Sunset at Sheba, page 9
‘Right into German South-West,’ Winter pointed out sarcastically. ‘And if they get that far they’ll be interned and our job will be over. Hallelujah!’
Kitto turned bland blank eyes towards him. ‘Well, what’s wrong with that?’ he demanded. ‘At least they’ll be out of the way. We’d be doing the country a service. It would answer all our problems.’
He swung round and wheeled his horse away. Winter could see the splashes from the puddles on the drying earth as he slammed the animal into a hard gallop. Then the Napier was freed abruptly and as it lurched forward its crew climbed on board and started shouting at him to join them.
Twelve
They came up to the river at midday, a deep strip of water beyond a patch of scrub and bastard camel thorn, flooded after the rain and running over rocks as black and shiny as anvils that were set in ripples below steep banks, overhung with red-berried bushes and studded with small flowers like shrunken daffodils.
Polly stood by the cart, holding the reins, watching the blind-eyed police horse picking its way through the broken ground along the bank towards her, through flocks of gay little blue, crimson and emerald birds which kept starting up from the water’s edge. Sammy seemed thoughtful as he halted alongside the cart, and for a while he ignored her, staring back the way he had come, then he pushed his hat back and swung round towards her.
‘Better cross here,’ he suggested. ‘It’s steep, but it’s the best spot. I’ve scouted a mile each way. We’ll have to off-load and work her down gentle.’
He swung from the saddle, and between them, they began to unpack the cart, stacking their belongings among the rocks alongside the river - the bedding and the blankets, then the pots and cooking utensils, and their few hard stores, Polly’s trunk and the water barrel. Then Sammy began to lash a rope to the rear axle of the cart and, leading the other end around a thorn tree just above the stream, fastened it to the saddle ring of the Argentino.
‘What are you going to do?’ Polly asked.
‘Use it as a brake,’ he explained. ‘I can hang on to this. She’ll go down easy then. We’ll maybe have to haul you up the other side too.’
He put his hands under her arms and lifted her up on to the cart again. For a moment he kept his hands on her waist and she looked down at him and smiled. There was no makeup on her face - and her skin was brown, her hair bleached at the ends by the sun.
‘Sammy?’
‘Yep?’
‘I’m sorry I complained so much when we started. Honest, I am.’
He released her and pushed his hat back on his head, avoiding her eyes. ‘That’s all right, Poll,’ he said. ‘I expect you’d got good cause to.’
‘No, I hadn’t. You’ve done all the work up to now. I’ve done nothing much except get in the way. But it’s just the change, that’s all. Just the change, Sammy. Not knowing what’s going on. Not having everything handy - water and that - having to do everything for myself. I’m a bit of a townie, I suppose, especially compared with you, but I’m getting used to it now.’
He nodded and began to turn away.
‘Sammy,’ she called.
‘Yep?’
She paused before she spoke, as though she were faintly embarrassed by what she was going to ask him. ‘Sammy,’ she said, ‘you ever thought you’d like to take me out on one of them shoots of yours some time? I’d drive the cart and cook for you. You could perhaps even teach me how to use the rifle. Maybe I could be a help.’
He smiled. ‘Suppose I could,’ he said, pleased at her offer. ‘It’s not hard. Just got to learn how to do it, that’s all. There’s a different way for everything. Bush, for instance. It telescopes things. Gun barrel looks a mile long. Open flats and across water brings ‘em closer. You’ve got to halve the distance then and aim low.’
He talked slowly, with a soft hunter’s sibilance, like the footfall of a stalking animal.
‘Messy job for a woman, mind,’ he pointed out. ‘Ten to twelve wildebeest a day’s nothing. Strips of meat drying on trees and the grass covered with blood, and flies everywhere.’
‘I’ll learn. Will you teach me?’
He grinned. ‘You’re learning already. At least you don’t talk all the time any more. You’re doing all right.’
He moved away from the cart and began to examine the rope, while Polly sat above him, pleased at the compliment.
‘Hold her back, Poll,’ he said at last as he straightened up. ‘Shove the brake on hard and sit back on the reins.’
She nodded.
‘Right,’ he said. ‘Let’s try it. Giddup, hoss! Voertsek!’
The Argentino leaned on the rope and the cart began its slow descent of the donga, creaking slowly forward, the iron frames that carried the canvas rattling in their sockets as the wheels bumped over the rocky ground.
