He was on a line to pass the rocky redoubt at twenty paces, and Zouga let him come on to twice that distance before he threw up the Sharps rifle.
He aimed for the fold of thick skin under the throat that marked the frontal aiming point for the heart and its complex of arteries and blood vessels. He hardly noticed the recoil nor the blurt of the shot as he watched for the strike of the lead bullet. There was a little spurt of dust off the grey hide precisely on his aiming point, and the sound of the hit was exactly like his headmaster swinging the malacca cane against his own schoolboy backside, sharp and meaty.
The bull took the bullet without a stumble or lurch, instead it swung towards them, and seemed immediately to double in size as it lifted its nose into the high attitude of the charge.
Zouga reached for his second gun, but he groped in vain.
Mark, his number two, showed the whites of his eyes in a flash of terror, let out a squawk, hurled the elephant gun aside, and went bounding away towards the mopani grove.
The bull saw him and swerved again, thundering ten feet past Zouga as it went after the fleeing bearer. Waving the empty Sharps, Zouga shouted desperately for another rifle, but the bull was past him in a grey blur and it caught Mark as he reached the tree line.
The great bossed head dropped until the snout almost touched the earth, and then flew up again in a powerful tossing motion that bunched the muscle in the thick black neck. Mark was looking back over his shoulder, his eyes wide and glaring white in the black face, rivulets of sweat pouring down his naked back, his mouth a pink gape as he screamed.
Then he was in the air. Legs and arms tumbling wildly, he went up like a rag doll thrown by a petulant child and disappeared into the thick green canopy of mopani foliage overhead. Without missing a stride, the bull drove on into the forest, but that was all that Zouga saw, for a cry from Sergeant Cheroot made him turn again.
‘Hier kom hulle! Here they come!’
Across their whole front, the earth seemed to move, as though racked by the convulsions of an earthquake. Shoulder to shoulder, nose to rump, the main herd broke from cover, flattening the thorn bush under the great wave of bodies, filling the valley from side to side.
They lifted behind them a dense curtain of pale dust, from which the front ranks seemed endlessly to emerge, their great bossed heads nodding in unison as they pounded on, long silver strings of saliva dangling from open jaws as they bellowed in alarm and anger, and the roar of their hooves drowned the sound of the flames.
Matthew and John, Zouga’s two remaining bearers, had stood their ground, and one of them snatched away the empty Sharps and thrust the thick stock of an elephant gun into Zouga’s hand.
The weapon seemed heavy and unbalanced after the Sharps, and the sights were crudely fashioned, a blunt cone for the foresight, and a deep vee for the backsight.
The solid wall of bodies was bearing down upon them with frightening speed. The cows were a dark chocolate colour, and their horns were more delicately curved. The calves that raced at their flanks were sleek russet with crowns of reddish curls between the rudimentary little horn spikes. The herd was so tightly packed that it seemed impossible that they could split open to pass the rock. There was a tall rangy cow in the leading rank, coming straight on to Zouga.
He held half a beat aiming into the centre of her chest, and squeezed off the shot. The firing cap popped with a tiny puff of white smoke, and a heartbeat later the elephant gun vomited a deafening gust of powder smoke and bright flame, the burning patches went spinning away over the heads of the charging buffalo, and Zouga felt as though one of them had kicked in his shoulder. He staggered backwards, the barrel thrown high by the recoil, but the big red cow seemed to run into an invisible barrier. A quarter of a pound of mercury-hardened lead drove into her chest, and brought her down in a rolling sliding tangle of hooves and horns.
‘Tom Harkness! That one was yours!’ Zouga shouted, offering the kill to the memory of the old white bearded hunter, and he grabbed the next loaded rifle.
There was a prime bull, big and black, a ton of enraged bovine flesh. It had seen Zouga, and was coming in over the rocks in a long scrambling leap – hunting him out, so close that Zouga seemed to touch it with the gaping muzzle of the four-to-the-pound. Again the great clanging burst of sound and flame and smoke, and half the bull’s head flew away in a gust of bone chips and bloody fragments. It reared up on its hind legs, striking out with fore hooves, and then crashed over in a cloud of dust.
