Men of Men (42 page)

‘Go then! Go and be damned to you.’

That was not the way he had wanted it. Zouga Ballantyne had been the central figure in his life until that day. A colossus who overshadowed each of his actions, each of his thoughts.

Much as he had chafed under the shackles that his duty to his father had placed upon him, much as he had resented every one of his decisions being made for him, each of his actions ordered, yet
now he felt as though the greater part of himself had been removed by some drastic surgery of the soul.

Until this moment he had not really thought of losing his father, he had not let the memory of their brutal parting cut him too deeply. Now suddenly this dirty slow river was the barrier between
him and the life he had known. There was no going back – now or ever. He had lost his father and his brother and Jan Cheroot and he was alone and lonely. He felt the acid tears scald his
eyelids.

His vision wavered, played him tricks, for across the wide river course, on the far bank was the figure of a horseman.

The horseman slouched easily in the saddle, one hand on his hip, the elbow cocked; and the set of the head upon the broad shoulders was unmistakable.

Slowly Ralph came to his feet, staring in disbelief, and then suddenly he was running and sliding down the sheer bank and splashing waist deep through the grey waters of the ford. Zouga swung
down from Tom’s back and ran forward to meet Ralph as he came up the bank.

Then both of them stopped and stared at each other. They had not embraced since the night of Aletta’s funeral, and they could not bring themselves to do so now, though longing was naked in
the eyes of both of them.

‘I could not let you go, not like that,’ said Zouga, but Ralph had no reply, for his throat had closed.

‘It is time for you to go out on your own,’ Zouga nodded his golden beard. ‘Past time. You are like an eaglet that has outgrown the nest. I realized that before you did, Ralph,
but I did not want it to be. That is why I spoke so cruelly.’

Zouga picked up Tom’s reins and the pony nudged him affectionately. Zouga stroked his velvety muzzle.

‘There are two parting gifts that I have for you.’ He placed the reins in Ralph’s hand. ‘That is one,’ he said evenly, but the green shadows in his eyes betrayed
how dearly that gesture had cost him. ‘The other is in Tom’s saddle-bag. It’s a book of notes. Read them at your leisure. You may find them of interest – even of
value.’

Still Ralph could not speak. He held the reins awkwardly, and blinked back the stinging under his eyelids.

‘There is one other small gift, but it has no real value. It is only my blessing.’

‘That is all that I really wanted,’ whispered Ralph.

I
t was six hundred miles to the Shashi river, to the border of Matabeleland.

Isazi inspanned at dusk each evening and they trekked through the cool of the night. When the moon went down and it was utterly dark, then Umfaan threw the lead rein over Dutchman’s head,
and the big black ox put his nose down and stayed on the track, like a hunting dog on the spoor, until the first glimmering of dawn signalled the outspan.

During a good night’s trek they made fifteen miles – but when the going was heavy with sand they might make only five miles.

During the days, while the cattle grazed or chewed the cud in the shade, Ralph saddled up Tom and, with Bazo running beside his stirrup, they hunted.

They found herds of buffalo along the banks of the Zouga river, the river on whose bank Ralph’s father had been born, big herds, two hundred beasts together.

The herd bulls were huge, bovine and bald with age, their backs crusted with the mud from the wallow, the spread of their armoured heads wider than the stretch of a man’s arms, the tips of
the polished black horns rising into symmetrical crescents like the points of the sickle moon, while the bosses above their broad foreheads were massively crenellated.

They ran them down, and Tom loved those wild flying chases every bit as much as his rider.

They chased the ghostly grey gemsbuck over the smoking red dunes, and in the thorn country they hunted the stilt-legged giraffe and sent their grotesque but stately bodies plunging and sliding
to earth with the crack of rifle fire, the long graceful necks twisting in the agony of death like that of a swan.

They baited with the carcasses of zebra, and the coppery red Kalahari lions came to the taint of blood, and Tom stood down their charge. Though he trembled and snorted and rolled his eyes at the
shockingly offensive cat smell, he stood for the shot which Ralph took from the saddle, aiming between the fierce yellow eyes or into the gape of rose-pink jaws starred with white fangs.

Thus, fifty days out from Kimberley they came at last to the Shashi river, and when they had made the crossing Bazo was on his native soil. He put on his war plumes and carrying his shield on
his shoulder he walked with a new spring and joy in his stride as he led Ralph to a hilltop from which to survey the way ahead.

‘See how the hills shine,’ Bazo whispered with an almost religious fervour. And it was true. In the early sunlight the granite tops gleamed like precious jewels. Soft, dreaming,
ruby, delicate sapphires and glossy pearl shaded like a peacock tail into a fanfare of colour.

The hills rolled away, rising gradually towards the high central plateau ahead of them, and the valleys were clad with virgin forest.

‘You never saw such trees on the plains around Kimberley,’ Bazo challenged him, and Ralph nodded. They stood on soaring trunks, some scaled like the crocodile, others white and
smooth as though moulded from potter’s clay, their tops sailing in traceries of green high above the open glades of yellow grass.

‘See, the buffalo herds – thick as cattle.’

