The Sound of Thunder (22 page)

“I see,” said Sean, and kept the grin off his face. Mbejane had invested a large percentage of his capital. “And what do YOU propose doing with all your wives, you know we must soon return again to fight?”

“When the time comes they will go to the kraals of their fathers and wait for me there. ” Mbejane hesitated delicately. “I bring them with me until I am certain that I have trodden on the moon of each of them. ” Treading on a woman’s moon was the Zulu expression for interrupting her menstrual cycle. Mbejane was making sure his investment bore interest.

“There is a farm upon the hills up there.” Sean seemed to be changing the subject.

“Many times, Nkosi, you and I have spoken of it. ” But Mbejane understood and there was an anticipatory gleam in his eyes.

“It is a good farm? ” Sean held him a little longer in suspense.

“It is truly an excellent and beautiful farm. The water is sweeter than the juice of the sugar-cane, the earth is richer than the flesh of a young ox, the grass upon it as thick and as full of promise as the hair on a woman’s pudendum. ” Now Mbejane’s eyes were shining with happiness. In his book a farm was a place where a man sat in the sun with a pot of millet beer beside him and listened to his wives singing in the fields. It meant cattle, the only true wealth, and many small sons to herd them.

It meant the end of a long weary road.

“Take your wives with you and select the place where you wish to build your kraal. ” “Nkosi. ” There is no Zulu equivalent of thank you. He could say I praise you, but that was not what Mbejane felt.

At last he found the word. “Bayete! Nkosi, Bayete! ” The salute to a King.

Dirk’s pony was tethered to the hitching-post in front of the homestead. Using a charred stick Dirk was writing his name in crude capitals on the wall of the front veranda.

Although the entire house would be replastered and painted Sean found himself quivering with anger. He jumped from his horse roaring and brandishing his sjambok and Dirk disappeared round the corner of the house. By the time Sean had regained self-control and was sitting on the veranda wall revelling in the pride of ownership, Mbejane arrived.

They chatted a while and then Mbejane led his women away. Sean could trust him to build the beehive huts of his kraal on the richest earth of Lion Kop.

The last girl in the line was Mbejane’s youngest and prettiest wife. Balancing the large bundle on her head, her back straight, her buttocks bare except for the strip of cloth that covered the cleft, she walked away with such unconsciously regal grace that Sean was instantly and forcibly reminded of Ruth.

His elation subsided. He stood up and walked away from the old building. Without Ruth in it, this house would not be a home.

He sat alone on the slope of the hills. Again he was reminded of Ruth. This place was so much like their secret glade. Except, of course, there were no wattle trees here.

“Wattle!” exclaimed Ronny Pye and glared at his sister and his brother-in-law. “He’s planting wattle.”

“What for? ” Dennis Petersen asked.

“For the bark, man. The bark! There’s a fortune in it. Twenty pounds a ton!”

“What do they use it for?”

“The extract, is used in tanning leather.”

“If it’s so good why haven’t other people-” Dennis began, but Ronny brushed him aside impatiently.

“I’ve gone into it thoroughly. Lion Kop is ideal wattle ground, high and misty. The only other really good ground in the district is Mahobo’s Kloof Ranch and Theuniskraal. Thank God you own Mahobo’s Kloofl Because that’s where we’re going to plant our own wattle. He looked at Dennis but without seeing him as he went on. “I’ve spoken to Jackson at Natal Wattle Company. He’ll sell us the saplings on the same terms as he’s supplying that bastard Courtney, and he’ll buy our bark-every scrap of it at a guaranteed twenty pounds a ton. I’ve hired two men to supervise the planting. Labour will be our big problem, Sean has grabbed every native within twenty miles. He’s got an army of them up there.” Suddenly Ronny stopped. He had seen the expression on Dennis’s face. “What’s wrong with you?”

“Mahobo’s lGoof!” Dennis moaned. “Oh God! Oh my God.

“What do you mean?”

“He came to see me last week. Sean … He wanted an option to purchase. A five years” option. ” “You didn’t give it to him!” Ronny screamed.

