Men of Men b-2

by Wilbur Smith

  oh Ralph, we are so glad to see you. Nobody has talked of anything else since first we heard that you were upon the road."

  "Who, who are you?" Ralph blurted, his surprise and embarrassment making him boorish; but she seemed unaffected by the gauche question.

  "Salina" she said, and slipped her hand into the crook of his "elbow to lead him up the bank. "Salina Codrington."

  "I don't understand." He pulled against the hand so that she had to turn to face him again.

  "Salina -" she repeated, laughing now, and her laughter was warm and sweet as her smile. "I'm Salina Codrington." And then when it was apparent that the name meant nothing, "I'm your cousin, Ralph. My mother is your father's sister, Robyn Codrington, but she was Robyn Ballantyne., "Good God" Ralph stared at her. "I didn't know Aunt Robyn had a daughter."

  suppose not. Uncle Zouga never was a good correspondent." But suddenly the smile was no longer on Salina's lips, and Ralph remembered abruptly that he had never taken the trouble to unravel the tangled skein of family history, except to comprehend vaguely that there was ill-feeling and unsettled scores between Zouga and his Aunt Robyn. Then it came back to him, he had overheard his father recalling bitterly how Robyn had taken unfair advantage by publishing her own version of their joint expedition to the Zambezi months before Zouga's Hunter's Odyssey, thereby robbing Zouga of his fair share of critical acclaim, and royalties.

  Ralph's touching on the family enmities must account for Salina's quick change of mood, but it was fleeting.

  She took his arm again, and was smiling as they came up the bank.

  "Not one daughter, Ralph. We Codringtons will not let you off so lightly. There are a whole tribe of us, four of us, all girls." And she stopped, lifted the straw hat to shade her eyes and looked down the winding overgrown track that meandered away across the grassy savannah.

  "Oh dear!" she exclaimed. "I came ahead to warn you and I was only just in time!"

  Down the track towards them pelted three small figures, jostling one another for advantage, their faint squeaks of excitement gaining rapidly in volume, long hair flying wildly, fluttering skirts of faded and patched cloth lifted high above the knees so that bare legs flashed, faces freckled and flushed, contorted with exertion and excitement and recrimination.

  "Salina! You promised to wait!"

  They bore down on where Ralph stood with the lovely blond girl on his arm.

  "Good God!" Ralph whispered again, and Salina squeezed his elbow.

  "That's the second time that you have used the Lord's name, Cousin Ralph. Please don't." So that was the reason for her faint displeasure.

  "Oh, I'm terribly sorry." And he remembered too late that Salina's parents were pious missionaries. "I didn't mean -" Again he was thick-tongued, for suddenly this girl's opinion was the most important thing in all the world. "I won't do it again. I promise."

  "Thank you," she said softly, and before either of them could speak again they were surrounded by what appeared to be an ocean of small females, every one of which was bobbing up and down with remarkable rapidity, competing vocally for Ralph's attention and at the same time shrieking accusations at their eldest sister.

  "You cheated, Salina. You told us "Ralph, Cousin Ralph, I'm Victoria, the eldest twin."

  "Cousin Ralph, we prayed God to speed you to us."

  Salina clapped her hands, and there was a barely noticeable reduction in the volume of sound.

  "In order of age!" she said calmly.

  "You always say that because you are the eldest!"

  Salina ignored the protest and picked out a dark-haired child with a hand on her shoulder.

  "This is Catherine." She drew her forward to face Ralph. "Cathy is fourteen."

  "And a half, almost fifteen," said Cathy, and her manner changed with this declaration, becoming ladylike and controlled.

  She was thin, and as flat-chested as a boy, but the young body gave the immediate impression of strength and suppleness. Her nose and cheeks were peppered with freckles, but the mouth was full and frank, her eyes the same Ballantyne green as Ralph's own, and her thick dark brows were a frame for their bright intelligent gleam. Her chin was a little too large, as was her nose, but they had a determined set and thrust. Her thick dark hair was plaited and piled on top of her head, leaving her ears expose small and pointed and lying flat against her head.

