A Falcon Flies

by Wilbur Smith

  Even in the subdued light of the hut, the thin irregular seam of metal that wavered uncertainly between quartz crystals flicked a pin-prick of bright gold into his eyes. Zouga stared at it numbly, twisting the lump of quartz to catch the light and make it twinkle. There was a sense of unreality about the moment, as there always is when something sought for and longed for is at last held in the hand.

  He found his voice at last, a hoarse croak through his swollen, blistered, powder-scorched lips, and Jan Cheroot came almost immediately.

  ‘The grave,’ he whispered urgently, ‘Matthew’s grave, it was dug so swiftly in such rocky soil.’

  ‘No,’ Jan Cheroot shook his head. ‘It was there. There are other holes like it along the ridge.’

  Zouga stared at him for a long moment, his face lopsided with the scabbed and stitched wound, his one eye a mere slit in the puffed and bruised flesh. He had let himself sink low from the wound. It had been under his nose and he had almost missed it. He started to drag himself out of his blanket.

  ‘Help me!’ he ordered. ‘I must see them. Show me these holes.’

  Leaning on Jan Cheroot’s shoulder, stooped to favour his shoulder, he dragged himself along the ridge in the rain, and when at last he was satisfied, he limped back to the hut and used the last feeble light of that day to scrawl in his journal, holding it in his lap and bowing over it to protect the pages from the drip of rain through the rough thatching, using his left hand so the writing was barely decipherable.

  ‘I have named it the Harkness Mine, for this must be very similar to the ancient workings that old Tom described. The reef is white sugar quartz and runs along the back of the ridge. It would appear to be very narrow but rich, for there is visible gold in many of the samples. My injury prevents me crushing and panning these, but I would estimate values well in excess of two ounces of fine gold to the ton of quartz.

  ‘The ancient miners have driven four shafts into the hillside. There may be more that I overlooked, for they are heavily overgrown and an attempt has been made to refill the shafts, possibly to conceal them.

  ‘The shafts are large enough to admit a small man crawling on hands and knees. Probably they used child-slaves in the diggings and the conditions of labour in these rabbit warrens must have been infernal. In any event they were only able to go down as far as the water table, and without sophisticated machinery to pump the flooded working, they would have been abandoned. This is probably what happened here at the Harkness Mine and there is almost certainly a great amount of gold-bearing ore to be recovered by modern methods.

  ‘The rock dump on which stands my rude hut is composed almost entirely of the gold matrix, awaiting crushing and refining, and the miners were probably driven away by an enemy before they could complete their labours.

  ‘I am couched upon a mattress of gold, and like King Midas all around me is the precious metal. Like that unfortunate King, there seems to be little profit in it for me that I can perceive at this moment—’

  Zouga paused, and laid his pen aside, warming his icy hands at the smoky fire. He should have felt wildly elated. He picked up his pen once again. He sighed and then wrote tortuously,

  ‘I have a huge store of ivory, but it is spread across this land, buried in small caches. I have fifty pounds and more of native gold in ingot and nugget, and I have discovered the mother lode of untold fortune, but it cannot buy me a pound flask of gunpowder nor an unguent for my grievous injuries.

  ‘I will not know until tomorrow if I have the strength remaining to me to continue the march to the south, or if I am destined to remain here with Matthew and the great elephant as my only companions.’

  Jan Cheroot shook him awake. It took a long time. Zouga seemed to be swimming up from great depths through cold and murky water, and when at last he surfaced, he knew immediately that his gloomy prophecy written in the journal the previous evening had become reality. There was no feeling or strength in his legs. His shoulder and arm were bound rock hard with spasmed muscle.

  ‘Leave me here,’ he said to Jan Cheroot, and the Hottentot heaved him to a sitting position, snarling at him when Zouga cried out at the agony of each movement, and forced him to drink the steaming hot soup made from elephant marrowbones.

  ‘Leave one gun with me,’ Zouga whispered.

  ‘Here.’ Jan Cheroot ignored the order and instead made him take the bitter white powder. Zouga gagged on the quinine.

