A Falcon Flies

  A few hours after the setting of the sun the camp settled for the night, and lying under her hastily thatched shelter with Juba curled on the mattress of freshly cut grass beside her, Robyn listened to the melodious African voices of her porters fade gradually into silence. She sighed once, deeply, and fell instantly asleep – to wake with a confusion of sound and movement all around her.

  She knew that it was late by the frostiness of the air, the utter darkness and her own sleep-drugged stupor. The night rang with the terrified shouts of men and the rush of their feet. Then there was the thudding report of a musket, the crash of heavy logs being thrown on the watch fires and then, heart-stoppingly, the screams of Juba close to her head.

  ‘Nomusa! Nomusa!’

  Still groggy with sleep, Robyn struggled up. She was not certain what she was dreaming and what was reality.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘A devil!’ shrieked Juba. ‘Devils have come to kill us all.’

  Robyn flung off her blanket, and ran out of the shelter bare-footed, dressed only in her flannel nightgown with ribbons in her hair.

  At that moment the new logs blazed up on the watch fire, and she saw naked yellow and black bodies, and terrified faces, whites of rolling eyes and open shouting mouths.

  The little Hottentot Corporal, stark naked, pranced beyond the fire, brandishing his musket, and as Robyn ran towards him he fired it blindly into the darkness.

  Robyn caught his arm as he began to reload.

  ‘What is it?’ she shouted into his ear.

  ‘Leeuw! Lion!’ His eyes were glittering with fright and bubbles of spittle ran from the corners of his mouth.

  ‘Where is it?’

  ‘It has taken Sakkie! It pulled him out of his blankets.’

  ‘Quiet!’ Robyn shouted. ‘Keep quiet all of you!’

  Now, at last, they all turned instinctively to her for leadership.

  ‘Quiet!’ she repeated, and the gabble of fright and uncertainty died swiftly.

  ‘Sakkie!’ she called in the silence, and the missing Hottentot’s voice answered her faintly from below the steep bank of the river-bed.

  ‘Die leeuw het my! The lion has me! Die duiwel gaan my dood maak, the devil is going to kill me,’ and he broke off with a shriek of agony.

  Above the high-pitched shriek they all clearly heard the crunch of bone, and the muffled growl like that of a dog with food in its jaws. With a rush of horror that raised goose pimples along her arms, Robyn realized that she was listening to the sounds of a man being eaten alive not fifty yards from where she stood.

  ‘Hy vreet my bene,’ the voice out of the darkness rang with unbearable agony. ‘He is eating my legs,’ and the gruesome cracking, tearing sounds made Robyn’s gorge rise to choke her. Without thinking, she snatched a burning brand from the fire and holding it aloft shouted at the Hottentot Corporal. ‘Come on! We must save him!’

  She ran forward to the lip of the bank before she realized she was alone, and unarmed.

  She looked back. Not one of the men around the fire had followed her. They stood in a tight group, shoulder to shoulder, clutching muskets or axes or assegais, but rooted where they stood.

  ‘He is finished.’ The Corporal’s voice shook with fright. ‘Leave him. It’s too late. Leave him.’

  Robyn hurled the burning brand she held down into the river-bed below her feet, and before its flames faded and pinched out she thought she saw something big and dark and terrifying on the edge of the shadows.

  Robyn ran back to the group and snatched a musket from one of the Hottentots. Thumbing back the hammer, she ran once more to the river bank and peered down into the dry bed. It was utterly dark, until suddenly there was somebody at her shoulder, holding high a burning branch from the fire.

  ‘Juba! Go back!’ Robyn snapped at the child. Juba was completely naked except for a single string of beads about her hips, and the firelight glinted on her sleek black body.

  She could not answer Robyn, for tears were rolling down her plump cheeks and her throat was closed with terror, but she shook her head fiercely at the order to retreat.

  Below them, outlined against the white sand of the dry river, was that grotesque dark shape. and the screams of the dying man blended with the grisly wet growls of the animal.

  Robyn lifted the musket, but hesitated for fear of hitting the Hottentot. Disturbed by the light, the lion rose, becoming huge and black; swiftly it dragged the weakly wriggling body, dangling between its forelegs back into the darkness beyond the feeble circle of light from the flames.

