going easy, so Zouga ordered tirikeza, the double march, so that even at their slow pace the column left many miles of dusty grey earth behind them that day.

  They marched until the heat came up in the middle of the morning and the merciless sun dried the sweat the moment it burst through their pores and left tiny salt crystals on the skin, that sparkled like diamond chips. Then they found shade and lay like dead men through the heat of noon, stirring again only when the lowering sun gave the illusion of cooling the air and the blast of the kudu-horn trumpet forced them to their feet again.

  The second stage of the tirikeza lasted until sunset when it became too dark to see the ground under their feet.

  The fires were dying and the voices of the porters in their thorn bush scherms had slowly descended through the occasional mutter and soft murmur to ultimate silence before Zouga left his tent and limped silently as a night creature out of the camp.

  He carried the Sharps rifle slung over his shoulder, the staff in one hand and a bull’s eye lantern in the other, while the Colt revolver hung in its holster upon his belt. Once clear of the camp, he stepped out as briskly as his leg would allow two miles along the freshly beaten footpath that the column had made that afternoon until he reached the fallen tree trunk that was the agreed rendezvous.

  He stopped and whistled softly, and a smaller figure stepped out from the undergrowth into the moonlight, carrying a rifle at high-port. The jaunty step and alert set of head on narrow shoulders was unmistakable.

  ‘All is well, Sergeant.’

  ‘We are ready, Major.’

  Zouga inspected the ambush positions that Sergeant Cheroot had chosen for his men astride the path. The little Hottentot had a good eye for ground and Zouga found his trust and liking for him increasing with every such display of competence.

  ‘A puff?’ Jan Cheroot asked now, with the clay pipe already in his mouth.

  ‘No smoking,’ Zouga shook his head. ‘They will smell it.’ And Jan Cheroot reluctantly buttoned the pipe into his hip pocket.

  Zouga had chosen a position in the centre of the line, where he could make himself comfortable against the trunk of the fallen tree. He settled down with a sigh, his leg thrust out stiffly ahead of him – after the tirikeza it was going to be a long wearying night.

  The moon was a few days short of full, and it was almost light enough to read the headlines of a newspaper. The bush was alive with the scurry and rustle of small animals, and it kept their nerves tightened and their ears strained to catch the other sounds for which they waited.

  Zouga was the first to hear the click of a pebble striking against another. He whistled softly and Jan Cheroot snapped his fingers, imitating the sound of a black scarab beetle to show that he was alert. The moon had dropped low upon the hills, and its light through the forest trees laid silver and black tiger stripes upon the earth and played tricks with the eye.

  Something moved in the forest, and then was gone, but Zouga picked up the whisper of bare feet scuffling the sandy disturbed earth of the path, and then suddenly they were there, and very close, man shapes in file, hurrying, silent, furtive. Zouga counted them, eight – no nine. Each of them straight-backed under the bulky burden he carried balanced upon his head. Zouga’s anger simmered to the surface and yet at the same time he felt a grim sense of satisfaction that he had not wasted the night.

  As the leading figure in the file came level with the fallen tree trunk, Zouga pointed the muzzle of the Sharps rifle straight into the air and pressed the trigger. The crash of the shot broke the night into a hundred echoes that bounced and rebounded through the forest, and the silence magnified it until it seemed like the thunder of all the heaven.

  The echoes had not dispersed, and the nine dark figures were still frozen with shock when Jan Cheroot’s Hottentots fell upon them from every direction in a shrieking pack.

  The sound of their cries was so shrill, so inhuman, that it even startled Zouga, while the effect on the victims was miraculous. They let fall the burdens they carried, and dropped to earth in a paralysis of superstitious awe, adding their wails and screams to the pandemonium. Then the thud and clatter of cudgels against skull and cringing flesh mingled with it all, and the screams and howls rose to a new pitch.

  Jan Cheroot’s men had spent much time and care on selecting and cutting their clubs and now they wielded them with a lusty glee, making up for a night of discomfort and boredom. Sergeant Cheroot himself was in the thick of it, and in his excitement he had almost lost his voice. He was yipping squeakily like a demented fox terrier with a cat up a tree.

