1972 - A Story Like the Wind (56 page)

His explanation produced an outbreak of merriment equal to that at their first meeting. But noticing that François had no inkling that she was not laughing at him but with him, delighted at so original a concept of laughter, she stopped and faced him apologetically, saying, ‘But seriously, I do wish, even if you must laugh so much inwardly, you would smile at us more often. It rather suits you, you know.’ Then, tactfully changing the subject, she said, ‘And please, let’s go to the river.’

François hesitated. ‘It’s rather a long way for you to walk. Can you ride?’

Her instinct, as a young person who had ridden ever since she could remember, was to laugh again. However, instead she made straight for Noble as if to get into the saddle. But François restrained her. As far as he knew, he was the only other person allowed to ride Noble, just as he had been the only person who had ever been allowed to shoot with any of Mopani’s guns. Besides, his own horse, often ridden by Lammie, seemed a more obvious choice. Accordingly, he quickly shortened his own stirrups, made sure the girth had not slackened, and the horse was ready for Luciana. She was so impatient to be off now, however, that she did not even wait for him to help, but took a run at the horse, jumped, threw herself across the saddle, scrambled upright, quickly found the stirrups, took the reins from François and exclaimed, ‘Lead on, MacDuff!’

For a moment François thought Amelia would protest, but the temptation of now being able to withdraw from an uncomfortable excursion under a hot sun to the comfort and coolness of the camp was too much for her. After some ambiguous noises and a perfunctory gesture of disapproval, she swung slowly about and retreated with great dignity towards Sir James’s tents.

For François, the most important thing about the journey to the river and back was perhaps the extent to which it revealed differences in their temperaments, which at times excited and at others dismayed him. He had had no experience to enable him to decide to what extent the differences were due to the fact that she was a girl and he a boy. All he knew was that she did seem to have a knack of making him feel an awfully slow, plodding sort of person when he had always taken it for granted that he had quick reflexes and reactions. Even their pace of thought and feeling appeared different. His seemed slow, single and persistent; hers quick, varied, changeable and no sooner announced or felt than impatient to be realized without delay.

She was hardly in the saddle before she called out, ‘I dare you to race me to the river!’

‘I’m afraid we can’t do that,’ François replied, annoyed that he had to say no. ‘We have to walk them so the horses can cool down properly before we water them.’

She made a face full of disappointment before her expression brightened and she countered, ‘Well then, I’ll race you back to the camp. I bet I beat you to it!’

She said it with such confidence that François could not possibly suspect that this mystique of horses which had invaded her like an attack of scarlet fever, as Amelia would have had it, demanded that the rider who had featured so prominently in the drawings which had incurred Sir James’s disapproval, had to be expert at racing, particularly races with young women.

However, she was disappointed again. François, in his slow, deliberate way, explained that nothing could be worse for horses than racing them with their stomachs full of cold water.

‘Oh bother!’ she answered, irritated again and needing all the self-control of which she was capable, to alter the ‘Why must you always be so maddeningly sensible?’ that was on the tip of her tongue, to an oblique, impatient and scathing, ‘Why must one always be so sensible? I do hate having to be sensible all the time, don’t you?’

This was a favourite theme, but with a secret aspect to it. It may have been pure reaction against the eminently practical sense of her father, or the peasant, shrewd sense of Amelia, raised in the Portuguese governess’s case to a point which transformed Luciana from a sort of female Sancho Panza to an incorrigibly quixotic charge. But, whatever the reason, part of her had come to dislike what was called ‘being sensible’ to such an extent that she had already informed Amelia that when she grew up she would never dream of marrying anyone who, in addition to the exacting range of other qualities expected of him, was not also utterly incapable of being sensible about her.

François did not quite know how to answer. He hesitated in fact so long that his silence was misinterpreted and he was unfairly upbraided with a scornful, ‘Ah, I might have known it. There you go searching again for a sensible answer. I wish you would say the first thing that came into your head.’

