A Falcon Flies (40 page)

The smell of roasting
ropoko
cakes rose on tendrils of pale smoke straight into the windless dark sky. The muted voices became louder, more cheerful as the flames drove away the chills and the nightmares.

‘Safari!' The cry was taken up, and the divisions assembled, ghostly figures in the gloom, emerging more clearly as the growing dawn light paled the sky and snuffed out the stars.

‘Safari!' And the mass of men and equipment resolved itself and order grew out of chaos.

Like those long columns of big shiny black serowe ants that endlessly cross and re-cross the African earth, the stream of porters moved steadily away into the still gloomy forest.

As each of them passed Zouga and Robyn standing together at the gate of the thorn
scherm
, they shouted a greeting and executed a few prancing steps to demonstrate their loyalty and enthusiasm – while Robyn laughed with them and Zouga called encouragement.

‘We no longer have a guide, and we don't know where we are going.' She took Zouga's arm. ‘What is to become of us?'

‘If we knew, it would take all the fun out of it.'

‘At least a guide.'

‘While you thought I was hunting I went out as far as the escarpment which is further than that swaggering Portuguese ever went, further than any white man, except of course Pater, has ever been. Follow me, Sissy, I am your guide.'

She looked up at him now in the strengthening light of coming dawn.

‘I knew you were not hunting,' she told him.

‘The escarpment is rugged and very broken, but I have examined two passes through the telescope that I think will go—'

‘And beyond that?'

He laughed, ‘We will find out.' Then he squeezed her around the waist. ‘That is the whole fun of the thing.'

She studied his face with full attention for a few moments. The new full beard emphasized the strong, almost stubborn, lines of his jaw. There was a piratical devil-maycare lift to the corner of his lips, and Robyn realized that no man of conventional mind would have proposed and engineered this expedition. She knew he possessed courage, his exploits in India had proved that beyond doubt, and yet when she looked at his sketches and water colours and read the rough notes he was making for the book, she discovered a sensitivity and an imagination she had never before suspected. He was a difficult person to know and understand.

Perhaps she could have told him about Sarah and the child or even about Mungo St John, and that night in the main cabin of
Huron
, for when he laughed like this, the stern features softened with humour and humanity, and green lights sparkled in his eyes.

‘That's what we are here for, Sissy, the fun of it all.'

‘And the gold,' she teased, ‘and the ivory.'

‘Yes, by God, the gold and ivory as well. Come on, Sissy, this is where it truly begins,' and he limped after the column as its tail disappeared into the acacia forest, favouring his injured leg and using a freshly cut staff to move across the sandy earth. For a moment Robyn hesitated and then she shrugged aside her doubts and ran to catch up with her brother.

That first day the porters were rested and eager, the valley floor flat and the going easy, so Zouga ordered
tirikeza
, the double march, so that even at their slow pace the column left many miles of dusty grey earth behind them that day.

They marched until the heat came up in the middle of the morning and the merciless sun dried the sweat the moment it burst through their pores and left tiny salt crystals on the skin, that sparkled like diamond chips. Then they found shade and lay like dead men through the heat of noon, stirring again only when the lowering sun gave the illusion of cooling the air and the blast of the kudu-horn trumpet forced them to their feet again.

The second stage of the
tirikeza
lasted until sunset when it became too dark to see the ground under their feet.

T
he fires were dying and the voices of the porters in their thorn bush
scherms
had slowly descended through the occasional mutter and soft murmur to ultimate silence before Zouga left his tent and limped silently as a night creature out of the camp.

He carried the Sharps rifle slung over his shoulder, the staff in one hand and a bull's eye lantern in the other, while the Colt revolver hung in its holster upon his belt. Once clear of the camp, he stepped out as briskly as his leg would allow two miles along the freshly beaten footpath that the column had made that afternoon until he reached the fallen tree trunk that was the agreed rendezvous.

He stopped and whistled softly, and a smaller figure stepped out from the undergrowth into the moonlight, carrying a rifle at high-port. The jaunty step and alert set of head on narrow shoulders was unmistakable.

