by Wilbur Smith
‘I know so little about him,’ Janine confessed.
‘I don’t think anybody knew much about him,’ Craig said. ‘He was a very strange man, but when they buried him, the Matabele gave him the royal salute. He had some incredible power over other men.’
They went down the far side of the hill to the square mausoleum of stone blocks with its bronze frieze of heroic figures.
‘Allan Wilson and his men,’ Craig explained, ‘they exhumed their bodies from the battlefield on the Shangani, and reburied them here.’
On the north wall of the memorial were the names of the dead and Craig ran his finger down the graven roll of honour and stopped at one name.
‘The Rev. Clinton Codrington,’ he read it aloud. ‘He was my great-great-grandfather, a strange man, and his wife, my great-great-grandmother was a remarkable woman indeed. The two of them, Clinton and Robyn, founded the Mission Station at Khami. A few months after he was killed by the Matabele, she married the commander of the column who had ordered Clinton to his death, an American chap called St John. I bet there was some interesting hanky-panky there! A bit of hithering and thithering, a touch of to-ing and fro-ing.’
‘They used to do it even in those days?’ Janine asked. ‘I thought it was a recent invention.’
They wandered on around the side of the hill and came to another grave. Over the grave stood a misshapen and dwarfed msasa tree that had taken precarious hold in a fault in the solid granite. Like the one on the summit, this grave also was covered by a heavy plate of weathered bronze, but the inscription read:
‘Here lies the body of
SIR RALPH BALLANTYNE,
FIRST PRIME MINISTER OF SOUTHERN
RHODESIA.
He deserves well of his country.’
‘Ballantyne,’ she said. ‘Must be an ancestor of Roly’s.’
‘A mutual ancestor of both of ours,’ Craig agreed. ‘Our great-grandfather, Bawu’s papa. This is the real reason why we have driven out here.’
‘What do you know about him?’
‘A great deal, actually. I have just finished reading his personal journals. He was quite a lad. If they hadn’t knighted him, they would probably have had to hang him. By his own secret confessions, he was an unqualified rogue, but a colourful one.’
‘So that is where you get it from,’ she laughed. ‘Tell me more.’
‘Funny thing, he was a sworn enemy of that other old rogue up there.’ Craig pointed up the hill towards Cecil Rhodes’ grave. ‘And here they are buried almost side by side. Great-grandpa Ralph writes in his journal that he discovered the Wankie coalfield, but Rhodes cheated him out of it. He swore an oath to destroy Rhodes and his Company, he actually wrote that down! I’ll show you! And he boasts that he succeeded. In 1923 the rule of Rhodes’ British South Africa Company came to an end. Southern Rhodesia became a British colony, old Sir Ralph was its prime minister. He had made good his threat.’
They sat down, side by side, on the curbstone of the grave and he told her the funniest and most interesting of the stories that he had read in the secret journals, and she listened with fascination.
‘It’s strange to think that they are a part of us and we a part of them,’ she whispered. ‘That everything that is happening now had its roots in what they did and said.’
‘Without a past there is no future,’ Craig repeated the words of Samson Kumalo, then went on, ‘that reminds me, I have something else I want to do before we go back to town.’
This time Craig did not have to be warned of the hidden turn-off, and he swung onto the track that led past the cemetery, down the avenues of spathodea trees to the whitewashed staff cottages of Khami Mission. The first cottage in the row was deserted. There were no curtains in the windows and when Craig climbed up onto the porch and peered in, he saw the rooms were bare.
‘Who are you looking for?’ Janine asked, when he came back to the Land-Rover.
‘A friend.’
‘A good friend?’
‘The best friend I ever had.’
He drove on down the hill to the hospital and parked again. He left Janine in the Land-Rover and went into the lobby. A woman came striding to meet him. She wore a white laboratory coat, and her unnaturally pale face was set in a belligerent frown.
