A Sparrow Falls c-9

by Wilbur Smith

  As the voters had come in during the day, their hopes had see-sawed up and down. Often it seemed that the end of the hall where Dirk Courtney's organizers sat under huge posters of their candidate was as crowded as Sean Courtney's end of the hall was deserted.

  When this happened, Marion's brother-in-law, Peter Botes, removed his pipe from his mouth and smirked comfortably at Mark across the length of the hall. He had become an enthusiastic supporter of Dirk Courtney's, and his circumstances had altered remarkably in the last six months. He had opened offices of his own on the first floor of the Ladyburg Farmers Bank. He drove a new Packard and had moved from the cottage to a fine rambling house in three acres of garden and orchard, where he had insisted that Marion and Mark dine with him the previous night. The evening star sets, the morning star rises, my dear Mark. The wise man recognizes that, he had sermonized as he carved the roast. General Courtney's star has not set yet, said Mark stubbornly. Not yet, agreed Peter. But when it does, you will need new friends. Powerful friends. You can always rely on us, said Marion's sister kindly. You don't always have to live out there in the bush. You don't understand, Mark interrupted quietly. My life's work is out there, in the bush. Oh, I wouldn't bank on that. Peter heaped slices of roast beef onto Mark's plate. There are going to be changes in the Ladyburg district when Mr Dirk Courtney takes over. Big changes! Besides, it isn't fair on poor Marion. No woman wants to live out there. Oh, I am quite happy wherever Mark wants to go, Marion murmured. Don't worry, Peter assured them. We'll look after you.

  And he patted Mark's shoulder in a brotherly fashion. Mr Dirk Courtney thinks the world of Peter said his wife proudly.

  Now as Mark crossed the hall towards General Sean Courtney, he felt the heavy doughy feeling of dread in his guts. He did not want to bear the tidings he had for the General, yet he knew it was better that they came gently from a friend, rather than in gloating triumph from an enemy.

  He paused to watch Sean Courtney from a distance, feeling both pity and anger. Sean had rallied strongly since those low days at Emoyeni. His shoulders had regained some of that wide rakish set, and his face had filled out.

  Some of the gaunt shadows had smoothed away, and he had been in the sun again. The skin was tanned brown against the silver of his beard and his hair.

  Yet he was seated now. The strain of the last few days had taxed him sorely. He sat erect on a hard-backed chair, both hands resting on the silver head of his cane. With him were many of his old friends who had gathered to give him support, and he listened seriously to his brother Garrick who sat in the chair beside him, nodding his agreement.

  Mark did not want to go to him, he wanted to delay the moment, but then there was a stir across the hall. Mark saw Peter Botes scurrying across to where Dirk Courtney stood, and his face was bright scarlet with excitement. He spoke rapidly, gesticulating widely, and Dirk Courtney leaned forward to listen eagerly.

  Mark could not delay a moment longer. He hurried forward and Sean saw him coming. Well, my boy, come and sit a while. They tell me the voting is extremely close so far, but we'll have the result before noon. Then he saw Mark's face. What is it? he demanded harshly.

  Mark stooped over him, his mouth almost touching the General's ear, and his voice croaked in his own ears. It's just come in on the telegraph, General. We have lost Johannesburg Central, Doornfontein and Jeppe, They were all solid safe Smuts seats, they had been South Africa Party since Union in 19 10, and now they were gone. It was a-disaster, a stunning catastrophe. Sean gripped Mark's forearm as if to take strength from him, and his hand shook in a gentle palsy.

  Across the hall they heard the wild gloating cheers start ringing out, and Mark had to hurry. That's not all, sir. General Smuts himself has lost his seat. The nation had rejected them, the coalition of the Labour and the National Party under Hertzog were sweeping; into power. My God, muttered Sean. It's come. I didn't believe it possible.

  Still gripping Mark's arm, he pulled himself to his feet. Help me out to the car, my boy. I don't think I can bring myself to congratulate the new member for Ladyburg. But they were too late. The announcement came before they reached the door. It was shouted in a stentorian voice, by the chief scrutineer from the platform at the end of the hall.

