Sunset at Sheba (17 page)

Kitto turned his narrow face towards Winter again. ‘Dammit, this is war,’ he snapped.

‘This is a lynching.’

‘Don’t be so bloody spineless!’ Kitto lost his temper. ‘If a German fired at us, we’d be fully entitled to fire back and kill him. Anybody who fires on the King’s men in wartime becomes an enemy immediately and we’re quite within our rights to finish him off.’ He jerked on to his side in the dust to stare at Winter. ‘Thirty years ago,’ he said, T thought I might reach the highest rank in the British Army. Then things went wrong. I got the medals but none of the rank. Maybe I made a few mistakes in the last war. I don’t know. But I’m not going to make any mistakes in
this
one. I’ve got my duty to do and I’m going to do it.’

‘My God,’ Winter said helplessly, ‘the messes that have been made by people who had to do their duty! You’re another damn’ De Wet. You’ve got pride and patriotism all confused.’

Kitto was gesturing irritably now, impatient at what to him had become an arid intellectual brawl. ‘He fired on us,’ he said, as though that ended the argument, ‘and we’re reacting in the only possible way - by firing back.’

In spite of himself, Winter knew that he was right, and that his own arguments carried no conviction. Kitto’s sense of justice was just too much for him. He could feel himself beating his head against a brick wall.

‘Dammit, Winter,’ Kitto was saying with frosty self-righteousness, ‘what right have
you
to elect yourself as the conscience of the mob? It was your suggestion in the first place that we follow him.’

‘It was wrong,’ Winter said hopelessly. ‘You know it was. I know it was now. I never dreamed he could be manoeuvred into this damnable position! My God, Kitto, I think you’re going to murder that boy just to satisfy your own ego!’

Kitto turned away. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ he said. ‘But I do know that it would probably be best for all concerned.’

Nobody was moving and there was no sign of life on the high sides of Sheba.

Men were crouched behind every rock, staring upwards in the fast-fading light, their rifles in front of them. The Kaffirs had taken the horses round to the shelter of Babylon and the two motorcars had jolted out of sight without any attempt from the boy on Sheba to stop them.

Kitto was crouching behind his rock with Le Roux and Romanis, staring at a watch he had dragged from his pocket.

‘Are you going on with this murder?’ Winter demanded.

‘I’ll give him five minutes to come out.’

‘You know he’ll never come out.’

Kitto nodded. ‘Yes,’ he said calmly, ‘I know.’

‘I believe you want it that way.’

Kitto gestured angrily, surprised that Winter didn’t see it his way. ‘Of course I do, man,’ he said. ‘How else can it end? I couldn’t
ever
have taken the damned boy back to Plummerton.’

He lifted his head and shouted, his words echoing back off the sides of Sheba.

‘This is Kitto speaking, Schuter. Hector Stark Kitto. You’d better come out, or we’ll come and get you!’

The voice came back to them, thin and disembodied, hidden among the clefts of rock.

‘I’m waiting.’

‘I’ll give you five minutes. I’m timing from now.’

Again there was silence for a while, then they heard the boy’s voice once more, faint but steady.

‘I’d stay where you are, if I was you. Next time, I’m shooting to hit somebody.’

‘I hope he does,’ Kitto murmured. ‘We wouldn’t miss one or two of that damned rabble down there and it would give me the best excuse I could wish for.’

He crouched below his rock, studying the men waiting behind him. Their faces were keen and fierce, the faces of men with nothing to lose.

‘Can you see him, Romanis?’ he asked.

Romanis peered upwards through his binoculars, half-covered by a patch of thorn. ‘Not a wink of the filthy little bounder,’ he said.

‘Can’t you tell where he is by his voice?’

‘Not a chance.’

‘Never mind,’ Kitto nodded. ‘We’ll go in anyway.’

He raised his binoculars to his eyes and swept the rocky slopes above him.

‘Stand by,’ he called out. ‘Wait for the signal.’

He raised his eyes to the hill. ‘Time’s up, Schuter,’ he shouted. ‘We’re coming.’

‘I’m waiting.’ The reply floated down again, faintly contemptuous and taunting; and Kitto waved and started to scramble from behind his rock.

Someone started to cheer and two dozen men made for the kopje. When the first of them reached the slope, his hat flew off as a shot rang out, and went spinning backwards among the rocks, its owner dropping flat into shelter in alarm. Another man, his rifle across his chest, was spun round as a bullet smacked into the stock, shattering it, sending him sprawling on his back in a puff of dust.

