by Wilbur Smith
‘Interest rates right down – people are buying yachts again.’
It was like discussing the terms of a divorce with a lawyer, or the arrangements with a funeral director. Bawu had been part of his life for too long.
‘She is in good nick, all tight and shipshape, and your price is sensible. I’ll bring some people to see her tomorrow.’
‘Just make sure I’m not here,’ Craig warned him.
‘I understand, Mr Mellow.’ The man could even sound like an undertaker.
Ashe Levy also sounded like an undertaker when Craig telephoned. However, he sent an office messenger down to the marina to collect the first three chapters Craig had completed in Africa. Then Craig went to lunch with Henry Pickering.
‘It really is good to see you.’ Craig had forgotten how much he had grown to like this man in just two short meetings.
‘Let’s order first,’ Henry suggested, and decided on a bottle of the Grands Echézeaux.
‘Courageous fellow,’ Craig smiled. ‘I am always too afraid to pronounce it in case they think I am having a sneezing fit.’
‘Most people have the same reluctance. Must be why it is the least known of the world’s truly great wines – keeps the price down, thank God.’
Appreciatively they nosed the wine and gave it the attention it deserved. Then Henry set his glass down.
‘Now tell me what you think of General Peter Fungabera,’ he invited.
‘It’s all in my reports. Didn’t you read them?’
‘I read them, but tell me just the same. Sometimes a little thing may come out in conversation that just didn’t get into a report.’
‘Peter Fungabera is a cultivated man. His English is remarkable – his choice of words, his power of expression – but it all has a strong African accent. In uniform he looks like a general officer in the British army. In casual clothes he looks like the star of a TV series, but in a loin-cloth he looks what he really is, an African. That’s what we tend to forget with all of them. We all know about Chinese inscrutability, and British phlegm, but we seldom consider that the black African has a special nature—’
‘There!’ Henry Pickering murmured smugly. ‘That wasn’t in your reports. Go on, Craig.’
‘We think them slow-moving by our own bustling standards, and we do not realize that it is not indolence but the deep consideration they bring to any subject before acting. We consider them simple and direct – when really they are the most secretive and convoluted of people, more tribally clannish than any Scot. They can maintain a blood feud over a hundred years, like any Sicilian—’
Henry Pickering listened intently, prodding him with a leading question only when he slowed. Once he asked, ‘Something that I still find a little confusing, Craig – the subtle difference between the term Matabele, Ndebele and Sindebele. Can you explain?’
‘A Frenchman calls himself a Français, but we call him a Frenchman. A Matabele calls himself an Ndebele, but we call him a Matabele.’
‘Ah,’ Henry nodded, ‘and the language he speaks is Sindebele, isn’t it?’
‘That’s right. Actually the word Matabele seems to have acquired colonial connections since independence—’
Their talk ranged on easily, relaxed and free-flowing, so that it was with a start of surprise that Craig realized that they were almost the last party left in the restaurant and that the waiter was hovering with the bill.
‘What I was trying to say,’ Craig concluded, ‘is that colonialism has left Africa with a set of superimposed values. Africa will reject them and go back to its own.’
‘And probably be the happier for it,’ Henry Pickering finished for him. ‘Well, Craig, you have certainly earned your wage. I’m truly pleased that you are going back. I can see that you will soon be our most productive field agent in that theatre. When do you return?’
‘I only came to New York to pick up a cheque.’
Henry Pickering laughed that delightful purring laugh of his. ‘You hint with a sledge-hammer – I shudder at the prospect of a direct demand from you.’ He paid the bill and stood up. ‘Our house lawyer is waiting. First you sign away your body and soul and then I give you drawing rights up to the total of five million dollars.’
The interior of the limousine was silent and cool, and the suspension ironed out most of the trauma of the New York street surfaces.
‘Now enlarge on Sally-Anne Jay’s conclusions regarding the head of the poaching ring,’ Henry invited.
‘At this stage, I don’t see any alternative candidate for the master poacher, perhaps even the leader of the dissidents.’