  Mr Dirk Courtney, National Labour Party: 2683 votes.

  General Sean Courtney, South Africa Party: 2441 votes. I give you the new member for Ladyburg -'And Dirk Courtney leapt lightly on to the platform, clasping both hands above his head like a prize-fighter. Well. There was a twisted grin on Sean's face the skin had that greyish tone again and his shoulders had slumped. So, exit the Butcher of Fordsburg, and Mark took him out to where the Rolls waited in the street.

  The champagne was aDorn Perignon of that superb 1904 vintage, and Sean poured it with his own hands, limping from guest to guest. I had hoped to toast victory with it, he smiled. But it will do as well to drown our sorrows. There was only a small gathering in the drawing-room of Lion Kop homestead, and the few attempts at joviality were lost in the huge room. The guests left early. Only the family sat down to dinner, with Marion in Storm's old seat and Mark between her and Ruth Courtney. Well, my boy, what are your plans now? Sean -abruptly asked in one of the silences, and Mark looked up with genuine astonishment. We'll be going back to Chaka's Gate, of course. Of course. Sean smiled with the first spontaneous warmth of that dark day. How foolish of me to think otherwise. But you do realize what this, Sean made a gesture with one hand, unable to say the word defeat, what this could mean for you? Yes, sir. But you still have enormous influence. There is our Wildlife Society, we can fight. We have to fight to keep Chaka's Gate. Yes, Sean nodded, and there was a little sparkle in his eyes again. We'll fight, but my guess is it will be a hard, dirty fight. At first there was no sign of the gathering clouds to darken the tall blue sky above Chaka's Gate. The only change was that Mark was submitting his monthly report, not to Sean Courtney, but to the new Minister of Lands, Peter Grobler, a staunch Hertzog man. His reports were acknowledged formally, but although his salary was still paid regularly by the Department, in a short official letter Mark was informed that the whole question of the proclaimed areas was now under consideration at Cabinet level, and that new legislation would be promulgated at the next session of Parliament. His appointment as game warden was to be considered a temporary post, without pension benefits, and subject to monthly notice.

  Mark worked on doggedly, but many nights he sat late in the lantern light writing to General Courtney. The two of them were planning at long distance their campaign to awaken public interest in Chaka's Gate, but when Marion had gone off to bed in the next room, he would take a fresh page and cover it with the small cramped lines to Storm, pouring out to her all his thoughts and dreams and love.

  Storm never replied to his letters, he was not even certain that she was still in that thatched cottage above the beach, but he imagined her there, thinking of her at odd hours of the day and the night, seeing her working at her easel, or walking the beach with baby John tottering at her side. One particular night he lay awake and imagined her in the tiny shuttered bedroom with the child at her breast, and the image was too vivid, too painful to allow him sleep.

  He rose quietly, left a note for Marion as she slept heavily, and, with Pungushe trotting at Trojan's head, set off up the valley.

  Marion woke an hour after he had gone, and her first waking thought was that if there was still no show on this morning then it was certain. She had waited all these weeks for that absolute certainty, before telling Mark.

  Somehow she had been afraid that if she had spoken of it too soon, it would have been bad luck.

  She slipped from the bed and crossed the still dark room to the bathroom. When she returned minutes later she was hugging herself with suppressed joy, and she lit the candle by her bedside, eager to see Mark's face when she woke him to tell him.

  Her disappointment when she saw the empty rumpled bed and the note propped on the pillow was intense, but lasted only a sh
ort while before her usual gentle placid nature reasserted itself. It will give me more time to enjoy it by myself, she said aloud, and then she spoke again. Harold, Harold Anders? No, that's too common. I will have to think of a really fine-sounding name. She hummed happily to herself as she dressed, and then went out into the kitchen yard.

  It was a cool still morning with a milky pink sky. A baboon called from the cliffs of Chaka's Gate, the short explosive bark ringing across the valley, a salute to the sunrise that was turning the heights to brazen splendour.

