A Falcon Flies

  Zouga started across the intervening courtyard, hacking impatiently at the bush and creepers, and halfway across he saw that there was a second tower, an identical twin to the first that had until that moment obscured it. Now his heart was pounding fiercely against his ribs, not from the exertion of swinging the axe – but with an intuitive belief that the towers were the centre of this strange ancient city, and that they held the key to the mystery.

  He stumbled in his haste, and went down on his knees, tearing another long rent in his breeches and abrading a strip of skin from his shin, so he swore in his impatience and his pain. He had lost the axe but when he groped for it in the tangled roots and interwoven branches, he found it almost immediately, and at the same time, uncovered the stone that had tripped him.

  It was not the granite of which the walls and tower had been constructed. That fact caught his attention, and still on his knees he used the axe to clear the bush around the stone. He felt his nerves thrill as he realized that it was a work of sculpture.

  Jan Cheroot had come up behind him, and now he knelt also and tore at the plants with his bare hands – then the two of them rocked back on their heels, and still squatting examined the statue that they had uncovered. It was not large, probably weighed less than a hundredweight. It was carved in satiny, greenish soapstone, sitting on that familiar ornamental plinth, the simple pattern of triangles, like a row of shark’s teeth.

  The head was smashed off the statue, seemingly by a blow from a sledge hammer, but more likely from a rock used as a hammer. The body of the statue was still intact, the body of the raptor, with the folded pointed wings of a bird of prey, crouching on the point of flight.

  Zouga slipped his hand into the opening of his shirt and drew out the little ivory charm on its leather thong, that he had taken from the body of the Mashona chieftain he had killed at the pass of the elephant road.

  He let it nestle in the palm of his hand, comparing it with the statue. Beside him Jan Cheroot murmured, ‘It is the same bird!’

  ‘Yes,’ Zouga agreed softly. ‘But what does it mean?’ He dropped the ivory charm back inside his shirt.

  ‘It is from long ago.’ Jan Cheroot shrugged. ‘We will never know.’ And dismissing it thus, he would have risen to his feet again, but something else caught his beady bright eye and he darted forward, his hand pecking at the loose earth beside the statue like a greedy hen, and held it up between thumb and forefinger to catch the slanted morning light.

  It was a perfectly round bead of metal, pierced for the string of a necklace, a tiny bead only slightly bigger than the head of a wax Vesta, and it was irregular in shape, as though beaten out under the hammer of a primitive smithy, but the colour was red-yellow, and its surface was undulled by either tarnish or corrosion; there is only one metal that has that peculiar lustre and sheen.

  Zouga held out his hand for it almost reverently, and it had the weight and the warmth of a living thing.

  ‘Gold!’ said Zouga, and beside him Jan Cheroot giggled ecstatically, like a young bride at her first kiss.

  ‘Gold,’ he agreed. ‘Good yellow gold.’

  Zouga was always aware of the very limited time left to him, and every hour or so as they worked he would lift his head to the sky with the sweat streaming down his face and neck, and greasing the flat hard muscles of his naked upper body, and always the clouds were taller and blacker, the heat more punishing, and the wind sullen as a captive tribe on the point of rebellion.

  In the night he would start awake, breaking up through the drugged surface of exhausted sleep, to lie and listen to the thunder growling below the horizon like a man-killing monster.

  Each dawn he shook his men from their blankets and drove them in a suppressed frenzy of impatience to their labour, and when Matthew, the gunbearer, refused to rise again after the short rest which Zouga allowed them in the hottest hour of the day, Zouga dragged him to his feet and hit him once, a short, perfectly timed chopping blow that sent him spinning backwards full length into his own excavation. Matthew crawled out again with blood dribbling from his chin, and picked up the crude sieve of plaited split bamboos with which he was sifting the earth from the digging, and began again working over the piles of loose earth and rubble.

  Zouga drove himself harder than he drove his small band of temple plunderers. He worked shoulder to shoulder with them as they cut out all the undergrowth from the courtyard below the twin stone towers, exposing the broken cobbles, and piles of loose rubble amongst which lay the fallen statues.

