Mark had to remain silent, not trusting himself to speak until he controlled the violent urge to burst out laughing. He spoke again, solemnly, but with laughter rippling his belly muscles.
‘In what style will you address me, Pungushe? When I speak, will you answer “Yehbo, Nkosi – Yes, Master”?’
Pungushe stirred restlessly, and an expression flitted across the broad smooth features like a fastidious eater who has just discovered a large fat worm on his plate. ‘I will call you Jamela,’ he said. ‘And when you speak as you have just spoken, I will answer “Jamela, that is a great stupidity.”’
‘In what style will I address you?’ Mark inquired politely, fighting his mirth.
‘You will call me Pungushe. For the jackal is the cleverest and most cunning of all the silwane, and it is necessary for you to be reminded of this from time to time.’
Then something happened that Mark had not seen before. Pungushe smiled. It was like the break-through of the sun on a grey overcast day. His teeth were big and perfect and white, and the smile stretched so wide that it seemed his face might tear.
Mark could no longer contain it. He laughed out loud, beginning with a strangled chuckle. Hearing it, Pungushe laughed also, a great ringing bell of laughter.
The two of them laughed so long and hard, that the wives fell silent and watched in amazement, and Marion came out on to the stoep.
‘What is it, dear?’
He could not answer her, and she went away shaking her head at the craziness of men.
At last they both fell silent, exhausted with mirth, and Mark gave Pungushe a cigarette from which he carefully broke the corked tip. They smoked in silence for nearly a minute, then suddenly without warning Mark let out another uncontrolled guffaw, and it started them off again.
The cords of sinew stood out on Pungushe’s neck, like columns of carved ebony, and his mouth was a deep pink cavern lined with perfect white teeth. He laughed until the tears ran down his face and dripped from his chin, and when he lost his breath, he let out a great whistling snort like a bull hippo breaking surface, and he wiped the tears away with his thumb and said, ‘Ee — hee!’ and slapped his thigh like a pistol shot, between each fresh paroxysm of laughter.
Mark ended it by reaching out his shaking right hand, and Pungushe took it in a reverse grip, panting and heaving still.
‘Pungushe, I am your man,’ Mark sobbed.
‘And 1, Jamela, am yours.’
There were four men sitting in a semi-circle around the wall of the hotel suite. They were all dressed in such fashion that it seemed a uniform. The dark high-buttoned suits, the glazed celluloid collars and sober neckties. Although their ages were spread over thirty years, although one of them was bald with grey wisps around his ears and another had a fiery red bush of hair, although one wore a prim gold pince-nez pinched on to a thin aquiline nose while another had the open far-seeing gaze of the farmer, yet all of them had those solid hewn calvinistic faces, indomitable, unrelenting and strong as granite.
Dirk Courtney spoke to them in the young language which had only recently received recognition as a separate entity from its parent Dutch, and had been given the name of Afrikaans.
He spoke it with an elegance and precision that softened the reserve in their expressions, and eased the set of jaw and the stiffness in their backs.
‘It’s a Jingo area,’ Dirk told them. ‘There is a Union Jack flying on every roof-top. It’s a rich constituency, landowners, professional men – your party has no appeal there.’ He was talking of the parliamentary constituency of Ladyburg. ‘In the last elections you did not even present a candidate, nobody fool enough to lose his deposit, and the Smuts party returned General Courtney unopposed.’
The eldest of his listeners nodded over his gold pince-nez, inviting him to continue.
‘If you are to fight the Ladyburg seat, you will need a candidate with a different approach, an English speaker, a man of property, somebody with whom the voters can identify—’
It was a beautiful performance. Dirk Courtney, handsome, debonair, articulate in either language, striding back and forth across the carpeted lounge, holding all their attention, stopping dramatically to make a point with a graceful gesture of strong brown hands, then striding on again. He talked for half an hour, and he was watching his audience, noting the reaction of each, judging their weaknesses, their strengths.
At the end of that half hour, he had decided that all four of them were dedicated, completely committed to their political faith. They stirred only at appeals to patriotism, to national interest, at reference to the aspirations of their people.