‘I hope you haven’t come here to harass and frighten our people,’ she began. ‘Here police mean trouble.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Craig glanced down at his uniform. ‘It’s a private matter. I am looking for a friend of mine. His family lived here. Samson Kumalo—’
‘Oh,’ the woman nodded. ‘I recognize you now. You were Sam’s employer. Well, he’s gone.’
‘Gone? Do you know where?’
‘No,’ flatly, and unhelpfully.
‘His grandfather, Gideon—’
‘He’s dead.’
‘Dead?’ Craig was appalled. ‘How?’
‘He died of a broken heart – when your people murdered someone who was dear to him. Now, if there is nothing more you want to know, we don’t like uniforms here.’
By the time they reached town it was late afternoon. Craig drove directly to his yacht without asking her permission, and when he parked under the mango trees, Janine made no comment, but climbed out and walked beside him to the ladderway.
Craig put a tape on the recorder and opened a bottle of wine, then he brought down Sir Ralph’s leather-bound journal that Bawu had loaned him, and they sat side by side on the bench in the saloon and pored over it. The faded ink and pencil drawings that decorated the margins delighted Janine, and when she came to a description of the locust plagues of the 1890s, she was captivated.
‘The old geezer had a good eye.’ She studied his drawing of a locust. ‘He might have been a trained naturalist, just look at the detail.’
She glanced up at him sitting close beside her. He looked like a puppy, an adoring puppy. She deliberately closed the leather-bound book without taking her eyes from his. He leaned closer to her, and she made no effort to pull away. He covered her lips with his own, and felt them soften and part. Her huge slanted eyes closed, and the lashes were long and delicate as butterflies’ wings.
After a long time she whispered huskily, ‘For God’s sake, don’t say anything stupid. Just keep right on doing what you are doing at the moment.’
He obeyed, and it was she who broke the silence. Her voice was shaky.
‘I hope you had enough forethought to make the bunk wide enough for two.’
Still he said nothing, but lifted her up in his arms and took her to see for herself.
‘Do you know, I didn’t realize it could be like that.’ There was wonder in his voice, as he stared down at her, leaning on one elbow. ‘It was so good and natural and easy.’
She traced a fingertip over his bare chest, drawing little circles around his nipples. ‘I like a hairy chest,’ she purred.
‘I mean – you know, I always felt it was such a solemn thing to do – after vows and declarations.’
‘The sound of organ music?’ she giggled. ‘If you’ll excuse the expression.’
‘That’s another thing,’ he said. ‘The only time I have ever heard you giggle is when you are doing it, or when you have just done it.’
‘That’s the only time I ever feel like giggling,’ she agreed, and giggled again. ‘Do be a pet and get the wineglasses.’
‘Now what is so funny?’ he demanded from the companion way.
‘Your bottom is white and baby smooth – no, don’t cover it.’
While he hunted in the galley cupboard, she called from the cabin, ‘Do you have a tape of the “Pastoral”.’
‘I think so.’
‘Put it on, pet.’
‘Why?’
‘I will tell you when you come back to bed.’
She was sitting at the head of the bunk, stark naked in the lotus position. He put one of the wineglasses in her hand, and after a short struggle managed to twist his own long legs into the lotus and sat facing her.<
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‘So tell me,’ he invited.
‘Don’t be dense, Craig – I mean isn’t that just a perfect accompaniment?’
Another great storm of music and love swept over them, leaving them clinging helplessly to each other, and in the aching silence that followed, she tenderly stroked back the sweat-damp hair that had fallen into his eyes.
It was too much for him. ‘I love you,’ he blurted out. ‘Oh God, I love you so!’
Almost roughly she pushed him aside, and sat up.
‘You are a sweet funny boy, and a gentle considerate lover, but you do have an ungodly talent for saying stupid things at the wrong time.’
In the morning, she said, ‘You made dinner, so I’ll make breakfast,’ and went to the galley wearing only one of his old shirts. She had to roll the sleeves up and the tails dangled below her knees.
‘You’ve got enough eggs and bacon to open your own restaurant – were you expecting a visitor?’