‘We’re doing fine,’ Polly shrieked, dragging at the reins until the leather cut at her fingers. ‘We’re nearly down.’
Just when they thought they were safe, one of the wheels dropped off a rock and the cart lurched unexpectedly, so that the little grey mare lost her footing immediately and began to slip, her hooves digging at the muddy surface of the bank.
‘Look out!’ Sammy’s voice brought Polly’s head round. ‘The tree’s bustin’!’
The white thorn, its roots in thin rain-softened soil, was beginning to lean towards the river. Polly glanced round, her eyes scared, as she heard the sound of wood cracking; then Sammy kicked his mount forward until its feet scrabbled in the dirt, kicking up great lumps of clayey mud as it leaned on the rope.
‘It’s going,’ Polly shrieked.
She felt the Argentino being dragged backwards, its hind feet fighting to get a grip, then Sammy whipped off his hat and banged it down hard against the horse’s flanks, and the Argentino’s eye rolled wildly as the flecks of foam from its mouth spattered its chest. As the tree gave way, the cart rolled the last five or six feet with a crash, and the water shot up in a sheet of spray that caught the sunshine in a thousand diamond-points of light. Then the Argentino was slithering backwards, its legs tangled up with the broken thorn tree, and Sammy leapt from the saddle just as it rolled on its side in the water. Immediately, caught by the excitement, the bony mare started to kick in fright, her hooves ringing against the shafts, and Polly jumped down into the water and waded to the animal’s head.
For a moment the drift was full of the clattering of wood and iron as the horses struggled, then when the muddy water began to settle into place again, the wagon was standing lopsidedly among the rocks, the Argentino still attached to it, trembling violently with the wreckage of the thorn tree between its legs, its one eye rolling wildly.
‘Well, we’re down!’ Sammy splashed towards Polly through the water, grinning. ‘We’re down and no bones broken.’
The grey was quiet now, quivering in the shafts, reacting to the soothing noises Polly made.
‘All we’ve got to do now,’ Sammy said, ‘is get up the other side.’
He led the police horse across the stream and attached it again by the rope to the front of the cart, then Polly called out, pointing to the off rear wheel.
‘You aren’t going to shift that far,’ she said.
The fall into the river had split the ancient axle and the wheel now lay over at a crazy angle, up to the hub in scummy, stirred-up water.
Sammy stared at it, his face unemotional.
‘Take us a long time to repair that,’ he announced, turning to Polly. ‘Looks like we got to leave her here.’
He bent and, scooping up a handful of water, threw it over his head and rubbed it in his hair. Then he released the grey mare from the cart and gave both horses water from his hat.
‘We’ve got to leave something behind,’ he said, looking apologetically at Polly. ‘It’s going to be no featherbed ride from now on.’
Polly shrugged, sturdily indifferent. ‘I can manage,’ she said. ‘It wasn’t before.’
They began to carry their belongings across the stream, wading knee-deep in the muddy water and dumping them in an untidy pile at the other side, making trip after trip through the muddy water, Polly with her skirt caught up round her waist.
When they had almost finished, Sammy paused and looked at the coffee pot he was holding in his hand. ‘Might as well eat,’ he said.
He filled the pot from higher up the stream where the water was still clear and kicked the top off a small ant heap. Watched by Polly, he dragged out his knife and started to scoop a hole in the side, uncovering the galleries of teeming ants and their eggs. Stuffing dry grass into the hole, he lit it and the flames swept through the passages, roasting the ants and coming up in solid heat through the hole at the top where the coffee pot rested.
‘Might as well start with something inside us,’ he said. ‘Then I’ll take the Argentino and look for a route home.’
An hour and a half later they were ready to move on. The wagon still stood in the stream, lopsided and forlorn-looking, with all around on both banks the belongings they had not been able to load on to the horses.
Waiting alone among the bushes, surrounded by assorted packages, abandoned pots and pans and scattered cardboard cartridge boxes, Polly stared at the open trunk and the few clothes she was leaving behind, regarding them with a lazy good-natured regret. Clothes had always been important to her but she found, to her surprise, that she could face leaving them behind with far more composure than she had thought herself capable of.
She picked up the concertina and stared at it, fingering the notes, trying a few snatches of melody, her face nostalgic as her mind went back to all the things the tunes meant to her. There was nothing of much value in the possessions she was abandoning but for a moment she had a superstitious desire to hang on to the concertina. It was symbolic of her life in Plummerton and, since it was the only life she had ever known, the loss of the instrument gave her an uneasy sense of self-sacrifice.