  It was good to be alive and to have a child growing on such a day, Marion thought, and she wanted to do something to celebrate it. Mark's note had told her that he would be home by nightfall. I'll bake a new batch of bread, and, She wanted something very special for this day. Then she remembered that it had rained five days previously. There might be wild mushrooms coming up from the rains, those rounded buds with sticky brown tops; the rich meaty flesh was a favourite of Mark's and he had taught her when and where to find them.

  She ate her breakfast absentmindedly with Mark's copy of The Home Doctor propped against the jam jar, re-reading the section on The Expectant Mother. Then she began on her housework, taking a comfortable pride in the slippery glaze of the cement floors and the burnish which she had worked on to the wood of the simple furniture, in the neatness and order, the smell of polish, the wild flowers in their vases. She sang as she worked and once laughed out loud for no reason.

  It was midmorning before she tied her sun bonnet under her chin, put a bottle of Chamberlain's Superior Diarrhoea Remedy into her basket, and set off up the valley.

  She stopped at Pungushe's kraal and the youngest wife brought the baby to her. Marion was relieved to see that he was much improved, and Pungushe's wife assured her that she had given him much liquid to drink. Marion took him in her lap and fed him a spoonful of the diluted remedy, despite his violent protests, and afterwards the five women sat in the sun and talked of children and men and childbirth, of sickness and food and clothing, and all the things that absorb a woman's life.

  It was almost an hour later that she left the four Zulu women and went down towards the river.

  The downpour of rain had disquieted the lioness. Some deep instinct warned her that it was but the harbinger of the great storms to come.

  The jessie thickets in the valley were a suitable retreat for her litter no longer. Heavy rain on the escarpment would soon turn the steep narrow valley into a cascading torrent.

  Twice already she had tried to lead the cubs away, but they were older now and had developed a stubbornness and tenacity. They clung to the haven of the thick thorny jessie, and her efforts had failed. Within half a mile, one or two of the faint-hearts would turn and scurry back to what they considered home. Immediately the lioness turned back to seize the deserter, it precipitated an undignified rush by the others in the same direction, and within five minutes they were all back in the jessie.

  The lioness was distracted. This was her first litter, but she was governed by instinct. She knew that it was time to wean her cubs, to take them out of the trap of the narrow valley, to begin their hunting lessons, but she was frustrated by the size of her litter, six-cub litters were a rarity in the wilderness and so far there had been no casualties among the cubs; her family was becoming too ungainly for her to handle.

  However, instinct drove her and in the middle of a cool bright morning in which she could smell the rain coming, she tried again. The cubs gambolled along behind her, falling over each other and sparring amicably, as far as the river. This was familiar ground and they went along happily.

  When the lioness started out across the open white sandbanks towards the far side, there was immediately the usual crisis in confidence. Three cubs followed her willingly, two stood undecidedly on the high bank and whined and mewled with concern, while the sixth turned and bolted straight back up the valley for the ebony.

  The lioness went after him at a gallop and bowled him on his back. Then she took the scruff of his neck and lifted him. The cubs were big now, and although she lifted him to the full stretch of her neck, his backside still bumped on every irregularity of the ground. He curled up his legs, wrapped his tail tightly up under his quarters and closed his eyes, hanging from her mouth as she carried him down into the bed of the Bubezi River.

  The river was five hundred yards wide at this point, and almost completely empty at the end of the dry season.

  There were still deep green pools of water between the snowy-white sand-banks, and the pools were connected by a slow trickle of warm clear water only a few inches deep.

  While five cubs watched in an agony of indecision from the near bank, the lioness carried the cub through the shallows, soaking his dragging backside so he hissed and wriggled indignantly, then she trotted up the far bank and found a clump of dense watels where she placed him.

  She turned back to fetch another cub, and he followed her with a panicky rush. She had to stop and box him about the ears, snarling until he squealed and fell on his back.

  She grabbed him by the neck and dragged him back into the wit-els. She started back across the river to find the cub stumbling along on her heels again. This time she nipped hard enough to really hurt, and bundled him back into the thicket. She nipped again at his hindquarters until he cowered flat on the earth, so subdued and chastened that he could not gather the courage to follow again. He lay under the bush and made distraught little sounds of anguish.