  Robyn drew a deep breath and the heavy musket shook in her hands, but she lifted her chin in a gesture of decision and holding up the skirts of her long nightdress in one hand, went down the path into the river-bed. Juba followed her like a faithful puppy, pressing so hard against her that they nearly lost their balance, but she kept the burning brand on high, though it shook, and the flames wavered smokily.

  ‘Brave girl!’ Robyn encouraged her. ‘Good brave girl!’

  They stumbled through the loose white sand that covered the ankles of their bare feet at each pace.

  Ahead of them, at the extreme limit of their vision, moved the menacing black shadow, and the deep muttering growls seemed to fill the night around them.

  ‘Leave it!’ Robyn shouted, her voice quavering and breaking. ‘Drop it – this instant!’

  Unconsciously she was using the same commands as she had given her terrier as a child when it refused to deliver the rubber ball.

  Ahead of her in the darkness Sakkie heard her, and bleated feebly. ‘Help me – for God’s love, help me.’ But the lion pulled him away, leaving a long wet drag mark through the sand.

  Robyn was tiring rapidly, her arms ached from the weight of the heavy weapon, each breath burned her throat as she panted, but she could not seem to get enough air, for an iron band of fear cramped her chest. She sensed that the lion would only retreat a certain distance before it lost patience with the shouting and harassment, and her instinct was right.

  Suddenly she made out the full shape of the lion ahead of them. It had dropped the maimed body and stood over it now like a tomcat with its mouse, but it was as big as a Shetland pony, with the dark ruff of its mane fully erect, seeming to double its size.

  In the light of the flames, its eyes glowed a bright ferocious gold, and it opened its jaws and roared. The very air dinned upon Robyn’s eardrums, causing her actual physical pain as that great gust of sound struck her. It rose to an unbearable pitch, so that involuntarily she reeled backwards with Juba clinging to her. The child wailed with despair, losing control of her body so that in the light of the flames her urine shot in sharp little spurts down her legs, and as the lion launched into its charge she dropped the torch into the sand, plunging them all into complete darkness.

  Robyn lifted the musket in front of her, as a defensive reflex rather than a planned act of aggression, and when the barrel was at waist-level she pulled the trigger with all her strength. The cap flashed, flaring brightly in the blackness and for an instant she saw the lion. It was so close that the long barrel of the musket seemed to touch its huge shaggy head. The mouth was wide open, still emitting those shattering gusts of sound, and the fangs that lined the deep, meat-red gape of jaws were long and white and cruel. The eyes burned yellow as living flames, and Robyn found that she was screaming, but the sound was lost completely in the roaring of the enraged animal.

  Then an instant after the flash of the cap the musket fired, bucking so savagely in her hands that it almost tore itself from her grip, and the butt, not anchored against her shoulder, was driven back into her stomach with a force that expelled the air from her lungs, and sent her reeling in the loose white sand. Juba, clinging to her legs and wailing with despair, tripped her and she went over backwards, sprawling full length at the same moment that the full weight of the lion lunged into her.

  If Robyn had not fallen, the charge would have stove in her ribs, and snapped her neck, fo
r the lion was over four hundred pounds weight of driving bone and muscle. As it was, it knocked her out of her senses for she never knew how long, but she became conscious again, with the strong cat-reek of the lion in her nostrils, and an immense weight crushing her into the sand. She wriggled weakly, but the weight was suffocating her, and gouts of hot blood, so hot it seemed to scald her, were spurting over her head and neck.

  ‘Nomusa!’ Juba’s voice, high with anguish and very close, but those shattering roars were silent. There was just the unbearable weight and the rank smell of lion.

  Robyn’s strength came back to her with a rush, and she struggled and kicked, and the weight above her rolled loosely aside, slithering off her, and she dragged herself free of it. Immediately Juba clung to her again, throwing her arms about Robyn’s neck.

  Robyn comforted her as though she were an infant, patting her and kissing her cheek that was wet and hot with tears.

  ‘It’s over! There, now. It’s all over,’ she mumbled, aware that her hair was sodden with the lion’s blood, and that a dozen men, led cautiously by the Hottentot Corporal, had lined the high river bank, each of them holding aloft a torch of burning grass.

