Leopard Hunts in Darkness b-4

by Wilbur A. Smith

  "Let's go to your bedroom, darling," she said.

  There was one awkward moment when he sat naked on the edge of the bed to remove his leg, but she knelt quickly in front of him, naked also, pushing his hands away and undid the straps herself. Then she bowed her head and kissed the neat hard pad of flesh at the extremity of his leg.

  "Thank you," he said. "I'm glad you could do that."

  "It's you," she said, "and part of you," and she kissed it again, and then ran her lips gently up to his knee and beyond.

  He woke before she did, and lay with his eyes closed, surprised at the sense of wonder that possessed him, not knowing why, until suddenly he remembered and joy came upon him, and he opened his eyes and rolled his head, for an instant terrified that she would not be there but she was.

  She had thrown her pillow off the bed, and kicked the sheet aside.

  She was curled up likea baby, with her knees almost under her chin. The dawn light, filtered by the curtains, cast pearly highlights on her skin, and shaded the dips and hollows of her body. Her hair was loose, covering her face and undulating to each long slow breath she drew.

  He lay very still so as not to disturb her and gloated over her, wanting to reach out, but denying himself, so as ake the ache of wanting more poignant, waiting for it to In to become unbearable. She must have sensed his attention, for she stirred and straightened out her legs, rolled over onto her back and arched in a slow voluptuous cat-like stretch.

  He leaned across and with one finger lifted the shiny dark hair off her face. Her eyes swivelled towards him, came into focus, and she stared at him in cosmic astonishment. Then she crinkled her nose in a roguish grin.

  "Hey, mister," she whispered, "you are something pretty damned special. Now I'm sorry I waited so long." And she reached out both brown arms towards him.

  PP

  Craig, however, did not share her regrets. He knew it had been perfectly timed even a day earlier would have been too soon. Later, he told her so as they lay clinging to each other, glued lightly together with their own perspiration.

  "We learned to like each other first, that was the way I wanted it to be."

  "You're right," she said, and drew back a little to look at his face so that her breasts made a delightfully obscene little sucking sound as they came unstuck from his chest. "I do like you, I really do."

  "And I-" he started, but hastily she covered his lips with her fingertips.

  "Not yet, Craig darling," she pleaded. "I don't want to hear that not yet."

  "When?"he demanded.

  "Soon, I think-" And then with more certainty. "Yes," she said, 'soon, and then I'll be able to say it back to you." he great estate -of King's Lynn seemed to have "waited as they had waited for this to happen again.

  Long ago it had been hewn from the wilderness.

  "The love of another man and woman had been the main inspiration in the building of it, and over the decades since then it had taken the love of the men and women who followed that first pair to4sustain and cherish it. They and the generations who ad followed them lay now in the walled cemetery on" the kopje behind the homestead, but while they had lived, King's Lynn had flourished. Just as it had sickened when it fell into the hands of uncaring foreigners in a far land, had been stripped and desecrated and deprived of the vital ingredient of love.

  Even when Craig rebuilt the house and restocked the pastures, that vital element had been lacking still. Now at last love burgeoned on King's Lynn, and their joy in each other seemed to radiate out from the homestead on th e hill and permeate the entire estate, breathing life and the fecund promise of more life into the land.

  The Matabele recognized it immediately. When Craig and Sally-Anne in the battered Land-Rover rode the red dust tracks that linked the huge paddocks, the Matabele women straightened up from the wooden mortars in which they were pounding maize, or turned stiffnecked under the enormous burden of firewood balanced upon their heads to call a greeting and watch them with a fond and knowing gaze. Old Joseph said nothing, but made up the bed in Craig's room with four pillows, put flowers on the table at the side of the bed that Sally-Anne had chosen, and placed four of his special biscuits on the early morning tea-tray when he brought it in to them each dawn.

  For three days Sally-Anne restrained herself, and then one morning sitting up in bed, sipping tea, she told Craig, "As curtains, those make fine dish rags." She pointed a half eaten biscuit at the cheap unbleached calico that he had tacked over the windows.

  "Can you do better?" Craig asked with concealed cunning, and she walked straight into the trap. Once she was involved in choosing curtains, she was immediately involved in everything else. From designing furniture for Joseph's relative, the celebrated carpenter, to build, to laying out the new vegetable garden and replanting the rose bushes and shrubs that had died of neglect.

  Then Joseph entered the conspiracy by bringing her the proposed dinner menu for the evening. "Should it be roast tonight, Nkosazana, or chicken curry?"

