Men of Men (65 page)

‘There they are, I’ll be damned! They are shy as blushing virgins, they are off already.’

There had been a time when Zouga had been able to ride up to within two hundred yards of a herd before they took alarm. These were still a mile away and already galloping from the two
horsemen.

‘Come on, Papa. We’ll catch them when they try to cross the Shashi,’ and they tore into the stand of flowering mimosa.

‘Tally-ho!’ yelled Ralph. His hat came off and, hanging on its thong, it slapped against his back; while his long dark hair fluttered in the wind of their gallop. ‘By God, Papa
– you’ll have to work to win your sovereign today,’ he warned laughingly.

They crashed out of the forest onto another level open plain. The entire herd of huge vulnerable animals were spread before them: bulls and cows and calves, but that was not what caught
Zouga’s attention.

He pulled his horse down out of its gallop and swung his head away to the west.

‘Ralph,’ he shouted, ‘let them go!’

Ralph looked back at him through the flying dust. His face was flushed with the hunter’s fever.

‘Warriors,’ Zouga shouted. ‘War party, Ralph. Close up!’

For a moment it seemed that Ralph would not obey, but then his good sense prevailed. It would be reckless to separate when there was a war party out, and he broke back to Zouga’s side and
let the panic-driven giraffe tear away towards the river.

He reined Tom to a halt. ‘What do you make of them?’ he asked, shading his eyes and peering through the heat-distorted air at the squiggly black line, like a shoal of tadpoles in the
bottom of a rippling pool, which moved across the far side of the open plain. ‘Khama’s men? Bamangweto raiders? We are only a few miles from the frontier.’

‘We won’t take any chances until we know,’ Zouga told him grimly. ‘Let the horses blow. We may have to make a run—’

But Ralph interrupted him. ‘Long shields! And they are red, those are the Moles, Bazo’s fellows,’ Ralph urged Tom towards the approaching impi. ‘And I’ll be damned
if that isn’t Bazo himself out front.’

By the time Zouga came up, Ralph had dismounted and, leaving Tom to stand, had run to embrace his old comrade – and he was already joshing Bazo cruelly.

‘Lo, the Moles-that-burrow-under-a-mountain are returning from a raid without women or cattle. Did Khama’s people give you the steel farewell?’

Bazo’s delighted smile slid off his face at such levity, and he shook his plumes sternly.

‘Not even in jest, Henshaw – do not talk like a giggling girl. If the king had sent us to Khama,’ and he stabbed the air with his assegai, ‘there would have been a
beautiful killing.’ He broke off as he recognized Zouga.

‘Baba!’ he said. ‘Bakela – I see you, and my eyes are white with joy.’

‘It has been too long, Bazo – but now you have the headring on your brow and an impi at your back – we shall shoot a beast and feast together this night.’

‘Ah Bakela, it grieves me – but I am on the king’s business. I return to GuBulawayo in haste to report the woman’s death to the king.’

‘Woman?’ Zouga asked without real interest.

‘A white woman. She ran from GuBulawayo without the king’s word, and the king sent me after her—’ Bazo broke off with an exclamation. ‘Hau! But you know this woman,
Bakela.’

‘It is not Nomusa, my sister?’ Zouga asked with quick concern. ‘Not one of her daughters?’

‘No, not them.’

‘There are no other white women in Matabeleland.’

‘She is the woman of One Bright Eye. The same woman who raced her horse against yours at Kimberley – and won. But now she is dead.’

‘Dead?’ All the blood had drained from Zouga’s face, leaving his tan muddy and yellow. ‘Dead?’ he whispered, and swayed in the saddle so that, had he not grabbed at
the pommel, he would have fallen.

‘Louise – dead.’

Z
ouga found the sycamore that Bazo described to him, merely by back-tracking the impi.

They had left a good wide spoor, and Zouga reached the tree in the middle of the afternoon.

He did not know why he tortured himself so. There could be no reasonable doubt that she was dead. Bazo had showed him the pathetic relics he had retrieved. The damaged rifle and bandolier, the
empty water-bottle, and the tatters of cloth and saddlery ripped and chewed by the omnivorous jaws of the hyena.

The ground under the sycamore was beaten and swept of all traces of Louise by the pads of jackal and hyena, by the fluttering wings and the talons of hundreds of feeding, squabbling vultures. It
smelled like a chicken coop, smeared with vulture dung, and loose feathers blew aimlessly hither and thither on the soft dry breeze.

Except for a few splinters of bone and tufts of hair, every trace of animal carcasses and the human body had been devoured. The hyena would have gobbled up even the leather of Louise’s
boots and belt, and the few remaining shreds of blanket and cloth were bloodstained.

It was quite easy to reconstruct what had happened. Louise had been set upon by a pride of lion. She had managed a single shot, there was an empty shell in the breech of the damaged rifle, and
had killed one of the cats before being pulled off the mule.

Zouga could imagine every moment of her agony, almost hear her screams as the great jaws crunched through her bone and the yellow claws hooked into her flesh. It left him physically nauseated
and weakened. He wanted to pray on the spot where she had died, but he did not seem to have the energy for even such small effort. It was as though the very force of life had gone out of him. Until
that moment he had not realized what Louise’s memory had meant to him, how the certainty that their lives were intertwined had sustained him while they were apart, how his belief in their
eventual reunion had given his life purpose and direction. She had become part of his dream, and now it had been snuffed out on this wild and bloody patch of earth.

Twice he turned back to his horse to mount and leave, but each time he hesitated and then wandered back to sift through the reeking dust with his fingers for some last trace of her.

At last he looked at the sun. He could not reach the wagons before nightfall. He had told Ralph to leave Jan Cheroot and the spare horses at the drift of the Shashi when he went on with the
wagons, so there was no urgency. There was no hurry. Without Louise there was no flavour in his life. Nothing really mattered any more, but he crossed to his horse, clinched the girth and mounted.
He took one more lingering look at the trampled earth and then turned his horse’s head back towards the Shashi and the wagons. He had not gone fifty yards when he found himself circling. It
was not a conscious decision to begin casting for outgoing spoor. He knew it was futile, but his reluctance to leave the place dictated his actions.

Once he circled the sycamore, leaning out of the saddle and examining the broken and stony earth, then he moved farther out and circled again, then again, each time opening the radius of the
circle. Suddenly his heart leaped against his ribs, and new hope flooded his devastated soul, but he had to steel himself to lean from the saddle and examine the thorn twig, in case he was to be
disappointed once again.

The white tear had caught his eye, the twig had been broken half-through and now hung from the main branch at the level of a man’s waist. The soft green leaves had wilted, the break was
two or three days’ old, but that was not what made Zouga’s fingers shake.

From one of the curved red-tipped thorns hung a fine red thread of spun cotton. Zouga lifted it reverently and then touched it to his lips as though it were a sacred relic.

He was to the west of the sycamore; he could just make out the top branches above the surrounding bush, which meant that Louise had left that thread on the grasping thorn after she had run from
the tree. The height above ground showed she had been on foot, and the broken twig and shredded cloth were evidence of her haste.

She had run from the sycamore and kept going in the direction which she had been stubbornly following, westwards, towards the Tati and Khama’s country.

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.’

‘W
ill 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.