  Zouga knew he would have to stop it soon, before they killed or seriously maimed somebody, but the punishment was richly earned, and he gave it a minute more. He even joined in himself when one of the prostrate figures scrambled to its feet and tried to dart away into the undergrowth. Zouga swung his staff and brought him down again with a blow to the back of his knees, and when he sprang up again as though he were on springs, Zouga dropped him in the dust with a short right-handed punch to the side of the head.

  Then, stepping back out of the fray, Zouga took one of his few remaining cheroots from his top pocket, and lit it from the chimney of the lantern, inhaling with deep satisfaction, while around him the enthusiasm of his Hottentots flagged a little as they tired and Jan Cheroot regained his voice and became coherent for the first time.

  ‘Slat hulle, kerels! Hit them, boys!’

  It was time to stop it, Zouga decided and opened the shutter of the lantern.

  ‘That’s enough, Sergeant,’ he ordered, and the thuds of blows became intermittent and then ceased while the Hottentots rested on the cudgels, panting and streaming with the honest sweat of their exertions.

  The deserting porters lay moaning and whimpering in pitiful heaps, with their loot scattered about them. Some of the packs had burst open, and trade cloth and beads, flasks of gunpowder, knives, mirrors and glass jewellery were strewn about and trodden into the dirt. Zouga’s fury returned at full strength when he recognized the tin box which contained his dress uniform and hat. He delivered a last kick at the nearest figure and then growled at Sergeant Cheroot,

  ‘Get them on their feet and clean it up.’

  The nine deserters were marched into camp, roped together and bearing not only the heavy burdens which they had stolen – but also an impressive set of contusions, cuts and bruises. Lips were swollen and split, some teeth were missing, a good many eyes were puffed closed and most of their heads were as lumpy as newly-picked Jerusalem artichokes.

  More painful than their injuries, however, was the ridicule of the entire camp which turned out to a man to jeer and mock them with laughter.

  Zouga lined up the captives, with their booty piled in front of them, and in the presence of their peers made a speech in limping but expressive Swahili in which he likened them to sneaking jackals and lurking hyena and fined them each a month’s wages.

  The audience was delighted with the show, and hooted at every insult while the culprits tried physically to shrink themselves into insignificance. There was not one of the watching porters who would not have done the same thing. In fact, had the escape succeeded, most of them would have followed the next night, but now that it had been foiled, they could enjoy the vicarious pleasure of having escaped punishment, and the discomfort of their companions who had committed the sin of being caught.

  During the noon rest that divided the two stages of the next day’s tirikeza, the clusters of porters chatting in the shade of the mopani groves a
greed that they had found a strong master to follow, one whom it would not be easy to cheat, and it gave them all confidence for the future of the safari. Coming directly after his defeat of the Portuguese, the recapture of the deserting porters added immeasurably to Zouga’s standing.

  The four indunas of the divisions agreed that it was fitting that such a man have a praise-name. They conferred at length, and after considering many suggestions, finally decided on ‘Bakela’.

  ‘Bakela’ means ‘the one-who-strikes-with-the-fist’, for this was still the one of Zouga’s many accomplishments which impressed them most.

  Where Bakela led, they were now prepared to follow, and though Zouga spread a dragnet of his faithful Hottentots behind the column each of the following nights, no more fish swam into it.

  ‘How many?’ Zouga whispered, and Jan Cheroot rocked on his heels, sucking softly on the empty clay pipe and squinting his oriental eyes thoughtfully, before he shrugged, ‘Too many to count. Two hundred, three hundred, perhaps even four.’

  The ground had been ploughed up into soft fluffy dust by the multitude of huge cloven hooves, and the dark pats of dung were round and shaped in little concentric circles, completely indistinguishable from those of domestic cattle, and the rank smell of cattle was heavy on the heated air of the Zambezi valley.

