She was a young white woman, and she was immediately familiar to Tungata. He stared at her sharply, not quite able to place her. She had gone very pale under his scrutiny, and her eyes were dark and terrified as those of a hunted animal. The hand in his was limp and cold, and trembled violently still Tungata could not decide where he had seen her before.
"Doctor Carpenter is the curator of the Entomological Section."
The name meant nothing to Tungata, and he turned away from her, irritated by his own inability to place her. He took his seat in the centre of the platform facing the auditorium, and the South African Museum's curator rose to address the gathering.
"All the credit for the successful negotiation of the exchange between our two institutions must go to the honourable minister who today honours us with his presence." He was reading from a typed sheet, clearly anxious to have done with speaking and sit down again. "It was at Minister Tungata Zebiwe's initiative that discussions first took place, and he sustained these during the difficult period when we appeared to be making little or no progress. Our great problem was in setting a relative value on two such diverse exhibits. On one hand you had one of the world's most extensive and exhaustive collections of tropical insects, representing many decades of dedicated collecting and classification, while on the other hand we had these unique artefacts from an unknown civilization." Van der Walt seemed to be warming to his subject enough to look up from his prepared script. "However, it was the honourable minister's determination to regain for his new nation a priceless part of its heritage that at last prevailed, and it is to his credit entirely that we are gathered here today." When at last Van der Walt sat down again, there was a polite splattering of applause, and then an expectant silence as Tungata Zebiwe rose to his feet. The minister had an immense presence, and without yet uttering a word, he transfixed them with his smoky unwavering gaze.
"My people have a saying that was passed down from the wise ones of our tribe," he started in his deep rumbling voice. "It is this. The white eagle has stooped on the stone falcons and cast them to earth.
Now the eagle shall lift them up again and they will fly afar. There shall be no peace in the kingdoms of the Mambos or the Monomatopas until they return. For the white eagle will war with the black bull until the stone falcons return to roost." Tungata paused a moment, letting his words hang between them, heavy with portent. Then he went on. "I am sure all of you here know the story of how the bird statues of Zimbabwe were seized by Rhodes" plunderers, and despite the efforts of my ancestors to prevent it, how they were carried away southwards across the Limpopo river." Tungata left the podium and strode to the curtained-off section at the back of the speakers" platform. "My friends, my comrades," he turned to face them once more.
"The stone falcons have returned to roost!" he said, and drew aside the curtains.
There was a long breathless silence and the audience stared avidly at the serried rank of tall soapstone carvings that was revealed.
There were six of them, and they were those that Ralph Ballantyne had lifted from the ancient stone temple. The one that his father had taken on his first visit to Zimbabwe thirty years before had burned in the pyre of Groote Schuur. These six were all that remained.
The soapstone -from which each of the birds was carved was of a greenish satiny texture. Each bird' crouched on top of a plinth that was ornamented by a pattern of intermeshed triangles like the teeth in a shark's jaw. The statues were not identical. some of the columns supported crocodiles and lizards that crawled up towards the bird image that surmounted it.
Some of the statues had been extensively damaged, chipped and eroded, but the one in the centre of the line was "almost perfect. The bird was a stylized raptor, with its long blade like wings crossed over its back. The head was proud and erect, the cruel beak hooked and the blind eyes haughty and unforgiving. It was a magnificent and evocative work of primitive art, and the crowded auditorium rose as one person in spontaneous applause.
Tungata Zebiwe reached out and touched the head of the central bird. His back was turned to his audience so that they could not see his lips move, and the applause drowned his whisper.
"Welcome home," he whispered. "Welcome home to Zimbabwe. Bird of my destiny." you do not want to go!" Janine was shaking "Now with fury. "After all the pains I have gone to, to arrange this meeting.
Now you simply do not want to go!" "Jan, it's a waste of time." "Thank you!" She put her face closer to his. "Thank you for that. Do you realize what it would cost me to face that monster again, but I was prepared to do it for you, and now it's a waste of time." "Jan, please-" "Damn you, Craig Mellow, it's you who are a waste of time, you and your endless cowardice." He gasped and drew away from her.
"Cowardice," she repeated deliberately. "I say that, and I mean it.
You were in too much of a blue funk to send that bloody book of yours to a publisher. I had literally to tear it away from you and send it off." She broke off, panting with anger, searching for words sharp enough to express her fury.
"You are afraid to face life, afraid to leave this cave you have built for yourself, afraid to take the chance of somebody rejecting your book, afraid to make any effort to float this thing you have built." With a wide, extravagant gesture she indicated the yacht. "I see it now, you don't really want to get onto the ocean, you prefer to hide here, swilling gin and covering yourself with dreams. You don't want to walk, you prefer to drag yourself around on your backside it's your excuse, your grand cast-iron excuse to dodge life." Again she had to stop for breath, and then she went on. "That's right, put that little-boy look on your face, make those big sad eyes, it works every time, doesn't it? Well, not this time, buster, not this time. They have offered me the job of curator at the South African Museum. I'm to see the collection safely installed in its new home, and I'm going to take it. Do you hear me, Craig Mellow? I'm going to leave you to crawl around on the floor because you're too damned scared to stand up." She flung herself out of the saloon and into the forward cabin.
