‘What kind of a man are you?’
She tried to strike him again, but he was ready for her and they rolled together chest to chest in the grass.
‘You’re a nothing, and you’ll stay like that because you haven’t the guts and the strength to be anything else,’ she hissed at him, and the words hurt a thousand times worse than the blow. His own anger flared to match hers and he came up over her.
‘Damn you. How dare you say that!’
She shouted back at him. ‘At least I dare, you wouldn’t dare—’ But she broke off then as she felt it happen, then she cried out again but in a different voice.
‘Oh God!’ Her whole body racked as she locked him to her, enfolding and holding him while she purred and murmured with a voice gone low and husky and victorious.
‘Oh Mark, oh darling, darling Mark.’
Sean Courtney sat his horse with the slumping comfortable seat of the African horseman. Long stirrups and legs thrust forward, sitting well back on his mount, sjambok trailing from his left hand and reins held low on the pommel of the saddle.
In the shade of the leadwood tree, his stallion stood with the patience of a trained gun horse, its weight braced on three legs and the fourth cocked at rest, neck stretched against the reins as it reached to crop the fine sweet grass that covered the upper slopes of the escarpment, its teeth making a harsh tearing sound with each mouthful.
Sean looked out across the spreading forests and grassland below him, and realized how much it had all changed since he had run across it barefooted with his hunting dogs and throwing sticks, a small boisterous child.
Four or five miles away, nestled against the protective wall of the escarpment, was the homestead of Theunis Kraal, where he had been born in the old brass bedstead in the front room, both he and Garrick, his twin brother, in the course of a single sweltering summer morning, a double birthing that had killed the mother he had never known. Garrick lived there still, and at last he had found peace and pride among his books and his papers. Sean smiled with affection and sympathy, tinged with ancient guilt – what might his brother have been if one leg had not been shattered by the careless shotgun that Sean had fired? He thrust the thought aside, and instead turned in the saddle to survey his own domain.
The thousands upon thousands of acres that he had planted to timber, and which had given him the foundation of his fortune. From where he sat he could see the sawmills and timber yards adjoining the railway yards down in the town, and once again he felt the warm contentment of a life not thrown to waste, the glow of achievement and endeavour rewarded. He smiled and lit one of the long dark cheroots, striking the match off his boot, adjusting easily to the shifting balance of the horse under him.
A moment longer he indulged this rare moment of self-gratification, almost as though to avoid thinking of the most pressing of his problems.
Then he let his eyes drift away across the spreading rooftops of Ladyburg to that new ungainly structure of steel and galvanized sheet iron that rose tall enough to dwarf any other structure in the valley, even the massive four-storey block of the new Ladyburg Farmers Bank.
The sugar refinery was like some heathen idol, ugly and voracious, crouching at the edge of the neat blocks of planted sugar which stretched away beyond the limit of the eye, carpeting the low rolling hills with waving, moving green that roiled in the wind like the waves of the ocean, planted to feed that eternally hungry structure.
The frown puckered the skin between Sean’s eyes at the bridge of his big beaky nose. Where he counted his land in thousands of acres, the man who had once been his son counted his in tens of thousands.
The horse sensed his change of mood and gathered itself, nodding its head extravagantly and skittering a little in the shade, ready to run.
‘Easy, boy,’ Sean growled at him, and gentled him with a hand on his shoulder.
He waited now for that man, having come early to the rendezvous as was always his way. He liked to be there first and let the other man come to him. It was an old trick, to let the other seem the interloper in established territory, while the waiting man had time to consider and arrange his thoughts, and to study the other as he approached.
He had chosen the place and the time with care. He had not been able to sanction the thought of Dirk Courtney riding on to his land again, and entering his home. The aura of evil that hung around the man was contagious, and he did not want that evil to sully the inner sanctum of his life which was the homestead of Lion Kop. He did not even want him on his land, so he had chosen the one small section of boundary where his land actually bordered on that of Dirk Courtney. It was the only half-mile of any land of Sean’s along which he had strung barbed wire.
