Wilbur Smith - B4 The Leopard Hunts In Darkness

by B4 The Leopard Hunts In Darkness(Lit)

  "I could throw him over the edge," Tungata thought, "if I can take him unawares." He glanced back and Peter was ten paces below him. He had the Tokarev pistol in his right hand and he smiled likea mamba.

  "No," he warned, and they understood each other with, out further words. For the moment Tungata put away the thought of vengeance and went on upwards. He turned a corner in the rock and they came out onto the crown of the hill, five hundred feet above the dark gorge.

  Standing a little apart, both of them sweating lightly in the white sunlight, they looked down into the deep wide valley of the Zambezi. On the edge of their vision, the wide waters of the man-made lake of Kariba glinted softly through the haze of heat and blue smoke from the first bush-fires of the dry season. The troopers came off the path with transparent relief, and Peter Fungabera looked expectantly at Tungata.

  "We are ready to go on, Comrade."

  "There is not much further to go," Tungata answered him.

  Over the crest of the cliff the rock formation had eroded and broken up into buttress and tumbled ramparts, the trees that had found purchase in the cracks and crevices had intertwined their root systems over the rock-face like mating serpents, while their stems were thickened and deformed by the severe conditions of heat and drought.

  Tungata led them through the broken rock and tortured forest, into the mouth of a ravine. At the head of the ravine grew an ancient Natalensis, the strangler fig ficus tree, its fleshy limbs of blotched yellow loaded with bunches of bitter fruit. As they approached it a flock of brown parrots, green wings flagged with bright yellow, that had been feasting on the wild figs, exploded into flight. At the base of the ficus tree, the cliff was segmented, and the roots had found the cracks and forced them apart.

  Tungata stood before the cliff and Peter Fungabera, suppressing an exclamation of impatience, glanced at him and saw his lips were moving silently, in a prayer or entreaty. Peter Fungabera began to examine the cliff ace more carefully, and realized with rising excitement that the racks in the rock were too regular to be natural.

  "Here!" he shouted to his troopers, and when they hurried forward, he pointed out one of the blocks in the face, and they set to work on it with bayonets and bare hands.

  Within fifteen minutes of sweaty labour, they had worked the block free, and it was now clear that the face was in reality a wall of carefully fitted masonry. In the depths of the aperture left by the block, they could make out a second wall of masonry.

  "Bring the prisoner," Peter ordered. "He will work in the front rank." By the time it was too dark to go on, they had opened an aperture just wide enough for two men to work shoulder to shoulder in the outer wall, and had begun on the inner wall. In the forefront, Tungata was able to confirm what he had guessed on his first visit to the tomb so long ago the signs that he had noticed then and concealed from old grandfather Gideon were even more apparent on the inner wall of the tomb. They helped salve his conscience and ease the pain of oath-breaking.

  r Reluctantly Peter Fungabera called a halt on the work for the night. Tungata's hands were raw from contact with the rough blocks and he had lost a fingernail where it had been trapped and torn off in a slide of masonry. He was 9 handcuffed to one of the Third Brigade troopers for the night, but even this could not keep him from dreamless exhaustion-drugged sleep. Peter Fungabera had to kick both him and his guard awake the next morning.

  it was still dark and they ate their meagre rations of cold maize cake and sweet tea in silence. They had barely gulped it down before Peter Fungabera ordered them back to the masonry wall.

  Tungata's torn hands were clumsy and stiff. Peter Fungabera stood behind him in the opening and when he faltered slashed him with the kiboko, around the ribs, in the soft and sensitive flesh below the armpit. Tungata growled likea wounded lion and lifted a hundredweight block out of the wall.

  The sun cleared the crown of the hill, and its golden rays illuminated the cliff-face. With a branch of dead wood, Tungata and one of the Shana troopers levered up another lump of rock, and as it began to move, there was a rumble and a harsh grating and the inner wall collapsed towards them. They jumped clear and stood coughing in the swirl of dust, peering into the aperture that they had made.

