Wilbur Smith - B3 The Angels Weep

by B3 The Angels Weep(Lit)

  Janine explained her reasons for not accepting the invitation of Douglas and Valerie to live at Queen's Lynn. "They look at me with such pity, that I start to feel it all over again. It would be like going into a state of perpetual mourning." He told her about St. Giles', and the way he had absconded. "They say it's not my legs, but my head that prevents me from walking. Either they are crazy or I am I prefer to think that it's them." He had two steaks in the refrigerator, and he grilled them on the gas while she made a dressing for the salad, and while they worked he explained all the modifications that he had made to the layout of the yacht.

  "With the roller boom, I would be able to shorten or make sail without leaving the cockpit," he chatted on. "I bet that I could manage her single-handed. It's a pity I'm not ever going to have the chance." "What do you mean?" She stopped with an onion in one hand and a knife in the other.

  "My darling is never going to feel the kiss of salt water on her bottom," he explained. "They have impounded her." "Craig, I don't understand." "I applied to the exchange control authorities for a permit to ship her to the coast. You know what they are like, don't you?" "I've heard they are pretty rough," she answered.

  "Rough? That's like calling Attila the Hun unkind. If you try to get out of the country, even as a legal emigrant, they allow you to take out only a thousand dollars" worth of goods or cash. Well, they sent an inspector round and he valued the yacht at two hundred and fifty thousand. If I want to take it out, I have to make a cash deposit of a quarter of a million dollars, a quarter of a million! I have a little over ten thousand dollars between me and prostitution, so until I come up with another two hundred and forty thousand, here I sit." "Craig, that's cruel. Couldn't you appeal? I mean in your special circumstances?" She stopped herself when she saw the little arrowhead of a frown appear between his eyes. Craig brushed over the reference to his disability.

  "You can see their point of view, I suppose. Every white man in the country wants to get out before the big black baddies take over.

  We would strip the country bare if there was no control." "But, Craig, what are you going to do?" "Stay here, I suppose. I don't have much alternative. I'll sit here and read His cock's Voyaging Under Sail and Mellor's Cruising Safe and Simple." "I wish there was something I could do to help." "There is. You can lay the table and hook a bottle of wine out of the cupboard." Janine left more than half her steak, and drank little of the wine, then she wandered across the saloon to examine his collection of tapes..

  Taganini's Capricci," she murmured, "now I know you are a masochist." And then her attention was attracted to the neat square pile of the typescript on the shelf beside the tapes.

  "What is this?" She turned the first few sheets, and then looked up at him. Those beautiful blue eyes in the once beautiful face, that was now swollen and distorted with fat and speckled about the chin with angry little blemishes, made his heart plunge. "What is it?" And then, seeing his expression, "Oh, I'm sorry. It's none of my business."

  "No!" he said, quickly. "It's not that. It's just that I don't really know what it is-" He couldn't call it a book, and it would be pretentious to call it a novel. "It's just something I have been fiddling with." Janine riffled the edges of the sheets. The pile was over twelve inches deep. "It doesn't look like fiddling," she said, "To me it looks like deadly earnest!" "It's a story I have been trying to write down." may I read it?" she asked, and he felt panic rising in him. "Oh, it wouldn't interest you." "How do you know?" She lugged the huge typescript to the table. "May I read it?" He shrugged helplessly, "I don't think you will get far, but if you would like to try-" She sat down and read the first page.

  "It's still very rough, you must make allowances, "he said.

  "Craig, you still don't know when to shut up, do you?" she said, without looking up. She turned the page.

  He took the plates and glasses through to the galley and washed them, then he made coffee and brought the pot to the saloon table.

  Janine did not look up. He poured her a mug, and she did not look up from the page.

  After a while he left her and slid through to his cabin. He stretched out on the bunk, and picked up the book he was reading from the bedside table. It was Crawford's Mariners" Celestial No6gation, and he began to wrestle distractedly with zenith distances and azimuth angles. He woke with Janine's hand on his cheek. She jerked her fingers away as he sat up hurriedly.

  "What time is it?"he asked groggily.

  "It's morning, I have to go. I didn't sleep all night. I don't know how I will get through work today." "Will you come back? "he demanded, coming full awake.

  "I have to, I have to finish reading. I would take it with me, but I'd need a camel to carry it, it's so big." She stood over the bunk looking down at him, with a strange speculation in those slanted dark blue eyes.

  "It's difficult to believe that was written by somebody I thought that I knew," she mused softly. "I realize that I really knew very little about you at all." She glanced at her watch. "Oh, my gosh! I have to fly!" She parked the VW under the mango trees beside the yacht a little after five o'clock that evening.

  "I have brought the steaks," she called, "and the wine." She came up the ladder and ducked down into the saloon. Her voice floated up to him in the cockpit, "But you'll have to cook them. I can't spare the time, I'm afraid." By the time he got down into the saloon, she was already seated and completely engrossed in the massive typescript.