The man immediately behind him, a great ginger-haired giant, leapt over him and went on scrambling up the slope, swearing heavily, his long legs carrying him well ahead of the others, ahead of Kitto even. For a long time, there was no sound from above and Winter began to think that the show of force had frightened the boy, then as the red-haired man reached the top of a boulder and paused to cheer his friends on, another shot rang out.

It was as though Sammy Schuter had needed time to make up his mind to kill.

The red-haired man seemed to be lifted bodily off the rock, bent back like a pulled bow, then he crashed back on to the slope below, his heels drumming, and rolled down into the hollow at their feet, drawing painful rattling breaths in his throat.

Immediately, it seemed as though Sheba was stricken with silence again. With three of their number down, the rest of the men dived for shelter and the shouting died away. For a second, Kitto stood on the slope, seeing his force melt away behind him, then he too dived for safety and scrambled back to where Winter and Romanis lay with a couple of other men.

‘Mr Kitto,’ Le Roux called, ‘Fred’s dead!’

‘The bastard’s using a Martini-Henry!’ A shout went up from the huddle of figures round the body, a howl of rage that demanded revenge.

‘Soft-nosed bullets!’

‘The dirty Jew! By Christ, he’ll pay for this!’

There were a few more angry yells, then the men fell silent, even the bunched soldiers round the corpse seeming to have no tongues left. Sheba descended again into the brooding stillness from which their arrival had only just lifted it.

Kitto was the first to recover, undisturbed by the disaster, staring to the crest of Sheba again with his binoculars. ‘Romanis,’ he said briskly, ‘send the sergeant here, and get that man down. We’re stuck for the night, it seems. We’ll have another try at first light in the morning with every available man. The advantage’s with us. It’s easier to shoot up than down and we can be halfway up the slope before he spots us. As soon as it’s dark enough to move, we’ll back off and move a couple of men to the north side to watch, in case they try to escape in the night.’

Romanis nodded and for a long time they continued to stare at Sheba, muttering together.

Around them, the soldiers were huddled in little groups behind the rocks. One of them was dragging the body of the ginger-haired man into shelter by the feet, his jacket rolling up round his arms as it snagged on the small stones.

‘I hope you’re satisfied, Kitto,’ Winter said bitterly and Kitto nodded slowly, still gazing at Sheba, fortified by his certainty of lawfulness and right.

Winter stared at him, then he scrambled to his feet and ducking from the rock, ran towards Babylon and the group of horses.

‘What’s that damn’ fool up to?’ Romanis said, staring after him. ‘Got the wind up or something?’

Kitto lowered his glasses and turned. His dark eyes glittered as Winter scrambled on to a horse, his shabby figure awkward in the saddle. For a second, he wrestled with the startled animal, wrenching the reins from the fingers of the Kaffir who was holding it, then he swung it round, dragging savagely at its mouth.

‘Let him go,’ Kitto said. ‘We’re well rid of him.’

‘Suppose he tells somebody?’

Kitto shrugged. ‘What’s it matter?’ he said confidently. ‘We’re behaving according to the rules.’

Sammy Schuter’s eyes were cold as he lowered the Mauser.

Polly was crouching alongside him, her face pale and shocked. Long after the running figures below had vanished, she caught a glimpse between the rocks of someone dragging away the body of the ginger-haired man and even from that distance she saw the blood that stained his chest. For the first time she realised he was dead.

‘Sammy, you killed him!’ Momentarily, she had a picture in her mind of the duiker they had shot on their first day out of Plummerton Sidings, one moment full of enormous pulsing life and the next snuffed out of existence. There was a man below like that now, a big, raw-boned man with red hair who had leapt up the slope full of confidence in his own strength, a man who probably had a wife or a girlfriend somewhere, and perhaps even children. He was as dead now as the duiker was. She remembered then how the flies had come from nowhere, clustering round the blood, horrible and obscene, and she shuddered as she connected it all with the man below.

She stared at Sammy and drew away from him quickly, horrified, as though the dead man’s blood were actually on his hands.

‘Sammy, you killed him,’ she said again.

Sammy nodded, still gazing below at the empty plain. ‘I could have killed anyone of ‘em, Poll, at this range. Any time I wanted.’