  "Welcome to Khami, Ralph," she said evenly, and bobbed a small curtsey, holding her skirts up as she had obviously been coached; and Ralph realized that the skirt was made of old flour bags that had been stitched together and dyed a muddy green. The lettering still showed through: "Cape Flour Mills".

  Then Cathy reached up and kissed him quickly, and it left a little wet spot on Ralph's lips. Kissing was obviously the accepted family salutation, and Ralph glanced with trepidation at the eager but grubby faces of the twins.

  "I'm Victoria, the eldest., "And I'm Elizabeth, but if you call me "baby", I shall hate you, Cousin Ralph."

  "You won't hate anybody," Salina said, and Elizabeth hurled herself at Ralph's neck, got a fair grip and hung on as she plastered her mouth to Ralph's.

  "I was teasing, Ralph. I shall love you," she whispered fiercely.

  "Always! Always!"

  "Me!" howled Victoria indignantly. "I'm older than Lizzie. Me first."

  Salina led them with that gliding walk which did not move her shoulders and barely ruffled the white-gold curtain of her hair, and every once in a while she turned to smile at Ralph, and he thought he had never seen anything so lovely.

  The twins each had hold of one of Ralph's hands, and they gabbled out all the things they had saved up for weeks to tell him, and skipped to keep pace with his stride. Cathy came up behind them all, leading Tom. She and the pony had formed an immediate accord.

  oh, he's beautiful, Ralph," she had said and kissed Tom's velvety muzzle.

  "We don't have a horse," Victoria explained. "Daddy is a man of God, and men of God are too poor to have horses."

  The small party straggled over the first low rise beyond the river, and Salina stopped and pointed down into the shallow basin ahead of them.

  "Khami!" she said simply, and all of them looked to Ralph for approbation.

  There was a notch in the next line of granite hills, a natural divide and shed for underground water, which accounted for the spread of lush grass that carpeted the valley.

  Like chickens under the hen, the small huddle of buildings crouched beneath the hills. They were neatly laid out, thatched with yellow grass and painted dazzlingly white with burnt limewash. The largest building had a wooden cross set proudly on the ridge of the roof.

  "Daddy and Mummy built the church with their own hands. King Silly Cat would not allow any of his people to help them," Victoria explained.

  "Silly Cat?" Ralph asked, puzzled.

  "King Mzilikazi," Salina translated. "You know Mama does not like you using fun names for the kings, Vicky," she rebuked the child mildly; but Victoria was shaking Ralph's hand excitedly and pointing to a distant figure in the valley below them.

  "Daddy!" shrieked the twins in unison. There's Daddy!"

  He was working in the precise geometrically laid out gardens below the church, a lanky figure whose shoulders remained stooped even when he stood upright and looked towards them, stabbed his spade into the earth and came striding up the hill.

  "Ralph!" He swept off the sweatstained hat, and he was bald, like a monk, with just a fringe of silky hair forming a halo around his pate at the level of his ears. It was immediately apparent from whom Salina had inherited her glorious white-gold tresses.

  "Ralph," the man repeated, and he wiped his right hand on the seat of his pants and then held it out. Despite the stoop, he was as tall as Ralph, his face deeply tanned, his bald dome as shiny as if it had been waxed and polished, his eyes pale blue as a summer sky, washed out by heat haze; but his smile was like Salina's, calm and tranquil, so that as he took the hand Ralph realized that this was the most
contented and deeply happy man he had ever met in his life.

  "I'm Clinton Codrington," he said. "And I suppose I must count as your uncle, though goodness knows I do not feel that old."

  "I would have known you anywhere, sir," said Ralph.

  "Would you indeed?"

  "I have read Aunt Robyn's books, and I have always admired your exploits as a Royal Naval officer."

  "Oh dear." Clinton shook his head in mock dismay. "I thought to have left that all far behind me., "You were one of the most illustrious and courageous officers in the African anti-slavery squadron, sir." Ralph's eyes shone with a still boyish hero worship.

  "Your Aunt Robyn's account suffered a dreadful list to port, I'm afraid."