‘So,’ Dirk Courtney thought comfortably. ‘It’s cheaper to buy honest men. Rogues cost good bright gold – while honest men can be had with a few fine words and noble sentiments. Give me an honest man every time.’
One of the older men leaned forward and asked quietly, ‘General Courtney has had the seat since 1910. He is a member of the Smuts Cabinet, a war hero, and a man of huge popular appeal. He is also your father. Do you think the voters will take the young dog when they can have the sire?’
Dirk answered: ‘I am prepared not only to risk my deposit if I achieve the National Party nomination, but I am confident enough of my eventual success to make a substantial earnest of my serious intentions to the campaign funds of the party.’ He named a sum of money that made them exchange quick glances of surprise.
‘In exchange for all this?’ the elder politician asked.
‘Nothing that is not in the best interest of the nation, and of my constituency,’ Dirk told them soberly, and he pulled down the map that hung on the far wall facing them.
Again he began to speak, but now with the contagious fervour of the zealot. In burning words, he built up a vision of ploughed fields stretching to the horizon, and sweet clean water running deep in endless irrigation furrows. The listeners were all men who had farmed and ploughed the rich but hostile soil of Africa, and all of them had searched blue and cloudless skies with hopeless eyes for the rain clouds that never came. The image of deeply turned furrows and slaking water was irresistible.
‘Of course, we will have to repeal the proclamation on the Bubezi Valley,’ Dirk said it glibly, and not one of them showed shock or concern at the statement. Already they could see the inland sea of sweet limpid water ruffling in the breeze.
‘If we win at this election,’ the eldest politician began.
‘No, Menheer,’ Dirk interrupted gently, ‘when we win.’
The man smiled for the first time. ‘When we win,’ he agreed.
Dirk Courtney stood high on the platform, with thumbs hooked into his waistcoat. When he smiled and tilted that noble lion head with the shining mane of curls, the women in the audience that packed the church hall rustled like flowers in the breeze.
‘The Butcher,’ said Dirk Courtney, and his voice rang with a depth and resonance that thrilled them all, man and woman, young and old. ‘The Butcher of Fordsburg, his hands red with blood of our countrymen.’
The applause began with the men that Dirk Courtney had in the audience, but it spread quickly.
‘I rode with Sean Courtney against Bombata—’ one man was on his feet, near the back of the hall. ‘I went to France with him,’ he was shouting to be heard above the applause. ‘And where were you, Mr Dirk Courtney, when the drums were beating?’
The smile never left Dirk’s face, but two little spots of hectic colour rose in his cheeks.
‘Ah!’ He faced the man across the craning heads of the audience. ‘One of the gallant General’s gunmen. How many women did you shoot down at Fordsburg?’
‘That doesn’t answer my question,’ the man shouted back, and Dirk caught the eye of one of the two big men who had risen and were closing in quietly on the questioner.
‘Four thousand casualties,’ said Dirk. ‘The Government would like to hide that fact from you, but four thousand men, women and children—’
The two big men had close
d in on their quarry, and Dirk Courtney drew all eyes with a broad theatrical gesture.
‘A Government that has that contempt for the life, property and freedom of its people.’
There was a brief scuffle, a yelp of pain and the man was hustled out of the side door into the night.
The newspapers started picking it up almost immediately, the same editorials which had rented Against the ‘Red Cabal’ and the ‘Bolshevik threat’, which had praised Smuts’ ‘direct and timely action’, were now remembering ‘a high-handed and brutal solution’.
Across the nation, begun by Dirk Courtney and picked up by all the Hertzogites, the balance of public feeling was swinging back, like a pendulum, or the curved blade of the executioner’s axe.
Dirk Courtney spoke in the Town Hall of Durban, to three thousand, in the Church Hall of Ladyburg to three hundred. He spoke at every country church in the constituency, at little crossroad general-dealer shops where a dozen voters assembled for an evening’s entertainment, but always the Press was represented.
