A Falcon Flies

by Wilbur Smith

  ‘You and you.’ He picked two of his strongest and his usually most willing porters, and when they still hesitated, he unslung the heavy elephant gun from his shoulder. They saw his expression and knew that his intention was serious, deadly serious. Sulkily they began breaking down their own loads and distributing them amongst their comrades.

  ‘At least let us leave this other thundering piece of rubbish.’ The rain and the cold had affected Jan Cheroot as much as the others, and he indicated the tin box that contained Zouga’s dress uniform with a hatred and contempt usually reserved for animate objects. Zouga did not bother to reply, but gestured to Matthew to take it up.

  It was noon before the bedraggled little column struggled through the long sodden grass that choked the valley floor and began to climb the far side, slipping and cursing in the mud.

  It rained for five days and five nights, sometimes in thick drumming bursts that seemed to fall in solid sheets of water from the sky, at other times it was a cold drizzling mist, that swirled gently about them as they trudged on in the soft treacherous footing, a fine silver mist that blanketed and muted all sound except the eternal dripping of the forest and the soft sighing passage of the wind in the upper branches.

  The fever vapours seemed to rise from the very ground, entering their lungs with each breath, and in the icy cold mornings they writhed and twisted like the wraiths of tormented souls down in the hollows of the valleys. The porters were the first to show the symptoms of the disease, for the fever was in their bones and the cold rain brought it out so they shivered in uncontrollable spasms and their teeth chattered in their jaws until it seemed they might crack like porcelain. However, they were seasoned to the rigours of the disease and they were still able to march.

  The bulky statue in its ungainly packing of grass and bark was borne painfully up the rocky ridges and down the other side by half-naked men staggering like drunks from the fever boiling in their veins, and when they reached the bank of another watercourse they dropped it gratefully and fell in the mud to rest without the will to cover themselves from the relentless rain.

  Where there had been dried river-beds, with drifts of white sand shining like alpine snowfields in the sun, with quiet pools of still green water, and with steep high banks in which the brilliant kingfisher and little jewelled bee-eaters burrowed to nest, there were now maddened torrents of racing brown water, which brimmed over the high banks and carved out the roots of tall trees, toppling them into the flood and whisking them away as though they were mere twigs.

  There was no possible means by which a man could cross these racing, foaming deluges; the corpse of a drowned buffalo with bloated pink belly and its limbs sticking stiffly into the air was borne downstream at the speed of a galloping horse, while Zouga stood morosely on the bank, and knew that he had left it too late. They were trapped by the spate.

  ‘We will have to follow the river,’ he grunted, and wiped his streaming face on the sleeve of his sodden hunting jacket.

  ‘It goes towards the west,’ Jan Cheroot pointed out with morbid relish, and it was not necessary for him to expand on the thought.

  To the west lay the kingdom of Mzilikazi, King of the Matabele, and already they must be close to that vaguely defined area that old Tom Harkness had marked on his map.

  ‘The Burnt Land – here Mzilikazi’s impis kill all travellers.’

  ‘What do you suggest, my ray of golden Hottentot sunshine?’ Zouga demanded bitterly. ‘Have you got wings to fly this?’ He indicated the broad expanse of wild water, where the curled waves stood as stationary as carved sculptures as they marked the position of submerged rocks and hidden snags. ‘Or what about gills and fins?’ Zouga went on. ‘Let me see you swim, or if you have neither wings nor fins, then surely you have good advice for me?’

  ‘Yes,’ Jan Cheroot answered as bitterly. ‘My advice is that you listen to good advice when first it is given, and second that you drop those in the river.’ He indicated the bundled statue and the sealed uniform box. Zouga did not wait for the rest of it, but turned his back and shouted.

  ‘Safari! On your feet, all of you! We march!’

  They worked slowly west and a little south, but too much westward for even Zouga’s peace of mind, though his route was dictated by the network of rivers and flooded valleys.

  On the sixth day the rain relented, and the clouds broke open, revealing a sky of deep aquamarine blue and a fierce swollen sun that made their clothing steam, and stilled the fever shakes of the porters.