  "Daddy is the bravest man in the world," Victoria declared stoutly, and she released Ralph's hand and ran to her father.

  Clinton Codrington gathered her up and held her on his hip.

  "And yours, young lady, is probably the most unbiased opinion in Matabeleland," he chuckled, and Ralph was suddenly sharply jealous of this palpable aura of deep affection and love which welded the little group, from which he felt himself excluded. It was something beyond his experience, something he had never missed until that moment. Somehow Salina seemed to sense his pang of melancholy, and she took the hand that Victoria had relinquished.

  ,"come," she said. "Mama will be waiting. And there is one thing you will soon learn, Ralph. in this family, nobody keeps Mama waiting."

  They went down towards the church, passing between the beds of growing vegetables.

  "You didn't bring any seed?" Clinton asked, and when Ralph shook his head, "Well, how were you to know?"

  and he went on to point out with pride his flourishing crops. "Maize, potatoes, beans, tomatoes do particularly well here."

  "We divide it this way," Cathy told Ralph, teasing her father. "One for the bugs, two for the baboons, three for the bushbuck, and one for Daddy."

  "Be good to all God's creatures." Clinton reached out to niffle her dark hair, and Ralph realized that these gentle people were always touching and kissing one another. He had never experienced anything like it.

  Squatting patiently on the shady side against the wall of the church were twenty or more Matabele of all ages and sexes, from a skeleton-thin ancient with a completely white cap of wool on his bowed head and both his eyes turned to blind orbs of milky jelly by tropical oph thalmia to a new-born infant held against its mother's milk-swollen breasts with its tiny dark face screwed up with the terrible colic of infant dysentery.

  Catherine tethered Tom beside the church door, and they all trooped into the cool interior, insulated by thatch and thick walls of unbaked brick from the outside heat. The church smelled of homemade soap, and of iodine. The pews of rough-hewn timber had been pushed aside to make way for an operating table of the same material.

  There was a girl at work over the table, but as they came in she tied the last knot in a bandage and dismissed her semi-naked black patient with a word and a pat then, wiping her hands on a clean but threadbare cloth, she came down the aisle of the church towards them.

  Ralph was certain that she was Cathy's twin, for though she was a little taller, she was as slim and as flat-chested; her hair had the same dark brown colouring, though shot through with tones of russet and chestnut, her skin the same youthful lustre, and her nose and chin the same forceful size and thrust.

  Then as she came closer, Ralph realized that he had been mistaken and that she was older than Cathy, perhaps even older than Salina, but not much.

  "Hello, Ralph," the girl said. "I'm your Aunt Robyn."

  Ralph felt the blasphemy of surprise leap to his lips again, conscious of Salina's hand in his he suppressed it.

  "You are so young," he said instead.

  "Bless you for that," she laughed. "You turn a prettier compliment than your daddy ever did." She was the only one who made no effort to kiss him; instead she turned to the twins.

  "Right!" she said. "I want ten pages of copperplate written out before Evensong, and I don't want to see a single blot., "Oh Mama!

  Ralph "Ralph has been your excuse for two weeks. Go, or you will eat in the kitchen hut tonight."

  Then, to Cathy: "Have you finished the ironing, young lady?"

  "Not yet, Mama." Cathy followed the twins "Salina, your baking."

  "Yes, Mama."

  Then there were three of them alone in the little church, and Robyn ran a professional eye over her nephew.

  "Well, Zouga has bred a likely boy," she gave her opinion. "But I never expected anything else."

  "How did you all know I was coming?" Ralph voiced his bewilderment at last.

  "Grandpa Moffat sent a runner when you left Kuruman, and Induna Gandang passed here two weeks ago on his way to King Lobengula's kraal.

  His eldest son was with him, and Bazo's mother is an old friend of mine."

  "I see."

  "Nothing moves in Matabeleland but the whole nation knows of it immediately," Clinton explained.

  "Now, Ralph, how is your father? I was terribly distressed to hear of the death of Aletta, your mother. She was a lovely person, so good and gentle. I wrote to Zouga, but he never replied."