Dirk Courtney worked slowly northwards, during the day visiting all his land holdings, each of his new cane mills, and each evening he spoke to the little assemblies of voters. Always he was vibrant and compelling, handsome and articulate, and he painted a picture for them of a land crossed with railways and fine roads, of prosperous towns, and busy markets. They listened avidly.
‘There are two,’ said Pungushe. ‘One is an old lion. I know him well. He stayed last year in Portuguese territory along the north bank of the Usutu River. He was alone then, but now he has found a mate.’
‘Where did they cross?’ Mark asked.
‘They crossed below Ndumu, and came south between the swamp and the river.’
The lion was five years old, and very cunning, a lean tom, tall at the shoulder and with a short ruff of reddish mane. There was an ugly bald scar across his forehead, and he favoured his right foreleg where a piece of hammered pot-leg fired from a Tower musket two years previously had lodged against the shoulder joint. He had been hunted by man almost without remission since he was a cub, and he was getting old now, and tired.
He crossed the river in the dark, swimming his lioness ahead of him, going south from the hunters who had assembled to drive the bush along the river the next morning. He could hear the drums still beating, and smell the smoke of their fires. He could hear also the yapping clamour of the dog packs. They had assembled, two or three hundred tribesmen with their hunting dogs and a dozen Portuguese half-breeds with breech-loading rifles, for the lions had killed two trek oxen on the outskirts of one of the river villages. In the morning the hunt would begin, and the lion took his mate south.
She was also a big animal, and though she was still very young and not as experienced, yet she was quick and strong, and she learned from him each day. Her hide was still clean and unscarred by claw or thorn. Across the back she was a sleek olive tan shading down to a lovely buttery yellow at the throat and fluffy cream on the belly.
She still had traces of her kitten spots dappling her quarters, but the night they swam the Usutu, she came into season for the first time.
On the south bank, they shook the water from their bodies, with fierce shuddering spasms, and then the lion snuffed at her, drumming softly in his throat and then lifting his snout to the bright white stars, his back arching reflexively at the tantalizing musk of her pale blood-tinged oestrous discharge.
She led him half a mile up one of the thickly wooded tributary valleys, and then she crept into the heart of the thicket of tangled bush, a stronghold guarded by the fierce two-inch, wickedly hooked thorns, tipped in red as though they had already drawn blood.
Here in the dawn, he covered her for the first time. She crouched low against the earth, hissing and crackling with angry snarls, while he came over her, biting at her ears and neck, forcing her to submit. Afterwards, she lay close against him, licking at his ears, nuzzling his throat and belly, turning half away from him and nudging him flirtatiously with her hind quarters, until he rose and she crouched down submissively and snarled at him while he mounted her briefly once again.
They mated twenty-three times that day, and in the night they left the thorn thicket and wandered southwards again.
A half hour before the set of the moon, they reached the edge of the ploughed land, and the lion stopped and growled softly at the smell of man and cattle.
Tentatively he reached out one paw and tested the freshly turned earth, then he drew his leg back and made a little troubled mewing sound of indecision. The lioness brushed herself lovingly against him, but he turned aside and led her along the edge of the ploughed land.
‘Will they reach the valley, Pungushe?’ Mark asked, leaning out of the saddle to speak to the Zulu as he trotted at Trojan’s shoulder.
Pungushe spoke easily, despite the fact he had run without rest for nearly three hours. ‘They must cross almost half a day’s march of land where men are working, where the ploughs of the new sugar-growers are busy. Besides, Jamela, they know nothing of your valley, and the mad Ngaga who would welcome them.’ Mark straightened in the saddle and rode on grimly. He knew that this pair, this matting pair, would be his last chance to have lions in his valley. Yet there was twenty miles of danger to cross such as these animals, coming out of the wilderness of Portuguese Mozambique, would never have experienced before, ploughlands, declared cattle area, where lions were vermin. An area devoid of wild prey, but heavily populated with domestic animals. An area where the cry of ‘Lion’ would send fifty men running eagerly for a rifle, fifty white men competing fiercely for the trophy, hating the big predatory cats with a blind unthinking hatred, welcoming what was probably their only chance at one of them, safe in the knowledge that they were fair game, unprotected by law in the cattle areas.