  Even with the accuracy of his chronometer in doubt, Zouga was able to observe the meridian passage that local noon and establish his latitude. He was not as far south as he had calculated by dead reckoning, so he was probably even further west than his suspect calculations of longitude suggested.

  ‘The land of the Mzilikazi is drier,’ Zouga consoled himself, as he wrapped his navigational instruments in their oilskin covers, ‘and I am an Englishman, and the grandson of Tshedi. Not even a Matabele would dare deny me passage, despite what old Tom writes.’ And he had his talisman, the stone bird, to add its protection.

  Resolutely he faced west again, and drove his caravan onwards. There was one other misery to add to their sufferings. There was no meat, and there had been none since the day they left the abandoned city.

  With the first onslaught of the rains, the great herds of game that had been concentrated upon the last few pools and waterholes had been freed to scatter widely across the vast land where every ditch and irregularity was now at last brimming with fresh sweet water and where the baked and sun-seared plains were already blooming green with the tender first shoots of new growth.

  In five days’ march in the rain, Zouga had seen only one small herd of waterbuck, the least palatable of all African game with its rank turpentine-scented musk which permeates the flesh. The heavily built bull, in his shaggy plum-brown coat led his small troop of hornless females at a frantic gallop across Zouga’s front with his wide lyre-shaped horns cocked high and the perfect white circle over his buttocks flashing with each bound. He tore through the drizzling rain and dense wild ebony bush not twenty paces from Zouga. Zouga threw up the heavy gun and led on his driving shoulder.

  Behind him his hungry, exhausted porters yipped like a pack of hunting dogs with anticipation, and Zouga held his aim for an instant to make deadly certain and then squeezed off the trigger.

  With a sharp crack, the cap exploded under the falling hammer, but there was not the long spurt of flame from the muzzle and the great clangour of the shot, followed by the heavy thumping impact of the lead ball into flesh. The gun had misfired and the handsome antelope led his harem away at full gallop, disappearing almost immediately into the bush and rain while the dwindling clatter of their hooves mocked Zouga. He swore with frustration as he laboriously drew the ball and charge with the corkscrew tool fitted to his ramrod, and found that the insidious rain had somehow entered the barrel, probably through the nipple and that the powder was as wet as though he had dipped it in the raging brown flood waters.

  Those few hours of fierce sunlight on the sixth day gave Zouga and Jan Cheroot an opportunity to spread the coarse grey contents of their powder bags on a flat rock and dry it out so there would be less chance of another disastrous misfire, and while they did so the porters let drop their packs and limped off to find a dry spot to stretch their aching limbs.

  Then too swiftly the sunlight was blotted out once more, and hurriedly they scooped the powder back into the pouches and as the fat raindrops began to hiss and splat about them they wrapped them in the worn oilskins, tucked them under their voluminous leather capes and resumed the westward trudge, heads bowed, silent and hungry and cold and miserable, Zouga’s ears singing with the quinine-buzz, the first apparent side-effect of massive doses of the drug taken over long periods. The quinine-buzz that can lead to eventual, irreversible deafness.

  Despite the heavy daily doses of the bitter powder, the morning arrived at last when Zouga woke w
ith the deep ache in the marrow of his bones, the dull weight like a heavy stone lying behind his eyes and by midday he was shaking and shivering with the alternate flood of fierce heat and deathly sepulchre cold through his veins.

  ‘The seasoning fever,’ Jan Cheroot told him philosophically, ‘it kills you, or hardens you.’

  ‘Some individuals would appear to have a natural resistance to the ravages of this disease,’ his father had written in his treatise, The Malarial Fevers of Tropical Africa: Their Causes, Symptoms and Treatment, ‘and there is evidence to suggest that this resistance is hereditary.’

  ‘We’ll see now if the old devil knew what he was talking about,’ Zouga mumbled through chattering teeth, hugging the stinking wet leather coat around his shoulders. It never occurred to him even briefly to halt for his affliction; he had not accorded that courtesy to any of his men, and he did not expect it himself.

