Sunset at Sheba, page 18
‘I’d like to call for volunteers to work that gun,’ he was demanding.
‘Not damn’ likely,’ O’Hare said through his gritted teeth. ‘I’ve had enough of my men injured for you and your mad-headed schemes, Major. Leave the gun where it is for a moment, man. We should never have tried to fight it from there. We’ll try to bring it in with horses soon. It might be done. Then you can pin him down with a few shells over the top of Babylon if you like.’
As he watched Kitto gesturing angrily, Winter became aware of Polly alongside him, crouching close to him as though she drew comfort from his presence as her only apparent ally. Her face was pale and strained, and he was startled at the change in her. The old, painted raucous Polly he had known in Plummerton had disappeared, and in her place was a taut, strained, girl with an unmade-up face, a suddenly rather plain girl, clutching a torn frock across her breast, her native resourcefulness broken down by the extraordinary circumstances in which she had become involved. More than once he’d seen her rid herself of some persistent drunk with complete confidence but here, caught up in murder and battle and the smell of cordite, she was suddenly younger and frightened, a girl with a heart, and with emotions unexperienced by the ribald woman from the bawdy house behind the Theophilus Street bars.
‘Mr Winter,’ she said tremulously, ‘can’t you stop ‘em?’
Winter shook his head, feeling inadequate and out of his depth in the battle-line.
‘Polly, this is war now,’ he said hopelessly. ‘It became war the minute the first shot was fired. The politicians have retired to the sideline here just as much as they have in Europe.’
She seemed to crouch nearer to him, seeking comfort and reassurance. ‘What’ll happen then, Mr Winter?’ she asked.
‘God knows, Poll,’ he said. ‘I don’t. This thing’s growing bigger with every hour. The longer it goes on, the less chance we have of stopping it.’
‘Do you think I did wrong coming down, Mr Winter? Should I have stayed up there with him?’ She was clearly uncertain now, troubled within herself at her treachery.
‘I don’t think it would have made much difference either way, Polly.’
‘I called him a murderer, Mr Winter,’ she went on, her eyes on the slopes of Sheba as though she were watching for Sammy. ‘I told him they’d hang him. And I enjoyed telling him. It all seemed so dreadful then. Especially when I saw Mr Plummer drop dead. But now, from down here it looks so different.’
She clutched at his hand. ‘It’s their faces, Mr Winter,’ she said. ‘It’s their faces. That Kitto’ - she shut her eyes - ‘and that Le Roux -’
She shuddered as she remembered how Le Roux had caught her in his strong arms as she had collapsed in the dust behind the shelter of his rock, and dumped her unceremoniously flat on her back, his hands roughly grasping at her clothes. She had been immediately surrounded by hard men with bitter faces full of lust, and a hatred that had frightened the facts out of her, so that she had told without intending to how much ammunition Sammy had, how much food and water, how he had used the scraps of yellow bandanna to give him the ranges.
Then Le Roux had twisted her arm and to stop him wrenching at the stuff of her dress, she had told them where the horses were, realising as she did so that with nightfall, they’d take them away and remove the only chance of escape that Sammy still had. It was only the heartlessness in their faces, the thirst for revenge, that had prevented the ultimate betrayal of telling them exactly where Sammy was hiding. Caught by a sudden fear for him, which was as unexpected as her earlier loathing had been, she had pretended she wasn’t certain, that everything looked different from below, that she was too shocked to be sure of anything.
‘It’s their faces,’ she said again, repeating it with a kind of wonder, as though she had never believed, even in her own hard life, how incredibly pitiless man could be when corroded by war.
‘All this talk of him being a Jew,’ she murmured. ‘As if it were a crime. He never seemed no different to me, Mr Winter. They look so wild. Like a pack of hounds after their prey.’
Winter glanced round him. What she said was right. There was vengeance now even in the features of O’Hare’s newcomers, and the cruelty that lay just below the civilised facade of every man. When it had all started at Plummerton Sidings, he remembered, there had been in the expressions of the troops around him only boredom and the indifferent unconcern of the private soldier doing a duty which only his superiors could explain.
‘Polly,’ Winter asked, turning to face her, ‘are you in love with young Schuter?’
