Sunset at Sheba (15 page)

He nudged Le Roux’s tired chestnut into movement and edged into the deep shadow of the hill, setting Le Roux’s horse at the first simple slopes and trailing the Argentino behind him. Polly stared after him for a second, her weary brain unable to take in this new demand he was making on her muscles, then she dug her heels into the grey’s flank and followed.

After a few minutes of following the narrow path Sammy had picked out, they stopped in a shallow depression, where the rocky outcrop overhung a flat clearing, a small valley in the side of the hill almost like a kraal. There were small caves in the rock, the homes of the dassies, and Sammy stood still, staring round at them, the grey horse nuzzling his hand. ‘We can leave the hosses here,’ he said. ‘We’ll knee-halter ‘em so they can’t get out. They won’t be seen from below.’

‘Suppose they come up?’

‘They won’t come up.’

Something in his voice made her swing round, but he had begun to off-load the horses and rub them down with his shirt, his face turned away from her. For a moment she stared at him, then she started to life again and began to untie the ropes that secured their belongings.

Hoisting as much as they could carry on their backs, they began to struggle higher up the slopes, their feet slipping and stumbling over the loose scattered stones, their faded and dust-caked clothes snagging on the thorn bushes that grew through the cracks between the boulders. After ten minutes, Polly halted and pushed the hair from her eyes.

‘Sammy, let’s stop,’ she pleaded, wiping the sweat from her face with the hem of her skirt. ‘I’ve had enough. Honest I have.’

Sammy stopped and turned towards her. ‘I’ll take the pack,’ he said. ‘You get on ahead.’

She shook her head. A moment before she had felt she had no more strength left to struggle but now, as he offered to take her burden, she summoned up reserves of courage she didn’t know she possessed.

‘I’ll take it,’ she panted. She tried to take the pack back from him again but he pushed her hand away gently.

‘I’ll take it.’ Her voice was pleading and insistent, and she was near to tears with a weary determination that she should do her share, but he took her wrist in his hand and pushed it gently away again.

‘I’ll
take it,’ he insisted.

She was too tired to argue anymore and she faced the slope without it.

‘How much farther, Sammy?’ she pleaded.

‘Up among them rocks,’ he said, pointing to a half-circle of granite crags, their bases sunk in a thicket of cactus and thorn. ‘They make a sort of cave. I sheltered there once in a hailstorm.’

‘Sammy,’ she asked, ‘why are we going up here? We’ve never had to climb before. What’s wrong with the veld?’

‘Just think it’s safer,’ he said. ‘Got a feeling, that’s all.’

He pushed past her and pointed higher up the slope to a cluster of grey shapes like broken teeth above them.

‘That’s where we want to be,’ he said.

Polly was watching him with frightened eyes.

‘Sammy’ - her voice sounded thin and small in the silence of the kopje - ‘are you reckoning on staying here for a few days?’

‘Might.’

‘Sammy, why?’

He had slipped back into the taut taciturn mood of the beginning of the affair and he looked up slowly and flipped a hand towards the veld.

‘Polly,’ he said; ‘I’m not running any more. If they want me, they’ve got to come and fetch me.’

He pointed and, looking back, she could see the clump of mimosas and the winding path of the stream beyond the rocky hump of Babylon where they had camped on their way out. There was water in it now after the rain storm, a shining strip of steel between the high banks as it curved towards them.

‘There’s height here,’ he said. ‘There’s water. I can fill the canteens and the barrel and if they try to interfere, I’ll give ‘em something to think about. Maybe then they’ll leave us alone. Polly, we’re thirty miles from Plummerton and getting on over a hundred from Kimberley. They’re right on our tails and baying like a lot of hounds, it seems to me. I’ll feel better with something at me back.’

He indicated the slope of Sheba and she was silent for a moment, appalled by what he was suggesting.

‘But, Sammy, it’s not legal.’

‘There’s no law when there’s no police.’

She grabbed at his arm and swung him round.

‘But Sammy, Sammy, why? Why? Why should they do this to us? We’ve done nothing to them.’