Impossibly, the herd split, galloping down each side of their rocky hide, a heaving, grunting, forked river of striving muscle and bone. Jan Cheroot was yipping shrilly with the fever of the chase, ducking down behind the rock to reload, biting open the paper cartridge with powder dribbling down his chin, spitting the ball into the muzzle and then plying the ramrod in a frenzy, before bobbing up again to fire into the solid heaving press of gigantic bodies.
It lasted for two minutes, which seemed to take a round of eternity, and then they were left choking and gasping in the swirling clouds of dust, surrounded by half a dozen huge black carcasses, with the drum beats of the herd fading away into the mopani forest, and a louder more urgent din roaring down on them from in front.
The first tongue of heat licked across them, and Zouga heard the lock of sunbleached hair that hung on his forehead frizzle sharply and smelt the stink of it. At the same instant, the dust cloud fell abruptly aside, and for seconds they stared at a spectacle which deprived them of power of movement.
The jessie bush was not burning, it was exploding into sheets of flame.
‘Run!’ shouted Zouga. ‘Get out of here!’
The sleeve of his shirt charred, and the air he breathed scorched his lungs painfully. As they reached the edge of the mopani forest, the shiny green leaves about their heads shrivelled and yellowed, curling their edges in the heat, and Zouga felt his eyeballs drying out as the dark smoke clouds rolled over them. He knew that they were experiencing only the heat and smoke carried on the wind, but if the flames were able to jump the gap, then they were all doomed. Ahead of him, the Hottentots and the other bearers were shadowy wraiths, staggering forward but weakening and losing direction.
Then, as suddenly as they had been engulfed by them, the billowing smoke clouds lifted. The flames had not been able to jump the open ground, and the heat came only in gusts. A ray of sunshine pierced the thick gloom overhead, and a puff of sweet fresh air came through. They sucked at it gratefully, and huddled in awed silence, beating at their clothing which still smouldered in patches. Zouga’s face was blackened and blistered, and his lungs still convulsed in spasms of coughing. As he caught his breath, he grunted hoarsely,
‘Well the meat is cooked already,’ and he pointed back at the buffalo carcasses.
At that moment something fell limply out of the dense top branches of a mopani tree, and then picked itself up and limped painfully towards them. Zouga let out a husky growl of laughter.
‘Oh, thou swift of foot,’ he greeted Mark, the bearer, and the others took up the mockery.
‘When you fly, the eagles are put to shame,’ Jan Cheroot hooted.
‘Your true home is in the treetops,’ Matthew added with relish, ‘with your hairy brethren.’
By evening they had hacked the buffalo carcasses into wet red chunks, and spread these on the smoking racks. The racks were waist-high cross-poles set in forked branches, with a slow smoking fire of wet mopani wood smouldering under it.
Here was meat for the caravan that would last them many weeks.
Camacho Pereira had no doubts that by simply following the line of the escarpment, keeping just below the bad broken ground, he must at last cut the spoor of the caravan. A hundred men, in column, would blaze a track that even a blind man would trip over.
His certainty dwindled with each day’s march through the quivering, breathless heat that seemed to rebound from black kopjes and the ironstone cliffs which glittered in the aching sunlight like the scales o
f some monstrous reptile.
Of the men that his half-brother, Alphonse, had given him, he had already lost two. One had stepped on something that looked like a pile of dried leaves, but which had transformed itself instantly into six feet of infuriated gaboon adder, thick as a man’s calf, with a repulsively beautiful diamond-patterned back, and a head the size of a man’s fist. The gaping mouth was a lovely shade of salmon pink, and the curved fangs three inches long. It had plunged them into the man’s thigh and squirted half a cupful of the most toxic venom in Africa into his bloodstream.
After blowing the serpent to shreds with volleys of rifle fire, Camacho and his companions had wagered all their expectations of loot on exactly how long it would take the victim to die. Camacho, the only one who owned a watch, was elected timekeeper, and they gathered around where the dying man lay, either urging him to give up the useless struggle or pleading with him raucously to hang on a little longer.
