The Sound of Thunder (32 page)

From the dining, room they heard the hooves beat away until they had dwindled into silence. Garry stood up.

“Where are you going?” snapped Anna.

“To my study. ” “To the brandy bottle in your study,” she corrected him contemptuously.

“Don’t, Anna.”

r’Don’t, Anna, ” she mimicked him. “Please don’t, Anna. Is that all You can say’? ” Her voice had lost the genteel inflexion she had cultivated so carefully. Now it contained all the accumulated bitterness of twenty years.

“Please, Anna. I’ll stop him going. I promise you.”

“You’ll stop him!” She laughed. “How will you stop him?

Will you rattle your medals at him? How would you stop him you who have never done one useful thing in all your life?”

She laughed again, shrilly. “Why don’t you show him your leg and say,

“Please don’t leave your poor crippled Daddy.” Garry drew himself up. His face had gone very pale. “He’ll listen to me. He’s my son.

Your son!

“Anna, please, ” “Your son! Oh, that’s choice! He’s not your son.

He’s Sean’s son.” “Anna. ” He tried to stop her.

“How could you have a son?” She was laughing again, and he could not stand it. He started for the door but her voice followed him, cutting into the two most sensitive places in his soul: his deformity and his impotence.

He stumbled into his study, slammed the door and locked it.

Then he crossed quickly to the solid cabinet that stood beside his desk.

He poured the tumbler half, full. and drank it. Then he sank into his chair and closed his eyes and reached for the bottle behind him.

He poured again carefully and screwed the cap back on to the bottle.

This one he would sip slowly, making it last perhaps an hour. He had learned how to keep the glow.

He unbuttoned and removed his tunic, stood up and hung it over the back of the chair, seated himself once more, sipped at the tumbler, then drew towards him the pile of handwritten sheets, and read the one on top.

“Colenso: An account of the campaign in Natal under General Buller. ” By Colonel Garrick Courtney, VC D.S.O.

He lifted it, laid it aside, and began to read what followed.

Having read it so many times before, he had come to believe in it.

It was good. He knew it was good. So too did Messrs. William.

Heinemann in London, to whom he had sent a draft of the first two chapters. They were anxious to publish as soon as possible.

He worked on quietly and happily all morning. At midday old Joseph brought a meal to the study. Cold chicken and salads on Delft, ware china, with a bottle of white Cape wine wrapped in a snowy napkin. He worked as he ate.

That evening when he had altered the last paragraph on the final page and laid his pen on the inkstand, he was smiling.

“Now, I will go and see my darling.” He spoke aloud and put on his tunic.

The homestead of Theuniskraal sat on the crest of a rise below the escarpment. A big building of whitewashed walls, thatch and Dutch gables. In front of it the terraced lawns sprawled away, contoured by beds of azaleas and blue rhododendrons and bounded on the one side by the horse paddocks: two large paddocks for the brood mares and the yearlings, where Garry paused beside the low fence and watched the foals nuzzling upwards at the udders.

Then he limped on along the fence towards the smaller enclosure with its nine, foot fence of thick, canvas, padded gum, poles that contained his stud stallion.

Gypsy was waiting for him, nodding his almost snakelike head so that his mane flared golden in the late sunlight, flattening his ears, then pricking them forward, dancing a little with impatience.

“Hey, Boy. Hey there, Gypsy,” Garry called and the stallion thrust his head between the poles to nibble with soft lips at Garry’s sleeve.

“Sugar, is that what you’re after. ” Garry chuckled and cupped his hands while the stallion fed delicately from them.

“Sugar, my darling,” Garry whispered in sensual delight at the touch of the soft muzzle on his skin and Gypsy cocked his ears to listen to his voice.

“That’s all. All finished.” The stallion nuzzled his chest and Garry wiped his hands on its neck, caressing the warm and silky coat.

“That’s all, my darling. Now run for me. Let me watch you run.”

He stepped back and clapped his hands loudly. “Run, my darling, run.”

The stallion pulled his head back between the poles and went up on his hind legs, whinnying as he reared, cutting at the air with his fore, hooves. The veins stood out along the belly and upon the tight double, swollen bag of its scrotum.