  It took two porters to get him on his feet.

  ‘I am leaving that stone.’ Jan Cheroot pointed to the packaged statute. ‘We cannot carry both of you.’

  ‘No!’ Zouga whispered fiercely. ‘If I go, the bird must go with me.’

  ‘How?’

  Zouga shrugged off their hands.

  ‘I will walk,’ he said. ‘Carry the bird.’

  They made less than five miles that day, but the following day the sun emerged again to cheer them on. Once it warmed Zouga’s abused muscles, he could increase the pace.

  That night he logged ten miles in his journal when they camped in open grassland. In the dawn Zouga was able to crawl from his blankets and gain his feet unaided. His injuries still stiff, he used the staff to leave the thorn scherm by its single gate and limp to the periphery of the camp. When he urinated his water was a dark amber colour from the fever and the quinine, but he knew now that he was going to be able to continue the march.

  He looked up at the sky. It would rain again soon. They should start at once. He was about to turn back to the camp and rouse the porters when movement in the tall grass caught his attention.

  For a moment he thought it might be a troop of wild ostrich passing the camp, then suddenly he realized that the whole plain was alive with swift but stealthy movement, the fluffy grass tops rustling and nodding with the passage of many bodies, only now and again there was a brief glimpse of ruffled plumes above the grass. The movement spread swiftly around both sides of the small camp, where Zouga’s men still slept.

  Zouga stared uncomprehendingly, leaning on his staff, still muzzy with sleep and fever and anchored by his injuries, he did not move until the swift encircling movement had been completed, and then the stillness and silence descended again so for a moment he believed he had been imagining phantoms.

  Then there was a soft fluting whistle, like a blast on Pan’s pipe, sweet and hauntingly melodious in the dawn, and immediately there was movement again, an encroaching movement, like a strangler’s hand upon the throat. Zouga saw the ostrich plumes clearly now, snowy white and dead black they swayed and danced above the grass tops, and immediately afterwards he saw the war shields, long oval shields of dappled black and white cowhide. The long shields – the Matabele.

  Dread was a cold, heavy lump under his ribs, yet instinct warned him that to show it would mean death, just when he had once again believed in life.

  There were a hundred, he calculated swiftly as he glanced around the closing ring of warriors. No, there were more than that, at least two hundred Matabele amadoda in full war plumage, only the plumes and their eyes showing above the tops of the long dappled shields. The grey dawn light glinted on the broad-bladed stabbing spears, held underhand so the points protruded beyond the ring of shields. The ring was unbroken, shield overlapped shield, the encircling horns of the bull, the classic tactics of the Matabele, the finest and most ruthless warriors that the continent of Africa had ever spawned.

  ‘Here Mzilikazi’s border impis kill all travellers,’ Tom Harkness had written.

  Zouga drew himself up and stepped forward, holding up his one good arm with the palm extended towards the ring of shields.

  ‘I am an Englishman. A commander of the great white Queen, Victoria. My name is Bakela, son of Manali, son of Tshedi – and I come in peace.’

  From the ranks stepped a man. He was taller than Zouga and his tossing ostrich plumes turned him into a giant. He swept aside his shield, and he was lean and muscled like a gladiator. On his upper arms he wore the tassels of cow tails, ea
ch one awarded him by his King for an act of valour. The cow tails were thick bunches, layer upon layer. His short kilt was of spotted civet cat tails, and there were more cow tails bound around his calves just below the knees. He had the handsome smooth moon-face of the true Nguni, with a broad nose and full sculptured lips. His bearing was noble, the carriage of his head proud.

  He looked at Zouga slowly and with grave attention. He looked at his tattered rags, at the untidy bindings that held his damaged arm, the staff on which he leaned like an old man.

  He studied Zouga’s singed beard, and powder-burned cheeks, the blisters on his lips and the black scabs that clung obscenely on his swollen discoloured cheek.

  Then the Matabele laughed. It was a deep musical laugh, and then he spoke.