  The air from the cave stank likea drunkard's mouth, stale and sour, and the darkness beyond was forbidding and menacing.

  "You first," Peter Fungabera ordered, and Tungata hesitated. He was overcome with a superstitious awe. He was an educated and sophisticated man, but beneath that, he was African. The sfirits of his tribe and his ancestors guarded this place. He looked at Peter Fungabera and knew that he was experiencing the same dread of the supernatural, even though he was armed with a flashlight, whose batteries he had conserved zealously for this moment.

  "Move!" Fungabera ordered. His harsh tone could not disguise his disquiet, and Tungata, to shame him, stepped cautiously over the rock fall into the cave.

  He stood for a while until his eyes adjusted to the gloom and he could make out the configuration of the cave. The floor beneath his feet was smooth and worn, but it sloped downwards at a steep angle. Obviously this cave had been the lair of animals and the home of primitive man for tens of thousands of years before it became the tomb of a king.

  Peter Fungabera, standing behind Tungata, played the beam of his flashlight over walls and roof. The roof was crusted with the soot of ancient cooking-fires, and the smooth walls were rich with the art of the little yellow Bushmen who had lived here. There were depictions of the wild game that they had hunted and observed so minutely: herds of black buffalo, and tall, dappled giraffe, rhinoceros and homed antelope in glowing colours, all delightfully caricatured. With them the pygmy artist had drawn his own people, sticklike figures with buttocks as pronounced as a camel's hump and imperial erections to boast of their manhood. Armed with bows, they pursued the herds across the rock wall.

  Peter Fungabera. flicked the torch beam over this splendid gallery and then held it steady into the inner recesses of the cave where the throat narrowed and the rocky passage turned upon itself and was shrouded in darkness and mysterious shadow far below them.

  "Forward!" he ordered, and Tungata moved cautiously down the sloping floor of the chamber.

  They reached the throat of the cave and were forced to stoop under the low roof. Tungata turned the corner of the rocky passage and went on for fifty paces before he stopped J9 short.

  He had come out into a capacious cavern with a domed roof twenty feet above their heads. The floor was level, but cluttered with rock fallen from above. Peter Fungabera flashed his beam around the cavern.

  Against the far wall was a ledge the height of a man's shoulder and he held the beam on a jumble of objects that were stacked upon it.

  For a moment Tungata was puzzled, and then he recognized the shape of a wagon wheel of a design from a hundred Years before, a wheel taller than the oxen that drew it; then he made out the wagon bed and the frames.

  The vehicle had been broken down into its separate parts and carried up to the cave.

  "Lobengula's wagon," he whispered. "His most cherished possession, the one his warriors pulled when the oxen failed--2 Peter Fungabera prodded him with the barrel of the Tokarev and they picked their way forward through the litter of fallen rock.

  There were rifles, stacked like wheat, sheaves old Lee Enfields part of the payment that Cecil Rhodes had made to Lobengula for his concessions. Rifles and a hundred gold sovereigns every month the price of a land and a nation sold into slavery, Tungata recalled bitterly. There were other objects piled upon the ledge, salt-bags of leather, stools and knives, beads and ornaments and snuff-horns and broad-bladed assegais.

  Peter Fungabera exclaimed with avarice and impatience. "Hurry. W must find his corpse, the diamonds will be with the body." Bones! They gleamed in the torchlight. A pile of them below the ledge.

  A skull! It grinned mirthlessly up at them, a cap of matted wool still coveriqg the pate.

  "That's him! cried Peter
jubilantly. "There is the old -to his knees beside the skeleton.

  devil." He dropped Tungata stood aloof. After the first pang of alarm, he had realized that it was the skeleton of a small and elderly man, not much larger than a child, with teeth missing in the front upper jaw. Lobengula had been a big man with fine flashing teeth. Everyone who had met him in life had commented on his smile. This skeleton was still decked in the gruesome paraphernalia of the witch-doctor's trade: beads and shells and bones, plugged duiker-horns of medicine and skulls of reptiles belted about the bony waist.