‘All is well, Sergeant.'

‘We are ready, Major.'

Zouga inspected the ambush positions that Sergeant Cheroot had chosen for his men astride the path. The little Hottentot had a good eye for ground and Zouga found his trust and liking for him increasing with every such display of competence.

‘A puff?' Jan Cheroot asked now, with the clay pipe already in his mouth.

‘No smoking,' Zouga shook his head. ‘They will smell it.' And Jan Cheroot reluctantly buttoned the pipe into his hip pocket.

Zouga had chosen a position in the centre of the line, where he could make himself comfortable against the trunk of the fallen tree. He settled down with a sigh, his leg thrust out stiffly ahead of him – after the
tirikeza
it was going to be a long wearying night.

The moon was a few days short of full, and it was almost light enough to read the headlines of a newspaper. The bush was alive with the scurry and rustle of small animals, and it kept their nerves tightened and their ears strained to catch the other sounds for which they waited.

Zouga was the first to hear the click of a pebble striking against another. He whistled softly and Jan Cheroot snapped his fingers, imitating the sound of a black scarab beetle to show that he was alert. The moon had dropped low upon the hills, and its light through the forest trees laid silver and black tiger stripes upon the earth and played tricks with the eye.

Something moved in the forest, and then was gone, but Zouga picked up the whisper of bare feet scuffling the sandy disturbed earth of the path, and then suddenly they were there, and very close, man shapes in file, hurrying, silent, furtive. Zouga counted them, eight – no nine. Each of them straight-backed under the bulky burden he carried balanced upon his head. Zouga's anger simmered to the surface and yet at the same time he felt a grim sense of satisfaction that he had not wasted the night.

As the leading figure in the file came level with the fallen tree trunk, Zouga pointed the muzzle of the Sharps rifle straight into the air and pressed the trigger. The crash of the shot broke the night into a hundred echoes that bounced and rebounded through the forest, and the silence magnified it until it seemed like the thunder of all the heaven.

The echoes had not dispersed, and the nine dark figures were still frozen with shock when Jan Cheroot's Hottentots fell upon them from every direction in a shrieking pack.

The sound of their cries was so shrill, so inhuman, that it even startled Zouga, while the effect on the victims was miraculous. They let fall the burdens they carried, and dropped to earth in a paralysis of superstitious awe, adding their wails and screams to the pandemonium. Then the thud and clatter of cudgels against skull and cringing flesh mingled with it all, and the screams and howls rose to a new pitch.

Jan Cheroot's men had spent much time and care on selecting and cutting their clubs and now they wielded them with a lusty glee, making up for a night of discomfort and boredom. Sergeant Cheroot himself was in the thick of it, and in his excitement he had almost lost his voice. He was yipping squeakily like a demented fox terrier with a cat up a tree.

Zouga knew he would have to stop it soon, before they killed or seriously maimed somebody, but the punishment was richly earned, and he gave it a minute more. He even joined in himself when one of the prostrate figures scrambled to its feet and tried to dart away into the undergrowth. Zouga swung his staff and brought him down again with a blow to the back of his knees, and when he sprang up again as though he were on springs, Zouga dropped him in the dust with a short right-handed punch to the side of the head.

Then, stepping back out of the fray, Zouga took one of his few remaining cheroots from his top pocket, and lit it from the chimney of the lantern, inhaling with deep satisfaction, while around him the enthusiasm of his Hottentots flagged a little as they tired and Jan Cheroot regained his voice and became coherent for the first time.

‘
Slat hulle, kerels
! Hit them, boys!'

It was time to stop it, Zouga decided and opened the shutter of the lantern.

‘That's enough, Sergeant,' he ordered, and the thuds of blows became intermittent and then ceased while the Hottentots rested on the cudgels, panting and streaming with the honest sweat of their exertions.

The deserting porters lay moaning and whimpering in pitiful heaps, with their loot scattered about them. Some of the packs had burst open, and trade cloth and beads, flasks of gunpowder, knives, mirrors and glass jewellery were strewn about and trodden into the dirt. Zouga's fury returned at full strength when he recognized the tin box which contained his dress uniform and hat. He delivered a last kick at the nearest figure and then growled at Sergeant Cheroot,

‘Get them on their feet and clean it up.'