Swift and virile and powerful, it pivoted upon its quarters.

“Run for me! ” shouted Garrick. The stallion came down into full gallop along the track worn by his hooves, sweeping around the paddock with loose dirt flying and the light dancing on his coat as the great muscles bulged beneath.

“Run. ” Leaning against the poles of the fence, Garrick watched him with an expression of terrible yearning.

When he stopped again with the first dark patches of sweat dulling his shoulders, Garrick straightened up and shouted across the stable yard.

“Zama, bring her now!”

On a long rein two grooms led the brood mare down towards the paddock. Gypsy’s nostrils flared into dark pink caverns and he rolled his eyes until the whites showed.

“Wait, my darling, ” whispered Garrick in a voice tight with his own excitement.

Michael Courtney dismounted among the rocks on the highest point of the escarpment. For a week he had denied the impulse to return to this place. Somehow it seemed a treachery, a disloyalty to both his parents.

Far below and behind him in the forest was the tiny speck of Theuniskraal. Between them the railway angled down towards the sprawled irregular pattern of rooftops that was Ladyburg.

But Michael did not look that way. He stood behind his mare and gazed along the line of bare hills to the gigantic quilt of trees that covered them in the north.

The wattle was tall now, so that the roads between the blocks no longer showed. It was a dark smoky green that undulated like the swells of a frozen sea.

This was as close as he had ever been to Lion Kop. It was a forbidden land, like the enchanted forest of the fairy, tale. He took the binoculars from his saddle, bag and scanned it carefully, until he came to the roof of the homestead. The new thatch, golden and un weathered stood out above the wattle.

Grandma is there. I could ride across to visit, there would be no harm in that. He is not there. He is away at the war, Slowly he replaced the binoculars in the saddle, bag, and knew he would not go to Lion Kop. He was shackled by the promise he had made to his mother. Like so many other promises he had made.

With dull resignation he remembered the argument at breakfast that morning, and knew that they had won again. He could not leave them, knowing that without him they would wither.

He could not follow him to war.

He smiled ironically as he remembered the fantasies he had imagined. Charging into battle with him, talking with him beside the camp fire in the evenings, throwing himself in front of a bayonet meant for him.

From the look, out on the escarpment Michael had spent hours each day of the last Christmas holidays waiting for a glimpse of Sean Courtney. Now with guilt he remembered the pleasure he had experienced whenever he picked up that tall figure in the field of his binoculars and followed it as it moved between the newly planted rows of wattle.

But he’s gone now. There would be no disloyalty if I rode across to see Grandma. He mounted the superb golden mare and sat deep in thought. At last he sighed, swung her head back towards Theuniskraal, and rode away from Lion Kop.

I must never come up here again, he thought determinedly, especially after he comes home.

They are tired, tired to the marrow of their bones. Jan Paulus Leroux watched the lethargy of his burghers as they off, saddled and hobbled their horses. They are tired with three years of running and fighting, sick, tired in the certain knowledge of defeat, exhausted with grief for the men they have buried, with grief also for the children and the women with them in the camps.

They are wearied by the sight of burned homes scattered about with the bones of their flocks.

Perhaps it is finished, he thought and lifted the battered old Terai from his head. Perhaps we should admit that it is finished, and go in to them. He wiped his face with his scarf and the cloth came away discoloured with the grease of his sweat and the dust of the dry land. He folded the scarf into the pocket of his coat and looked at the fire, blackened ruins of the homestead on the bluff above the river.

The fire had spread into the gum trees and the leaves were sere and yellow and dead.

“No,” he said aloud. “It is not finished, not until we try for this last time, ” and he moved, towards the nearest group of his men.

“Ja, Hennie. How goes it?” he asked.

“Not too bad, Oom Paul. ” The boy was very thin, but then all of them were thin. He had spread his saddle blanket in the grass and lay upon it.

“Good. ” Jan Paulus nodded and squatted beside him. He took out his pipe and sucked on it. There was still the taste of tobacco from the empty bowl.

, Will you take a fill, Oom Paul?” One of the others sat up and proffered a pouch of springbok skin.

“Nee, dankie. ” He looked away from the pouch, shutting out the temptation. “Keep it for a smoke when we cross the Vaal.”

