Men of Men

by Wilbur Smith

  Zouga thumped his heels into the horse’s flanks and galloped in the same direction. It was useless to look for spoor three days’ old on this rocky ground. The wind had blown steadily for most of that time, and it would have scoured the last traces.

  He must rely on luck and speed. He had seen the empty water-bottle and he knew what were the chances of survival on foot, without water, in this country between the rivers. He galloped on the line of her flight, quartering from side to side, searching grimly – not allowing himself to doubt again, concentrating all his mind on the search for another tiny sign. In the last minutes of dusk he found it. It was the heel of a brown riding boot torn from the sole. The gleam of the steel nails had caught his eye. He drew the rifle from its holder and fired three spaced shots into the darkening sky.

  He knew she had no rifle to reply – but if somewhere out ahead she heard his signal, it might give her hope and strength. He waited beside a small fire until the moon came up – and then by its light he went on, and every hour he stopped and fired signal shots into the great starry silence, and afterwards he listened intently, but there was only the shriek of a hunting owl overhead and the yipping of a jackal far out across the silvery plain.

  In the dawn he reached the wide white course of the Tati river. It was dry as the dunes of the Kalahari Desert, and the hopes which he had kept alive all night began to wane.

  He searched the morning sky for the high spiral of turning vultures which would show a kill, but all he saw was a brace of sand grouse slanting down on quick stabbing wings. Their presence proved that there was surface water – somewhere. She might have found it – that was the only chance. Unless she had found water she would be dead by now. He took a cautious mouthful from his own bottle, and his horse whickered when he smelt the precious liquid. Soon the thirst would begin wearing him down as well.

  He had to believe that if Louise had reached the river, she would follow it downstream. She was part Indian, and she would surely be able to get her direction from the sun and to know that her only chance was southwards towards the confluence with the Shashi. He turned in that direction, staying up on the bank, watching the river bed and the far bank and the sky.

  Elephant had been digging in the bed, but their holes were dry now. He trotted on along the edge of the high bank. Ahead of him there was a rush of big purple-beige bodies as a herd of gemsbuck burst through the rank undergrowth on the far bank. Their long straight horns were like lances against the pale horizon sky, and the diamond-patterned face masks that gave their name seemed theatrical and frivolous. They galloped away into the deserts of Khama’s country.

  They could live without water for months at a time, and their presence gave Zouga no hope, but as he watched them go, his attention shifted to another distant movement much farther out on the flat open ground beyond the river.

  There was a chacma baboon foraging there – the humanoid shape was quite distinctive. He looked for the rest of the troop – perhaps they were in the treeline beyond the plain. Chacma baboon would drink daily, and he shaded his eyes against the glare to watch the distant moving dark blob. It seemed to be feeding on the green fruit of the vine of the wild desert melons, but at this range it was difficult to be certain.

  Then abruptly he realized that he had never before encountered baboon this far to the west, and at the same moment he was convinced that there was no troop. It was a solitary animal, unheard of with such a gregarious species, and immediately after that he saw that this animal was too big to be a baboon, and that its movements were uncharacteristic of an ape.

  With a singing, soaring joy he launched into a full gallop, and the hooves beat an urgent staccato rhythm on the iron-hard earth, but as he dragged his horse down to a plunging halt and swung down out of the saddle, his joy shrivelled.

  She was on her knees, and they were scratched bloody by the stony ground. Her clothing was mostly gone, and her tender flesh was exposed in the rents. The sun had burned her arms and legs into red raw blisters. Her feet were bound up in the remains of her skirt, but blood had soaked through the rags.

  Her hair was a dry tangled bush about her head, powdered with dust and with the ends split and bleached. Her lips were black scabs, burned and cracked down into the living meat. Her eyelids were swollen as though stung by bees and she peered up at him like a blind old crone through slits that were caked with dried yellow mucus. The flesh had fallen off her body and her face. Her arms were skeletal and her cheekbones seemed to push through the skin. Her hands were blackened claws – the nails torn down into the quick.