Henry was silent for a moment. Then he said, ‘What do you make of General Fungabera’s reluctance to act?’
‘He is a prudent man, and an African. He will not rush in. He will think it out deeply, lay his net with care, but when he does act, I think we will all be surprised at how devastatingly swift and decisive it will be.’
‘I would like you to give General Fungabera all the assistance you can. Full co-operation., please, Craig.’
‘You know Tungata was my friend.’
‘Divided loyalty?’
‘I don’t think so, not if he is guilty.’
‘Good! My board is very happy with your achievements so far. I am authorized to increase your remuneration to sixty thousand dollars per annum.’
‘Lovely,’ Craig grinned at him. ‘That will be a big help on the interest payment on five million dollars.’
It was still light when the cab dropped Craig at the gates of the marina. The smog of Manhattan was transformed by the low angle of the sun to a lovely purple mist which softened the grim silhouettes of the great towers of concrete.
As Craig stepped on the gangplank, the yacht dipped slightly under his weight, and alerted the figure in the cockpit.
‘Ashe!’ Craig was taken by surprise. ‘Ashe Levy, the fairy princess of struggling authors.’
‘Baby.’ Ashe came down the deck to him with a landlubber’s uncertain steps. ‘I couldn’t wait, I had to come to you right away.’
‘I am touched.’ Craig’s tone was acid yellow. ‘Always when I don’t need help you come at a gallop.’
Ashe Levy ignored it, and put a hand on each of Craig’s shoulders. ‘I read it. I read it again – and then I locked it in my safe.’ His voice sank. ‘It’s beautiful.’
Craig checked his next jibe, and searched Ashe Levy’s face for signs of insincerity. Instead he realized that behind the gold-rimmed spectacles, Ashe Levy’s eyes were steely with tears of emotion.
‘It’s the best stuff that you have ever done, Craig.’
‘It’s only three chapters.’
‘It hit me right in my guts.’
‘It needs a lot of polishing.’
‘I doubted you, Craig. I’ll admit that. I was beginning to believe that you didn’t have another book in you, but this – it was just too much to take in. I’ve been sitting here for the last few hours going over it in my mind, and I find I can recite parts of it by heart.’
Craig studied him carefully. The tears might be a reflection of the sunset off the water. Ashe removed his spectacles, and blew his nose loudly. The tears were genuine, yet Craig could still scarcely believe them, there was only one positive test.
‘Can you advance on it, Ashe?’
Now he didn’t need money, but he needed the ultimate reassurance.
‘How much do you need, Craig? Two hundred grand?”
‘You really like it, then?’ Craig let go a small sigh, as the writer’s eternal doubts were dispelled for a brief blessed period. ‘Let’s have a drink, Ashe.’
‘Let’s do better than that,’ said Ashe. ‘Let’s get drunk.’
Craig sat in the stern with his feet up on the rudder post, watching the dew form little diamonds on the glass in his hand, and no longer really listening to Ashe Levy enthusing about the book. Instead he let his mind out to roam, and thought that it would be best not to have all one’s good fortunes at the sa
me time – but to spread them out and savour each more fully.
He was inundated with delights. He thought about King’s Lynn and in his nostrils lingered the odour of the loams of the Matabele grassland. He thought about Zambezi Waters and heard again the rush of a great body in the thorn brush. He thought about the twenty chapters which would follow the first three, and his trigger finger itched with anticipation. Was it possible, he wondered, that he might be the happiest man in the world at that moment?
Then abruptly he realized that the full appreciation of happiness can only be achieved by sharing it with another – and he found a small empty space down deep inside him, and a shadow of melancholy as he remembered strangely flecked eyes and a firm young mouth. He wanted to tell her about it, he wanted her to read those three chapters, and suddenly he longed with all his soul to be back in Africa where Sally-Anne Jay was.