“He offered three shillings an acre-that’s six times as much as I paid for it. How could I refuse. ” “You fool! You blathering bloody idiot! In five years that land will be worth . Ronny gulped,

“It will be worth at least ten pounds! ” “But nobody told me! ” Dennis wailed the age-old cry of the might-have-been, the lament of those that never quite succeed,

“Nobody told Sean either.” Audrey spoke softly for the first time and there was that in her voice that made Ronny turn &avagely on his handsome sister.

“All right-we all know about you and Sean. But he didn’t stay around long enough for you to get your hooks into him, did he?” Ronny stopped himself and glanced guiltily at Dennis. It was years before Audrey had abandoned all hope of Sean’s return to Ladyburg and succumbed to Dennis’s gentle but persistent courtship. Now Dennis coughed awkwardly and looked at his hands on the desk in front of him.

“Well, anyway,” he murmured,

“Sean’s got it and there’s nothing we can do about it. “To hell! ” Ronny pulled a notebook towards him and opened it. “This is how I see it. He’s borrowed that ten thousand from his mother-you know the money we tried to get her to invest in the Burley deal. ” They all remembered the Burley deal and looked a little ashamed. Ronny hurried on. “And he’s borrowed another five thousand from Natal Wattle-Jackson let it slip out. ” Ronny went on with his calculations. When he finished he was smiling again. “Mr. Sean Courtney is stretched about as thin as he can get without breaking.

Just one slip, one little slip and-Pow! ” He made a chopping motion with his open hand. “We can wait!

He selected a cigar from the leather box which had replaced the silver one and lit it before he spoke again. “By the way did you know he hasn’t been discharged from the army yet? The way the war is going they certainly need good fighting men.

That leg of his looks all right to me. Perhaps a word in the right ear-a little pressure somewhere.” Ronny was positively grinning now. His cigar tasted delicious.

The doctors at Greys Hospital had given Sean his final examination a week before Christmas. They had judged his disability as roughly one per cent, a slight limp when he was physically fired. This disqualified him from war wound pension and had made him available for immediate return to duty.

A week after New Year’s Day of 1901 the first letter from the army arrived. He was to report immediately to the Officer Commanding the Natal Mounted Rifles-the regiment which had ” now swallowed up the old Natal Corps of Guides.

The war in South Africa had entered a new phase. Throughout the Transvaal and Orange Free State the Boers had begun a campaign of guerilla warfare alarming in its magnitude. The war was far from over and Sean’s presence was urgently required to swell the army of a quarter of a million British troops already in the field.

He had written begging for an extension of his leave, and had received in reply a threat to treat him as a deserter if he wasn’t in Johannesburg by February first.

The last two weeks had been filled with frantic activity. He had managed to finish the planting of ten thousand acres of wattle begun the previous May. He had arranged a further large loan from Natal Wattle to pay for the tending of his trees. The repairs and renovation of the Homestead on Lion Kop were completed and Ada had moved from the cottage in Protea Street to act as caretaker and manager of the estate during his absence Now, as he rode alone over his land in a gesture of farewell, he had an opportimity to think of other things. The main one of these was his daughter. His first and only daughter. She was two months old now. Her name was Storm and he had never seen her. Saul Friedman had written a long, joyous letter from the front where Sean was soon to join him. Sean had sent hearty congratulations and then tried once again to contact Ruth. He had written her without result and, finally, had abandoned his work on Lion Kop and gone up to Pietermaritzburg. Four days he waited, calling morning and afternoon at the Goldberg mansion-and each time Ruth was either out or indisposed. He had left a bitter little note for her and gone home.

Deep in gloom he rode through his plantations. Great blocks of young trees, row upon endless row, covered the hills of Lion Kop. The older wattle planted ten months before had started to come away.

Already it was waist high with fluffy green tops. It was an achievement of almost superhuman proportion, ten months of ceaseless gruelling labour by two thousand native labourers. Now it was done.

He had retained a gang of fifty Zulus, who would work under Ada’s supervision, clearing the undergrowth between the rows and guarding against fire. That was all there was to it; four years of waiting until the trees reached maturity and were ready for stripping.

But now he was so completely absorbed in thought that he passed over the boundary of Lion Kop without noticing, and rode on along the foot of the escarpment. He crossed the road and the railway line.