  For an hour they had followed a small herd through the open mopani forest, stooping under the low branches with the thick shiny double leaves, each of them shaped like the cloven spoor that they followed, and now where the spoor emerged from the forest it had been joined by another much larger herd.

  ‘How close?’ Zouga asked again, and Jan Cheroot slapped his own neck where one of the buffalo flies had settled. It was the size of a honey bee, but dull black and the long needle of its proboscis stung as though it was white hot.

  ‘We are so close that the flies that follow the herd still linger,’ and he pushed his forefinger into the nearest pat of wet dung, ‘and the body heat is still in the dung, but,’ Jan Cheroot went on as he wiped his finger on a handful of dry grass, ‘but they have gone into bad ground—’ and he pointed ahead with his chin.

  A week before they had reached the escarpment of the valley, but each of the possible passes that Zouga had examined through the telescope had proved on closer inspection to be dead ends, the gorges pinching out into abrupt rock faces, or falling off into some terrifying abyss.

  They had turned westwards, following the edge of the escarpment, Zouga ranging ahead with his small scouting party. Yet day after day those impassable heights loomed at their left hand, rising sheer into the unknown. Even below the main escarpment, the ground was tortured and riven by deep gorges and ravines, by cliffs of dark rock and hills of enormous tumbled boulders. The ravines were choked with the drab grey stands of thorn, so densely interwoven that a man would have to crawl in on hands and knees, and his vision would be limited to a few feet ahead, yet the herd of many hundreds of buffalo that they were following had disappeared into one of these narrow gorges, their thick hides impervious to the cruel red-tipped thorn.

  Zouga took the telescope from his haversack carried by his bearer, and carefully scanned the ground ahead. It had a wild and menacing beauty and for the hundredth time in the last few days he wondered if there was a way through this maze to the empire of Monomatapa.

  ‘Did you hear that?’ Zouga demanded, lowering the glass suddenly. It had sounded like the distant lowing of the milk herd as it returned to the farmyard.

  ‘Ja!’ Sergeant Cheroot nodded, as again the mournful sound echoed against the black ironstone cliffs, and was answered by the bleat of a calf. ‘They are lying up in the jessie bush. They won’t move again until sunset.’

  Zouga glanced up at the sun. It was four hours or so from its zenith. He had over a hundred mouths to feed, and they had rationed out the last of the dried fish two days before.

  ‘We will have to go in after them,’ he said, and Jan Cheroot removed the stem of the pipe from between yellow teeth and spat reflectively in the dust.

  ‘I am a very happy man,’ he said. ‘Why would I want to die now?’

  Zouga lifted the glass again, and while he scanned the ridges of higher ground about the choked valley, he imagined what it would be like in there. When the first shot was fired, the jessie bush would be filled with huge, furiously charging black animals.

  The fluky breeze coming down the steep narrow valley brought with it another powerful whiff of the herd smell before it faded.

  ‘The wind is down the valley,’ he said.

  ‘They have not smelled us,’ Cheroot agreed, but that was not what Zouga had meant. Again he examined the nearest ridge of high ground. A man could work his way along the edge of it, up towards the head of the narrow valley.

  ‘Sergeant, we are going to flush them out,’ he smiled, ‘like spring pheasant.’

  Zouga had found the native names of his personal bearers hard to pronounce, and tiresome to remember. There were four of them. He had selected them with care, rejecting half a dozen others in the process, and he had rechristened them Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. They had earned enormous prestige by being so honoured, and had proved keen and willing to learn their duties. In a few days they were already proficient at reloading, though not yet of the same standard as Camacho Pereira’s gunbearers – but that would come.

  Zouga carried the Sharps rifle, but each of the four bearers had one of the heavy four-to-the-pound elephant guns that Harkness had recommended to Zouga. At any time he had only to reach back over his shoulder and a loaded and primed weapon would be thrust into his hand.

  Apart from the elephant guns, his bearers carried his blanket roll, water bottle, canvas food bag, spare ball and powder, and the little clay fire-pot from which a smouldering ball of moss and wood pulp could be blown into flame in a few seconds. It was wise to conserve the amenities of civilization, such as Swan Vestas, for the months and years ahead.