She looked up at him quickly, her eyes big, just a plain pale-faced girl frightened by the terrifying things she had brought on them all.
‘I don’t know, Mr Winter,’ she said. ‘Honest, I don’t. There was a time when I thought I did. Only he vanished and ended up shooting for the market. That was when I changed my mind. Then when we came out here into the Wilderness, and I saw him looking after me, taking care of me, trying to help me, doing things I wanted to do, even though he didn’t want to do ‘em himself, I felt I’d been wrong. But this morning, when I saw Mr Plummer drop dead, I thought I hated his guts. I thought I could never look at him again without wanting to spit at him.’ She paused unhappily. ‘Now I’ve seen it from the other end,’ she went on quietly, ‘and I can see what he’s been up against, and what they’re wanting to do to him, now I can see their faces - like ravening wolves, Mr Winter - now I’m not so sure of myself again. All I want to see now is for it all to finish and for him to get away free where he deserves to be. He’s only behaving as he’s been brought up to behave. If they left him alone, he wouldn’t go back to Plummerton, he’d just go. I’d make him go.’
‘Where would he go, Poll?’
Polly shrugged. ‘He talked of going over towards the South-West,’ she said. ‘He thought he’d be safe there.’
‘He’d be safer still if he headed north into Bechuanaland. But it’s a long way.’
She managed a faint smile in which there was a trace of pride. ‘Not to him, Mr Winter,’ she said. ‘Not to Sammy.
Nowhere’s too far for Sammy. He knows the country like the back of his hand. He’s shot in the Salt Pans dozens of times. I know he has.’ Somehow she seemed to see a gleam of hope in his words and was snatching at it with both hands. ‘He knows it all - from the Orange River to Khama’s country. He’s crossed it all. He told me so. Only the other day. He’s carted his kills into Windhoek and those places dozens of times. He’s driven horses across the Kalahari for the German Army and up to Bulawayo. He knows it all right. If he could get out of here, he’d make it. I know he would. He knows all the water holes and where to find the game.’
Winter nodded. ‘I think you know a great deal more about that young man than you realise, Poll. I think you’ve been watching him and listening to him more than you knew.’
She looked puzzled and stopped, sitting quietly alongside him, holding the torn dress across her breast, indifferent to the angry arguments going on round the prostrate O’Hare. ‘Perhaps you’re right, Mr Winter,’ she said wonderingly. ‘It takes something like this to bring it home to you, I suppose. Not that it’s going to do either of us much good now, though, is it?’
For a moment, Winter didn’t know what to say, then while he was thinking about it, he became aware of a movement among the horse lines and saw Hadman and three of O’Hare’s troopers swing to the saddle.
‘It’s a gun team,’ he said to Polly. ‘They’re going to try to fetch the gun in.’
‘What’ll happen then?’
Winter’s throat was dry as he replied. ‘They’ll fire from behind Babylon,’ he said, ‘where he can’t reach them.’
‘Will they kill him, Mr Winter?’
‘I don’t know, Poll.’
‘It can’t go on much longer, can it, Mr Winter?’
She seemed to be appealing to him to contradict her, but he shook his head. ‘No, Poll,’ he said heavily. ‘It can’t go on much longer.’
As he finished speaking, he saw Sergeant Hadman raise his hand and sweep it down. There was a sharp clatter of hooves on the stones then the four horses burst out from the shelter of the rocks towards the gun, sending the stones flying as their riders whipped them into an immediate gallop.
Nothing happened for a while, and they found themselves watching, fascinated as the horsemen drew nearer the gun. Then, as they swung round in a half circle to bring themselves up to the tail of the weapon, the rifle on Sheba cracked twice quickly and two of the horses dropped in their traces, going down on their knees without a sound and sending their riders flying over their heads.
‘Corked, by Jesus!’ Sergeant Hadman’s disgusted voice came across to them quite clearly, and Polly screamed with a sudden excited enthusiasm and grabbed Winter by the arm.