He looked down at her, his face calm and unafraid. ‘Polly, we’re dangerous,’ he said. ‘Both of us. Me because I know what Willie Plummer did, and you because I told you. And now that we’ve turned back, we’re more dangerous still, I reckon.’

She said nothing, her eyes frightened, and he nodded at the slope again. ‘They might keep us here for a day or two,’ he said. ‘But they’ll never get up that slope, Polly. They’ll have to go away in the end. We’ve got all the view. And with the sun behind us, we can see ‘em sharp and clear while we’ll be in shadow and in broken ground all day. The slope faces north and the sun’ll be in their eyes except at midday.’

Polly had got most of their belongings set out in the cranny of rocks when Sammy returned, struggling with the water.

He nodded approvingly and placed the canteens and the barrel under the overhang that formed a cave.

‘We’d better eat now,’ he said.

Polly turned quickly, trying to be helpful to hide her fears from him and from herself.

‘I’ll make a fire,’ she said.

Sammy shook his head quickly. ‘No fires, Polly. No smoke. Not tonight.’

She stared at him for a second, but she said nothing and reached for the meat they had cooked earlier in the day.

‘It’s going to be cold up here,’ she said.

Sammy grinned, a short brief grin that lit up his thin face. ‘Sleep close together, Poll,’ he suggested. ‘That’ll keep us warm.’

He untied the yellow bandanna he had tied round his throat against the dust and tore it into strips.

‘I got a little job to do before we settle down,’ he said, and Polly watched him move down the hillside again, the strips of yellow hanging from his hand.

Near the bottom, on the east side, he placed one of the strips of cloth on the south side of the rock, so that it was clearly visible from where she stood, and set a small stone on top of it. Then he moved slowly round the hill towards the west, selecting small rocks that were visible from the upper slopes and placing the yellow rags on them, holding them in place with other small rocks. Every now and again he paused, glancing up the slope as though trying to make up his mind about something, before he moved on patiently.

When she looked round again, he was out beyond the bottom of the slope, a long shadow stretching sharply from his feet, placing small, innocuous groups and patterns of stones in the grass, all of them plainly visible from where she stood. Working slowly, watched by the puzzled Polly, he placed a wide ring of the inconspicuous cairns round the foot of the kopje, then he turned and began to climb back towards her.

He jumped into the shallow hollow behind the rocks where she stood and caught the puzzled look in her eyes.

‘Makes shooting easier,’ he explained, ‘when you know the ranges. That’s where most people go wrong, but I’ve just been measuring it out. That’s all. First lot are two hundred yards. Second lot are four hundred. The stones are way up beyond that.’

‘Sammy,
will
there be any shooting?’

‘Not unless
they
start it.’

‘How many of ‘em are there?’

He grinned suddenly. ‘Not enough,’ he said. ‘You wait and see.’

She was moved to an explosion of anger by a sudden hatred for their pursuers. ‘I hope you kill all of ‘em,’ she said violently. ‘I hope you kill every single blasted one - chasing people up and down Africa like this, not giving ‘em any peace. I hope there isn’t a single
one
left when you’ve finished, Sammy.’

He grinned and, turning away from her, began to empty the ammunition from his pockets, tossing it in small shining groups among the rocks. He moved quietly and surely, like an animal that knows it has suddenly become involved in a hunt that can end only in death.

After they had gnawed at a piece of biltong and washed out their mouths with water, he sat back and began to clean the rifles, taking out the pull-throughs and working slowly and skilfully with them. Polly sat beside him, watching him, shivering from time to time, partly with excitement and partly with fear, her eyes on the subtle wiry muscles of his hands. He seemed to ignore her and went on working silently, his thin bony fingers moving over the weapons until he was satisfied. Then he replaced the pull-throughs and the oil and wiped the weapons on a piece of rag. The determined sureness of his movements had a frightening significance.

He caught her eyes on him and returned her gaze without blinking. Something inside her responded to his look, some trick of their sexes that had sparked in her from the first day she had seen him so that the very thought of him had always been a stimulant for as long as she could remember.

‘Sammy - !’

She stopped dead, unspoken words dying in her throat, and slowly he pushed the weapons aside, and reached out to her...