From ahead the murmur of the White Falls blended with the wind whisper in the grass, and he glimpsed the flash of water cascading down from the high rock in the sunshine. The acacia trees were in bloom, covered with the golden mist of their flowers above, gloomy with shadows beneath.

He crossed the river below the pool of the falls. The escarpment rose steeply above him, striped with dark dense bush in the gulleys, a thousand feet high so it blocked out the sunlight.

The pool was a place of fern and green moss, and the rocks were black and slippery with the spray. A cold place, out of the sun-and the water roared as it fell in a white, moving veil like smoke.

Sean shivered and rode on, ambling up the slope of the escarpment.

Then he knew that instinct had directed him. In his distress he had come back to the first home he had ever known.

This was Courtney land beneath his feet, and spreading down and out towards the Tugela. The nostalgia came upon him more strongly as he climbed, until at last he reached the rim and stood looking down upon the whole of Theuniskraal.

He picked out the landmarks below him; the homestead with the stables and the servants” quarters behind it; the paddocks with the horses grazing heads down and tails swinging; the dip tanks among the trees-and each of them had some special memory attached to it.

Sean dismounted and sat down in the grass. He lit a cheroot, while his mind went back and picked over the scrap-heap of the past.

An hour, and then another, passed before he came back to the present, pulled his watch from the front pocket of his waistcoat and checked the time.

“After one!” he exclaimed, and stood to dust the seat of his pants and. settle his hat on to his head before beginning the descent of the escarpment. Instead of crossing the river at the pool, he stayed on Theuniskraal and keeping to higher ground aimed to intersect the mad on this side of the bridge. Occasionally he found cattle feeding together in herds of less than a dozen; they were all in condition, fat on the new grass, for the land was not carrying nearly its full capacity. As he passed they lifted their heads and watched him with vacant, bovine expressions of un surprise

forest thickened, then abruptly ended and before him lay one of the small swampy depressions that bellied out from the river. From his look-out on the escarpment this area had been screened by trees, so now for the first time Sean noticed the saddled horse tethered on the far edge of the swamp. Quickly Sean searched for its rider, and found him in the swamp-only his head visible above the bright poisonous green field of papyrus grass. The man’s head disappeared again and there was a commotion in the grass; a wild thrashing and the sudden panic ridden bellow of a beast.

Sean worked his way quickly round the edge of the swamp until he reached the horse. The head and shoulders of the man in the swamp reappeared and Sean could see that he was splattered with mud.

“What’s the trouble?” Sean shouted, and the head turned towards him.

“There’s a beast bogged down here.

“Hold on, I’ll give you a hand.” Sean stripped his jacket, waistcoat and shirt and hung them with his hat on a branch before going in. Ploughing knee-deep through ooze that bubbled and belched gas as he disturbed it, using both arms to part the coarse tangle of reeds and marsh grass, Sean finally reached them.

The beast was an old black cow; her hindquarters completely submerged in a mudhole and her front legs twisted helplessly under her chest.

“She’s just about finished,” said the man. Sean looked at him and saw he was not a man but a youth. Tall for his age, but lightly built.

Dark hair, cropped short and the big nose to show he was a Courtney.

with an unnatural tightness in his gut and a shortening of his Sean knew that he was looking at his son.

breath,

“Don’t just stand there,” snapped the boy. He was covered from the chest down in a glistening evil-smelling coat of mud, sweat pouring down his face and dissolving the spots of mud on his forehead and cheeks, breathing heavily through open Mouth, crouching over the animal to hold its head above the surface.

“Have to roll her,” said Sean. “Keep her head, up. ” He waded to the hindquarters and the mud bubbled greasily up around his waist. He thrust his arms down through it-groping for the trapped legs.

Scans hands could only just encompass the thick bone and sinew of the hock. He settled his grip and leaned back against it, straining upwards, gradually bringing the fulll strength of his body into the pull until he knew that something in his belly was on the point of tearing. He held like that, his whole face contorted, mouth wide open so that his breathing rattled hoarsely up his throat, the great muscles of his chest and arms locked in an iron convulsion.

A minute, two minutes, he held the stance while the boy watched him with a mingled expression of alarm and wonder.