‘Not expecting, but hoping,’ he called back from the shower. ‘Make mine sunny side up!’
After breakfast she helped him install the big glittering stainless-steel winches on the maindeck. It needed someone to hold the gusset plates in position while he drilled and bolted through from the other side.
‘You are very handy, aren’t you?’ she said. They had to shout at each other, for he was working below deck while she was perched on the edge of the cockpit.
‘It’s kind of you to notice.’
‘So I suppose you are a first-class armourer.’
‘I’m pretty good.’
‘Do you do what I suspect, fix up guns?’
‘One of my duties.’
‘How can you bring yourself to do it? Guns are so evil.’
‘That is the typical prejudice of the ignorant and uninformed layman.’ He turned her own words against her. ‘Firearms are on one level highly functional and useful tools, and on another level they can be magnificent works of art. Man has always lavished some of his most creative instincts on his weapons.’
‘But the way men use them!’ she protested.
‘For instance, they were used to prevent Adolf Hitler gassing the entire Jewish nation,’ he pointed out.
‘Oh come on, Craig. What are they being used for out there in the bush at this very moment?’
‘Guns aren’t evil, but some of the men who use them are. You could say the same about spanners.’
He tightened the bolts on the winch and stuck his head out of the hatch. ‘That’s enough for today – on the seventh day He rested – how about a beer?’
Craig had rigged a speaker in the cockpit and they lolled in the sun and drank beer and listened to the music.
‘Look, Jan, I don’t know a tactful way to put this, but I don’t want you seeing anyone else, do you know what I mean?’
‘There you go again.’ Her eyes slanted and crackled like blue ice. ‘Do shut up, Craig!’
‘I mean after what has happened between us,’ he ploughed on doggedly. ‘I think we should—’
‘Look, dear boy, you have a choice – make me mad again, or make me giggle again, what’s it going to be.’
At lunchtime on Monday, she came up to police headquarters, and they ate his ham sandwiches while he showed her around the armoury, and despite herself, she was intrigued by the exhibits of captured weapons and explosives. He explained the operation of the various types of mines and how they could be detected and disarmed.
‘You have to hand it to the terrs,’ Craig admitted. ‘The swine carry those things in on their backs, two hundred miles or so through the bush. Just try and pick that up, and you’ll see what I mean.’
At last he took her through to a small back room. ‘This is my special project. It’s called T & I, trace and identify.’ He gestured at the charts that covered the walls and the big boxes of empty cartridge-cases piled beside the workbench. ‘After each contact with terrs our armourers sweep the area and pick up every used cartridge. Firstly they are checked for fingerprints. So if the terr has a record, then we can identify him immediately. If he has polished his rounds before loading or if we have no record of his fingerprints – we can still trace exactly which rifle fired the cartridge.’
He led her to the bench, and let her look into the low-power microscope that stood on it. ‘The firing-pin in each rifle strikes an indentation into the cap of the cartridge which is as individual as a fingerprint. We can follow the career of each active terr in the field. We can make accurate estimates of how many there are and which are the hot ones.’
‘The hot ones?’ She looked up from the microscope.
‘Out of every hundred terrs in the field, ninety or so of them hole up in good cover near a village which can supply them with food and young girls, and they try to keep out of danger and contact with our forces. But the hot ones are different. They are the tigers, the fanatics, the killers, these charts show their first team.’
He led her to the wall.
‘Look at this one. We call him Primrose because his firing-pin leaves a mark like a flower. He has been in the bush for three years, and been in contact ninety-six times. That is almost once every ten days, he must be made of steel.’
Craig ran his finger down the chart.
