Characteristically she felt neither excitement nor dismay at the prospect. She was of pioneer stock. Where a man goes, the woman follows. It was merely work that must be done.
‘The site for the homestead is up in the first fold of the hills, but you can see right down the valley, and the cliffs of Chaka’s Gate are right above it. It’s beautiful, especially in the evenings.’
‘I’m sure it is.’
‘I have designed the house so it can be added on to, a room at a time. To begin with there will only be two rooms—’
‘Two rooms will be enough to begin with,’ she agreed, frowning thoughtfully. ‘But we’ll need a separate room for the children.’
He broke off and stared at her, not quite certain that he had heard correctly. She paused with the rolling-pin held in both hands and smiled at him.
‘Well, that’s why you came here today, isn’t it?’ she asked sweetly.
He dropped his eyes from hers and nodded. ‘Yes.’ He sounded bemused. ‘I suppose it is.’
She lost her aplomb only briefly during the ceremony, and that was when she saw General Sean Courtney sitting in the front pew with his wife beside him, Sean in morning suit and with a diamond pin in his cravat, Ruth cool and elegant in a huge wagon-wheel sized hat, the brim thick with white roses.
‘He came!’ Marion whispered ecstatically, and could not restrain the triumphant glance she threw to her own friends and relatives, like a lady tossing a coin to a beggar. Her social standing had rocketed to dizzying heights.
Afterwards the General had kissed her tenderly on each cheek, before turning to Mark. ‘You’ve picked the prettiest girl in the village, my boy.’ And she had glowed with pleasure, pink and happy and truly as lovely as she had ever been in her life.
With the help of the four Zulu labourers Sean had given him, Mark had opened a rough track in as far as the Bubezi River. He brought his bride to Chaka’s Gate on the pillion of the motorcycle, with the side-car piled high with part of her dowry.
Far behind them, the Zulus led Trojan and Spartan under heavy packs, the rest of Marion’s baggage.
In the early morning the mist lay dense along the river, still and flat as the surface of a lake, touched to shades of delicate pink and mauve by the fresh new light of coming day.
The great headlands of Chaka’s Gate rose sheer out of the mist, dark and mysterious, each wreathed in laurels of golden cloud.
Mark had chosen the hour of return so that she might have the best of it for her first glimpse of her new home. He pulled the cycle and side-car off the narrow, stony track and switched off the motor.
In the silence they sat and watched the sun strike upon the crests of the cliffs, burning like the beacons that the mariner looks for in the watery deserts of the ocean, the lights that beckon him on to his landfall and the quiet anchorage.
‘It’s very nice, dear,’ she murmured. ‘Now show me where the house will be.’
She worked with the Zulus, muddy to the elbows as they puddled the clay for the unburned Kimberley bricks, joshing them in their own language and bullying them cheerfully to effort beyond the usual pace of Africa.
She worked behind the mules, handling the traces, dragging up the logs from the valley, her sleeves rolled high on brown smooth arms and a scarf knotted around her head.
She worked over the clay oven, bringing out the fat golden brown loaves on the blade of a long handled spade, and watched with deep contentment as Mark wiped up the last of the stew with the crust.
‘Was that good, then, dear?’
In the evenings she sat close to the lantern, with her head bowed over the sewing in her lap, and nodded brightly as he told her of the day’s adventures, each little triumph and disappointment.
‘What a shame, dear.’ Or, ‘How nice for you, dear.’
He took her, one bright, cloudless day, up the ancient pathway to the crest of Chaka’s Gate. Holding her hand as he led her over the narrow places, where the river flowed six hundred sheer feet below their feet. She tucked her skirts into her bloomers, took a firm hold on the basket she carried and never faltered once on the long climb.
On the summit, he showed her the tumbled stone walls and overgrown caves of the old tribesmen who had defied Chaka, and he told her the story of the old king’s climb, pointing out the fearsome path up which he had led his warriors — and finally he described the massacre and pictured for her the rain of human bodies hurled down into the river below.