She began to snatch her clothes out of the stowage and throw them onto the bunk.
"Jan,"he said behind her.
"What is it now? "She did not look around.
"If we are going to be there by three o'clock, then we'd better leave right away, "Craig said.
"You can drive," she said and pushed past him and went up in the cockpit, leaving him to follow at his best speed. They drove in silence until they reached the entrance to the long straight avenue of jacaranda trees. At the far end of it were the white gates of State House, and Janine stared straight ahead at them.
"I'm sorry, Craig. I said things that were hard to say and must have been harder to listen to. The truth is that I am as afraid as you are. I am going to face the man that destroyed me. If I can do it, then perhaps I can retrieve something of myself from the ruins. I lied when I said it was for you. It's for both of us." The police guard came to the driver's side of the maroon Land-Rover, and without a word Craig handed him the appointment card. The constable checked it against his visitors" book, and then made Craig fill in his name and address and the reason for his visit.
Craig wrote. "Visit to Comrade Minister Tungata Zebiwe', and the guard took the book back from him and saluted smartly.
The wrought-iron gates swung open and Craig drove through. They turned left towards the minister's annexe, with just a glimpse of the white gables and blue slate roof of the main residence between the trees.
Craig parked the Land-rover in the public car park, and slid into the wheelchair. Janine walked beside him to the steps that led up onto the veranda of the annexe, and there was an awkward moment while Craig negotiated them by the sheer strength of his arms. Then they followed the signs down the trestled veranda, beneath the blue wist aria and climbing purple bougainvillaea to the door of the antechamber. One of the minister's bodyguards searched Janine's handbag, frisked Craig quickly but expertly, and then stood aside to let them enter the light and airy room.
Craig and Janine waited for almost half an hour, and then the doors opened and another suited bodyguard came through.
"The Comrade Minister will see you now." Craig wheeled himself forward and into the inner room. On the facing wall were portraits of the nation's leaders, Robert Mugabe and Josiah Inkunzi. In the centre of the wall-to-wall carpeting stood a huge desk in the style of Louis XIV. Tungata Zebiwe sat behind his desk, and even its size could not belittle him.
Involuntarily Craig stopped halfway to the desk.
"Sam?" he whispered. "Samson Kumalo? I did not know I'm sorry-" The minister stood up abruptly. Craig's shock was reflected in his own face.
"Craig," he whispered, "what happened to you?" "The war," Craig answered, "I guess I was on the wrong side, Sam." Tungata recovered swiftly, and sat down again. "That name is best forgotten," he said quietly. "Just as what we were once to each other should also be forgotten. You made an appointment through Doctor Carpenter to see me.
What was it that you wished to discuss?" Tungata listened attentively while Craig spoke, and then he leaned back in his chair.
"From what you tell me, you have already made an application to the exchange control authority for a permit to export this vessel of yours. That permit was refused?" "That is correct, Comrade Minister, "Craig nodded.
"Then what made you think I would want to or even have the authority to countermand that decision?" Tungata asked.
"I didn't really think you would, "Craig admitted." "Comrade Minister," Janine spoke for the first time, "I asked for this appointment because I believe that there are special circumstances in this case. Mr. Mellow has been crippled for life, and his only possession is this vessel." "Doctor Carpenter, he is fortunate. The forests and wilderness of this land are thickly sown with the unmarked graves of young men and women who gave more than Mr. Mellow for freedom.
You should have a better reason than that." "I think I have," Janine said softly. "Comrade Minister, you and I have met before."
"Your face is familiar to me," Tungata agreed. "But I do not recall.-" "It was at night, in the forest beside the wreckage of an aircraft-" She saw the flare of recognition in those brooding smoky eyes. They seemed to bore into her very soul. Terror came at her again in suffocating overwhelming waves, she felt the earth sway giddily under her feet, and his face filled all her vision. It took all that remained of her strength and courage to speak again.
"You won a land, but in doing so, have you lost for ever your humanity?" She saw the shift in that dark hypnotic gaze, the almost imperceptible softening of his mouth. Then Tungata Zebiwe looked down at his own powerful hands on the white blotter before him.
"You are a persuasive advocate, Doctor Carpenter," he said quietly. He picked up the gold pen from the desk set and wrote briefly on the monogrammed pad. He tore off the sheet and stood up. He came around the desk and towards Janine.
"In war there are atrocities committed even by decent men," he said quietly. "War makes monsters of us all. I thank you for reminding me of my own humanity." He handed her the sheet of paper.
"Take that to the exchange control director," he told her. "You will have your permit." "Thank you, Sam." Craig looked up at him, and Tungata stooped over him and embraced him briefly but ardently. "Go in peace, old friend, he said, in Sindebele, and then straightened up.
"Get him out of here, Doctor Carpenter, before he unmans me completely," Tungata Zebiwe ordered harshly, and strode to the wide sash-windows.
He stared out across the green lawns until he heard the double doors close behind him, then he sighed softly and went back to his desk.