  He found six more of the bird carvings virtually undamaged, except for minor chips and the attrition of the ages, but there were the fragments of others that had been broken with a savagery which could only have been deliberate, so that he was uncertain of the original number of statues. Zouga spent little time puzzling over them. The loose earth and rubble on which they lay was rich ground for his band to pick over, though they were handicapped by the lack of tools. Zouga would have paid a hundred guineas for a set of good picks and spades and buckets. However, they had to make do with sharpened wooden stakes, the tips hardened in the fire, to dig out the loose stuff, and Jan Cheroot wove baskets of split bamboo, like the flat baskets used by the African women to winnow the stamped corn meal, and with these they sieved the fine earth after picking over it by hand.

  It was tedious, back-breaking work, and the heat was murderous, but the harvest was rich. The gold was in small pieces, mostly in the pierced round beads, from which the string had long ago rotted away, but there were flakes and flecks of thinly beaten foil, which might once have been used to decorate a votive wooden carving, there were coils of fine gold wire, and more rarely small ingots of the metal the size and thickness of a child’s finger.

  Once the green stone birds must have stood in a circle, facing inwards like the granite columns of Stonehenge, and the gold had probably formed some part of the offerings and sacrifices made to them. Whoever had thrown down the statues had scattered and trampled the sacrifice, and time had corroded all except that lovely yellow incorruptible metal.

  Within ten days of first hacking away the undergrowth that choked the inner courtyard, the temple yard, as Zouga called it, they had gleaned over fifty pounds weight of native gold, and the interior of the stone courtyard had been gutted, the earth rutted and harrowed as though a troop of wild bush pig had rooted it out.

  Then Zouga turned his full attention to the twin towers. He measured them around the base, over a hundred paces, and inspected each joint in the masonry for a secret opening. There was none, so he built a rickety ladder of raw timber and bark rope and risking neck and limb reached the top of the tallest tower. From this vantage point he could look down into the roofless passageways and courtyards of the city. It was a maze, all of it choked with growth – but there was no other part as promising as the temple courtyard of the bird statues.

  He turned his attention back to the tower on which he stood. There was again no sign of a secret opening, although he searched diligently for one. It puzzled him that the ancient architect would have built such a solid structure with no apparent use or motive, and the possibility occurred to him that it might be a sealed treasure house, built around an inner chamber.

  The work of trying to penetrate the massive stonework daunted even Zouga, and Jan Cheroot declared the attempt to be madness. But Zouga had exhausted the digging below the tower, and this seemed to be the only fruitful area left to him.

  Complaining bitterly, a small team led by Matthew climbed the rickety ladder, and under Zouga’s supervision began prising loose the small blocks from the summit of the tower. However, such was the skill and dedication of the original masons that progress in the demolition was painfully slow, and there was a long pause between each crash of one loose block into the courtyard below and the next. It needed three days’ unremitting toil to break a jagged aperture through the first layer of dressed blocks and to discover that the interior of the tower consisted merely of a fill of the same grey gr
anite.

  Standing beside him on the summit of the tower, Jan Cheroot voiced Zouga’s own disappointment.

  ‘We are wasting our time. It’s stone and more stone.’ He spat over the side of the tower and watched the speck of phlegm float down into the ransacked courtyard. ‘What we should look for is the place the gold came from.’

  Zouga had been so obsessed by his search and plunder of the ruined and deserted city that he had paid no thought to the mines which must lie somewhere beyond the walls. Now he nodded his head thoughtfully.

  ‘No wonder your mother loved you,’ he said. ‘Not only are you beautiful, but you are clever too.’

  ‘Ja,’ Jan Cheroot nodded smugly. ‘Everybody tells me that.’

  At that moment a fat weighty drop of rain struck Zouga’s forehead, and ran down into his left eyeball so that his vision blurred. The drop was warm as blood, warm as the blood of a man racked by malarial fever.

  Beyond the high walls there were other ruins, none of such proportions or importance as the inner city, however, and all of them so scattered, so overgrown and thrown down as to make detailed exploration of them out of the question in the time still available to Zouga.

  The kopjes around the city had been fortified, but were deserted, the caves empty as the eye-sockets of a long-dead skull, smelling of the leopards and rock rabbits who were the latest tenants, but Zouga concentrated his search on the ancient mine workings which he had convinced himself had formed the backbone of this vanished civilization. He imagined deep shafts driven into a hillside, and dumps of loose rock like the ancient Cornish tin mines, and he scoured the densely wooded country for miles in each direction, eagerly checking each irregularity of ground, each eminence that could possibly be an abandoned mine dump.

  He left Jan Cheroot to oversee the scratching and sweeping up of the last tiny scraps of gold in the temple yard, and all the men profited by the new relaxed supervision. They shared views with Jan Cheroot on the role of menial work in the life of a warrior and hunter.

  The first spattering of rain had been only a warning of the fury to come, and it had barely wet Zouga’s shirt through to the skin before passing, but it was a warning that Zouga realized he was ignoring at his own peril. Yet still the hope of the ancient mine workings with their fat golden seams of the precious metal tantalized him, and he spun out the days until even Jan Cheroot began to worry.

  ‘If the rivers spate, we will be trapped here,’ he brooded beside the camp fire. ‘Besides we have taken all the gold. Let us now live to spend it.’

  ‘One more day,’ Zouga promised him as he settled into his single blanket, and composed himself to sleep. ‘There is a valley just beyond the southern ridge, it will take me only another day to search it – the day after tomorrow—’ he promised sleepily.

  Zouga smelled the snake first, the sweet sickening stench of it filled his nostrils, so he drew each breath with difficulty, yet trying not to gasp or choke lest he called the snake’s attention. He could not move, he was pinned under an immense dark weight which threatened to crush his ribs and the smell of snake suffocated him.

  He could barely turn his head towards the place from which he knew the snake would come, and it came flowing sinuously, coil upon thick undulating coil. Its head was lifted, its eyes were unblinking and glassily fixed in the cold and deadly reptilian stare, the ribbon of its tongue flickered in a soft black blur through the icy smile of its thin curved lips. Its scales scratched softly across the earth, and they glittered with a soft metallic sheen, the colour of the polished gold foil that Zouga had gleaned from the temple courtyard.

  Zouga could not move nor cry out, his tongue had swollen with terror to fill his mouth and choke him, but the snake slid past him, close enough to touch if he had had command of his arms to reach out. It slid on into the circle of soft wavering light, and the shadows drew back so the birds emerged from the darkness, each on its elevated perch.

  Their eyes were golden and fierce, the cruel yellow curve of their beaks echoed by the proud pout of their russet-flecked breasts and the long pinions folded across their backs like crossed blades.

  Though Zouga knew they were hunting falcons with belled tresses on their legs, yet they were the size of golden eagles. They were decked with garlands of flowers, crimson blossoms of King Chaka fire, and the snowy virginal white of arum lilies. They wore necklaces and chains of brightest gold about their arrogant necks, and as the serpent slid into the midst of the circle they stirred upon their perches.

  Then as the serpent raised its glittering head with the crest of scales erect upon the back of its neck, the falcons burst into thunderous flight and the darkness was filled with the roar of their wings and the plaintive lament of their wild hunting cries.

  Zouga lifted his hands to shield his face, and great wings beat all about him, as the flock of falcons took flight and the presence of the snake was no longer of significance – what was important was the departure of the birds. Zouga felt a tremendous sense of doom, of personal loss, and he opened his mouth, able to utter again. He shouted at the birds to call them back to roost.

  He shouted into the darkness, after the soaring, buffeting thunder of the birds’ wings and his own shouts and the cries of his servants woke him from the coils of the nightmare.

  He woke to find the night was thunderous with the wind of the storm that swept down upon the camp. The trees tossed and thrashed their branches overhead, showering them with leaves and small twigs, and the rush of air was glacially cold. It stripped the thatch from their crudely built huts and it scattered ash and live coals from the fire. The coals, fanned into new life, were the only source of light, for overhead, the stars were obscured by the thick rolling banks of cloud that pressed close upon the earth.

  Shouting to each other above the wind, they scrambled to collect their scattered equipment.

  ‘Make sure the powder bags are kept dry,’ Zouga bellowed, naked except for his tattered breeches, and barefooted as he groped for his boots. ‘Sergeant Cheroot, where are you?’

  The Hottentot’s reply was lost in the cannon’s roar of thunder that drove in their eardrums, and the flash of lightning that followed immediately seared their eyeballs, and imprinted on Zouga’s vision the unforgettable picture of Jan Cheroot dancing stark naked on one foot, a red hot coal from the scattered fire stuck to the sole of the other, his wild curses lost in the drawn-out roll of the thunder and his face contorted like that of a gargoyle on the parapet of Notre Dame cathedral. Then the darkness fell on them again, like an avalanche, and out of it came the rain.

  It came in cutting horizontal sheets like the blade of a harvester’s scythe, so thick that it filled the air with water so they coughed and gasped like drowning men, it came with such hissing force that it stung their naked skins as though coarse salt had been fired at them from a shotgun barrel, and the cold chilled them to the bone, so that they crawled into a forlorn huddle, crowding together for comfort and warmth with the sodden fur blankets pulled over their heads, and stinking like a pack of wet dogs.

  The cold gloomy dawn found them still huddled from the silver streams of falling rain, under the swollen bruised sky that pressed down upon them like the belly of a pregnant sow. Scattered and sodden equipment floated or was submerged in the ankle-deep flood of water that poured through the wind-shattered camp. The lean-to shelters had been wrecked, the camp fire was a muddy black puddle of ash, there was no prospect of rebuilding it, and with that went any chance of hot food or comfort for their stiff cold bodies.

  Zouga had wrapped the powder bags in strips of oilskin, and he and Jan Cheroot had held them in their laps, like ailing infants, during the night. However, it was impossible to open the bags and check the contents for damp, for the rain still teemed down out of the low grey sky in long thin silver lances.

  Slipping and sloshing in the muddy footing, Zouga drove his men to make up their loads for the outward march, while he made his own final preparations. In the middle of the morning they
ate a miserable and hasty meal of cold millet cakes and the last scraps of smoked buffalo meat. Then Zouga stood, with a cloak of half-cured kudu skin draped over his head and shoulders, the rain dripping from his beard and plastering his patched clothing to his body.

  ‘Safari!’ he shouted. ‘We march!’

  ‘And not too damned soon either,’ muttered Jan Cheroot, reversing his musket on its sling so the barrel pointed at the ground and the rain could not run into the muzzle.

  It was then that the porters discovered the extra burden that Zouga had for them. It was lashed to carrying poles of mopani wood with bark rope, and protected by a plaited covering of elephant grass.

  ‘They are not going to carry it,’ Jan Cheroot told him, squeezing the rain from his woolly eyebrows with his thumb. ‘I told you they would refuse.’

  ‘They’ll carry it.’ Zouga’s eyes were cold and green as cut emeralds, and his expression was fierce. ‘They carry it – or they’ll stay here with it, dead!’

  He had carefully selected the best specimen of the carved stone birds, the only one that was completely undamaged and the one on which the carving was the most artistically executed, and he had packed and prepared it for porterage himself.

  For Zouga the carving was physical proof of the existence of the ancient abandoned city, proof that could not be denied when even the most cynical critic read his account in far-away London. Zouga guessed that the intrinsic value of this relic probably surpassed the equivalent weight in pure gold. The value of the artefact was not the most important consideration in Zouga’s determination to carry the carving out to civilization. The stone birds had come to have a special superstitious significance to him. They had come to symbolize for him the success of his endeavours, and by possessing one of them he had in some strange manner taken possession of this entire savage and beautiful land. He would return for the others, but he must have this single perfect specimen. It was his talisman.