  Marion had never been this far from the cottage alone, but it was such a lovely warm clear morning, peaceful and still, that she wandered on in a mood of enchantment and happiness such as she had seldom known before.

  She knew that if she followed the river bank, she could not lose herself, and Mark had taught her that the African bush is a safer place in which to wander abroad than the streets of a city, as long as one followed a few simple rules of the road.

  At the branch of the two rivers she stopped for a few minutes to watch a pair of fish eagles on top of their shaggy nest in the main fork of a tall leadwood tree. The white heads of the two birds shone like beacons in contrast to the dark russet plumage, and she thought she could just make out the chirruping sound of the chicks in the cup of the hay-stack nest.

  The sound of the young heightened the awareness of the life in her own belly, and she laughed and went on down the branch of the Red Bubezi.

  Once a heavy body crashed in the undergrowth nearby, and there was a clatter of hooves on stony earth. She froze with a fleeting chill of fear, and then when the silence returned she regained her courage and laughed a little breathlessly and went on.

  There was a perfume on the warm still air, sweet as fullblooming roses, and she followed it, twice going wrong but at last coming on a spreading creeper hanging over a gaunt dead tree. The leaves were dark shiny green and the dense bunches of flowers were pale butter yellow. She had never seen the plant before, nor the swarm of sunbirds that fluttered about it. They were tiny restless darting birds, with bright, metallic, shiny plumage like the little hummingbirds of America, and they dipped into the perfumed flowers with long slim curved beaks. Their colours were unbelievable in the sunlight, emerald greens and sapphire blue, black like wet anthracite and reds like the blood of kings.

  They thrust their beaks deep into the open throats of the yellow blooms to sip out the thick clear drops of nectar through their hollow tubular tongues.

  Watching them, Marion felt a deep pervading delight, and it was a long time before she moved on again.

  She found the first batch of mushrooms a little further on, and she knelt to snap the stems off at the level of the earth and then hold the umbrella-shaped fleshy plant to her face and inhale the delicious musty odour, before laying it carefully, cap uppermost, in the basket so that grit and dirt would not lodge in the delicately fluted gills. She took two dozen mushrooms from this one patch, but she knew they would cook down to a fraction of their bulk.

  She went on, following t
he lip of the steep bank.

  Something hissed close by and her heart skipped again.

  Her first thought was of a snake, one of those thick bloated reptiles, with the chocolate and yellow markings and flat scaly heads, which blew so loudly that they were called puff-adders.

  She began moving backwards carefully staring into the clump of first growth wit-els from which the sound had come. She saw small movement, but it was some seconds before she realized what she was seeing.

  The lion cub was flat on its belly in the dappled shadow of the thicket, and its own dappled baby spots blended beautifully against the bed of dried leaves and leaf mould on which it lay.

  The cub had learned already the first lesson of concealment, absolute stillness; except for his two round fluffy ears. The ears flicked back and forth, signalling clearly every emotion and intention. He stared at Marion with wide round eyes that had not yet turned the ferocious yellow of full growth, but were still hazed with the bluish glaze of kittenhood. His whiskers bristled stiffly, and his ears signalled wildly conflicting messages.

  Flattening against the skull: One step nearer and I'll tear you to pieces. Shooting out sideways: One step nearer and I'll die of fright. Coming up and cupping forward: What the hell are you anyway? Oh, exclaimed Marion. You darling little thing. She set down the basket, and squatted. She extended one hand and made soft cooing noises. There's a darling. Are you all alone then, poor baby?

  She moved forward slowly, still talking and cooing. Nobody's going to hurt you, baby. The cub was uncertain, its ears rising into an attitude of curiosity and indecision as it stared at her. Are you all alone then? You'll make a lovely pet for my own baby, won't you? Closer and closer she edged, and the cub warned her with a half-hearted apologetic hiss.

  What a cheeky darling we are, Marion smiled and squatted three feet from the cub.