Hadman leaned from the saddle and tried to cut the dead horses free, but the rifle cracked again and the fourth rider swayed in his seat and only managed to keep himself upright by clinging to the mane of his mount. As Hadman turned, baffled, and reached across to help the injured man, the rifle roared once more and the sergeant’s horse sat back on its haunches, as though it were resting, and slowly rolled over on to its side, its head stretched out, blowing bloody froth from its muzzle. The sergeant stepped from the saddle, an expression of puzzled anger on his face, and signalled with his arm to the two dazed dismounted gunners. The sole remaining horse had been cut from the traces now and three unmounted men were running again for the shelter of the rocks, keeping on the blind side of the animal.
‘By the Sweet Jesus,’ Hadman panted as he came into the shelter of the rocks again. ‘Let me like a soldier fall, by Christ! If it’s medals you want, this is the goddamn place to win ‘em, sure enough! That son-of-a-bitch up there sure can use a rifle.’
All talk had stopped again as their voices were stilled in surprise at the unreal situation.
Hadman was standing in front of O’Hare now, offering his report, sturdy and efficient. ‘Christ, sir,’ he said, ‘it’ll take a bloody army to shift that guy. I dunno how much ammunition he’s got, but while he’s still got it, there ain’t going to be no volunteers. I wouldn’t even ask for ‘em. He killed them hosses neat as you please. Every bullet in the same place, and if he can kill cattle like that, he can kill men. Mr O’Hare, apart from that sighting shot he took at you, he ain’t once failed to put a bullet where he wanted it.’
He pushed his broad-brimmed hat back and stared up at the slopes of the kopje. ‘Jesus,’ he went on, ‘an armoured car and a field gun sitting there, dominated by one guy with a rifle. It just ain’t possible.’
O’Hare was growing pale and weak now with pain and loss of blood and when Kitto came up to speak to him, followed by Romanis and Hoole, he raised himself irritably.
‘I hope you’re satisfied, Major,’ he said.
‘It’s a disgrace to British arms!’ Kitto postured, honour and courage rampant on his face, Winter was reminded of Offy Plummer’s scathing summing-up of him back in Plummerton West. The everlasting subaltern, he had called him, and he was reacting now as he might be expected to react, baffled, angry, able to think only in terms of forlorn hopes and headlong charges. As he found himself wondering how much Kitto’s defiance of Chief Jeremiah thirty years before had been sheer stupid do-or-die bravado instead of the colossal nerveless bluff he’d always thought it to be and how much of the legend had been of Kitto’s own making, Winter realised how much shrewder Offy Plummer had always been than the rest of them. He had always known Kitto right to the core.
Kitto was almost stamping with rage now as he walked up and down, talking, his still-slim youthful figure stiff with pride.
‘We ought to be ashamed of ourselves,’ he was saying. ‘Each and every one of us.’
O’Hare raised his head, wincing. ‘The British Army spent fifty years in South Africa underestimating people like that boy up there,’ he said. ‘My men are going to do nothing till after dark.’
Kitto seemed shocked by the turn of events, his bright dark eyes glittering ferociously in his thin face.
‘Since I arrived only an hour or two ago,’ O’Hare went on remorselessly through his pain, ‘I’ve had six men wounded, two of them fairly seriously, and I’ve lost three of my horses. You’ve got one or two wounded yourself, and one dead, to say nothing of Plummer himself.’
‘All the more reason why we should press home,’ Kitto snapped. ‘I for one shan’t be satisfied till I see his body lying in Plummerton like a condemned murderer’s.’
‘I wish to God I’d never seen your damned little war,’ O’Hare snapped. ‘I’d like you to supply me with a car to remove my wounded to Plummerton.’
Kitto nodded unwillingly. ‘I’ll provide you with a car,’ he said. ‘But I’d like a reassurance first that you’ll see this thing through. If we let this boy go free now, our prestige won’t stand for anything out here. De Wet’s followers’ll trot out all that old talk of the fumbling British Army, and start quoting lost guns at Colenso, and all the nonsense of Majuba and Spion Kop at us again. And once that starts, De Wet won’t ever be short of recruits.’
Sergeant Hadman snapped him a salute. ‘Permission to make a suggestion, sir. Mr O’Hare ain’t going to be much good around here anymore now and, with your permission, he oughta go in one of them cars himself to the Sidings to get hisself soled and heeled. I’ll see it through here for him.’ He paused. ‘If you ask me, sir, though,’ he ended, ‘it ain’t going to help our prestige much now, whichever way it finishes.’