“Or when we ride into Cape Town, ” joked Hennie, and Jan Paulus smiled at him. Cape Town was a thousand miles south of them, but that was where they were going.

“Ja, keep it for Cape Town,” he agreed and the smile on his face turned bitter. Bullets and disease had left him with six hundred ragged men on horses half, dead with exhaustion to conquer a province the size of France. But it was the last try. He started to speak then.

“Already Jannie Smuts is into the Cape, with a big commando.

Pretorius also has crossed the Orange, De la Rey and De Wet will follow, and Zietsmann is waiting for us to join him on the Vaal River.

This time the Cape burghers must rise with us. This time … ” He spoke slowly, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, a gaunt giant of a man with his unkempt, ginger beard wiry with dust and streaked about the mouth with yellowish grey. The cuffs of his sleeves were stained with the discharge from the veld sores on his wrists. Men came across from the other groups and squatted in a circle about him to listen and take comfort.

“Hennie, bring my Bible from the saddle, bag. We will read a little from the Book.”

The sun was setting when he closed the Book and looked around at them. An hour had gone in prayer that might more profitably have been spent in rest, but when he looked at their faces he knew the time had not been wasted.

“Sleep now, Kerels. We will up saddle early tomorrow.” If they do not come in the night, he qualified himself silently.

But he could not sleep. He sat propped against his saddle and for the hundredth time re, read the letter from Henrietta. It was dated four months earlier, had taken six weeks to reach him along the chain of spies and commandos which carried their mail. Henrietta was sick with dysentery and both the younger children, Stephanus and baby Paulus, were dead from the Witseerkeel. The concentration camp was ravaged by this disease and she feared for the safety of the older children.

The light had failed so he could not read further. He sat with the letter in his hands. With such a price as we have paid, surely we could have won something.

Perhaps there is still a chance. Perhaps.

“Upsaddle! Upsaddle! Khaki is coming.” The warning was shouted from the ridge across the river where he had placed his pickets. It carried clearly in the still of the evening.

” Upsaddle! Khaki is coming.” The cry was taken up around the camp. Jan Paulus leaned over and shook the boy beside him, who was too deep in exhaustion to have heard.

“Wake up, Hennie. We must run again.”

Five minutes later he led his commando over the ridge and southward into the night.

“Still holding southwards,” Sean observed. “Three days’ riding and they haven’t altered course.

“Looks like Leroux has got his teeth into something,” agreed Saul.

“We’ll halt for half an hour to blow the horses. ” Sean lifted his hand and behind him the column lost its shape as the men dismounted and led their horses aside. Although the entire unit had been remounted a week before, the horses were already losing condition from the long hours of riding to which they had been subjected. However, the men were in good shape, lean and hard, looking. Sean listened to their banter and watched the way they moved and laughed. He had built them into a tough fighting force that had proved itself a dozen times since that fiasco a year ago when Leroux had caught them in the mountains. Sean grinned. They had earned the name under which they rode. He handed his horse to Mbejane and moved stiffly towards the shade of a small mimosa tree.

“Have you got any ideas about what Leroux is up to?” he asked Saul as he offered him a cheroot.

“He could be making a try at the Cape railway.”

“He could be,” Sean agreed as he lowered himself gratefully on to a flat stone and stretched his legs out in front of him. “My God, I’m sick of this business. Why the hell can’t they admit it’s finished, why Must they go on and on?”

“Granite cannot bend.” Saul smiled dryly. “But I think that now it is very near the point where it must break. ” “We thought that six months ago,” Sean answered him, then looked beyond time. “Yes, Mbenjane, what is it?”

Mbejane was going through the ritual which preceded serious speech, He had come and squatted half a dozen pieces from where Sean sat, had laid his spears carefully beside him in the grass, and now he was taking snuff.

“Nkosi.”

“Yes?” Sean encouraged him and waited while Mbejane tapped a little of the dark powder on to his fingernail.

“Nkosi, this porridge has an unusual taste.” He sniffed and sneezed.

“Yes?”

“It seems to me that the spoor has changed. ” Mbejane wiped the residual snuff from his nostrils with the pink palm of his hand.