  In the dim yellow light the lion lay stretched out beside Robyn in the sand. The ball from the musket had struck him full in the nose, passed cleanly through the brain and lodged in the base of his neck, killing the great cat in midair, so the lifeless body had pinned Robyn to the sand.

  ‘The lion is dead!’ Robyn quavered as she called to the men, and they came down in a close bunch, timidly at first and then boldly when they saw the huge yellow carcass.

  ‘It was the shot of a true huntress,’ announced the Corporal grandly. ‘An inch high and the ball would have bounced off the skull, an inch lower and it would have missed the brain.’

  ‘Sakkie,’ Robyn’s voice still shook, ‘where is Sakkie?’

  He was still alive, and they carried him in his blanket up into the camp. His wounds were fearsome, and Robyn knew there was not the smallest chance of saving him. One arm from wrist to elbow had been chewed so that not a piece of bone bigger than the top joint of her finger remained. One foot was gone just above the ankle, bitten clean off and swallowed in one piece. He had been bitten through pelvis and spine, while through a tear in his diaphragm below the ribs the mottled pink of his lungs swelled out with each breath.

  Robyn knew that to attempt to cut and sew that dreadfully torn flesh or to saw the splintered bone stumps would be inflicting futile agony on the little yellow man. She had him laid close to the fire, she plugged the worst holes gently, and then covered him with blankets and fur karosses. She administered a dose of laudanum so powerful as to be almost lethal in itself. Then she sat next to Sakkie and held his hand.

  ‘A doctor must know when to let a man die with dignity,’ her professor at St Matthew’s had once told her. And a little before dawn Sakkie opened his eyes, the pupils dilated widely by the massive dose of the drug and smiled at her just once before he died.

  His brother Hottentots buried him in a small cave in one of the granite kopjes and they blocked the opening with boulders that the hyena could not roll aside.

  When the Corporal and his Hottentots came down from the hill, they indulged in a brief ritual of mourning which consisted mainly of emitting loud theatrical cries of anguish and firing their muskets in the air to speed Sakkie’s soul on its journey, after which they ate a hearty breakfast of smoked elephant meat, and the Corporal came to Robyn, dry eyed and grinning broadly.

  ‘We are now ready to march, Nomusa!’ he told her, and with a stamp of his right foot, which began with the knee lifted under his chin, he gave her one of those widely extravagant salutes, a mark of deep respect that up to that date had been reserved exclusively for Major Zouga Ballantyne.

  During that day’s march, the porters sang again for the first time since leaving Zouga’s camp at Mount Hampden.

  ‘She is your mother and your father too,

  She will dress your wounds

  She will stand over you while you sleep

  We, your children, greet you, Nomusa,

  The girl child of mercy.’

  It was not only the caravan’s rate of advance under Zouga that had irritated and annoyed Robyn. It was also their complete failure to make contact with any of the indigenous tribes, with any of the inhabitants of the scattered and fortified villages.

  To her it seemed completely logical that the only way that they would be able to trace Fuller Ballantyne through this wilderness was by asking questions of those who must have seen him pass, and almost certainly had spoken and traded with him.

  Robyn could not believe that her father would have adopted the same high-handed actions to force a passage past anybody or anything that stood in the way of the caravan as Zouga had done.

  When she closed her eyes she could still see clearly in her mind’s eye the tiny falling body of the black man in the tall headdress, shot down ruthlessly by her brother. She had rehearsed in her mind how she or her father would have passed through the elephant road without gunfire and slaughter. The tactful withdrawal, the offering of small gifts, the cautious parley and eventual agreement.

  ‘It was plain bloody murder!’ she repeated to herself for the hundredth time. ‘And what we have done since then has been blatant robbery.’

  Zouga had helped himself to the standing crops of the villages they had passed, to tobacco, millet and yams, not even bothering to leave a handful of salt or a few sticks of dried elephant meat as token payment.

  ‘We should try to communicate with these people, Zouga,’ she had remonstrated.

  ‘They are a sullen and dangerous people.’

  ‘Because they expect you to rob and murder them – and, as God is my witness, you have not disappointed them, have you?’