  It was long past midnight when she turned the last page. When she had finished it, she sat quietly with her hands clasped in her lap, staring at the pile of paper silently.

  Then when she looked up at him at last, her eyes were bright and wet with tears.

  "It's magnificent," she said quietly. "It will take me a little time before I can get over it enough to talk about it rationally, and then I will want to read it again." The following evening, she brought a fat Cornish chicken. "It's range-fed," she told him. "One more steak and you would start growing horns." She made a coq all yin and while they ate, she demanded an explanation of the characters in his typescript.

  "Was Mr. Rhodes really a homosexual?" "There doesn't seem to be any other explanation," he defended himself. "So many great men are hounded to greatness by their own imperfections." "What about Lobengula? Was his first love really a captured white girl? Did he commit suicide? And Robyn Ballantyne tell me more about her, did she impersonate a man to enrol in medical school? How much of that is true?" "Does it matter?" Craig laughed at her. "It's just a story, the way it might have been. I was just trying to portray an age, and the mood of that age." "Oh, yes, it does matter," she said seriously. "It matters very much to me. You have made it matter. It is as though I am a part of it you have made me a part of it all." That night when it grew late, Craig said simply, "I made up the bunk in the forward cabin, it seems silly for you to drive all that way home." She stayed, and the following evening she brought a valise which she unpacked into the stowage of the forward cabin, and they settled slowly into a routine. She had first use of the shower and heads in the morning while he made the breakfast. He did the cleaning and made up the bunks while she did the shopping and any other errands for him during her lunch break When she arrived back at the yacht in the evenings, she would change into a tee-shirt and jeans, then help him with the work on the yacht. She was particularly good at sanding and varnishing, she had more patience and dexterity than Craig did.

  At the end of the first week, Craig suggested, "It would save you a bundle if you gave up that flat of yours." "I'll pay you rent," she agreed, and when he protested, "Okay, then, I get the food and liquor agreed?" That night just after she had doused the gaslight in her cabin, she called through the dark saloon to his stern cabin.

  "Craig, do you know, this is the first time that I feel safe since-" She did not finish.

  "I know how you feel," he assured her. "Goodnight, Skipper." Yet it was only a few nights later that he came awake to her screams. They were so anguished, so tormented and heartrending
, that for seconds he could not move, then he tumbled from his bunk and sprawled on the deck in his haste to get to her. He fumbled and found the switch to the fluorescent tube in the saloon, and then clawed himself down the companionway.

  In the reflected light from the saloon, he saw her crouched in one corner of the cabin. Her bedclothes were hanging in untidy festoons from the bunk, her nightdress was tucked up around her naked thighs and her fingers formed a cage across her terrified contorted face.

  He reached for her. "Jan, it's all right. I'm here!" He wrapped both arms around her, to try and still those dreadful cries of terror.

  Immediately she turned into a maddened animal, and she flew at him.

  Her nails slashed down his forehead, and had he not jerked away, he would have lost his eye, the bloody parallel wounds ended in his eyebrow, and thick dark blood oozed into his -eye, half-blinding him.

  Her strength was out of all proportion to her size, he could not hold her, and the harder he tried, the wilder she became. She sank her teeth into his bare forearm, leaving a crescent-shaped bite-mark deep in his flesh.

  He rolled away from her, and instantly she crawled back into the corner, and crouched there, keening and blubbering to herself, staring at him with glittering unseeing eyes. Craig felt his skin crawl and itch with dread and his own horror. Once again he tried to reach her, but at first advance she bared her teeth like a rabid dog and snarled at him.

  He rolled out of the cabin and dragged himself into the saloon.

  Frantically he searched through the tapes and found Beethoven's "Pastoral." He pressed it into the slot and turned the volume up to the maximum. The magnificent music swamped the yacht.

  Slowly the sounds from her cabin dwindled into silence, and then hesitantly Janine came into the companionway of the saloon. She held her arms crossed over her chest, but the madness was gone from her eyes.

  "I had a dream," she whispered, and came to sit at the table.

  "I'll make some coffee, "he said.

  In the galley he bathed his scratches and bites with cold water, and took the coffee through to her.

  "The music-" she started, and then she saw his torn face. "Did I do that?" "It doesn't matter," he said.

  "I'm sorry, Craig," she whispered. "But you must not try to touch me. You see I am a little bit mad also. You mustn't try to touch me."

  Comrade Tungata Zebiwe, Minister for Trade, Tourism and Information in the Cabinet of the newly elected government of Zimbabwe, walked briskly along one of the narrow gravel pathways that meandered through the lush gardens of State House. His four bodyguards followed him at a respectful distance. They were all former members of his old ZIPRA cadre, each of them hardened veterans whose loyalty had been tested a hundred times. Now, however, they had changed the camouflage dungarees of the bush war for dark business suits and sunglasses, the new uniform of the political elete.

  The daily pilgrimage on which Tungata. was intent had become a ritual of his household. As one of the senior Cabinet ministers, he was entitled to luxurious quarters in one of the annexes of State House. It was an easy and congenial walk from there, through the gardens, past State House itself, to the indaba tree.