‘How interesting, dear,’ she murmured, as she spread a cloth from the basket she had carried. ‘I brought scones and some of that apricot jam you like so much.’
Something caught Mark’s eye, unusual movement far down in the valley below, and he reached for his binoculars. In the golden grass at the edge of the tall reed beds they looked like a line of fat black bugs on a clean sheet. He knew what they were immediately, and with a surging uplift of excitement he counted them.
‘Eighteen!’ he shouted aloud. ‘It’s a new herd.’
‘What is it, dear?’ She looked up from the scone she was spreading with jam.
‘It’s a new herd of buffalo,’ he exulted. ‘They must have come in from the north. It’s beginning to work already.’
In the field of the binoculars he saw one of the great bovine animals emerge into a clearing in the long grass. He could see not only its wide black back, but the heavy head and spreading ears beneath the mournfully drooping horns. The sunlight caught the bosses of the polished black horns so that they glittered like gunmetal.
He felt an enormous proprietary pride. They were his own. The first to come into the sanctuary he was building for them.
‘Look.’ He offered her the binoculars, and she wiped her hands carefully and pointed the glasses over the cliff. ‘There on the edge of the swamp.’ He pointed, with the pride and joy shining on his face.
‘I can see them,’ she agreed smiling happily for him. ‘How nice, dear.’
Then she swung the binoculars in a wide sweep across the river to where the roof of the homestead showed above the trees.
‘Doesn’t it look so nice with its new thatch?’ she said proudly. ‘I just can’t wait to move in.’
The following day they moved up from the shack of crude thatch and canvas at the old camp under the sycamore fig trees, and a pair of swallows moved in with them. The swiftly darting birds began to build their neat nest with little shiny globs of mud under the eaves of the new yellow thatch against the crisply whitewashed wall of Kimberley brick.
‘That’s the best of all possible luck,’ Mark laughed.
‘They make such a mess,’ said Marion doubtfully, but that night, for the first time ever, she initiated their love-making; rolling comfortably on to her back in the double-bed, drawing up her nightdress to her waist, and spreading her warm womanly thighs.
‘It’s all right, if you want to, dear.’ And because she was kind and loved him so, he was as quick and as considerate as he could be.
‘Was that good, then, dear?’
‘It was wonderful,’ he told her, and he had a sudden vivid image of a lovely vital woman, with a body that was lithe and swift and – and his guilt was brutal like a fist below the heart. He tried to thrust the image away, but it ran ahead of him through his dreams, laughing and dancing and teasing, so that in the morning there were dark blue smears beneath his eyes and he felt fretful and restless.
‘I’m going up the valley on patrol.’ He did not look up from his coffee.
‘You only came back last Friday.’ She was surprised.
‘I want to look for those buffalo again,’ he said.
‘Very well, dear. I’ll pack your bag – how long will you be gone — I’ll put in your sweater and the jacket, it’s cool in the evenings – it’s a good thing I baked yesterday—’ she prattled on cheerfully, and he had a sudden terrible urge to shout at her to be silent. ‘It will give me a chance to plant out the garden. It will be nice to have fresh vegetables again, and I haven’t writte
n a letter for ages. They’ll be wondering about us at home.’ He rose from the table and went out to saddle Trojan.
The flogging explosion of heavy wings roused Mark from his reverie and he straightened in the saddle just as a dozen of the big birds rose from the edge of the reed-beds.
They were those dirty buff-coloured vultures, powering upwards as they were disturbed by Mark’s approach, and undergoing. that almost magical transformation from gross ugliness into beautiful planing flight.
Mark tethered Trojan and slipped the Mannlicher from its scabbard as a precaution. He felt a tickle of excitement, hopes high that he had come upon a kill by one of the big predatory cats. Perhaps even a lion, one of the animals for which he still searched the valley in vain.