  She crouched like an animal over the flat leaves of the vine, and she had broken open one of the wild green melons with her fingers and stuffed pulp into her ruined mouth. The juice ran down her chin, cutting a runnel through the dirt that plastered her skin.

  ‘Louise.’ He went down on one knee, facing her. ‘Louise—’ His voice choked.

  She made a little mewling sound in her throat and then touched her hair in a heart-breakingly feminine gesture, trying to smooth the stiff dust-caked tresses.

  ‘Is it?’ she croaked, peering at him with bloodshot eyes from slits of sun-swollen red lids. ‘It isn’t—’

  Fumbling, she tried to cover one soft white breast with the rags of her blouse. She started to shake, wildly and uncontrollably, and then she closed her eyes tightly.

  He reached out gently and at his touch she collapsed against his chest, still shaking, and he held her. She felt light and frail as a child.

  ‘I knew—’ she mumbled. ‘It didn’t make sense, but I knew somehow that you would come.’

  ‘Will you not dowse the lantern, Ralph?’ Cathy whispered, and her eyes were huge and dark and piteous as she crept in under the canvas of his wagon.

  ‘Why?’ he asked, smiling, propping himself on one elbow on the wagon cot.

  ‘Somebody may come.’

  ‘Your father and mother are still at Lobengula’s kraal. There is nobody—’

  ‘My sister – Salina—’

  ‘Salina is long ago asleep, dreaming of brother Jordan, no doubt. We are alone, Cathy, all alone. So why should we put out the lantern?’

  ‘Because I am shy, then,’ she said, and blushed a new shade of scarlet. ‘All you ever do is tease me. I wish I had never come.’

  ‘Oh Cathy.’ His chuckle was fond and indulgent, and he sat up on his cot, and the blanket slid to his waist. Quickly she averted her eyes from his naked chest and muscled upper arms. The skin was so white and marble-smooth in comparison to his brown forearms and face. It set strange unfamiliar emotions loose within her.

  ‘Come!’ He caught her wrist and drew her towards the cot, but she hung back until he jerked her forward and, taken off balance, she fell across his legs.

  Before she could break free, he had taken a handful of the thick dark hair at the back of her head and turned her pale face up to his mouth. For a while she continued to struggle unconvincingly, and then her whole body softened, like wax in the candle flame, and seemed to melt over him.

  ‘Do you still wish you had not come, Cathy?’ he asked, but she could not reply; instead she tightened her arms around his neck convulsively. Once more she searched for his mouth with hers, and made a little moaning sound.

  He goaded her with his mouth and tongue, the way Lil had first taught him so long ago, and she was defenceless as a beautiful soft-bodied insect in the spider’s gossamer toils. It excited him as none of the practised and calculating women on whom he had spent his gold sovereigns ever had.

  His own breathing started to hunt roughly, and his fingers shook at the lacings of her bodice. The skin of her shoulder was without blemish, silky and warm. He touched it with the tip of his tongue, and she shuddered and gasped, but when he pulled down the light cotton, she shrugged her shoulders to let the cloth come free. It caught for a moment and then slid to the level of her lowest rib.

  He was unprepared for those tender and terribly vulnerable young breasts, so pale and rosy-tipped a
nd yet at the same time hard and jubilant in their marvellous symmetry.

  He stared at her body, and she watched him through half-closed lids, but made no effort to cover herself, though her cheeks were wildly flushed and her lips trembled as she whispered.

  ‘No, Ralph, I don’t want to go – not now, or ever.’

  ‘The lantern—’ He reached for it, but now she caught his hand.

  ‘No, Ralph, I’m not ashamed of you and me. I don’t want darkness, I want to see your dear face.’

  She jerked the ribbon loose from her waist and then lifted her dress over her head and let it flutter to the wagon floor. Her limbs were long and coltish, her hips still bony as a boy’s, and her belly concave as a greyhound’s above the dark triangular bush of her womanhood. Her skin shone in the lantern light with that peculiar lustre of healthy, vibrant youth. He stared at it for only an instant and then she had lifted the corner of the rough woollen blanket and slid in under it. The long slim arms and legs wrapped around him.