  ‘And I,’ he said, ‘am Matabele. An Induna of two thousand. My name is Gandang, son of Mzilikazi, son of the high heavens, son of Zulu, and I come with a bright spear and a red heart.’

  Robyn Ballantyne realized within the first day’s march that she had seriously miscalculated her father’s strength and resilience when she made the decision to try for the coast. Perhaps Zouga had divined instinctively what she a trained physician should have known. That thought made her angry with herself. She found that since parting with Zouga her hostility and sense of rivalry towards him had, if anything, increased. It made her angry that he should have given the correct advice.

  By noon of that first day Robyn had been forced to call a halt and to go into camp. Fuller Ballantyne was very weak, weaker than he had been when first she found him. His skin was burning hot and dry to the touch. The movement of the litter, the jolting and bumping over uneven ground had aggravated Fuller’s leg. It was grotesquely swollen, and so tender that he screamed and fought at the lightest touch upon the discoloured skin.

  Robyn had one of the bearers begin work on a cradle of green twigs and bark to place over the leg and keep the fur blanket off it, and then she sat by the litter applying a damp, cool cloth to her father’s forehead and speaking to little Juba and the Mashona woman, not expecting nor receiving advice from them, but taking comfort from the human contact.

  ‘Perhaps we should have stayed at the cave,’ she fretted. ‘At least he would have been more comfortable there, but then for how long could we have stayed?’ She spoke her thoughts aloud. ‘The rains will be on us soon. We could not have stayed, and even if we march as slowly as this, we will still be trapped here by them. We simply must increase the pace – and yet I do not know if he can survive it.’

  However, on the following day Fuller seemed stronger again, the fever had cooled, and they made a full day’s march, but in the evening when they went into camp he had once more sunk very low.

  When Robyn removed the dressing from the leg, it seemed to be less sensitive, and she was relieved – until she saw the colour of the skin around the ulceration. When she lifted the soiled dressing to her nose and sniffed it, she caught the taint that her professor of medicine at St Matthew’s had taught her to watch for. It was not the usual taint of benign pus, but a more pervasive odour, the smell of a decomposing corpse. Her alarm flared, and she threw the dressing on the fire and with dread returned to her examination of the leg.

  From the inside of the groin, down the wasted thigh muscles, there were the unmistakable scarlet lines beneath the thin pale skin, and the extreme sensitivity of the area seemed to have passed. It was almost as though Fuller had no further feeling in the leg.

  Robyn tried to console herself that the change and mortification in the leg was unconnected with having carried him two days in a litter over rough ground. But what other reasons were there? She could find no answer. Before the move, the ulceration had been stabilized, for it was almost eighteen months since the slaver’s ball had shattered the bone.

  The movement in the litter must have precipitated some serious change in the limb, and this was the result.

  Robyn felt herself culpable. She should have listened to Zouga. She had brought this on her own father. Gas-gangrene. She could only hope that she was wrong, but she knew she was not. The symptoms were unmistakable. She could only continue the march and hope they would reach the coast and civilization before the disease swept to its inevitable climax – but she knew that hope was futile.

  She wished that she had been able to develop the same philosophical acceptance that most of her fellow physicians cultivated in the face of disease or injury which were beyond their training and ability to alleviate. But she knew she never could, always she would be victim of this helpless sense of frustration, and this time the patient was her own father.

  She bound up the leg in a hot compress and knew that it was a pathetic gesture, like trying to hold back the tide with a child’s sand-castle. In the morning the leg felt cooler to the touch, and the flesh seemed to have lost resilience so that her fingers left depressions as though she had touched unleavened bread. The smell was stronger.

  They made a full day’s march, and Fuller was silent and comatose in the litter as Robyn walked beside it. He no longer chanted psalms and wild exhortations to the Almighty, and she thanked God that at least there was no pain.

  In the late afternoon they met a broad pathway, well travelled and running east and west as far as Robyn could see it. It fitted exactly the description and the location that her father had written of in his journal. Little Juba burst into tears and was rendered almost helpless with terror when she saw the road.