  Robyn seemed determined to catch up on the doings of a decade in the first ten minutes, and her questions were quick and incisive; but Clinton soon excused himself and left the two of them alone in the little church to return to his gardens.

  Ralph replied dutifully to all her questions, while he reassessed his first impression of his aunt. Youthful she looked, but childlike she was not. Now at last he could understand the remarkable achievements of this forceful woman. How she had enrolled at a famous London hospital, one which would never accept a female on its student body, by impersonating a man. Dressed in breeches, she had kept her terms and been granted her doctorate when she was twenty-one years of age. The scandal which attended the discovery that a female had invaded an exclusive male preserve had rocked all England.

  Then she had accompanied Zouga to Africa, equal partners in the expedition to find their father Fuller Ballantyne, who had been missing in the unexplored interior for eight years. When she and Zouga had fallen out over the conduct of the expedition, she had pushed on, a white woman alone with only primitive black tribesmen as companions, and achieved the main object of the expedition on her own.

  Her book describing the expedition, entitled Africa in My Blood, had been a publishing phenomenon and had sold almost a quarter of a million copies, three times as many as Zouga Ballantyne's A Hunter's Odyssey published six months later.

  Robyn had signed over all her royalties from the book to The London Missionary Society, and that august body had been so delighted by the donation that they had reinstated her as a society officer, had ordained her husband as her assistant, and had approved her heading a mission to Matabeleland.

  Her two subsequent publications had not enjoyed the same success as the first. The Sick African, a practical study of tropical medicine, had contained ludicrous theories that had earned her the derision of her medical peers she had even dared to suggest that malarial fever was not caused by breathing the foul night airs of tropical swamps, when this fact had been known since the time of Hippocrates.

  Then her further account of her life as a medical missionary, Blind Faith, had been too homely in style and too prejudiced in championing the indigenous tribes.

  She had firmly embraced the beliefs of lean-Jacques Rousseau and had added her own refinements to them. Her round condemnation of all settlers, hunters, prospectors and traders, and of their treatment of the noble savages, had been too salty for her European readers.

  Indeed, scandal and contention seemed to follow Robyn Codrington as vultures and jackals follow the lion, and at each new provocation all her previous adventures would be recalled: What decent female missionary would provoke men sufficiently to make them fight a bloody duel over her?

  Robyn Ballantyne had.

  What God-fearing lady would
sail aboard a notorious slaver, unchaperoned and with only slavers for company?

  Robyn Ballantyne had.

  What lady would choose for husband a man who had been court-martialled, stripped of his naval rank and imprisoned for piracy and dereliction of duty? Robyn Codrington had.

  What loyal subject of the Queen would hail the terrible reversal of British arms at Isandhlwana, the bloody death of hundreds of Englishmen at the hands of the savage Zulus, as a judgement of God, Robyn Codrington had, in a letter to the Evening Standard.

  Who, other than Robyn Codrington, would write to Lord Kimberley demanding that half the profits of the diamond fields that bore his name should go to the Griqua captain, Nicholaas Waterboer?

  Only Robyn Codrington would demand of Paulus Kruger, the newly-elected President of the little Transvaal Republic, that he return to Lobengula, King of the Matabele, the land below the Cashan mountains from which the Boer commandos had driven Mzilikazi, his father.

  She spared no one. Nothing was sacred to her except her God, whom she treated rather like a senior partner in the business of running Africa.

  Her enemies, and they were legion, hated her fiercely, and her friends loved her with equal passion. It was impossible to be unmoved by her, and Ralph found himself fascinated as she sat beside him on the church pew and subjected him to an exhaustive catechism that covered every aspect of his life and that of the family.

  "You have a brother," she seemed to know it all.

  "Jordan? That is his name, isn't it? Tell me about him."

  It was a comnand.

  "Oh, Jordie is everybody's favourite; everybody loves him."

  Ralph had never met anybody like her. He doubted he could ever bring himself to like her, she was far too prickly. That was the exact word to describe her, but he would never doubt her strength and her determination.

  Clinton Codrington came back into the church as the light outside was mellowing into late afternoon.

  "My dear, you really must let the poor fellow go now."