There was other game. There were small family groups of grey kudo, pale as ghosts, trumpet-eared, the bulls carrying the burden of their long black corkscrew horns with studied grace.

There were clouds of red impala antelope upon the woven silk carpet of golden grasses. There were the darkly massive statues of the rhinoceros seemingly graven from the solid granite of the
hills, and there were the noblest antelope of all, the sable antelope, black and imperial as the name implied, the long horns curved and cruel as Saladin’s scimitar, the belly blazing white,
the neck of the herd bull arched haughtily as he led his lighter-coloured females out of the open glade into the cool green sanctuary of the forest.

‘Is it not beautiful, Henshaw?’ Bazo asked.

‘It is beautiful.’

There was the same awe in Ralph’s voice, and a strange unformed longing in his throat, a wanting that he knew could never be satisfied – and suddenly he understood his own
father’s obsession with this fair land: ‘My north,’ as Zouga called it.

‘My north,’ Ralph whispered, and then, thinking of his father, the next question came immediately to mind.

‘Elephant –
Indhlovu?
There are no elephant. Bazo. Where are the herds?’

‘Ask Bakela – your own father,’ Bazo grunted. ‘He was the first to come for them with the gun, but others followed him, many others. When Gandang, my father, son of
Mzilikazi the Destroyer, half brother of the great black bull Lobengula, when he crossed the Shashi as a child on his mother’s hip, the elephant herds were black as midnight upon the land and
their teeth shone like the stars. Now we will find their bones growing like white lilies in the forest.’

In the last hours of daylight, when Bazo and Isazi and Umfaan still slept to fortify themselves for the long night’s trek, Ralph took the leather-bound notebook out of Tom’s
saddle-bag.

By now the pages were dog-eared and grubby from the constant perusal to which Ralph had subjected it. It was the gift that Zouga Ballantyne had given him on the bank of the Vaal river, and the
inside cover was inscribed:

The first twenty pages were filled with hand-drawn sketch maps of those areas of the land between the Zambezi and the Limpopo and the Shashi rivers over which Zouga, and before
him the old hunter Tom Harkness, had travelled.

Often the map was headed by the notation:

Ralph recognized the unique value of this information, but there was more. Page 21 of the notebook bore a terse explanation in Zouga’s precise spiky hand:

And on page 22 the list began:

The current price of ivory was twenty-two shillings and sixpence the pound, and Ralph had added the total weights of the ivory still lying out in the veld. It exceeded three
thousand pounds: a great fortune waiting merely to be picked up and loaded on his wagon.

Still that was not all. The final entry in the notebook read:

There followed a detailed description of the route that Zouga had taken to reach Zimbabwe, and then the notes ended with this statement:

The following noon Ralph took the brass sextant from its travel-battered wooden case. He had bid ten shillings for it at one of the Saturday auctions in the Market Square
of Kimberley – and Zouga had checked its accuracy against his own instrument and showed Ralph how to shoot an ‘apparent local noon’ to establish his latitude. Ralph had no
chronometer to fix a longitude, but he could guess at it from his proximity to the confluence of the Shashi and Macloutsi rivers.

Half an hour’s work with
Brown’s Nautical Almanac
gave him an approximate position to compare with the one that his father had given in the notes for Zimbabwe.

‘Less than one hundred and fifty miles,’ he muttered to himself, still squatting over his father’s map, but staring eastwards.

‘Six thousand pounds just lying there,’ Ralph said quietly, and shook his head in wonder. It was a sum difficult to imagine.

He packed away the sextant, rolled the map and went to join the slumbering trio beneath the wagon for what remained of the drowsy afternoon.

R
alph woke to a stentorian challenge that seemed to echo off the granite cliffs above the camp.

‘Who dares take the king’s road? Who chances the wrath of Lobengula?’

Ralph scrambled out from under the wagon. The day was almost gone, the sun flamed in the top branches of the forest, and the chill of evening prickled his bare chest. He stared about him wildly,
but some instinct warned him not to reach for the loaded rifle propped against the rear wheel of the wagon. Below the trees the shadows were alive, blackness moved on blackness, dusky rank on
rank.

‘Stand forth, white man,’ the voice commanded. ‘Speak your business – lest the white spears of Lobengula turn to red.’

The speaker stepped forward, out of the forest to the edge of the camp. Behind him the ring of dappled black and white war-shields overlapped, edge to edge in an unbroken circle surrounding the
entire outspan, the ‘bull’s horns’ of the Matabele fighting formations.

There were many hundreds of warriors in that deadly circle, and the broad stabbing spears were held in an underhand grip so that the silver blades pointed forward at belly height between the
shields.

Above each shield the frothy white ostrich-feather headdress trembled and swayed in the small evening breeze, the only movement in that silent multitude.

The man who had broken the ranks was one of the most impressive figures that Ralph had ever seen. The high crown of ostrich feathers turned him into a towering giant. The breadth of his chest
was enhanced by the flowering bunches of white cowtails that he wore on his upper arms. Each separate tail had been awarded him by his king for an act of valour – and he wore them not only on
his arms but around his knees also.