Kitto stared up at Sheba. ‘Whichever way it finishes,’ he said slowly, ‘it’ll be finished.’
As he moved away, the sergeant saw Winter staring at them. His eyebrows rose and he shrugged, speaking in his deep nasal American voice.
‘You Limeys certainly know how to make your lynchings legal,’ he said.
Ten
The flat-topped hills were folded in the pearly haze of distance beneath a sky of perfect turquoise, and the jagged top of Sheba shone like a diamond as the narrow wheels of the Napier pushed steadily through the yellow grass and dry bushes, crushing the stones and sending the lizards scuttling before it.
Riding one of Kitto’s cavalry horses alongside, Polly stared back to the little group of figures clustered round the base of Babylon, and the silent abandoned gun a little way out from where they were standing. The aasvogels had arrived now and had started their work on the carcasses of the dead horses, which sprawled bloodstained and feather-strewn in the sunshine, twenty or more rusty dusty naked-headed birds tearing at them with a strength that set the dead legs kicking.
Once, before she had left, she had seen one of the revolted troopers fire into the mass, miss, and turn his back on the sight. Within a few hours there would be little but bones and bloated tawny-eyed vultures, too heavy to rise, beating at the ground with creaking, tattered wings.
Up in the sky above her other ragged shapes were circling, still gathering, then one of them came swooping over the tender in a long slanting dive that carried it beyond them to the raucous crowd of ugly bodies she could see near Babylon.
They had buried Plummer alongside the big ginger-haired trooper from Kitto’s column who had been the first to fall, hacking with difficulty at the thin rock-hard soil with shovels from Kitto’s car.
‘This is his country,’ Romanis had said, sycophantic to the end. ‘Let him rest here.’
Kitto had recited the burial service, standing at the head of the grave, small, leathery and sombre, playing the part of the commander to the last gesture.
‘Man that is born of woman hath but a short time to live and is full of misery’ - the slow sombre words still hung on Polly’s ears - ‘He cometh up, and is cut down, like a flower -’
He had done the thing properly, with a volley of rifle fire and a flag unearthed from his kit making it into a barrack-square ceremony as though they were in the middle of that willow-shaded burial ground near Plummerton instead of out in the veld, tired, dusty and unshaven and beginning to grow frustrated and a little sick of it all.
As they had filed away from the grave, Polly had seen a squad of O’Hare’s men under Sergeant Hadman give the wooden cross a smart eyes-left as they passed. Nearby, the Napier with the injured men in it, their wounds crudely cauterised where possible with a heated pistol barrel, was waiting to leave; and beyond it the men who were to remain behind had stood in a group, their faces hard and masked with the dust that was beginning to blow from the Kalahari, Le Roux’s snake eyes ignoring the existence of the grave and remaining constantly on Polly.
Now, as she moved away, she could see them all taking up their places again behind the rocks, and even as she watched she heard a short spattering of rifle fire and, sickened, she kicked the gaunt horse she was riding after the slowly moving tender.
As she caught up, one of the wounded men, sitting by the tail board, whistled at her, then another head appeared, grinning broadly. They all knew her and where she came from and as she rode up alongside they began to catcall.
The tender seemed crowded with men, the boots of the injured sticking stiffly over the stern board. O’Hare, who was supposed to be in command was in the front seat, feverish and exhausted with pain, his knee wrapped in first-aid bandages and splinted with sticks broken from ammunition boxes. In front of the car there was a man with an arm wound, riding a dusty neglected horse, and behind a corporal, his right thigh strapped with bandages, all of them victims of the fantastic one-sided battle at Sheba.
O’Hare raised his head wearily at the jeers. ‘Cut it out,’ he ordered. He turned to Polly with difficulty. ‘I’d be obliged,’ he said in a cold voice as she came alongside, ‘if you wouldn’t dawdle, Miss - er -’
‘You know me name,’ Polly said sharply. ‘Parasol Poll, they call me!’
She stared at him aloofly and he blushed before her gaze.
‘Whatever it might be,’ he said uncomfortably. ‘I’ll thank you to keep close.’