Craig found a second-hand Land-Rover in Jock Daniels’ used car lot that backed onto his auctioneering floor. He closed his ears to Jock’s impassioned sales spiel and listened instead to the motor. The timing was out, but there was no knocking or slapping. The front-wheel transmission engaged smoothly, the clutch held against the brakes. When he gave it a run in an area of erosion and steep dongas on the outskirts of town, the silencer box fell off, but the rest held together. At one time he had been able to take his other old Land-Rover down into its separate parts and reassemble it over a weekend. He knew he could save this one. He beat Jock down a thousand dollars and still grossly overpaid, but he was in a hurry.
Into the Land-Rover he loaded everything he had saved from the sale of the yacht: a suitcase full of clothing, a dozen of his favourite books and a leather trunk with brass bindings, his heaviest piece of luggage, that contained the family journals.
These journals were his entire inheritance, all that Bawu had left him. The rest of the old man’s multi-million-dollar estate, including the Rholands shares, had gone to his eldest son Douglas, Craig’s uncle, who had sold out and cut for Australia. Yet those battered old leatherbound, hand-written texts had been the greater treasure. Reading them had given Craig a sense of history and a pride in his ancestral line, which had armed him with sufficient confidence and understanding of period to sit down and write the book, which had in turn brought him all this: achievement, fame and fortune, even Rholands itself had come back to him through that box of old papers.
He wondered how many thousands of times he had driven the road out to King’s Lynn – but never like this, never as the patron. He stopped just short of the main gate, so that his feet could touch his own earth for the first time.
He stood upon it and looked around him at the golden grassland and the open groves of flat-topped acacia trees, at the lines of blue grey hills in the distance and the unblemished blue bowl of the sky over it all, then he knelt like a religious supplicant. It was the only movement in which the leg still hampered him a little. He scooped up the earth in his cupped hands. It was almost as rich and as red as the beef that it would grow. By eye he divided the handful into two parts, and let a tenth part spill back to earth.
‘That’s your ten per cent, Peter Fungabera,’ he whispered to himself. ‘But this is mine – and I swear to hold it for all my lifetime and to protect and cherish it, so help me God.’
Feeling only a little foolish at his own theatrics, he let the earth fall, dusted his hands on the seat of his pants and went back to the Land-Rover.
On the foothills before the homestead he met a tall lanky figure coming down the road. The man wore an oily unwashed blanket over his back and a brief loin-cloth; over his shoulder he carried his fighting-sticks. His feet were thrust into sandals cut from old car tyres, and his earrings were plastic stoppers from acid jars embellished with coloured beads that expanded his earlobes to three times normal size. He drove before him a small herd of multi-coloured goats.
‘I see you, elder brother,’ Craig greeted him, and the old man exposed the gap in his yellow teeth as he grinned at the courtesy of the greeting and his recognition of Craig.
‘I see you, Nkosi.’ He was the same old man that Craig had found squatting in the outbuildings of King’s Lynn.
‘When will it rain?’ Craig asked him, and handed him a packet of cigarettes that he had brought for precisely such a meeting.
They fell into the leisurely question and answer routine that in Africa must precede any serious discussions.
‘What is your name, old man?’ A term of respect rather than an accusation of senility.
‘I am called Shadrach.’
‘Tell me, Shadrach, are your goats for sale?’ Craig could at last ask without being thought callow, and immediately a craftiness came into Shadrach’s eyes.
‘They are beautiful goats,’ he said. ‘To part with them would be like parting with my own children.’
Shadrach was the acknowledged spokesman and leader of the little community of squatters who had taken up residence on King’s Lynn. Through him, Craig found he could negotiate with all of them, and he was relieved. It would save days and a great deal of emotional wear and tear.
He would not, however, deprive Shadrach of an opportunity to show off his bargaining skill, nor insult him by trying to hasten the proceedings, so these were extended over the next two days while Craig reroofed the old guest cottage with a sheet of heavy canvas, replaced the looted pump with a Lister diesel to raise water from the borehole and set up his new camp-bed in the bare bedroom of the cottage.