  He trudged on grimly, with his knees giving a rubbery little bounce at each pace, his vision blurring and starring into little pinwheels of light, then emerging again though phantom worms and gnats still wriggled across his sight. Every now and then a touch upon his shoulder from the little Hottentot who marched behind him directed Zouga’s stumbling feet back on to the path from which they had strayed.

  The nights were hideous with the nightmares of his fever-inflamed brain, they were filled with the buffeting thunder of dark wings and the sickly stench of snakes so that he would wake panting and screaming, often to find Jan Cheroot holding him with a comforting arm around his shaking shoulders.

  The lifting of that first bout of his seasoning fever coincided with the next brief break in the rains. It seemed that the bright sunlight, magnified by the lingering moisture in the air, burned away the mists from his mind and the poisonous miasma from his blood, leaving him clear-headed, with a fragile sense of well-being but a weakness in his legs and arms and a dull ache up under the right-hand side of his rib cage where his liver was still swollen and hard as a rock, the typical after-effect of the fever.

  ‘You will be all right,’ Jan Cheroot prophesied. ‘You threw it off as quickly as I’ve seen any man with his first hit of the fever. Ja! You are a man of Africa – she will let you live here, my friend.’

  It was while he still walked on wavering legs, light-headed, so that it felt as though his feet did not touch the muddy earth but danced inches above it, that they cut the spoor.

  The weight of the great bull had driven the spoor a foot deep into the sticky red mud, so that it was a series of deep potholes, strung across the earth like beads on a necklace. The exact impression of the huge pads had been cast in the holes as though in plaster of Paris, each crack and fissure in the skin of the sole, each irregularity, even the outline of the blunt toenails were there in precise detail, and at one place where the soft earth had been unable to bear his weight and the elephant had sunk almost belly deep, he had left the impression of his long thick ivories in the earth when he had used them to push himself free.

  ‘It is him!’ breathed Jan Cheroot, without looking up from the enormous spoor. ‘I would know that spoor anywhere.’ He did not need to say more to identify the great old bull that they had last seen so many months before on the high pass of the elephant road on the escarpment of the Zambezi river.

  ‘Not an hour ahead of us,’ Jan Cheroot went on in a reverential whisper, like a man at prayer.

  ‘And the wind stands fair.’ Zouga found he was whispering also. He remembered his premonition that he would encounter this animal again. Almost fearfully he looked up at the sky. In the east the storm clouds were rolling ponderously towards them once more, the brief respite was almost over. The next onslaught of the storm promised to be as fierce, and even those deep and perfect prints would soon dissolve into liquid mud and be washed into oblivion.

  ‘They are feeding into the wind,’ he went on, trying to put the threat of rain out of his mind and concentrating his still fever-dulled wits to the problem of the hunt.

  The old bull and his remaining consort were feeding and moving forward with the wind into their faces. That way they would not walk into trouble. Yet these two old veterans, with their decades of accumulated experience, would not hold steadily into the wind for long, they would turn at intervals to get below the wind of a possible tracker.

  Every minute now was of vital consideration, if the hunt was to succeed – for despite the weakness in his legs and the silliness in his head, Zouga had not for a single moment considered letting the spoor go. They might be a hundred miles within the borders of Mzilikazi’s country with a Matabele impi of border guards closing swiftly, and the hours lost in following the two old bulls might make all the difference between escaping from these fever-haunted forests or leaving their bones here for the hyena to crunch, but neither Zouga nor Jan Cheroot hesitated. They began to shed their unneeded equipment, they would not need water bottles for the land was overflowing, the food bags were empty anyway, and the blankets sodden. They would shelter tonight against the old bull’s massive carcass.

  ‘Follow at your best pace,’ Zouga shouted to his heavily burdened porters, dropping his unwanted equipment into the mud for them to pick up. ‘You can fill your bellies with meat and fat tonight, if you put your feet to it now.’