  Zouga relieved Luke, the quickest and most wiry of the four, of all his equipment except the fire-pot, pointed out the path along the cliff, and explained carefully to him what he was to do.

  All of them listened with approval, even Sergeant Cheroot nodded sagely at the end. ‘My old mother tells me, before she throws me out, “Jan”, she says, “remember it’s brains what counts.” ’

  In the mouth of the valley, where it debouched out into the mopani forest, was a low outcrop of rock, the black ironstone boulders had been split into strange shapes by sun and erosion, and they formed a natural redoubt, with chest-high walls behind which a man could crouch. A hundred paces directly ahead, the dense palisade of iron-grey thorn blocked the valley, but the ground between was fairly open, with a few stunted second-growth mopani bushes and clumps of coarse dried razor grass as high as man’s shoulder.

  Zouga moved his party into the lee of the rocks, and himself scrambled on to the highest point to follow through his glass the progress of the almost naked bearer as he picked his way cautiously along the rim of the cliff. Within half an hour he had worked so far up the escarpment that he had disappeared from Zouga’s view.

  It was another hour before, from the head of the valley, a thin tendril of pure white smoke rose gently into the heated air, and then bent into the elegant shape of an ostrich plume before the gentle breath of the breeze.

  With miraculous suddenness the rising column of white smoke was surrounded by another living cloud, hundreds of tiny black specks that weaved and darted about and around it. The faint but excited bird cries carried down to where Zouga waited, and through the glass he could make out the rainbow, turquoise and sapphire plumage of the blue jays as they rolled and dived for the insects put to flight by the flames. Competing with them for the feast, were the iridescent black drongas with their long, forked tails catching the sunlight with metallic glitter as they swirled above the spreading smoke clouds.

  Luke was doing his job well. Zouga grunted with satisfaction, as new columns of smoke rose at intervals, sealing off
the valley from side to side as they spread to meet each other. Now there was a solid wall of smoke from one cliff to the other, and as the smoke turned dirty black, billowing upwards, spinning upon itself, carrying flaming fragments of leaves and twigs within it, it began to roll ponderously down the valley.

  It reminded Zouga of a snow avalanche he had watched in the high Himalayas, the slow majestic progress gathering weight and momentum, building up its own wind storm as it sucked the valley of air.

  He could see the tops of the flames now, leaping above the thorn, and hear the sound of them, like the whispering waters of a distant river. The alarm bellow of a bull buffalo rang like the blast of a war trumpet from the ironstone cliffs, and the whisper of flames rose swiftly to a dull crackling roar.

  The smoke clouds rose across the sun, plunging them into an unnatural gloom, and Zouga felt a sharp drop in his spirits at the extinction of the bright morning sun, that infernal swirling pall of dun smoke seemed to hold a world of menace.

  From the edge of the jessie bush broke a herd of kudu, led by a magnificent bull with his corkscrew horns laid flat along his back. He saw Zouga standing on the pinnacle of rock, and snorted with alarm, swinging away out of easy shot with his cows flying big-eared and scared behind him, their fluffy white tails flickered away amongst the mopani groves.

  Zouga scrambled down from his too obvious position, and propped himself comfortably against the rock, checked the nipple on the cap of the Sharps and then cocked the big hammer.

  Ahead of the flames, a pale white dust cloud was rising over the tops of the jessie bush, and another sound was added to the roar of flames. It was a low thunder that made the earth tremble under their feet.

  ‘They are coming,’ Jan Cheroot muttered to himself, and his little eyes sparkled.

  A single buffalo burst from the palisade of thorn. He was an old bull, almost bald across the shoulders and rump, the dusty grey skin criss-crossed by a thousand ancient scars and scabby with the bites of bush ticks. The big bell-shaped ears were torn and tattered, and one thickly curved horn was broken off at the tip. He came out at a crabbing gallop, dust exploding at each hoof beat like miniature mortar bursts.