As a cattleman and horseman, he had an aversion to barbed wire, but still he had strung it between his land and that of Dirk Courtney, and when Dirk had written asking him for this meeting, he had chosen this place where there would be a fence between them.
He had chosen the late afternoon with intent also. The low sun would be behind him and shining into the other man’s eyes as he came up the slope of the escarpment.
Now Sean drew the watch from his waistcoat and saw it was one minute before four, the appointed time. He looked down into the valley, and scowled. The slope below him was deserted, and he could follow the full length of the road into town beyond that. Since he had seen young Mark puttering past on his motorcycle half an hour before, the road also had been deserted.
He looked beyond the town to the flash of the white walls of the grand mansion that Dirk Courtney had built when first he returned to the valley. Great Longwood, a pretentious name for a pretentious building.
Sean did not like to look at it. To him it seemed that the same aura of evil shimmered about it, even in the daylight an almost palpable thing, and he had heard the stories - they had been repeated to him with glee by the gossip-mongers - about what happened up there under the cover of night.
He believed those stories, or he knew with the deep instinct which had once been love, the man who had once been his son.
He looked again at the watch in his hand, and scowled at it. It was four o’clock. He shook the watch and held it to his ear. It ticked stolidly, and he slipped it back into his pocket and gathered the reins. He wasn’t coming, and Sean felt a sneaking coward’s relief, because he found any meeting with Dirk Courtney draining and exhausting.
‘Good afternoon, Father.’ The voice startled him, so that he gripped the horse with his knees and jerked the reins. The stallion pranced and circled, tossing his head.
Dirk sat easily on a golden red bay. He had come down out of the nearest edge of the forest, walking his mount carefully and silently over the thick mattress of fallen leaves.
‘You’re late,’ growled Sean. ‘I was just leaving.’ Dirk must have circled out, climbing the escarpment below the falls on to Lion Kop, avoiding the fence and riding up through the plantations to come to the rendezvous from the opposite direction. Probably he had been sitting among the trees watching Sean for the last half hour.
‘What did you want to speak to me about?’ He must never again underestimate this man. Sean had done so many times before, each time at terrible cost.
‘I think you know,’ Dirk smiled at him, and Sean was reminded of some beautiful glossy and deadly dangerous animal. He sat his horse with a casual grace, at rest but in complete control – and he was dressed in a hunting-jacket of finely woven thorn-proof tweed, with a yellow silk cravat at the throat; his long powerful legs were encased in polished chocolate leather.
‘Remind me.’ invited Sean, consciously hardening him self against the fatal mesmeric charm that the man could project at will.
‘Oh come now, I know you have been busy thrashing the sweating unwashed hordes back into their places. I read with pride of your efforts, Father. Your butcher’s bill at Fordsburg was almost as fearsome as when you put down Bombata’s rebellion back in 1906. Magnificent stuff—’
‘Get on with i
t.’ Sean found himself hating again. Dirk Courtney had a high skill at finding weakness or guilt, and exploiting it mercilessly. When he spoke like this of the manner in which Sean had been forced to discharge his duty, it shamed him more painfully than ever.
‘Of course it was necessary to get the mines operating again. You do sell most of your timber to the gold mines, I have the exact sales figures somewhere.’ Dirk laughed lightly. His teeth were perfect and white, and the sunlight played in the shining curls of his big handsome head, backlighting him and making his looks more theatrically magnificent. ‘Good on you, dear Papa. You always had a keen eye for the main chance. No future in letting a bunch of wild-eyed reds put us all out of business. Even I am utterly dependent on the gold mines in the long run.’
Sean could not bring himself to answer, his anger was choking him. He felt dirtied and ashamed.