  They had to gamble all Zouga’s remaining strength on the opening play, using speed to beat the rain and to reach the bulls before they made a turn into the wind and took the scent. They ran at the spoor, going hard from the first, knowing that even a healthy man could not hold that pace beyond an hour or two at the most before his heart broke.

  In the first mile Zouga’s vision was starring and fragmenting again, sweat drenched his lean body and he reeled like a drunkard as his legs threatened to give under him.

  ‘Run through it,’ Jan Cheroot counselled him grimly.

  He did it, by a sheer effort of will. He drove himself through to that place beyond the pain. Quite suddenly his vision cleared and though there was no feeling at all in his legs they drove on steadily under him so he seemed to float over the ground without effort.

  Running at his side Jan Cheroot recognized the moment when Zouga broke the shackles and went clear of his own weakness. He said nothing but glanced sideways at him, eyes bright with admiration and he nodded once. Zouga did not see that nod, for his head was up and his dreaming gaze was fixed far ahead.

  They ran the sun to its zenith, Jan Cheroot not daring to break the rhythm for he knew that Zouga would drop like a man shot through the heart if they stopped to rest. They ran on as the sun began to drop, pursued by the ponderous cohorts of the oncoming storm that threatened it with extinction, and their own shadows danced ahead of them along the deeply driven elephant spoor. In a tight bunch behind Zouga, his four gunbearers matched him pace for pace, ready to hand him a weapon at the instant he required it.

  The hunter’s instinct warned Jan Cheroot. He twisted his head every few minutes to look back along the trail they had already run. That was how he picked them up.

  They were two grey shadows, merging softly into the darker acacia shadows below the dripping trees, but they were moving with steadfast purpose, circling to strike their own spoor again, throwing a loop about their pursuers and taking the wind from them.

  The bulls were half a mile away, moving with that swinging deceptively leisurely gait that would bring them, within minutes, full on to the hot trail with which the small band of hunters had overlaid their own huge pug marks; the trail would be reeking with the rank odour of man, the air thick with it.

  Jan Cheroot touched Zouga’s arm, turning him back upon their own run without checking him nor breaking the driving rhythm of his numbed legs.

  ‘We have to catch them before they cut our spoor,’ he called softly. He saw Zouga’s eyes come back into focus and the colour flare in his waxen pale cheeks as Zouga turned and saw for the first time the two huge shapes cruising serenely through the open forest, under the tall umbrella-shaped acacias, moving with a stately deliber
ation down towards the string of reeking man-prints in the red mud.

  The big bull was leading, his gaunt frame too tall and bony for the wasted flesh over which the skin hung in deep folds and bags. The huge yellow tusks were too long and heavy for the ancient head, and his ears were ripped and torn into scarred tatters that dangled on to his creased cheeks. He had been wallowing in a mud hole and his body was slick and shining with wet red mud.

  He stepped out on his long, heavily boned legs around which the thick loose skin bagged and drooped like a badly tailored pair of breeches, and close behind him strode his askari, a big heavily toothed elephant, but dwarfed by his leader.

  Zouga and Jan Cheroot ran together, stride for stride, their breath hissing and gasping in their throats, as they spent their last reserves to get in gunshot range before the bulls took the scent.

  They traded all stealth, any attempt at concealment for speed, trusting that the weak eyesight of the old bulls would betray them. This time, the vagaries of the weather favoured them, for as they ran, the storm burst about them again.

  It had held off just long enough to allow them to come up, and now the thick streamers of pale grey rain were drawn across the forest like lace curtains and the bad light beneath the thick cloud banks gave them cover to cross the last few hundred yards unseen, and the tapping rain and the rush of the wind in the branches of the acacias muffled their racing footfalls.

  A hundred and fifty yards ahead of Zouga the old bull hit the man spoor, and it stopped him as though he had run into the side of an invisible cliff of glass. He flared back on his hind quarters, his back humping and his wrinkled ivoried head flying up high, the ragged banners of his ears filling like the mainsail of a tall ship, and clapping thunderously as he flapped them against his shoulders.