  "Nkosi Craig likes tripe," Sally-Anne had made this discovery during casual discussion. "Can you do tripe and onions?" Joseph beamed. "The old governor-general before the war, whenever he come to Kingi Lingi I make him tripe and onions, Nkosazana. He tell me "Very good, Joseph, best in world!""

  "Okay, Joseph, tonight we'll have your "best-in-world tripe and onions"," she laughed, and only when Joseph formally handed over to her the pantry keys did she realize what a serious pronouncement that had been.

  She was there at midnight when the first new calf was born on King's Lynn, a difficult birthing with the calf's head twisted back so that Craig had to soap his arm and thrust it up into the mother to free it while Shadrach and Hans Groenewald held the head and Sally-Anne held the lantern high to light the work.

  When at last it came in a slippery rush, it was a heifer, pale beige and wobbly on its long ungainly legs. As soon as it began to nurse from its mother's udder, they could leave it to Shadrach and go home to bed.

  "That was one of the most marvelous experiences of my life, darling. Who taught you to do that?"

  "Bawu, my grandfather." He held her close to him in the dark bedroom. "You didn't feel sick?" 11 loved it, birth fascinates me."

  "Like Henry the Eighth, I prefer it in the abstract," he chuckled.

  "You rude boy," she whispered. "But aren't you too tired?"

  "Are you?"

  "No," she admitted. "I jint truthfully say that I am." She made one or Va half-hearted attempts to break out and leave.

  had a telegram today, the "C. of A." on the Cessna is complete, and I should go down to Johannesburg to collect her."

  "If you can wait two or three weeks or so, I'll come down with you. They are having a terrible drought in the south and stock prices are rock bottom. We could fly around the big ranches together and pick up a few bargains." So she let it pass, and the days telescoped into each other, filled for both of them with love and work work on the photographic book, on the new novel, on collating her field research material for the Wildlife Trust, on the final preparations for the opening of Zambezi Waters, and on the daily running and embellishing of King's Lynn.

  With each week that passed, her will to resist the spell that Craig and King's Lynn were weaving about her weakened, the exigencies of her previous life faded, until one day she caught herself referring to the house on the hill as "home" and was only slightly shocked at herself.

  A week later a registered letter was forwarded from her address in Harare. It was a formal application form for the renewal of her research grant from the Wildlife Trust.

  Instead of filling it in and returning it immediately, she slipped it into her camera bag.

  "I'll do it tomorrow," she promised herself, but deep in herself realized she had reached a crossroads in her life.

  The prospect of flying about Africa alone with her only possessions a change of clothes and a camera, sleeping where she lay down and bathing when she could, was no longer as attractive as it had a
lways been to her.

  That night at dinner she looked around the huge almost bare dining-room, the new curtains its only glory, and touched the refectory table of Rhodesian teak that, under her guidance, Joseph's relative had fashioned and she anticipated the patina of use and care it would soon acquire. Then she looked past the burning candles to the man who sat opposite her and she was afraid and strangely elated. She knew she had made the decision.

  They took their coffee onto the veranda and listened to the cicadas" whining in the jacaranda trees, and the squeak of the flying bats hunting below a yellow moon.

  S he snuggled against his shoulder and said, "Craig, darling, it's time to tell you. I do love you so very dearly."

  if raig wanted to rush into Bulawayo and take the magistrate's court by storm, but she restrained him laughingly.

  "My God, you crazy man, it isn't like buying a pound of cheese. You can't just up and get married, just like that."

  "Why not? Lots of people do."

  "I don't," she said firmly. "I want it to be done properly." She did some counting on her fingers and pencilling on the calendar at the back of her notebook, and then decided, "February 16th."

  "That's four months away," Craig groaned, but his protests were ridden down ruthlessly.

  Joseph, on the other hand, was in full accord with Sally Anne plans for a formal wedding.

  "You get married on Kingi Lingi, Nkosikazi." It was a statement rather than a question, and Sally Anne Sindebele was now good enough to recognize that she had been promoted from "little mistress" to 'great lady'.

  "How many people?" Joseph demanded. "Two hundred, three hundred?" "I doubt we can raise that many," Sally-Anne demurred.

  "When Nkosana Roly get married Kingi Lingi, we have four hundred, even Nkosi Smithy he come! "Joseph," she scolded him, you really are a frightful old snob, you know!" or Craig the pervading unhappiness that he had felt at Tungata's sentence slowly dissipated, swamped by all the excitement and activity at King's Lynn. In a few months he had all but put it from his mind, only at odd and unexpected moments his memory of his one-time friend barbed him. To the rest of the world, Tungata Zebiwe might have never existed. After the extravagant coverage by press and television of his trial, it seemed that a curtain of silence was drawn over him likea shroud.