‘It’s one of the many things for which I’m indebted to you,’ Dirk went on, watching him carefully, smiling and urbane and deadly. ‘I am your heir, I have inherited from you the ability to recognize opportunity and to seize it. Do you recall teaching me how to take a snake, how to pin it and hold it with thumb and forefinger at the back of the neck?’
Sean remembered the incident suddenly and vividly. The fearlessness of the child had frightened him even then.
‘I see you do remember.’ The smile faded from Dirk’s face, the lightness of his manner was gone with it. ‘So much, so many little things – do you remember when we were lost after the lions stampeded the horses in the night?’
Sean had forgotten that also. Hunting in Mopani country, the child’s first overnight away from the security and safety of the wagons. A little adventure that had turned into nightmare, one horse killed by the lions and the other gone, and a fifty-mile walk back through dry sandveld and thick trackless bush.
‘You showed me how to find water. The puddle in the hollow tree – I can still taste the stink of it. The bushmen wells in the sand, sucking it up with a hollow straw.’
It all came back, though Sean tried to shut his mind against it. They had gone wrong on the third day, mistaking one small dry stony river bed for another and wandering away into the wilderness to a lingering death.
‘I remember you made a sling from your cartridge belt, and carried me on your hip.’
When the child’s strength had gone, Sean had carried him, mile after mile, day after day in the thick dragging sand. When finally his own great strength had been expended also, he had crouched down over the child, shielding him from the sun with his shadow, and had worked his swollen tongue painfully for each drop of saliva to inject into Dirk’s cracked and blackening mouth, keeping him alive just long enough.
‘When Mbejane came at last, you wept.’
The stampeded horse had reached the wagons with the lion’s claw-marks slashed deeply across its rump. The old Zulu gunbearer, himself sick with malaria, had saddled the grey and taken a pack horse on the lead rein. He had backtracked the loose horse to the lion camp, and then picked up the spoor of man and child, following them for four days along a cold wind-spoiled spoor.
When he reached them, they were huddled together in the sand, under the sun – waiting for death.
‘It was the only time in my life I ever saw you cry,’ Dirk said softly ‘But did you ever think how often you made me weep?’
Sean did not want to listen longer. He did not want to be further reminded of that lovely, headstrong, wild and beloved child who he had reared as mother and father together, yet Dirk’s quiet insidious voice held him captive in a web of memory from which he could not escape.
‘Will you ever know how I worshipped you? How my whole life was based on you, how I mimicked every action, how I tried to become you?’
Sean shook his head, trying to deny it, to reject it.
‘Yes, I tried to become you. Perhaps I succeeded—’
‘No.’ Sean’s voice was strangled and thick.
‘Perhaps that’s why you rejected me,’ Dirk told him. ‘You saw in me the mirror-image of yourself, and you could not bring yourself to accept that. So you turned me away, and left me to weep.’
‘No. God, no – that’s not true. It was not that way at all.’
Dirk swung his horse in until his leg touched Sean’s.
‘Father, we are the same person, we are one – won’t you admit that I am you, just as surely as I fell from your loins, just as surely as you trained and moulded me?’
‘Dirk,’ Sean started, but there were no words now, his whole existence had been touched and shaken at its very core.
‘Don’t you realize that every thing I have ever done was for you? Not only as a child, but as a youth and a man. Did you never think why I came back here to Ladyburg, when I could have gone to any other place in the world – London, Paris, New York – it was all open to me. Yet I came back here. Why, Father, why did I do that?’
Sean shook his head, unable to answer, staring at this beautiful stranger, with his vital strength and his compelling disturbing presence.
‘I came back because you were here.’
They were both silent then, holding each other’s eyes in a struggle of wills and a turmoil of conflicting emotions. Sean felt his resolve weakening, felt himself sliding slowly under the spell that Dirk was weaving about him. He heeled his horse, forcing it to wheel and break the physical contact of their legs, but Dirk went on remorselessly.
