Men of Men (66 page)

‘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 and 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.’

R
alph 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 there?’

‘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.

Ralph could tell by the spacing and weight of their gait that they were carrying a heavy litter.

He had guessed that the leading band was merely a vanguard. This was the main party, while the person on the litter was without any doubt Lobengula himself, and following him were his
attendants, his high indunas and other important personages. After them again, more bearers carrying sleeping-mats and karosses of fur, beer pots and leather sacks of maize meal and other burdens.
They filed past and disappeared, but still Ralph did not rise from hiding.

Another long silence, and then, with only a soft warning rustle, came the rear guard, two hundred more picked warriors trotting past. After five minutes Ralph felt it was safe to crawl out onto
the path and dust the damp leaf mould from his knees and elbows.

From the top of the ridge he stared back in the direction which Lobengula’s party had taken, puzzled as to where they were all headed and why. He knew from Cathy that Rudd and his party
were still at GuBulawayo and that Clinton Codrington and Robyn were with them, negotiating the concession that Mr Rhodes so desperately needed.

Why would Lobengula leave such important guests at his kraal and come up here into these sacred and deserted hills?

There was no answer, and Ralph had to be content with having so narrowly escaped discovery, and to be now alerted to the presence of large parties of warriors in the area.

He moved forward with even more caution than before so that it took three more nights of travel at the pace of the bullocks before they came out of another pass between bald granite cliffs and
saw the open forests of tall and lovely trees rolling away below them, silver and charcoal in the moonlight.

In the dawn Ralph climbed the cliff to the peak of the last of the Matopos Hills, and on the eastern horizon – almost exactly where he had hoped to find it – he picked out the far
blue silhouette of a solitary kopje standing above the forested plain. It was still thirty miles distant, but the shape of a crouching lion was unmistakable, and it fitted exactly the description
in Zouga Ballantyne’s notes: