The Leopard Hunts in Darkness (60 page)

As he had anticipated, buoyancy was his first problem. The pull of the bag on his chest rolled him onto his back like a dead fish, and with the thrust of his one leg, he was unable to right
himself. He paddled back to the slab, and began the irksome business of experimenting with rock weights to adjust his attitude in the water. In the end he found that the only way to do it was to
hold an excessively heavy stone and let it draw him down head-first. However, as soon as he released the stone, he was borne irresistibly upwards.

‘At least the joints are watertight,’ he told them when he surfaced again. ‘And I’m getting oxygen. There is a lot of water leaking in around the edges of the mask, but I
can purge that in the usual way.’ He demonstrated the trick of holding the mask at the top and forcing the accumulated water out of the bottom with a sharp exhalation of breath.

‘When are you going to go for the wall?’

‘I guess I’m as ready now as I’ll ever be,’ Craig admitted reluctantly.

‘Y
ou must understand that I wish to be as a father to you,’ Peter Fungabera smiled gently. ‘I look upon you as my
children.’

‘I can understand this Shona chattering as little as I can the barking of baboons from the hilltops,’ Vusamanzi replied courteously, and Peter Fungabera made a gesture of irritation
as he turned to his sergeant.

‘Where is that translator?’

‘He will be here very soon, mambo.’

Tapping his swagger-stick against his thigh, Peter Fungabera walked slowly down the ragged rank of villagers that his troopers had gathered in from their hoeing on the maize fields and had
flushed from the huts. Apart from the old man, they were all women and children. Some of the women were as ancient as the witch-doctor, with white woolly pates and wizened dugs hanging to their
waists, others were still capable of child-bearing with fat infants strapped to their backs, or standing naked at their knees; snot had dried white around the toddlers’ nostrils and flies
crawled unnoticed on their lips and at the corners of their eyes, and they stared up at Peter as he passed with fathomless eyes. There were still younger women with firm full breasts and glossy
skin, pre-pubescent girls and uncircumcised boys. Peter Fungabera smiled kindly at them, but they stared back at him without expression.

‘My Matabele puppies, we will hear you yap a little before this day is done,’ he promised softly, and turned at the end of the line. He walked back slowly to where the Russian waited
in the shade of one of the huts.

‘You will get nothing out of the old one.’ Bukharin took the ebony cigarette-holder from between his teeth and coughed softly, covering his mouth with his hand. ‘He is dried
up, beyond pain, beyond suffering. Look at his eyes. Fanatic.’

‘I agree, these
sangoma
are capable of self-hypnosis, he will be impervious to pain.’ Peter Fungabera shot back the cuff of his battle-smock and glanced impatiently at his
watch. ‘Where is that translator?’

It was another hour before the Matabele trusty from the rehabilitation centre was hustled up the path from the valley. He fell on his knees before Peter Fungabera, blubbering and holding up his
manacled hands.

‘Get up!’ Then, to the sergeant, ‘Remove his manacles. Bring the old man here.’

Vusamanzi was led into the centre of the village square.

‘Tell him I am his father,’ Fungabera ordered.

‘Mambo, he replies that his father was a man, not a hyena.’

‘Tell him that although I cherish him and all his people, I am displeased with him.’

‘Mambo, he replies that if he has made Your Honour unhappy, then he is well content.’

‘Tell him he has lied to my men.’

‘Mambo, he hopes for the opportunity to do so again.’

‘Tell him that I know he is protecting and feeding four enemies of the state.’

‘Mambo, he suggests that Your Honour is demented. There are no hidden enemies of the state.’

‘Very well. Now address all these people. Repeat that I wish to know where the traitors are hidden. Tell them that if they lead me to them, then nobody in the village will come to any
harm.’

The translator stood before the silent rank of women and children, and made a long and passionate plea, but when he ended, they stared back at him stolidly. One of the infants began to scream
petulantly, and its mother swung it under her arm and pressed her swollen nipple into its tiny mouth. There was silence again.

‘Sergeant!’ Peter Fungabera gave terse orders, and Vus-amanzi’s hands were snatched behind his back and bound at the wrists. One of the troopers fashioned a hangman’s
noose in a length of nylon rope and tossed the free end of the rope over one of the main supports of an elevated maize bin at the edge of the square. They stood Vusamanzi under the maize bin and
dropped the noose over his head.

‘Now tell his people that when any one of them agrees to lead us to the traitors, this punishment will end immediately.’

The translator raised his voice, but he had not finished before Vusamanzi called over him in a firm voice, ‘My curse upon any of you who speak to this Shona pig. I command silence upon
you, no matter what is done – he who breaks it will be visited by me from beyond the grave. I, Vusamanzi, master of the waters, command this thing!’

‘Do it!’ Peter Fungabera ordered, and the sergeant inched in the slack of the rope. The noose closed around the old man’s neck, and gradually he was forced up onto his
tiptoes.

‘Enough!’ Peter Fungabera ordered and they secured the free end of the rope.

‘Now, let them come forward and speak.’

The translator moved down the rank of women, urging them and finally pleading unashamedly, but Vusamanzi glared at his women fiercely, unable to speak but still commanding them with all his
will.

‘Break one of his feet,’ ordered Peter Fungabera, and the sergeant faced the old man and, with a dozen blows, using the butt of his rifle like a maize stamp, he crushed
Vusamanzi’s left foot. As the women heard the brittle old bones snap like kindling for the hearth, they began to wail and ululate.

‘Speak!’ Peter Fungabera commanded.

Vusamanzi stood on one leg, his neck twisted to one side at the pull of the rope. His damaged foot began to swell, like a balloon being inflated, to three times its natural size, the skin
stretched black and shiny as an overripe fruit on the point of splitting open.

‘Speak!’ Peter Fungabera ordered the second time, and the mourning cries of the women drowned him out.

‘Break his other foot!’ he nodded to the sergeant.

As the rifle-butt shattered the complex of small bones in Vusamanzi’s right foot, he fell sideways against the rope, and the sergeant stepped back, grinning at the contortions of the old
man as he tried frantically to relieve the pressure of the rope by taking his weight on his mutilated feet.

All the women were screaming now, and the children’s cries swelled the anguished chorus. One of the old women, the senior wife, broke the line and ran forward with both thin arms
outstretched towards her husband of fifty years.

‘Leave her!’ Peter Fungabera ordered the guards who would have restrained her. They stepped aside.

The frail old woman reached her husband and tried to lift him, crying out her love and her compassion, but she did not have the strength even for Vusamanzi’s emaciated body. She succeeded
only in relieving the pressure on his larynx enough to prolong the agonies of his strangulation. The old man’s mouth was open, hunting for air, and white froth coated his lips. He was making
a harsh, cawing sound, and the old wife’s antics were ludicrous.

‘Listen to the Matabele rooster crow, and his ancient hen cackle!’ Peter Fungabera smiled, and his troopers guffawed delightedly.

It took a long time, but when at last Vusamanzi hung still and silent with his face twisted up to the sky, his wife sank to the earth at his feet and rocked her body rhythmically as she began
the keen of mourning.

Peter Fungabera walked back to the Russian, and Bukharin lit another cigarette and murmured, ‘Crude – and ineffective.’

‘There was never any chance with the old fool. We had to get him out of the way, and set the mood.’ Peter dabbed at his chin and forehead with the tail of his scarf. ‘It was
effective, Colonel, just look at the faces of the women.’

He tucked the scarf back into the neck of his smock and strolled back to the women.

‘Ask them where the enemies of the state are hidden.’ But as the translator began to speak, the old woman sprang to her feet and rushed back to face them.

‘You saw your lord die without speaking,’ she screeched. ‘You heard his command. You know that he will return!’

Peter Fungabera altered the grip on his swagger-stick and with little apparent effort drove the point of it up under the old woman’s ribs. She screamed and collapsed. Her spleen, enlarged
by endemic malarial infection, had ruptured at the blow.

‘Get rid of her,’ Peter ordered, and one of the troopers seized her ankles and dragged her away behind the huts.

‘Ask them where the enemies of the state are hidden.’

Peter walked slowly along the rank, looking into their faces, evaluating the degree of terror that he saw in each pair of black Matabele eyes. He took his time over the selection, coming back at
last to the youngest mother, barely more than a child herself, her infant strapped upon her back with a strip of patterned blue cloth.