The buffalo lay at the edge of the damp soft ground, half hidden by the reeds, and it was so freshly dead that the vultures had not yet managed to penetrate the thick black hide, nor spoil the sign which was deeply trodden and tom into the damp earth. They had only gouged out the uppermost eye and, with their beaks, scratched the softer skin around the bull’s anus, for that was always their access point to a big thick-skinned carcass.
The buffalo was a big mature bull, the great boss of his horns grown solidly together across the crown of his skull, a huge head of horn, forty-eight inches from tip to tip. He was big in the body also, bigger than a prize Hereford stud bull, and he was bald across the shoulders, the scarred grey hide scabbed with dried mud and bunches of bush ticks.
Mark thrust his hand into the crease of skin between the back legs and felt the residual body warmth.
‘He’s been dead less than three hours,’ he decided, and squatted down beside the huge body to determine the cause of death. The bull seemed unmarked until Mark managed to roll him over, exerting all his strength and using the stiffly out-thrust limbs to move the ton and a half of dead weight.
He saw immediately the death wounds, one was behind the shoulder, through the ribs, and Mark’s hunter’s eye saw instantly that it was a heart-stroke, a wide-lipped wound, driven home deeply; the clotted heart blood that poured from it had jellied on the damp earth.
If there was any doubt at all as to the cause of that injury, it was dispelled instantly when he looked to the second wound. This was a frontal stroke, at the base of the neck, angled in skilfully between bone, to reach the heart again, and the weapon had not been withdrawn, it was still plunged in to the hilt and the shaft was snapped short where the bull had fallen upon it.
Mark grasped the broken shaft, placed one booted foot against the bull’s shoulder and grunted with the effort it required to withdraw the blade against the reluctant suck of clinging flesh.
He examined it with interest. It was one of those broad bladed stabbing spears, the assegai which had been designed by the old king Chaka himself. Mark remembered Sean Courtney reminiscing about the Zulu wars, Isandhlwana, and Morma Gorge.
‘They can put one of those assegais into a man’s chest and send the point two feet out between his shoulder blades, and when they clear the blade, the withdrawal seems to suck a man as white as though he had his life blood pumped out of him by a machine.’ Sean had paused for a moment to stare into the camp fire. ‘As they clear, they shout “Ngidhla!”—I have eaten! Once you have heard it, you’ll not forget it. Forty years later, the memory still makes the hair come up on the back of my neck.’
Now still holding the short heavy assegai, Mark remembered that Chaka himself had hunted the buffalo with a similar weapon. A casual diversion between campaigns – and as Mark glanced from the blade to the great black beast, he felt his anger tempered with reluctant admiration. His anger was for the wanton destruction of one of his precious animals, and his admiration was for the special type of courage that had done the deed.
Thinking of the man, Mark realized that there must have been special circumstances for that man to abandon such a valuable, skilfully and lovingly wrought weapon together with the prize he had risked his life to hunt.
Mark began to back-track the sign in the soft black earth and he found where the bull had come up one of the tunnel-like pathways through the reeds after drinking. He found where the huntsman had waited in thick cover beside the path, and his bare footprints were unmistakable.
‘Pungushe!’ exclaimed Mark.
Pungushe had lain upwind and, as the bull passed, he had put the steel behind his shoulder, deeply into the heart.
The bull had leapt forward, crashing into a ponderous gallop as Pungushe cleared his point, and the blood had sprayed from the wide wound as though the standing reeds had been hosed by a careless gardener.
The buffalo is one of the few wild animals which will turn and actively hunt its tormentor. Although the bull was dead on his feet, spurting blood with every lunging stride, he had swung wide into the wind to take Pungushe’s scent and when he had it, he had steadied into that terrible crabbing, nose up, wide-homed, relentless charge that only death itself will stop.
Pungushe had stood to meet him as he came thundering down through the reeds, and he had picked the point at the base of the neck for his second stroke and put the steel in cleanly to the heart, but the bull had hit him also, before blundering on a dozen paces and falling to his knees with that characteristic death bellow.
Mark found where Pungushe had fallen, his body marks etched clearly in the soft clay.