  ‘There is nothing I would not do for you. I would steal and lie and cheat – and even kill for you, my wonderful, beautiful Ralph,’ she whispered. ‘I’m not sure what a man and woman do, but if you show me I will be the happiest girl on this earth to do it with you.’

  ‘Cathy, I didn’t mean this to happen—’ He tried with a last sudden lash of his conscience to push her away.

  ‘I did,’ she said, clinging stubbornly to him. ‘Why else do you think I came here?’

  ‘Cathy—’

  ‘I love you, Ralph, I loved you from the very first moment I ever saw you.’

  ‘I love you, Cathy.’ And he was amazed to find that what be said was the truth. ‘I really and truly love you,’ he said again, and then later, much later: ‘I didn’t realize how much until now.’

  ‘I didn’t know that it would be like this,’ she whispered. ‘I have thought about if often, every day since you first came to Khami. I even read about it in the Bible – it says that David knew her. Do we know each other now, Ralph?’

  ‘I want to know you better – and more often,’ he grinned at her, his tousled hair still damp with sweat.

  ‘I felt as though I had fallen through a dark hole in my soul into another beautiful world, and I didn’t want to come back again.’ Cathy’s voice was awed and marvelling, as though she were the first in all the infinite lists of creation to experience it. ‘Didn’t you feel that, Ralph?’

  They held each other close under the blanket, and they talked softly, examining each other’s faces in the yellow lantern light, breaking off every few minutes to kiss the other’s throat and eyelids and lips.

  It was Cathy who pulled away at last. ‘I don’t want to know the time, but listen to the birds, it will be light too soon.’ Then, with a rush of words, ‘Oh Ralph, I don’t want you to go.’

  ‘It will not be for long, I promise you. Then I will be back.’

  ‘Take me with you.’

  ‘You know I can’t.’

  ‘Why not – because it’s dangerous, isn’t it?’

  But he avoided the question by trying to kiss her again. She put her hand over his mouth.

  ‘I’ll die a little every moment of the time you are gone, but I’ll pray for you. I’ll pray that Lobengula’s warriors do not find you.’

  ‘Don’t worry about me,’ he chuckled fondly. ‘We’ll fall through that dark hole in your soul again soon.’

  ‘Promise,’ she whispered, and brushed the damp curls off his forehead with her lips. ‘Promise me you will come back, my beautiful, darling Ralph.’

  Ralph started his wagon train south again on the road to the Shashi, and for the first morning he rode at the head of the unusually lightly loaded vehicles. At noon he gave the order to outspan. He and Isazi slept away the hot afternoon, while the bullocks and horses grazed and rested.

  Then at dusk they cut the five chosen bullocks out of the herd and tied them to the wagon wheels by leather reins around the boss of their horns while they fitted the back packs. Ralph and Isazi had selected these beasts for their strength and willingness, and during the long trek up from Kimberley he had trained them to accept these unusual burdens with resigned docility.

  Jordan had provided Ralph with the precise measurements and weight of the bird statue that now graced the entrance to Mr Rhodes’ new mansion, Groote Schuur, and Ralph had used these figures to design the back packs and constructed them with his own hands, not trusting anyone else with his secret intentions.

  Each pack could carry two statues like the one at Groote Schuur. They would be slung in woven nets of good mania rope on each side of the bullock, and Ralph had worked meticulously to ensure a perfect fit of the saddle to protect the beasts’ back from galling, and prevent the load from shifting even over the roughest ground or on the steepest inclines.

  Now, when Isazi, the little Zulu driver, led the file of three bullocks quietly out of the camp and disappeared into the darkening forest, they followed meekly. Ralph stayed behind just long enough to repeat his orders to the other drivers.

  ‘You will double-march to the Shashi river. If the border impis question where I am, you will tell them I am hunting to the east with the king’s permission, and that you expect me to rejoin the wagons at any time. Do you understand?’

  ‘I understand, Nkosi,’ said Umfaan, who, although now promoted from voorlooper to driver, still answered to the name of ‘Boy’.

  ‘Once you cross the Shashi, you will trek on as far as the Bushman wells, five days’ march beyond the frontier. Lobengula’s impis will not follow you that far. Wait there until I come, do you understand, Umfaan?’