He stood in front of her and stared her down, then, when he judged the moment, he reached out and took her wrist. He led her gently to the centre of the open square, where the remains of the
watch-fire still burned.

He kicked the smouldering ends of the logs together, and, still holding the girl, waited until they burst into flames again. Then he twisted the girl’s arm, forcing her to her knees.
Slowly silence fell over the other women, and they watched with deadly fascination.

Peter Fungabera loosened the blue cloth and lifted the infant off the girl’s back. It was a boy. A chubby infant, with skin the colour of wild honey, his little pot-belly was gorged with
his mother’s milk, and there were creases of fat like bracelets, at his wrists and ankles. Peter tossed him up lightly and as he fell seized one ankle. The child shrieked with shocked
outrage, dangling upside down from Peter’s fist.

‘Where are the enemies of the state hidden?’

The child’s face was swelling and darkening with blood.

‘She says she does not know.’

Peter Fungabera lifted the child high above the flames.

‘Where are the enemies of the state?’

Each time he repeated the question he lowered the infant a few inches.

‘She says she does not know.’

Suddenly Peter lowered the little wriggling body into the very heart of the flames, and the child squealed with a totally new sound. Peter lifted it clear of the flames after a second and
dangled it in front of its mother’s face. The flames had frizzled away the child’s eyelashes and the tight little criss-curls from its scalp.

‘Tell her that I will roast this little piglet slowly and then I will force her to eat it.’

The girl tried to snatch her child back, but he kept it just beyond her reach. The girl started screaming a single phrase, repeating it over and over again, and the other women sighed and
covered their faces.

‘She says she will lead you to them.’

Peter Fungabera dropped the infant into her arms and strolled back to the Russian. Colonel Bukharin inclined his head slightly in grudging admiration.

F
orty feet down Craig hung suspended before the wall of the tomb. He had anchored his waist strap to a lump of limestone, and by the feeble yellow
light of the lamp from one of the life-jackets was carefully examining the masonry for a weak point of entry. Using his hands to supplement his water-distorted vision, he found that there was no
break or aperture, but that the foot of the wall was composed of much larger lumps of limestone than the top. Probably the availability of large rocks within easy portability of the tomb had been
exhausted as the work progressed and the old witch-doctor and his apprentices had fallen back on smaller material, and yet the smallest was larger than a man’s head.

Craig seized one of these and struggled to dislodge it. His hands had been softened by the water, and a tiny puff of blood clouded the water as his skin split on the sharp edge of the stone, but
there was no pain for the cold had numbed him.

Almost immediately the bloodstain in the water was obscured by a darker shadow as the dirt and debris that had lain so long undisturbed swirled into suspension at his efforts. Within seconds he
was totally blinded as the water was filthied, and he switched off the lamp to conserve the battery. Small particles of dirt irritated his eyes, and he closed them tightly, working only by sense of
touch.

There are degrees of darkness, but this was total. It was a darkness that seemed to have physical weight and it crushed down upon him, emphasizing the hundreds of feet of solid rock and water
above him. The oxygen he drew into his mouth had a flat chemical taste, and every few breaths a spurt of water would find its way around the ill-fitting seal of his mask and he choked upon it,
forcing himself not to cough, for a coughing fit might dislodge the mask entirely.

The cold was like a terminal disease, sapping and destroying him, affecting his judgement and reactions, making it more and more difficult to guard against the onset of oxygen poisoning, and
each signal on the rope from the surface seemed to be an eternity after the last. But he worked at the wall with a grim determination, beginning to hate the long-dead ancestors of Vusamanzi for
their thoroughness in building it.

By the time his half-hour shift finally ended, he had pulled down a pile of rock from the head of the wall and had tunnelled a hole three or four feet into the masonry just wide enough to
accommodate his upper body with its bulky oxygen equipment strapped to it, but there was still no indication as to just how much thicker the wall was.

He cleared the rock he had dislodged, kicking it down the incline of the chute and letting it fall away into the depths of the grand gallery. Then, with soaring relief, he untied the anchor rope
and slid down after it and began the long ascent to the surface of the pool.