  Even Peter recognized his mistake, and he jumped to his feet.

  "This isn't him!" he cried anxiously. "They must have sacrificed his witch-doctor and placed him here as a guardian." He was playing the torch wildly about the cave.

  "Where is he?" he demanded. "You must know. They must have told you." Tungata remained silent. Above the skeleton of the witch, doctor the ledge jutted out, rather likea large pulpit of rock. The king's possessions were laid out neatly around this prominence, the human sacrifice laid below it. The entire focus of the cavern was on this spot. It was the logical and natural position in which to place the king's corpse. Peter Fungabera sensed that also and slowly turned th e beam back to it.

  The rock pulpit was empty.

  "He isn't here," Peter whispered, his voice tense with disappointment and frustration. Tobengula's body is gone! The signs that Tungata had noticed at the outer wall, N the place where the masonry wall had been opened and U1 resealed with less meticulous workmanship, had led him to the correct conclusion. The old king's tomb had obviously been robbed many years previously. The corpse had long ago been spirited away and the tomb resealed to hide the traces of this desecration.

  Peter Fungabera clambered up onto the rock pulpit, and searched it frantically on his hands and knees. Standing back impassively, Tungata marvelled at how ludicrous greed could render even such a dangerous and impressive man as Peter Fungabera. He was muttering incoherently t 0 himself as he strained the dusty detritus; from the floor through his hooked fingers.

  "Look! Look here! He held up a small dark object, and Tungata stepped closer. In the torchlight he recognized that it was a shard from a clay pot, a piece of the rim decorated in the traditional diamond pattern used on the Matabele beer-pots.

  "A beer-pot." Peter turned it in his hands. "One of the diamond pots broken!" He dropped the fragment and scratched in the dirt, stirring up a soft cloud of dust that undulated in the torch beam.

  Here!" He had found something else. Something smaIller. He held it up between thumb and forefinger. It was the size of a small walnut.

  He turned the torch beam full upon it, and immediately the light was shattered into the rainbow hues of the spectrum. Shafts of coloured light were reflected into Peter Fungabera's face, like sunlight off water.

  "Diamond," he breathed with religious awe, turning it slowly in his fingers so that it shot out arrows and blades of light.

  It was an uncut stone, Tungata realized, but the crystal had formed in such symmetry and each plane was so perfect as to catch and reflect even the meagre beam of the torch.

  "How beautiful!" Peter murmured, bringing it closer still to his face.

  This diamond was a perfect natural octahedron and its colour, even in artificial light, was clear as snowmelt in a mountain stream.

  "Beautiful," Peter Fungabera repeated, and then gradually his face lost its drelmy, gloating expression.

  "Only one!" he whispered. "A single stone dropped in haste, when there Ishould have been five beer-pots brimming with diamonds." His eyes swivelled from the diamond to Tungata. The torch was held low, and it cast weird shadows across his face, giving him a demoniacal look.

  knew," he accused. "I sensed all along you were "You hiding something back. You knew the diamonds had been taken, and you knew where." Tungata shook his head in denial, but Peter Fungabera ri was working himself into a fury. His features contorted, his mouth worked soundlessly and a thin white froth coated his lips.

  "You knew!" He launched himself from the ledge with all the fury of i a wounded leopard.

  "You'll tell me!" he shrieked. "In the end you'll tell me." He hit Tungata in the face with the barrel of the Tokarev.

  "Tell me!" he screamed. "Tell me where they are!" And the steel thudded into Tungata's face as ie struc again k and again.

  "Tell me where the diamonds are! The barrel crunched against Tungata's cheekbone, split- i ting the flesh, and he fell to his knees.

  Peter Fungabera pulled himself away, and braced himself against the rock ledge to contain his own ri".