  The same argument had run its well-worn course many times, neither of them relenting, each holding stubbornly to their own view. Now at least she was free to attempt to establish contact with these people, Mashona, as Juba called them disparagingly, without her brother’s impatience and arrogance to distract her and alarm the timid black people.

  On the fourth day after leaving Zouga’s camp, they came in sight of an extraordinary geological formation. It was as though a high dam wall had been constructed across the horizon, a great dyke of rock running almost exactly north and south to the very limit of the eye.

  Almost directly in their line of march was the only breach in this rampart, and from the altered vegetation, the denser growth and deeper green, it was clear that a river flowed through the gap. Robyn ordered a small adjustment in their line of march and headed for the pass.

  When they were still some miles distant Robyn was delighted to make out the first signs of human habitation that they had come across since leaving Mount Hampden.

  There were fortified walls on the cliffs above the breach in the long low hill, high above the river bed, and as they drew closer, Robyn could see the gardens on the banks of the river, defended by high brush and thorn barriers with little thatched look-out huts standing high on stilts in the centre of the dark luscious green stands of young millet.

  ‘We will fill our bellies tonight,’ the Hottentot Corporal gloated. ‘That corn is ripe enough to eat.’

  ‘We will camp here, Corporal,’ Robyn told him firmly.

  ‘But we are still a mile . . .’

  ‘Here!’ Robyn repeated.

  They were all puzzled and resentful when Robyn forbade entry to the tempting gardens, and confined them all to the perimeter of the camp, except for the water and wood parties. But resentment turned to genuine alarm when Robyn left the camp herself, accompanied only by Juba, and as far as they could see completely unarmed.

  ‘These people are savages,’ the Corporal tried to intercept her. ‘They will kill you, and then Major Zouga will kill me.’

  The two women entered the nearest garden, and carefully approached the look-out hut. On the earth below the rickety ladder that
rose to the elevated platform a fire had burned down to ash, but flared again when Robyn knelt and fanned it. Robyn threw a few dry branches upon it and then sent Juba for an armful of green leaves. The column of smoke drew the attention of the watchers on the cliff above the gorge.

  Robyn could see their distant figures on the skyline, standing very still and intent. It was an eerie feeling to know that so many eyes were upon them, but Robyn was not relying entirely on the fact that they were women, nor was she relying on their patently peaceful intentions, nor even upon the prayers which she had offered up so diligently to protect them. On the principle that the Almighty helps those who show willing, she had Zouga’s big Colt pistol stuffed into the waistband of her breeches and covered by the tail of her flannel shirt.

  Next to the smoking beacon fire, Robyn left a half pound of salt in a small calabash gourd, and a bundle of sticks of black smoked elephant meat which was the last of her stock.

  Early the next morning Robyn and Juba again visited the garden and found the meat and salt had been taken, and that there were the fresh footprints of bare feet overlaying their own in the dust.

  ‘Corporal,’ Robyn told the Hottentot with a confidence she did not feel, ‘we are going out to shoot meat.’

  Corporal grinned beatifically. They had eaten the last of the smoked meat, weevils and all, the previous evening, and he flung her one of his more flamboyant salutes, his right arm quivering at the peak of his cap, his fingers spread stiffly, the stamp of his right foot raising dust, before he hurried away shouting orders to his men to prepare for the hunt.

  Zouga had long ago declared the Sharps rifle to be too light for elephant, and left it in camp, favouring the big four-to-the-pound smooth bores to the more expensive breech-loading rifle. Robyn took it now and inspected it with trepidation. Previously she had only fired it at a target, and now in the privacy of her grass hut she rehearsed loading and cocking the weapon. She was not sure that she would be capable of cold-bloodedly aiming it at a living animal, and had to reassure herself of the absolute necessity of procuring food for the many mouths and stomachs that now depended upon her. The Corporal did not share her doubts, he had seen her shoot a charging lion between the eyes, and trusted her now implicitly. Within an hour’s walk they found a herd of buffalo in the thick reed beds along the river. Robyn had listened to Zouga talking of the hunt with enough attention to know the necessity of keeping below the wind – and in the reeds with visibility down to a few feet and with the commotion created by two hundred cows and bleating calves they crept up to a range at which nobody could miss.