The nine deserters were marched into camp, roped together and bearing not only the heavy burdens which they had stolen – but also an impressive set of contusions, cuts and bruises. Lips were swollen and split, some teeth were missing, a good many eyes were puffed closed and most of their heads were as lumpy as newly-picked Jerusalem artichokes.

More painful than their injuries, however, was the ridicule of the entire camp which turned out to a man to jeer and mock them with laughter.

Zouga lined up the captives, with their booty piled in front of them, and in the presence of their peers made a speech in limping but expressive Swahili in which he likened them to sneaking jackals and lurking hyena and fined them each a month's wages.

The audience was delighted with the show, and hooted at every insult while the culprits tried physically to shrink themselves into insignificance. There was not one of the watching porters who would not have done the same thing. In fact, had the escape succeeded, most of them would have followed the next night, but now that it had been foiled, they could enjoy the vicarious pleasure of having escaped punishment, and the discomfort of their companions who had committed the sin of being caught.

During the noon rest that divided the two stages of the next day's
tirikeza
, the clusters of porters chatting in the shade of the mopani groves agreed that they had found a strong master to follow, one whom it would not be easy to cheat, and it gave them all confidence for the future of the safari. Coming directly after his defeat of the Portuguese, the recapture of the deserting porters added immeasurably to Zouga's standing.

The four indunas of the divisions agreed that it was fitting that such a man have a praise-name. They conferred at length, and after considering many suggestions, finally decided on ‘Bakela'.

‘Bakela' means ‘the one-who-strikes-with-the-fist', for this was still the one of Zouga's many accomplishments which impressed them most.

Where Bakela led, they were now prepared to follow, and though Zouga spread a dragnet of his faithful Hottentots behind the column each of the following nights, no more fish swam into it.

‘
H
ow many?' Zouga whispered, and Jan Cheroot rocked on his heels, sucking softly on the empty clay pipe and squinting his oriental eyes thoughtfully, before he shrugged, ‘Too many to count. Two hundred, three hundred, perhaps even four.'

The ground had been ploughed up into soft fluffy dust by the multitude of huge cloven hooves, and the dark pats of dung were round and shaped in little concentric circles, completely indistinguishable from those of domestic cattle, and the rank smell of cattle was heavy on the heated air of the Zambezi valley.

For an hour they had followed a small herd through the open mopani forest, stooping under the low branches with the thick shiny double leaves, each of them shaped like the cloven spoor that they followed, and now where the spoor emerged from the forest it had been joined by another much larger herd.

‘How close?' Zouga asked again, and Jan Cheroot slapped his own neck where one of the buffalo flies had settled. It was the size of a honey bee, but dull black and the long needle of its proboscis stung as though it was white hot.

‘We are so close that the flies that follow the herd still linger,' and he pushed his forefinger into the nearest pat of wet dung, ‘and the body heat is still in the dung, but,' Jan Cheroot went on as he wiped his finger on a handful of dry grass, ‘but they have gone into bad ground—' and he pointed ahead with his chin.

A week before they had reached the escarpment of the valley, but each of the possible passes that Zouga had examined through the telescope had proved on closer inspection to be dead ends, the gorges pinching out into abrupt rock faces, or falling off into some terrifying abyss.

They had turned westwards, following the edge of the escarpment, Zouga ranging ahead with his small scouting party. Yet day after day those impassable heights loomed at their left hand, rising sheer into the unknown. Even below the main escarpment, the ground was tortured and riven by deep gorges and ravines, by cliffs of dark rock and hills of enormous tumbled boulders. The ravines were choked with the drab grey stands of thorn, so densely interwoven that a man would have to crawl in on hands and knees, and his vision would be limited to a few feet ahead, yet the herd of many hundreds of buffalo that they were following had disappeared into one of these narrow gorges, their thick hides impervious to the cruel red-tipped thorn.