When he went into back-arching convulsions, with his eyes rolled up into his skull, his jaws locked into a grinning rictus and he lost control of his sphincter muscle, Camacho knelt beside him, holding a bunch of smouldering tambooti leaves under his nostrils to shock him out of it, and crooning, ‘Ten minutes more – hang on for just ten minutes more for your old friend Machito!’
The last convulsion ended with a dreadful gargling expulsion of breath, and when the heart beat faded completely, Camacho stood and kicked the corpse with disgust.
‘He always was a dung-eating jackal.’
When they began to strip the corpse of all items of any possible value, five coins, heavy golden mohurs of the East India Company, fell out of the folds of his turban.
There was not one man in all that company who would not have willingly sold his mother into slavery for a single gold mohur, let alone five.
At the first gleam of gold, all their knives came out with a sardonic metallic snickering, and the first man to snatch for the treasure reeled away, trying to push his intestines back into the long clean slice through his stomach wall.
‘Leave them lie,’ Camacho shouted. ‘Don’t touch them until the lots are drawn!’
Not one of them trusted another, and the knives stayed out while the lots were cast, and grudgingly the winners were allowed one at a time to claim their prize.
The man with the belly wound could not march without his stomach falling out, and because he could not march, he was as good as dead. The dead, as everybody knows, have no need of personal possessions. The logic was apparent to all. They left him his shirt and breeches, both torn and badly stained anyway, but stripped him of all else as they had stripped the first corpse. Then, with a few ribald pleasantries, they propped him against the base of a marula tree, with the naked corpse of the snake-bite victim beside him for company, and they marched away along the line of the escarpment.
They had gone a hundred yards when Camacho was overcome by a rush of compassion. He and the dying man had fought and marched and whored together for many years. He turned back.
The man gave him a haggard grin, his dry crusted lips cracking with the effort. Camacho answered him with that marvellous flashing smile as he dropped the man’s loaded pistol in his lap.
‘It would be better to use it before the hyena find you tonight,’ he told him.
‘The thirst is terrible,’ the man croaked, a tiny bead of blood appeared on his deeply cracked lower lip, bright as an emperor’s ruby in the sunlight. He eyed the two-gallon water bottle on Camacho’s hip.
Camacho resettled the water bottle on its strap so it was out of sight behind his back. The contents sloshed seductively.
‘Try not to think about it,’ he counselled.
There was a point where compassion ended and stupidity began. Who knew where and when they would find the next water? In this God-blasted desolation, water was an item not to be wasted on a man who was already as good as dead.
He patted the man’s shoulder comfortingly, gave him a last lovely smile and then swaggered away amongst the grey ironthorn scrub, whistling softly under his breath with the plumed beaver cocked over one eye.
‘Camachito went back to make sure we had forgotten nothing.’ The one-eyed Abyssinian greeted him as he caught up with the column, and they shouted with laughter. Their spirits were still high, the water bottles more than half filled and the prospects of immense loot danced like a will-o’-thewisp down the valley ahead of them.
That had been ten days ago, the last three of which without water, for you could not count the cupful of mud and elephant piss they had from the last puddled waterhole. Apart from the lack of water, the going had become appalling. Camacho had never marched through such broken and harsh terrain, toiling up one rocky slope and then battling down through tearing thorn to the next dry river course, and then up again.
Also, it now seemed highly probable that either the Englishman had changed his mind and gone north of the Zambezi river after all, in which case they had lost him, or else, and Camacho’s skin crawled at the thought, or else they had crossed the spoor of the caravan in the early dawn or late evening when the light was too bad to make it out clearly. It was an easy mistake to make, they had crossed hundreds of game tracks each day, and the spoor could have been wiped by a herd of game, or one of the fierce short-lived little whirlwinds, the dust devils which ravaged the valley at this season of the year.