‘As a sign of my love, of this love that has been strong enough to stand against all your abuse, against the denials you have made, against every blow you have dealt it – as a sign of that, I come to you now – and I hold out my hand to you. Be my father again, and let me be your son. Let us put our fortunes together and build an empire. There is a land here, a whole land, ripe and ready for us to take.’
Dirk reached out across the space between the horses with his right hand, palm upwards, fingers outstretched.
‘Take my hand on it, Father,’ he urged. ‘Nothing will stop us. Together we will sweep the world from our path, together we will become gods.’
‘Dirk,’ Sean found his voice, as he fought himself out of the coils in which he had been trapped. ‘I have known many men, and not one of them was all good nor completely evil. They were all combinations of those two elements, good and evil – that is, until I came to know you. You are the only man who was totally evil, evil unrelieved by the slightest shading of good. When at last I was forced to face that fact, then I turned my back on you.’
‘Father.’
‘Don’t call me that. You are not mine, and you never will be again.’
‘There is a great fortune, one of the great fortunes of the world.’
‘No,’ Sean shook his head. ‘It is not there for either you or me. It belongs to a people, to many peoples – Zulu, and Englishman and Afrikander – not to me, but especially not to you.’
‘When I came to see you last, you gave me cause to believe,’ Dirk began to protest.
‘I gave you no cause, I made no promise.’
‘I told you everything, all my plans.’
‘Yes,’ said Sean. ‘I wanted to hear it, I wanted to know every detail, not so that I could help you – but so that I could stand in your way.’
Sean paused for emphasis, and then leaned across so his face was close to Dirk’s and he could look into his eyes.
‘You will never get the land beyond the Bubezi River. I swear that to you.’ He said it quietly, but with a force that made every word ring like a cathedral bell.
Dirk recoiled, and the high colour drained away from his face.
‘I rejected you because you are evil. I will fight you with all my strength, with my life itself.’
Dirk’s features changed, the line of the mouth and the set of the jaw altered, the slant and tilt of the eyes became wolfish.
‘You deceive yourself, Father. You and I are one. If I am evil, then you are the source and fountain and father of that evil. Don’t spout noble words to me, don??
?t strike postures. I know you, remember. I know you perfectly – as I know myself.’ He laughed again, but not the bright easy laughter of before. It was a cruel thin sound and the shape of the mouth did not lose its hard line. ‘You rejected me for that Jewish whore of yours, and the bastard slut you spawned on her soft white belly.’
Sean bellowed, a low dull roar of anger, and the stallion reared under him, coming up high on his hindquarters and cutting at the air, and the bay mare swung away in alarm, milling and trampling as Dirk sawed at its mouth with the curb.
‘You say you will fight me with your life,’ Dirk shouted at his father. ‘It may just come to that! I warn you.’
He brought the horse under control, barging in on the stallion so he could shout again.
‘No man stands in my way. I will destroy you – as I have destroyed the others who have tried it. I will destroy you and your Jewish whore.’
Sean swung back-handed with the sjambok, a polo cut, using the wrist so the thin black lash of hippo-hide fluted like the wing of a flighting goose. He aimed at the face, at the snarling vicious wolfs head of the man who once had been his son.
Dirk threw up his arm and caught the stroke; it split the woven tweed of his sleeve like a sword cut and bright blood sprang to stain the luxurious cloth, as he kneed the bay away in a wide prancing circle.
He held the wound, pressing the lips of the cut together while he glared at Sean, his face contorted with utter malevolence.
‘I’ll kill you for that,’ he said softly, and then he swung the bay away and put her into a dead gallop, straight at the five-stranded, barbed fence.
The bay went up and stretched at the jump, flying free of earth and then landing again on the far side, neatly gathered and fully in hand, reached out again into a run, a superb piece of horsemanship.
Sean walked the stallion, fighting the temptation to lash him into a gallop, following the path over the high ground, a path now almost indiscernible, long overgrown. Only a man who knew it well, who had been along it often before, would know it as a path.