‘Here is another, we call him Leopard Paw, you can see why by the print of his rifle. He is a newcomer, his first time across the river, but he hit four farms and ran an ambush, then he went into contact with Roly’s Scouts. Not many of them survive that, Roly’s boys are incredible. They wiped out most of the cadre, but Leopard Paw fought like a veteran and got away with a bunch of his men. Roly’s combat report says he lost four men to AP mines that Leopard Paw put down as he ran, and another six in the actual fighting – ten men. That’s the heaviest casualties the Scouts have ever taken in any one contact.’ Craig tapped the name on the chart. ‘He is the hot one. We are going to hear more of this lad.’
Janine shuddered. ‘It’s awful – all this death and suffering. When will it ever end?’
‘It started when man first stood up on his hind legs, it’s not going to end tomorrow. Now let’s talk about dinner tonight, I’ll pick you up at your flat at seven, okay?’
She telephoned him at the armoury a little before five o’clock.
‘Craig, don’t come for me this evening.’
‘Why not?’
‘I won’t be there.’
‘What has happened?’
‘Roly is back from the bush.’
Craig did a little work on the foredeck of the yacht, placing the cleats for the jib sheets, but when it was too dark, he went below, and wandered around disconsolately. She had left her dark glasses on the table beside the bunk, and a lipstick on the edge of the wash-basin. The saloon still smelled of her perfume, and the two wineglasses stood together in the sink.
‘I think I will get drunk,’ he decided, but he had no tonic, and gin with plain water tasted awful. He tipped it into the sink, and put the ‘Pastoral’ on the tape, but the images it conjured up were too painful. He hit the ‘stop’ button.
He picked Sir Ralph’s leather-bound journal off the table, and flicked through it. He had read it twice; he should have gone out to King’s Lynn at the weekend, Bawu would have been expecting him to come for the next journal in the series. He started to read it again, and it was an immediate opiate for the loneliness.
After a while he searched in the drawer of the chart-table and found the ruled exercise book which he had used for drawing the layout of the cabins and galley. He tore out the used pages, and there were still over a hundred unused sheets. He sat down at the saloon table with an HB pencil from the navigation set, and stared at the first empty sheet for almost five minutes. Then he wrote:
‘Africa crouched low on the horizon, like a lion in ambush, tawny and gold in the early sunlight, seared by the cold of the Benguela Current.
‘Robyn Ballantyne stood by the ship’s rail and stared towards it—’
Craig re-read what he had
written, and felt a strange excitement, something he had never experienced before. He could actually see the young woman. He could see the way she stood with her chin lifted eagerly and the wind snapping and tangling her hair.
The pencil started to race across the empty page, and the woman moved in his mind and spoke aloud in his ears. He turned the page and wrote on, then, almost before he realized it, the exercise book was filled with his pointed peaky handwriting and outside the porthole by his head the day was lightening.
Ever since Janine Carpenter could remember, there had always been horses in her father’s stables at the back of the veterinary dispensary. When she was eight her father had taken her out for the first time with the local hunt. Just after her twenty-second birthday, a few months before she had left home for Africa, she had been awarded her hunt buttons.
The mount that Roland Ballantyne had given her was a beautiful chestnut filly without any other marking. She was curried to a gloss so that she shone in the sunlight like wet red silk. Janine had ridden her often before. She was fleet and strong, and there was an accord between them.
Roland rode his stallion. It was an enormous black beast he called ‘Mzilikazi’ after the old king. The veins stood out under the skin of his shoulders and belly like living serpents. The great black bunch of his testicles was crudely and overpoweringly masculine. When he laid back his ears and bared his teeth, the mucous membrane in the corner of his savage eyes was the colour of blood. There was an arrogance and menace in him that frightened Janine, and yet excited her also. Horses and rider were of a pair.
Roland Ballantyne wore brown whipcord breeches and high boots boned to glossy perfection. The short sleeves of the crisp white shirt were stretched tightly across the hard smooth muscle of his upper arms. Janine was certain that he always wore white to contrast against the deep tan of his face and arms. She thought he was impossibly handsome, and that cruel and ruthless streak in him made him all the more attractive than mere good looks alone could ever do.
Last night in the bed in her bachelor flat she had asked him,
‘How many men have you killed?’