Even then François did not answer. He was thinking, as so often since Ouwa’s death, of something he had once said on this subject. It was extraordinary how in some way Ouwa had now become a more clearly defined and real person to François than when alive. Most vividly he could now hear Ouwa’s rather tired, slightly ironical voice saying, ‘The art of living, François, is nothing if it does not consist of being sensible on completely non-sensible grounds. It is, if I dare suggest so flagrant a defiance of collective precepts for wisdom, nothing if not a leap into the dark; a finding of alternatives to what common sense holds to be inevitable. Those who look before they leap, never leap.’

François would have liked to explain all this, but apart from the fact that being more a feeling than a process of reasoning, it was difficult to put into words, the time and place seemed wrong. All he could do was to protest, ‘It isn’t that at all. I often do wild, impulsive things. Perhaps I can tell you when we have more time. Only the other day I did something that frightened everyone at home.’

He uttered this last sentence rather proudly; for he was, of course, thinking of the way he had allowed Hintza to lead him out into the dangerous first light of day to find Xhabbo and rescue him from the lion trap, the leopard and all the other dangerous things which had threatened him at the time. He had not been at all ‘sensible’ then, and he had an instinct that he could trust her with the full story, without imperilling Xhabbo. He longed to do so but knew he would have to wait.

However, not what he had said so much as the tone in which he had said it, had apparently been enough to restore him to grace, for Luciana exclaimed eagerly, ‘I smell another secret. You promise to tell me one day, if I promise not to tell?’ She laughed, and drew the edge of her hand sharply like a knife across her throat and clicked her tongue against her teeth, before reminding him, ‘And what of that secret about Hin? You’ve not told me about that yet.’

Hintza and his parents were scouting far ahead at the moment, so François could tell her, without chance of being overheard, why
Hintza
had been contracted into
Hin
, as well as the origin of
tsa
as he had had it from old Koba, and how old Koba and her people had had it from the stars.

He was rewarded not only by the fact that she listened with the utmost attention, but also by her final exclamation, ‘Oh, I love it so when things have stories to them. And they all seem to have here in this place where you live.’

And on this occasion the sharing of the secret was made more dynamic by the fact that chance provided François with the opportunity of illustrating the need for the contraction of Hintza’s name. Perched high on his horse, he spotted about fifty yards away to the left of them, behind an ant-heap, the tip of the nose and pointed ear of a jackal which the Matabele call the ‘turn-about’ jackal because of its adroit way of twisting, turning and doubling back on its tracks in order to avoid its many and far more powerful enemies.

Calling Hintza to him, François had only to point in the direction of the jackal in the long grass which was invisible from Hintza’s level, and proclaim a loud ‘
Tsa!
’ Instantly Hintza, followed by Nandi and !#grave;Swayo, set out at great speed to flush the jackal within a few seconds and pursue it with incredible speed and determination.

Luciana appeared to be equally divided between two longings; one to see François’s Hintza succeed in his mission, the other to spare the life of the nimble jackal. Running races with death in the animal world of Africa produces the greatest and most poignant of all eurhythmic graces. It was utterly unpossible to watch the lithe body of the jackal, elongated with the extremity of speed, its dark coat streaked with gold and silver, flashing in and out of occasional bare patches of the vast clearing, and to see it soar effortlessly over some thorn bush into a sheet of sunlight like an animal breaking a silver hoop in the limelight of a circus, not to want such perfection of movement and beauty of form to out-run death.

Fortunately François had no love of unnecessary killing. Also he had another, perhaps more egotistical motive: he wanted to spare Hintza loss of face in front of the girl for it was just possible that he and his parents could fail to catch so expert a quarry.

The moment the point of his demonstration appeared effectively made, he put two fingers in his mouth and a whistle, loud and clear, broke the silence of the day. Hintza at once swung about and, followed by his parents, came back as fast as he could towards the horses.

‘Heavens, what a whistle?’ Luciana exclaimed. ‘Do you think you could teach me how to do it too? And how perfectly wizard of Hin. What a magic word that
tsa
is?’ (To François’s delight she pronounced the
tsa
perfectly.)