  State House was a sprawling edifice with white walls and gables, arched in the tradition of the great homes of the Cape of Good Hope.

  It had been built on the instructions of that arch-imperialist Cecil John Rhodes. His taste for the big and barbaric showed in the design, and his sense of history in his choice of the site for State House. It was built on the spot where Lobengula's kraal had once stood before it was destroyed by Rhodes" marauders when they rode in to take possession of this land.

  Beyond the great house, not two hundred paces from its wide verandas, stood a tree, a gnarled old wild plum enclosed and protected by a fence of iron palings. This tree was the object of Tungata's pilgrimage. He stopped in front of the iron palings, and his bodyguards hung back so as not to intrude on this private moment.

  Tungata stood with his feet apart and his hands clasped lightly behind his. back. He was dressed in a navy blue suit with a light chalk stripe. One of a dozen that Gieves and Hawkes of Savile Row had tailored for him during his last visit to London. It fitted his wide rangy shoulders to perfection and subtly emphasized his narrow waist and the length of his legs. He wore a snowy white shirt under it, his tie was maroon with the tiny buckle and bridle logo of Gucci picked out in blue. His shoes were by the same Italian house, and he wore his expensive Western clothes with the same ilan as his forefathers had worn the blue heron's feathers and royal leopard pelts.

  He removed the gold-rimmed aviator-type Polaroid glasses from his face, and as part of his personal ritual, read the inscription on the plaque that was riveted to the palings.

  "Beneath this tree Lobengula, the last King of the Matabele, held his court and sat in judgement." Then he looked up into the branches, as though in search of his ancestor's spirit. The tree was dying of old age, some of the central branches were black and dry, but from the rich red soil at its base new shoots were bursting into vibrant life.

  Tungata saw the significance of that and he murmured to himself, "They will grow as strong as the great tree once was and I also am a shoot of the old king's stock." There was a light tread on the gravel path behind Tungata. He frowned as he turned, but the frown cleared as he saw who it was.

  "Comrade Leila," he greeted the white woman with the pale intense face.

  "I am honoured that you call me that, Comrade Minister," Leila came directly to him and held out her hand.

  "You and your family have always been true friends of my people," he told her simply, as he took her hand. "Beneath this tree your grandmother, Robyn Ballantyne, met often with Lobengula, my great great-uncle. She came at his invitation to give him advice and counsel." "Now, I come at your invitation, and you must believe that I will always be yours to command." He released her hand and turned back to the tree, his voice had a quiet reflective quality.

  "You were with me when the Umlimo, the spirit medium of our people, made her final prediction. I thought it was right that you should be there when that prediction is brought to fruition." "The stone falcons have returned to roost," Leila St. John agreed softly.

  "But that is not all the Umlimo's prophecy. She foresaw that the man who brought the falcons back to Zimbabwe would rule the land as once did the Mambos and Monomatopas, as once did your ancestors Lobengula and great Mzilikazi." Tungata turned slowly to face her once more.

  "That is a secret that you and I share, Comrade Leila." "It will remain our secret, Comrade Tungata, but you and I both know that there will be need during the difficult years that lie ahead for a man as strong as Mzilikazi was strong." Tungata did not reply. He looked up into the branches of the ancient tree, and his lips moved in a silent supplication. Then he replaced the gold-rimmed glasses over his eyes, and turned back to Leila.

  "The car is waiting, "he said.

  It was a black bullet-proofed Mercedes 500. There were four police motorcycle outriders and a second smaller Mercedes for his bodyguards. The small convoy drove very fast, with the police sirens shrieking and wailing, and the colourful little ministerial pennant fluttering on the front of Tungata's Mercedes.

  They went down the three-kilo metre-long jacaranda lined driveway that Cecil Rhodes had designed as the approach to his State House, and then crossed the main commercial section of Bulawayo, flying through the red lights at the junctions to the geometrical grid of roads and avenues, past the town square where the wagons had laagered during the rebellion when Bazo's imp is had threatened the town, down along the wide avenue that bisected the meticulously groomed lawns of the public gardens, and at last turned off sharply and drew up in front of the modern three-storey museum building.

  There was a red carpet laid down the front steps of the museum and a small gathering of dignitaries, headed by the Mayor of Bulawayo, the first Matabele ever to hold that position, and the curator of the museum.

  "Welcome
, Comrade Minister, on this historic occasion." They escorted him down the long corridor to the public auditorium. Every seat was already filled, and as Tungata entered, the entire gathering stood and applauded him, the whites in the gathering outdoing the Matabele as a positive demonstration of their goodwill.

  Tungata was introduced to the other dignitaries on the speakers" platform. "This is Doctor Van der Walt, curator of the Southern African Museum." He was a tall balding man with a heavy South African accent. Tungata shook hands with him briefly and unsmilingly. This man represented a nation that had actively opposed the people's republican army's march to glory. Tungata turned to the next in line.