Mark followed where he had dragged himself out of the edge of the reed beds and shakily regained his feet.
Slowly Pungushe had turned northwards, but his stride was cramped, he was heeling heavily, not up on his toes, not extended into his normal gait.
He stopped once where he had left his steel-jawed spring trap, and he hid it in an ant bear hole and kicked sand over it, obviously too sick and weak to carry it or to cache the valuable trap more securely. Mark retrieved the trap and, as he tied it on to Trojan’s saddle, he wondered briefly to how many of his animals it had dealt hideous death.
A mile further on, Pungushe paused to gather leaves from one of the little turpentine bushes, a medicinal shrub, and then he had gone on slowly, not using the rocky ridges, not covering or back-tracking as he usually did.
At the sandy crossing of one of the steep narrow dry water courses, Pungushe had dropped on one knee, and had used both hands to push himself upright.
Mark stared at the sign for there was blood now for the first time, black droplets that had formed little pellets of loose sand, and in his anger and jubilation, Mark felt a prick of real concern.
The man was hard hit, and he had once saved Mark’s life. Mark could still remember the blessed taste of the bitter medicine in the black baked pot cutting through the terrible thirsts of malaria.
He had been leading Trojan up to this point, to keep down, to show a low silhouette, so as not to telegraph heavy hoof-beats ahead to his quarry.
Now he swung up into the saddle, and kicked the mule into a plunging sway-backed canter.
Pungushe was down. He had gone down heavily at last, dropping to the sandy earth. He had crawled off the game path, under a low bush out of the sun, and he had pulled the light kaross of monkey-skins over his head, the way a man settles down to sleep – or to die.
He lay so still that Mark thought he was indeed dead. He slipped down off Trojan’s back and went up cautiously to the prostrate body. The flies were buzzing and swarming gleefully over the bloody bundle of green turpentine leaves that were bound with strips of bark around the man’s flank and across the small of his back.
Mark imagined clearly how he had received that wound, Pungushe standing to meet the charging buffalo, going for the neck with the short heavy-bladed assegai, putting the steel in cleanly and then jumping clear, but the bull pivoting hard on his stubby front legs and hooking with the massive bossed and wickedly curved horns.
Pungushe had taken the hook low in the side, far back behind the hip-bone of the pelvis. The shock would have hurled him clear, giving him time to crawl away while the bull staggered on, fighting the
deep steel in his chest, until at last he had gone down on his fore-legs with that last defiant death bellow.
Mark shuddered in the harsh sunlight at the wound that bundle of leaves covered, and went down on one knee to brush the flies away.
Now for the first time, he became aware of the man’s physique. The kaross covered his head and shoulders only, the great chest was exposed. A loin-cloth of softly tanned leather embroidered with blue beads was drawn up between his legs, leaving free the solid bulge of his buttocks, and the sinewy thews of his thighs and the flat hard plain of the belly.
Each separate muscle was clearly defined, and the ropey veins below the surface of the skin were like bunches of serpents, testimony to the man’s tremendous physical development and fitness. The skin itself was lighter than that of the average Zulu. It had the smooth dark buttery colour and lustre of a woman’s skin, but tight dark curls covered the chest.
‘I baited for a jackal,’ Mark thought wonderingly, ‘and I caught myself a lion, a big old black-maned lion.’ And now he felt real concern that Pungushe was dead. For such a splendid animal, death was a shabby bargain.
Then he saw the gentle, almost imperceptible rise and fall of the deep muscled chest, and he reached out and touched the shoulder through the kaross.
The man stirred, and then painfully lifted himself on one elbow, letting the kaross fall back, and he looked at Mark.
He was a man in the full noon of his strength and pride and dignity, perhaps forty years of age, with just the first frosts of wisdom touching the short cap of dark wool at his temples.
The agony did not show in his face, the broad forehead was smooth as polished amber, the mouth was in repose, and the eyes were dark and fierce and proud. It was the handsome moon face of the high-bred Zulu.