"It's strange to think that that is the same view of Africa as Robyn and Zouga Ballantyne had in 1860 when they arrived in the slaving clipper Huron." Craig pointed back over the stern at the great massif of Table Mountain standing perpetual guard over the southernmost tip of a continent, wreathed in the silver clouds that spilled over her weathered brow of stark rock. Around the foot of the mountain, like a necklace around the throat, were strung the white buildings with their windows shining in the early sunlight like ten thousand beacon fires.
"This is where it all began, my family's great African adventure, and this is where it all ends." "It's an end," Janine agreed quietly.
"But it's also a new beginning." She was standing in the stern, with one hand on the back stay for balance.
She wore a thin tee-shirt and blue denim pants with the legs hacked off short, exposing her long brown legs. During the months of final fitting-out of the yacht, in the basin of the Royal Cape Yacht Club, she had put herself on a strict diet. no wine, no gin and no white food. Her waist had fined down, and the buttocks that peeked out from under the ragged bottoms of her pants were round and tight and hard once again.
She had cut her hair as short as a boy's and the salt sea air had made it curl tightly against her scalp. The sun had darkened her face and burned away the blemishes around the corners of her mouth and across her chin. Now she revolved slowly, taking in the wide horizon ahead of them. "It's so big, Craig,"she said, "aren't you scared?" "Scared as hell," he grinned up at her. "I am not certain whether our next landfall will be South America or India, but it's exciting also." "I'll make us a mug of cocoa," she said. "I hate this drying-out period."
"It's your own rule to have no liquor on board you'll have to wait until South America or India, or whatever." She ducked down into the saloon, but before she reached the galley the radio above the chart-table squawked.
"Zulu Romeo Foxtrot. This is Cape Town marine radio. Come in, please." "Jan, that's us. Take it," Craig yelled. "Someone at the yacht club saying goodbye, probably." "Cape Town marine radio, this is Zulu Romeo Foxtrot. Let's go to Channel 10." "Is that the yacht Bawu?"
The operator's voice was clear and undistorted, for they were still on line of sight to the antenna above the harbour.
"Affirmative. This is Bawu." "We have a radio-gram for you. Are you ready to copy?" "Go ahead, Cape Town." "Message reads. "For Craig Mellow regarding your typescript A Falcon Flies STOP we wish to publish and offer advance of $5,000 against 12V, per cent royalties on world rights STOP reply soonest congratulations from Pick chairman William Heinemann Publishers London."" "Craig," Janine shrieked from below.
"Did you hear? Did you hear that?" He could not answer her. His hands were frozen to the wheel and he was staring directly ahead over Bawu's bows as they rose and fell gently across the distant blue horizon of the Atlantic Ocean.
Two days out, the gale came out of the south-east without any warning. It laid Bawu over until solid T green water came in over the rail and swept Janine out of the cockpit. Only her safety-line saved her, and Craig struggled for ten minutes to get her back on board, while the yacht paid off madly before the wind and the jib sail burst with a crash like cannonshot.
The gale lasted five days and five nights, during which time there seemed to be no clear dividing line between mad wind and wild water.
They lived in a deafening cacophony Of sound as the gale played on Bawu's hull like a crazed violinist, and the Atlantic grey-beards marched down upon them in majestic succession. They lived with the cold in their bones, soaked to the skin, and with their hands white and wrinkled like those of a drowned man, and the soft skin torn by harsh nylon sheets and stiff unyielding sails. Once in a while they snatched a dry biscuit or a mouthful of cold congealed beans, and washed it down with plain water, then crawled back on deck again. They slept in turns for a few minutes at a time on top of the bundled wet sails that had been stuffed down the companionway into the saloon.
They went into the storm as green-horns and when the wind dropped as suddenly as it had attacked them, they were sailors utterly exhausted and gaunt with the terror
through which they had lived, but with a new pride in themselves and the vessel that had borne them.
Craig had just sufficient strength to heave the yacht to, and let her ride the smooth but still mountainous swells on her own. Then he dragged himself to his bunk, dropped his stinking wet clothing on the deck and fell back naked on the rough blanket and slept for eighteen hours straight.
He woke to a new tumult of emotions, uncertain of what was fantasy and what was reality. Where before there had been no sensation at all, his lower body was locked in an agonizing spasm. He could feel each separate muscle, and they seemed pitted against each other to the point of tearing or bursting. From the sole of his foot to the pit of his stomach, his nerve-ends felt as though they were scraped raw. He cried out as the pain threatened to swamp him, and then in the pain found suddenly the beginnings of exquisite, almost insupportable, pleasure.
He cried out again, and heard his cry echoed from above him. He opened his eyes and Janine's face was inches above his, her naked body pressed against his from breast to thighs. He tried to speak, but she gagged him with her own lips, and moaned into his mouth. Abruptly he realized that he was buried deeply in her heat and silken elasticity, and they were borne aloft on a wave of triumph higher and fiercer than any that the Atlantic had hurled at them during the gale.
Wilbur Smith - B3 The Angels Weep Page 64