  "No," he told himself. "That is too easy. He's going to suffer __2 He folded his own arms tightly across his chest to restrain himself from attacking Tungata again.

  "In the end you will tell me you will plead with me to allow you to take me to the diamonds. You'll plead with me to kill you-2 abes in the fornicating woods," said Morgan Oxford.

  "That's what you two are! By God, you have dropped us in this cesspool as well, right up to the eyebrows." Morgan Oxford had flown down from Harare as soon as he had heard that a Botswana border patrol had brought Craig and Sally-Anne in from the desert.

  "Both the American ambassador and the Brits have had notes from Mugabe. The Brits are hopping up and down and frothing at the mouth also. They know nothing about you, Craig, and you are a British subject. I gather that they'd like to lock you up in the tower and chop your head off.1 Morgan stood at the foot of Sally-Anne's hospital bed.

  He had declined the chair that Craig offered him.

  you, Missy, the ambassador has asked me to As inform you that he would like to see you on the next plane back to the States."

  "He can't order me to do that." Sally-Anne stopped his flow of bitter recriminations. "This isn't Soviet Russia, and I'm a free citizen." "You won't be for long. No, by God, not if Mugabe gets his hands on you! Murder, armed insurrection and a few other charges-"

  "Those are all a frame-up!"

  "You and your boyfriend here left a pile of warm bodies behind you like empty beer cans at a labour-day picnic.

  Mugabe has started extradition proceedings with the Botswana government-"

  "We are political refugees," Sally-Anne flared.

  "Bonny and Clyde, sweetheart, that's the way the Zimbabweans are telling it."

  Sally' Anne Craig intervened mildly. "You are not supposed to get yourself excited-"

  "Excited!" cried So4yAnne. "We've been robbed and beaten, threatenedowith rape and a firing squad and now the official representative of the United States of America, the country of which I happen to be a citizen, barges in here and calls us criminals."

  "I'm not calling you anything," Morgan denied flatly.

  "I'm just warning you to get your cute little ass out of Africa and all the way home to mommy."

  "He calls us criminals, and then patronizes me with his male chauvinistic--2

  "Throttle back, Sally-Anne." Morgan Oxford held up hand wearily. "Let's start again. You are in big trouble one we are in big trouble. We've got to work something out."

  "Now will you sit down?" Craig pushed the empty chair towards him and Morgan slumped into it and lit a Chesterfield.

  "How are you, anyway?" he asked.

  "I thought you'd never ask, sweetheart," Sally' Anne snapped tersely.

  "She was badly desiccated. They suspected renal failure, but they've had her on a drip and liquids for three days.

  She is okay that end. They were also worried about the crack on her head but the X,rays are negative, thank God.

  it was only a mild concussion. They have promised to discharge her tomorrow morning."

  "So she's fit to travel?"

  "I thought your concern was too touching-" 41 _,oak, Sally' Anne this is Africa. If the Zimbabweans get hold of you, there will be nothing we can do to help.

  It's for your own good. You've got to get out. The ambassador-" "Screw the ambassador," said Sally-Anne with relish, "and screw you, M
organ Oxford."

  "I can't speak for His Excellency," Morgan grinned for the first time, "but for myself, when can we begin?" And even Sally-Anne laughed.

  Craig took advantage of the softening of attitudes.

  "Morgan, you can rely on me to see she does the right thing-_2 Immediately Sally-Anne puffed up in the high bed, preparatory to fending off another chauvinistic onslaught, but Craig gave her a tiny frown and shake of the head and she subsided reluctantly. Morgan turned on Craig instead.

  "As for you, Craig. How the hell did they find out you the agency?" Morgan demanded.

  4, were working for

  "Was ! Craig looked stunned. "If I was, nobody told me."

  "Who the hell do you think Henry Pickering is anyway Santa Claus?"

  "He my, he is- a vice-president of the World Bank!"