On the third day the sale price was agreed and Craig found himself the owner of almost two thousand goats. He paid off the sellers in cash, counting each note and coin into their hands to forestall argument, and then loaded his bleating acquisitions into four hired trucks and sent them into the Bulawayo abattoirs, flooding the market in the process and dropping the going price by fifty per cent for a net loss on the entire transaction of a little over ten thousand dollars.
‘Great start in business,’ he grinned, and sent for Shadrach.
‘Tell me, old man, what do you know about cattle?’ – which was rather like asking a Polynesian what he knew about fish, or a Swiss if he had ever seen snow.
Shadrach drew himself up in indignation. ‘When I was this high,’ he said stiffly, indicating an area below his right knee, ‘I squirted milk hot from the cow’s teat into my own mouth. At this height,’ he moved up to the kneecap, ‘I had two hundred head in my sole charge. I freed the calves with these hands when they stuck in their mothers’ wombs; I carried them on these shoulders when the ford was flooded. At this height,’ two inches above the knee, ‘I killed a lioness, stabbing her with my assegai when she attacked my herd—’
Patiently Craig heard out the tale as it rose in small increments to shoulder height and Shadrach ended, ‘And you dare to ask me what I know about cattle!’
‘Soon on this grass I will graze cows so sleek and beautiful that to look upon them will dim your eyes with tears. I will have bulls whose coats shine like water in the sun, whose humps rise like great mountains on their backs and whose dewlaps, heavy with fat, sweep the earth when they walk as the rain-winds sweep the dust from the drought-stricken land.’
‘Hau!’ said Shadrach, an expletive of utter astonishment, impressed as much by Craig’s lyricism as by his declaration of intention.
‘I need a man who understands cattle – and men,’ Craig told him.
Shadrach found him the men. From the squatter families he chose twenty, all of them strong and willing, not too young to be silly and flighty, not too old to be frail.
‘The others,’ said Shadrach contemptuously, ‘are the products of the unions of baboons and thieving Mashona cattle-rustlers. I have ordered them off our land.’
Craig smiled at the possessive plural, but was impressed with the fact that when Shadrach ordered, men obeyed.
Shadrach assembled his recruits in front of the rudely refurbished cottage, and gave them a traditional giya, the blood-rousing speech and mime with which the old Matabele i
ndunas primed their warriors on the eve of battle.
‘You know me!’ he shouted. ‘You know that my great-great-grandmother was the daughter of the old king, Lobengula, “the one who drives like the wind”.’
‘Eh – he!’ They began to enter into the spirit of the occasion.
‘You know that I am a prince of the royal blood, and in a proper world I would rightfully be an induna of one thousand, with widow-bird feathers in my hair and oxtails on my war shield.’ He stabbed at the air with his fighting-sticks.
‘Eh – he!’ Watching their expressions, Craig saw the real respect in which they held the old man, and he was delighted with his choice.
‘Now!’ Shadrach chanted. ‘Because of the wisdom and far-sightedness of the young Nkosi here, I am indeed become an induna. I am the induna of King’s Lynn,’ he pronounced it ‘Kingi Lingi’, ‘and you are my arnadoda, my chosen warriors.’
‘Eh – he!’ they agreed, and stamped their bare feet on the earth with a cannon-fire clap.
‘Now, look upon this white man. You might think him young and unbearded – but know you, that he is the grandson of Bawu and the great-grandson of Taka Taka.’
‘Hau!’ gasped Shadrach’s warriors, for those were names to conjure with. Bawu they had known in the flesh, Sir Ralph Ballantyne only as a legend: Taka Taka was the onomatopoeic name the Matabele had given Sir Ralph from the sound of the Maxim machine-gun which the old free-booter had wielded to such effect during the Matabele war and the rebellion.
They looked upon Craig with new eyes.
‘Yes,’ Shadrach urged them, ‘look at him. He is a warrior who carried terrible scars from the bush war. He killed hundreds of the cowardly, women-raping Mashona—’ Craig blinked at the poetic licence Shadrach had taken unto himself – ‘he even killed a few of the brave lionhearted Matabele ZIPRA fighters. So you know him now as a man – not a boy.’