  Then abruptly, once again the name Tungata Zebiwe was blazed from every television screen and bannered on every front page across the entire continent.

  Craig and Sally' Anne sat in front of the television set, appalled and disbelieving, as they listened to the first reports. When they ended, and the programme changed to a weather report, Craig stood up and crossed to the set. He switched it off and came back to her side, moving likea man who was still in deep shock from some terrible accident.

  The two of them sat in silence in the darkened room, until Sally-Anne reached for his hand. She squeezed it hard, but her shudder was involuntary, it racked her whole body.

  Those poor little girls they were babies. Can you imagine their terror?"

  "I knew the Goodwins. They were fine people. They always treated their black people well, "Craig muttered.

  "This proves as nothing else possibly could that they were right to lock him away likea dangerous animal." Her horror was beginning to turn to anger.

  "I can't see what they could possibly hope to gain by this--2 Craig was still shaking his head incredulously, and Sally-Anne burst out.

  "The whole country, the whole world must see them for what they are. Bloodthirsty, inhuman-'her voice cracked and became a sob. "Those babies oh Christ in heaven, I hate him. I wish him dead." "They used his name that doesn't mean Tungata ordered it, condoned it, or even knew about it." Craig tried to sound convincing.

  "I hate him," she whispered. "I hate him for it." t's madness. All they can possibly achieve is to bring

  _4 Shana troops sweeping through Matabeleland like the wrath of all the gods."

  "The little one was only five years old." In her outrage and sorrow, Sally-Anne was repeating herself.

  "Nigel Goodwin was a good man I knew him quite well, we were in the same special police unit during the war, I liked him." Craig went to the drinks table and poured two whiskies. "Please God, don't let it all start again. All the awfulness and cruelty and horror please God, spare us that." Ithough Nigel Goodwin was almost forty years of age, he had one of those beefy pink faces unaffected by the African sun that made him look likea lad.

  His wife, Helen, was a thin, dark-haired girl, her plainness alleviated by her patent good nature and her sparkly, toffee-brown eyes.

  The two girls were weekly boarders at the convent in Bulawayo. At eight years, Alice Goodwin had ginger hair and gingery freckles and, like her father, she was plump and pink. Stephanie, the baby, was five, really too young for boarding-school. However, because she had an elder sister at the convent, the Reverend Mother made an exception in her case. S4 was the pretty one, small and dark and chirpy as ajittle bird with her mother's bright eyes.

  Each Friday morning, Nigel and Helen Goodwin drove in seventy-eight miles from the ranch to town. At one o'clock they picked up the girls from the convent, had lunch at the Selbourne Hotel, sharing a bottle of wine, and then spent the afternoon shopping. Helen restocked her groceries, chose material to make into dresses for herself and the girls, and then, while the girls went to F

  watch a matinee at the local cinema, had her hair washed, cut and set, the one extravagance of her simple existence.

  Nigel was on the committee of the Matabele Farmers" Union, and spent an hour or two at the Union's offices in leisurely discussion with the secretary and those other members who were in town for the day. Then he strolled down the wide sun-scorched streets, his slouch hat pushed back on his head, hands in pockets, puffing happily on a black briar, greeting friends and acquaintances both white and black, stopping every few yards for a word or a chat.

  When he arrived back where he had left the Toyota truck outside the Farmers" Co-operative, his Matabele headman, Josiah, and two labourers were waiting for him.

  They loaded the purchases of fencing and tools and spare parts and cattle medicines and other odds and ends into the truck, and as they finished, Helen and the girls arrived for the journey home.

  "Excuse me, Miss," Nigel accosted his wife, "have you seen Mrs. Goodwin anywhere?" It was his little weekly joke, and Helen giggled delightedly and preened her new hairdo.

  For the girls he had a bag of liquorice all sorts His wife protested, "Sweets are so bad for their teeth, dear," and Nigel winked at the girls and agreed, "I know, but just this once won't kill them." Stephanie, because she was the baby, rode in the truck cab between her parents, while Alice went in the back with Josiah and the other Matabele.

  "Wrap up, dear, it will be dark before we get home," Helen cautioned her.

  The first sixty-two miles were on the main road, and then they turned off on the farm track, and Josiah jumped down to open the wire gate and let them through.

  "Home again," said Nigel contentedly, as he drove onto his own land. He always said that and Helen smiled and reached across to lay her hand on his leg.

  "It's nice to be home, dear," she agreed.

  The abrupt African night fell over them, and Nigel switched on the headlights. They picked up the eyes of the cattle in little bright points of light, fat contented beasts, the smell of their dung sharp and ammoniac al on the cool night air.

  "Getting dry," Nigel grunted. "Need some rain."