She swung round, staring at his face. It was lean and hard, mercilessness showing in the angular thinly-fleshed features and pale blue eyes, while his mind remained obscure and silent as a wild cat’s behind his inscrutable eyes.

‘But he’s dead,’ she said, her voice breaking. ‘Sammy, you don’t even seem to care!’

He glanced at her briefly, his eyes resting on her for a second before they turned back again to the plain, searching unceasingly for any sign of further movement.

‘That’s what I came up here for,’ he said flatly. ‘I gave ‘em plenty of warning. You heard me. If they try again - ‘

‘Oh, God,’ Polly moaned. ‘No more of ‘em!’

The words were wrenched out of her in her horror. She had seen him kill a man with the same air of professional detachment he had employed to kill a buck. Those same thin bony hands which only a short time before had held her, now held the Mauser lightly across the rock, and the blue eyes which had been warm when he had looked at her were now glittering with menace. She saw him suddenly as a different individual, as solitary and self-dependent as the beasts he hunted, and it seemed impossible in that instant to imagine him as a domestic animal, moving about a farm or a house, attending to the duties of a home, living with other human beings.

She drew away from him, feeling as distant from him as if he’d been on the moon, cold and hard and ice-brilliant in his skill.

He looked round sharply, sensing the change in her. ‘What’s the matter?’ he asked.

He reached out a hand to touch her but she pulled away from him.

‘Leave me alone,’ she said, her voice high and shrill.

Sammy stared at her and, as she saw he didn’t comprehend, couldn’t even hope to understand her horror, it came home to her how different a man’s world and a woman’s world were, so different as almost to belong to different planets. While her own lay with warmth and love and all the sensualities of life, he was as set apart from that aspect of living as if it never existed. His home had been too often the veld, his companions only his horse and his gun.

The light was fading rapidly now, and the rocks below were merging slowly into the darkness of the veld. As they watched, they heard a rolling of stones and they saw a bunch of men move away and dive in a scuttling run towards Babylon from the lower slopes of the kopje.

Sammy pushed the rifle forward, his eyes cold again, and Polly flung herself across his arms, staring up at him.

‘No, Sammy,’ she begged. ‘For God’s sake, no more!’

He tried to pull the rifle away from her but she refused to let go and he slowly relaxed, lowering it. Finally, he put it down and moved into the shelter of the rocks.

‘Better eat,’ he said heavily.

He fumbled among their belongings and, bringing out the remains of the cold meat from the saddle bags, he pushed it towards her with one of the water bottles.

‘Easy on the water,’ he said.

She raised her eyes, saying nothing.

‘We might be a long time,’ he pointed out.

His face was suddenly strained and tired as he knelt beside her and tossed a blanket across her. Her eyes followed him but she made no attempt to speak. For a while, he knelt by her, looking at her, his expression as enigmatic as the distant aloof hills, then he sat down.

‘Reckon it’s safe to sleep,’ he said. ‘They won’t trouble us till daylight now. And I’ll be waiting for them then.’

Her eyes were still on his face and for the first time he saw the horror in them.

‘Polly,’ he said, desperation in his voice,
‘they
started it.
I
didn’t.’

There was an air of tension about Plummerton West when Winter arrived, clattering on to the newly-made surface of Theophilus Street from the dusty earth that was all that paved the rest of the town.

He was surprised to see police about, uniformed and plain-clothed, waiting in the shadows, and small groups of soldiers sitting on the wooden stoeps, smoking, their horses tethered in bunches to the pepper trees and swishing at the inevitable flies. Saddles lay along the walls with piles of blankets and cooking tins; and a fire was glinting briefly by the brick wall of the livery stable.

As he arrived, hammering at a staggering horse that he knew would never recover, two men ran out from the darkness and grabbed at the bridle of his mount.

‘Wie gaan?’
one of them demanded in guttural backveld accents. ‘Where do you think you’re going, man?’

‘Into town.’

‘Oh, no you’re not!’ the other chimed in, in the chirpy tongue of a Londoner. ‘We want no visitors, mister! Not after this afternoon. It was a cross here between the Charge of the Light Brigade and Saturday night at the Palace. Them Boers is out,’ he went on. He indicated the street, and then Winter noticed broken windows, an overturned cart and a dead horse lying under the trees. ‘There was some talk of treachery, mate. I don’t know whose side they were on, but the police couldn’t control ‘em. You wouldn’t be one of ‘em, would you?’