A few minutes later they came to the edge of the broad belt of reeds and rushes along the banks of the river, its sound reaching them like that of the wind which produces the slow build-up of clouds before rain in François’s world. There, to Luciana’s amazement, François turned off the track to ride straight into the grass and reeds, so tall that they brushed her lips, even when sitting on her horse.

François, looking round to see if she was following, noticed her surprise and exclaimed, ‘The river’s full of crocodiles making their living by waiting for the game who never learn how stupid it is always to use the same track to drink at the same place. It’s easier of course…but sheer laziness on their part. And nothing could suit the crocodiles better. They study their habits and so know exactly where to lie in wait for them. You should hear !#grave;Bamuthi on the subject! He says that there’s nothing more dangerous for man in the bush than regular habits.’

By the time he’d finished, they saw the smooth broad water of the river, flashing beyond the tall rushes and reeds. When François at last found an opening in them produced by a large flat slab of an outcrop of ironstone, he walked his horse across it to the water lapping at the edge and dismounted. Luciana, whose first close glimpse of the Amanzim-tetse this was, seeing it so broad, smooth, purposeful in its urge to find the far-off Zambezi which was the royal way of all their rivers to the sea, noticed how the water against the far bank was like a Chinese painting on silk. There was the reflection not only of the sky but also of the taut, river-bamboo, sprung grass and rushes bent low with birds’ nests that hung like round paper lanterns on them.

Luciana swung out of her saddle to come and stand silently, deeply stirred, beside François. François had already released Noble from his bit and snaffle and allowed him to step forward to drink, or rather sip at the water because, like all their horses, he did so with the delicacy of a gourmet, first blowing away any film of dust or grass seeds which might have collected on the surface of that sluggish backwater and then, thirsty as he was, taking only the smallest of mouthfuls to see whether the water was of a vintage to his liking, before drinking it more steadily.

François, perhaps, should have responded to the girl’s appreciation of the scene. But he appeared to her to be insensitive to it all and more interested in unslinging his gun, unlocking the magazine and deftly undoing the bolt to push a bullet into the breech. The harsh, metallic sound jarred sharply on Luciana. She looked at François, feeling reproachful that he should introduce so discordant a sound and be so impervious to what seemed to her the most harmonious and peaceful sight she had ever seen. Worse, he seemed nt only totally unaware of the beauty of the place but completely unaware of her presence. He was just standing there with his gun held at the ready in front of him, utterly absorbed in examining, first their bank of the river, then the water immediately in front of them and finally the far bank, and that shining sheet covered all over with the inscriptions of the vegetation looming over it. Had it not been for that humbling episode of the black cobra earlier on, she would have suspected François of playing at some kind of Boy Scout heroics.

Her attention came back to the river and nothing, she realized, had ever looked lovelier to her. It was not only the cool, purposeful sound of the river, nostalgic for its own great sea-level, and the noise of the trustful horses drinking up water like wine. She was also hearing in concert, woven into the wind-instrument music of the river, the calling of all sorts of birds among the reeds. She saw them in all shapes and colours, fluttering from one dense clump to another, until the green and gold tops were a confetti of crimson bee-eaters, bronze sun-birds, glistening green-black starlings, with stippled breasts; chrome yellow and olive green finches; blue Ethiopian rollers; cool, purple little doves with warm voices; water plovers with flutes in their throats and vivid little weaver birds, coming in and out of the side entrance of their round green homes suspended low over the water from the tip of bent reeds and rushes. Indeed, it all looked such a secluded place that François, standing there with his gun at the ready, struck her as unnecessarily melodramatic.

It was suddenly too much for her. Despite her stirred-up feeling, she found herself whispering again as if she were in some great concert hall, wherein one is listening to a performance of universal music which the human voice, however still or small, could spoil, ‘You’re mean to stand with your back to me. Can’t you tell me the names of those lovely birds?’

François was not aware of doing anything unusual. He had done what he had done unconsciously, so much had his earliest training to be always on guard become a habit. Surprised not only that his behaviour was not understood but also by the vehemence of feeling which had blurred the whisper, he said without turning round in, to her, a maddeningly unperturbed tone, ‘I’m sorry to look rude, but I’m keeping an eye on that crocodile there.’