  They found an encampment of deserted and dilapidated huts, that might have been those used by the slave-traders, and Robyn ordered camp there. She left the Mashona woman and the still snivelling and shivering Juba to tend Fuller Ballantyne, and she took only old Karanga with her. He armed himself with his long spear, and strutted like an ancient peacock to be so honoured. Within two miles, the pathway climbed steeply to pass through a saddle in a line of low hills.

  Robyn was seeking evidence that this was indeed the slave road, the Hyena Road, as Juba called it tearfully.

  She found her evidence on the saddle, lying in the grass a few paces from the edge of the track. It was a double yoke, hewn from a forked tree trunk and roughly dressed with an axe.

  Robyn had studied the sketches in her father’s journal, and she recognized it immediately. When the slave-masters did not have chains and cuffs, they used these yokes to bind their captives around their necks; two slaves linked together and forced to do everything in concert, march, eat, sleep and defecate – everything except escape.

  Now all that remained of the slaves who had once worn the yoke were a few fragments of bone that the vultures and hyena had overlooked. There was something terribly sad and chilling about that roughly carved fork of wood, and Robyn could not bring herself to touch it. She said a short prayer for the unfortunate slaves who had died on that spot and then, with her knowledge that she was on the slave road confirmed, she turned back towards the camp.

  That night she held counsel with the Hottentot Corporal, old Karanga and Juba.

  ‘This camp and road have not been used for this many days,’ Karanga showed Robyn both hands twice with fingers spread, ‘twenty days.’

  ‘Which way did they go?’ Robyn asked. She had come to have confidence in the old man’s tracking ability.

  ‘They were moving along the road towards the sunrise, and they have not yet returned,’ quavered Karanga.

  ‘It is even as he says,’ Juba agreed, and it must have been an effort to agree with somebody for whom she had such disdain and jealousy. ‘The slavers will make this the last caravan before the rains. There will be no trading after the rivers are full, and the Hyena Road will grow grass until the dry season comes again.’

  ‘So there is a caravan of slavers ahead of us,’ Robyn mused. ‘If we follow the road we may overtake them.’

  The Hottentot Corporal interrupted. ‘That will not be possible, madam. They are weeks ahead of us.’

  ‘Then we will meet them returning, after having sold their slaves.’


  The Corporal nodded and Robyn asked him, ‘Will you be able to defend us, if the slavers decide to attack our column?’

  ‘Me and my men,’ the Corporal drew himself to his full height, ‘are a match for a hundred dirty slavers,’ he paused and then went on, ‘and you shoot like a man, madam!’

  Robyn smiled. ‘All right,’ she nodded. ‘We will follow the road down to the sea.’

  And the Corporal grinned at her. ‘I am sick of this country and its savages, I long to see the cloud on Table Mountain and wash the taste of dust from my throat with good Cape Smoke once again.’

  The hyena was an old male. There were patches of fur missing from his thick shaggy coat, and his flat, almost snakelike head was covered with scars, his ears ripped away by thorns and a hundred snapping, snarling encounters over the decomposing carcasses of men and animals. His lip had been torn up into the soft of the nostril in one of these fights and had healed askew, so that the yellow teeth in one side of his upper jaw were exposed in a hideous grin.

  His teeth were worn with age, so that he could no longer crush the heavy bones that made up the bulk of hyena diet, and unable to compete, he had been driven from the hunting pack.

  There had been no human corpses along the trail since the slave column had passed weeks before, and game was scarce in this dry country. Since then the hyena had subsisted on scrapings, the fresh dung of jackal and baboon, a nest of field mice, the long-abandoned and addled egg of an ostrich which had burst in a sulphurous geyser of gas and putrefied liquid when he pawed at it. However, even though the hyena was starving, he still stood almost three foot high at the shoulder and weighed 140 pounds.

  His belly under the matted and scruffy coat was concave as that of a greyhound. From high ungainly shoulders, his spine slanted back in a bony ridge to his scraggy hindquarters.