To cap all Camacho’s tribulations, his band of noble warriors was on the point of mutiny. They were talking quite openly about turning back. There never had been an Englishman and a caravan of riches, even if there had, he was now far from here and getting further every day. They were exhausted by these switchback ridges and valleys and the water bottles were nearly all of them dry, which made it hard to maintain enthusiasm for the venture. The ringleaders were reminding the others that in their absence, their share of the profits of the slave caravan were blowing in the wind. Fifty slaves, for certain, were worth a hundred mythical Englishmen. They had many excellent reasons for turning back.
Camacho, on the other hand, had nothing to return for, apart from his half-brother’s ire. He also had a score to settle, two scores. He still hoped that they might manage to take the Englishman and his sister alive, especially the woman. Even in the thirst and the heat, his groin swelled at the memory of her in men’s breeches. He jerked himself back to reality, and he glanced over his shoulder at the straggling line of ruffians who followed him.
Soon it would be necessary to kill one of his men, he had decided hours ago. Dung-eaters all of them – it was the only language they truly understood. He must make an example to stiffen their backbones, and keep them slogging onwards.
He had already decided which one it would be. The oneeyed Abyssinian was the biggest talker, the most eloquent apostle of the return to the coast, and what made his choice even more attractive was that his left side was blind. The problem was that the job must be done properly. The others would be impressed by the knife but not the gun. However, the Abyssinian allowed no man into that blind spot. Without making it too obvious, Camacho had twice sidled up on his left, but each time the Abyssinian had swung his head with its frizzed-up halo of dense curly hair towards him, and given him a grin with a slow trickle of a tear running down his cheek from that obscenely empty eye-socket.
However, Camacho was a persistent man, and an inventive one, for he noticed that whenever he moved out of the Abyssinian’s blind spot, the man relaxed, and immediately became more verbose and arrogant. Twice more Camacho tried an approach from the left, and twice more was met with a single cold beady stare. He was establishing a pattern, teaching the victim that threat came only from the left, and when they halted in the middle of the morning, he ostentatiously squatted on the right. The Abyssinian grinned at him as he wiped the spout of his almost empty water bottle on his sleeve.
‘This is the place. I go no further.’ The one-eyed man announced in fluent Portuguese. ‘I make the oath on Christ’s sacred wounds.’ And he touched the Copti
c gold cross that hung around his neck. ‘Not another step forward. I am going back.’
Fanning himself with the beaver hat, Camacho shrugged, and answered the cold grin with his own sunny smile. ‘Let’s drink to your going then.’ With his free hand, he lifted his own water bottle, and shook it slightly. There was a cupful, no more. All their eyes went instinctively to the bottle. Here water was life, even the Abyssinian’s single eye fastened on it.
Then Camacho let it slip from his fingers. It looked like an accident, the bottle rolled to the Abyssinian’s feet with clear water glugging out on to the baked earth, and, with an exclamation, the man stooped for it with his right hand, his knife hand.
Nobody really saw Camacho move. He had been holding the knife in the lining of the beaver hat. Suddenly it seemed to reappear behind the Abyssinian’s right ear, just the carved bone handle protruding, the blade completely buried. The Abyssinian lifted his hand with a mystified expression and touched the hilt of the knife, blinked his single eye rapidly, opened his mouth and then closed it firmly and fell forward on top of the water bottle.
Camacho was standing over them, a cocked pistol in each hand.
‘Who else wishes to make an oath on Christ’s sacred wounds?’ he smiled at them, his teeth very big and white and square. ‘Nobody? Very well then, I will make an oath. I make it on the long-lost maidenheads of your sisters which they sold a hundred times for an escudo the bunch.’
Even they were shocked by such blasphemy.
‘I make it on your flaccid and puny manhoods which it will be my great pleasure to shoot off,’ he was interrupted, and broke off in mid-sentence.
There was a faint popping sound on the hushed heated morning, so distant, so indistinct, that for a moment none of them recognized it as the sound of gunfire. Camacho recovered first, he thrust the pistols into his waistband. They were no longer needed – and he ran to the crest of the rocky kopje on which they sat.