  ‘I understand, Nkosi.’

  ‘Then repeat it to me.’

  Satisfied at last, Ralph stepped up into Tom’s stirrup and looked down at them from his back.

  ‘Go swiftly,’ he said.

  ‘Go in peace, Nkosi.’

  He trotted out of camp, following Isazi’s bullock train and dragging behind him a bulky branch of thorn mimosa to sweep their spoor clean. By mid-morning the following day they were well clear of the wagon road and had entered the mystical Matopos Hills. While the oxen grazed and rested, Ralph rode ahead to mark a trail between the soaring granite kopjes, and through the deep and sullen gorges. At dark they resaddled the bullocks with their packs and went on.

  The next day Ralph made a noon observation of the sun with the old brass sextant. From experience he made allowance for the cumulative error in his boxed chronometer, and worked out a position which he knew was accurate to within ten miles. Also from experience, he knew that his father’s observations, made before he was born, were usually as accurate. Without them he would never have found the caches of ivory which had been the start of his growing fortune.

  His calculations compared to his father’s showed that he was one hundred and sixty miles west of the ancient ruined city that the Matabele called Zimbabwe, the burial place of the old kings.

  Then, while he waited for darkness to resume the march, he took from his saddle-bags the sheaf of notes which Zouga had given him as a parting gift when he first left Kimberley. He read the description of the route to Zimbabwe, and of the city itself, for possibly the hundredth time.

  ‘How much longer must we march through these hills?’ Isazi broke his concentration. He was cooking maize cakes on a small smokeless fire of dry wood. ‘My beasts suffer on these rocks and steep places,’ he grumbled. ‘We should have gone farther south and passed below the hills on the open ground.’

  ‘Where Lobengula’s bucks wait and pray every day for the chance to stick an assegai through a skinny little Zulu,’ Ralph smiled.

  ‘There is the same danger here.’

  ‘No,’ Ralph shook his head. ‘No Matabele comes into these sacred hills without good reason. We will find no impi here, and once we come out on the far side, we will be beyond the farthest regimental kraals.’

  ‘And this place of stone to which we go? There will be no impi waiting for us ther
e?’

  ‘Lobengula forbids any man even to look into the valley in which the stones stand. It is a death-marked place, cursed by Lobengula and his priests.’

  Isazi shifted uncomfortably. ‘Who sets store by the curse of a fat Matabele dog?’ he demanded, and touched the charm on his belt which warded off devils and hobgoblins and other dark secret things.

  Despite his assurances to Isazi, Ralph moved with utmost caution in threading the maze of the Matopos. During daylight he hid the bullocks in some thick patch of bush in a rock gorge, and he went ahead to reconnoitre every yard of the way and to mark it for Isazi to follow with a discreetly blazed tree trunk or a broken twig of green leaves at every turning or difficult place.

  These precautions saved him from disaster. On the third day he had tied Tom in good cover and gone forward on foot to the ridge from where he could look into the next valley.

  Just below the brow he was alerted by the raucous alarm call of a grey lourie, the ‘Go-Away’ bird of the African bush. The cry came from just beyond the ridge, and as he froze to listen he heard a gentle susurration like the wind in tall grass; he ducked and jumped off the path, sprawling on his belly with his rifle tucked into the crook of his elbows, and rolled under the spreading branches of a low red berry bush – just as the first rank of Matabele warriors came sweeping over the rise ahead of him, with their cloaks and kilts and headdresses rustling – the sound which had warned him.

  From where he lay under the bush beside the path, Ralph could see only as high as their knees as they passed, but their gait was that determined businesslike trot which the Matabele call ‘minza hlabathi’, to eat the earth greedily.

  He counted them. Two hundred warriors in all went past, and the soft rustle of their feet dwindled – but Ralph lay frozen beneath his bush, not daring even to creep deeper into the undergrowth. Minutes later, he heard the soft chant of bearers coming up from the next valley, and then they were trotting past his hiding-place, singing the praise song to the king in their deep melodious voices.