For some time, she clung to him, a great tenderness and passion flooding over her as she leaned against his shoulder, content to let him touch her, responding impetuously when he kissed her mouth with a raw unexpected violence, his fingers in her tangled hair, both of them drowning in the darkness of the emotion that flooded over them.

Then, after a while, she sat up, shaken and cold, shivering as she held on to him, caressing his thin features, unable to take her eyes off him, and she was crying, softly and secretly, as she hadn’t cried for years.

‘Sammy, Sammy,’ she mourned. ‘What’s come over me? I’ve not done this since I was a kid.’

He pulled her closer, stroking her forehead with the back of his hand.

‘Wind up, Poll,’ he said. ‘It’ll soon go.’

She stirred in his arms, unhappy and afraid.

‘It’s you I’m scared for, Sammy,’ she said. ‘We’re up against it now and no error.’

‘Nothing to be afraid of,’ he said confidently.

‘Isn’t there? I don’t know so much.’

On her face there was the look of woman throughout the whole of history, hating conflict, wanting only warmth and love and roots deep in the earth, a look that was impossible to answer with words.

‘We just happened to fall on the wrong side of the fence, Poll, that’s all,’ he said inadequately.

Her body shook again in a new paroxysm of misery and fear. ‘Sammy, why did we waste so many years? Why didn’t you ever take me with you before?’

‘I will next time, Poll,’ he promised. ‘Next time I’ll take you with me.’

‘Or I could maybe run a little bar to keep me while you were away,’ she said. ‘Somewhere you could come home to, when you were sick of shooting or when you were tired. Then there’d always be somewhere if you decided to leave the veld.’

He laughed.
‘Me
leave the veld, Poll? It’s in my blood.’

He grinned and she saw that, like all men, he came from a different world from hers, a world that was as remote from her own desire for security as it was from the moon.

‘There might be kids,’ she pointed out anxiously, trying with all her woman’s skill to give him roots, trying to entwine him, however unconsciously, with the vines of domesticity, trying to tie him down to something. ‘You might be glad to come home once in a while.’

‘I
might,’
he said unconvincingly.

Polly sat back, forgetting her discomfort and the growing chilliness as she busied herself with daydreams she hadn’t ever dared to dwell on before, preoccupied with the idea of houses and homes, seeing him as a new tamed Sammy, accepting ties and roots, attentive in a way she could never in her heart of hearts remember him and never honestly expected to; then, looking round for him, reaching out for him, wanting merely to touch him, she realised he had moved quietly away from her.

She sat up abruptly, but he had moved to the edge of the rocky ledge out of reach - restless even now - and was scanning the russet veld below them.

They could see over a dozen miles in most directions, except north. The evening light was extraordinarily clear, better even to see by than the full flare of the afternoon sun which set the plain dancing with heat shimmers and water-patches of mirage and made it hard to spot sudden movement.

But the faint roll of the ground was deceptive nevertheless. A whole column of buck could hide itself at a distance of a few miles in a place that seemed as flat as a plate, and he was looking for small things that indicated men, a layer of floating dust among the scrub and the scattered thorn trees, a running antelope, or a movement of quail.

He glanced back at the place he had selected for them. Above them the kopje rose gaunt and bleak with high krantzes of stone, buttress on buttress of it, with sparse grassy slopes between. There was only one way to the top, he knew, and that was directly past where he was standing.

He saw Polly watching him, her face still flushed, but her eyes frightened. He grinned at her to reassure her, and laid the two rifles out on the rocks in front of them, their muzzles facing towards the north, protruding through the screen of monkey thorn and cactus that filled the gap between the boulders.

The two weapons had a wicked look about them, the old Martini-Henry, a discarded mounted police weapon years old, with its short barrel, well pitted with rust scars, and the shining new Mauser. Alongside each he had laid the ammunition.

He saw Polly still looking at him and he stooped to pick up the Mauser and one of the clips of ammunition. He held the weapon in his left hand and pulled back the bolt. For a second he stood, balancing the rifle, then he pushed in the clips of bullets and drove the bolt home.

‘Nice gun,’ he commented and Polly shuddered with an unknown fear.

He laid the rifle down again slowly, then he straightened up and stood in front of her. Lifting her to her feet, he placed his hands on her hips.