The lions came to the camp downwind, and they lay flat in the short grass in the darkness at the edge of the camp.
They listened to the drowsy voices of the men at the fire, and smelled the myriad strange smells, of tobacco smoke, of cooking maize meal and the sour tang of Zulu beer, and they lay very flat and tense against the earth, only their round black-tipped ears cocked and their nostrils flaring and sucking the air.
The oxen were kraaled with a low circular enclosure of felled thorn trees, arranged with their trunks inward and the bushy thorny tangle outwards. The smell of the cattle was strong and tempting.
There were seventy-two oxen in the kraal, two full spans. They belonged to Ladyburg Sugar Company and they were ploughing the new lands east of Chaka’s Gate, after the labour teams had stumped out the standing timber and burned it in long windows.
The lion waited, patient, but alert and tensed and silent, while the silver moon went down below the trees and the men’s voices dwindled into silence. He waited while the fires died down into puddles of dull ruddy ash. Then he rose silently.
The lioness did not move, except that the great muscles in her chest and limbs swelled, rigid with tension, and her ears cocked fractionally forward.
The lion circled cautiously upwind of the camp. There was a soft cool wash of breeze coming steadily out of the east and he used it skilfully.
The oxen caught the whiff of lion as he moved into the wind, and he heard them coming up, rising in that awkward plunging leap from where they had settled.
Horns clashed together as they swung into a tight group facing upwind, and one of them let out a soft mournful lowing. Immediately it was taken up, and their low bellows woke the men at the fires. Somebody shouted, and threw a log on the fire. A torrent of sparks rose into the dark branches of the mimosa and the log caught, lighting the camp with a yellow leaping dancing light. The ploughmen and the lead boys were gathered fearfully around the fire, still with skin karosses draped around their shoulders, owl-eyed with sleep and alarm.
The lion slipped like a shadow, dark and flat against the earth towards the kraal, and the cattle bunched and bellowed wildly at the sharp rank cat smell.
Against the thorny windward side of the kraal, the lion crouched, arched his back and ejected a stream of urine.
The pungent, biting ammoniac stink was too much for the mass of cattle. In a single solid bunch, they swung away downwind and charged the thorny wall of the temporary kraal, crashing through it without check, and they thundered free, quickly spreading, losing the solid formation and scattering away into the night.
The lioness was ready for them, and she streaked in across the flank of the panicking plunging formation, selecting a single victim, a heavy young beast. She drove him onwards, chivvying him like a sheep dog, crossing and recrossing his frantic driving quarters, running him far from the fires and the ploughmen before coming snaking up alongside and hooking expertly at one of his powerfully driving forelegs, and the curved yellow claws bitting in just above the hock until they grated against the bone. Then she went back on her own bunched quarters and dragged the leg to cross the other.
The ox dropped as though he had been shot through the brain, and he somersaulted haunch over head, and slid against the earth on his back, all four legs kicking to the starry sky.
In a rubbery flash of supple speed, the cat closed, judging finely the massive hooves that could have crushed her skull and the wide straight horns which could have impaled her rib to rib.
She bit in hard at the base of the skull, driving the long ivory yellow eye teeth into the first and second vertebrae, so they crunched sharply like a walnut in the jaws of the cracker.
When the lion came padding hurriedly out of the night, she had already opened the belly cavity of the ox and her whole head was red and toffee sticky with blood as she went for liver and spleen and kidneys.
She flattened her ears against her bloody skull and snarled murderously at him, but he put his shoulder to her flank and pushed her aside; she snarled again and he cuffed her with a lordly paw and began to feed in the hole she had made.
She glared at him for a second, then her ears came erect and she began to lick his shoulder with long pink voluptuous strokes, purring with a deep soft rattle in her throat, pressing her long sleek body against him. The lion tried to ignore her and fed with snuffling grunts and wet tearing ripping sounds.