Then she realised that the unhappiness of the past had always outweighed the fragmentary joy and she found she was suddenly glad to be putting it all behind her. Since she had forsaken it, it had seemed to grow more and more meaningless with every mile she had travelled, and the present had grown more and more real.
In the few days she had spent in the Wilderness, labouring across the saddle-back folds of ground and struggling through the deep dry dongas, she had seen a wider world than she had ever known existed. She had seen pure clear mornings when all the veld was still and the air was cold and stimulating, rinsed with the same heavy dew that soaked their clothes. She had seen vast cloudy herds of game -duiker, steenbok, hartebeeste and springbok, Indian files of wildebeeste and dramatically-striped zebra. She had seen heron, stork and flamingo round the salt marshes, a secretary bird dancing a queer long-legged dance round its victim, strings of guinea fowl like grey drops of quicksilver in the grass, widow birds trailing their long tail-feathers across the dusty earth, and red and gold finches that rose in clouds from the spruits as the pink flush of dawn flooded the tawny grassland with ruthless daylight.
She had felt the immensity of the veld right to her bones, and the clean clear sense, of elbow-room that came from the wide expanses of gently rolling land and the sight of the blue and purple hills, the absence of other people, and the wide bowl of the sky above her, cruel in its harsh brightness but surprisingly satisfying once you got used to it.
There were better places in the world than Plummerton West, she decided, and hopefully set her face to the future and the problem of achieving them.
It was without regret that she tossed the concertina into the water, watching the spreading circles of ripples moving swiftly, as though they swept the past away from her into a faded unreality as insubstantial as the dying wavelets.
The bony grey was waiting quietly by the stream, tethered to a thorn tree, wearing a device across its back which Sammy had constructed of rope and pieces of blanket. The parcels with which it was slung seemed to indicate a bleaker life but Polly felt no twinges of regret.
While she stood staring at the old horse, Sammy came scrambling along the river bank on the Argentine As he reached the cart, he plunged into the stream, sending the water flying, and stopped abruptly beside her.
‘Poll,’ he panted, ‘they’ve got south and west of us!’
Polly’s heart sank, all the warm enthusiasm of her daydreams lost in a twinge of fear. ‘I thought we’d thrown ‘em off,’ she said heavily.
‘So did I. But I rid in a big circle looking for a track, and I saw ‘em. The main party’s west of us, but there’s some horses to the south as well.’
‘What the hell are they up to?’ Polly snapped, her temper rising.
‘I dunno. I think they’re trying now to drive us over to German South-West. But we’ve made ‘em think a bit because we’ve got on the wrong side of ‘em.’
‘What are we going to do then?’ Polly asked. ‘I wish we could do something. I’m tired and I’m fed up with hiding.’
There was a sick sensation of disappointment in her heart, a conviction that somehow her newly-discovered ambitions were not to come to fruition.
Sammy was thinking, and when he raised his head, there was something in his eyes that withered the remaining hope in her. His face was calm and expressionless as he spoke, as though he had been thinking hard and had come to a decision that hadn’t been easy to make.
‘Polly,’ he said quietly, ‘I’m going to head back to Plummerton Sidings.’
Polly’s jaw dropped, and she stared at him for a moment, drained of emotion and emptied of ambition.
She brushed back a lock of hair from her face, her features devoid of enthusiasm, her eyes blank with a look of defeat.
‘Back?’ she said. ‘The way we came? After all we’ve been through?’
Sammy nodded, his gaze honest with the strength of his conviction. ‘We were wrong to come out here in the first place,’ he said.
‘Have you got the wind up or something?’ she demanded suddenly angry.
His eyes rested on hers, begging her to understand. ‘You know I haven’t,’ he said. ‘I mean, we should have gone to Plummerton and got it over with in the first place - not tried to dodge it.’ He gestured unhappily, as though he felt he was letting her down. ‘Maybe if they’d left us alone and let us go quietly to Kimberley,’ he went on, ‘I might have forgotten all about Willie Plummer. I was going to. God knows, I’d no reason to shop him. But this sort of thing kind of makes a man stubborn.’ His eyes seemed to grow oddly paler as the determination took hold of him. ‘They’re getting me mad now,’ he said. ‘I’m not going to be driven to German South-West. I’m not even going to Kimberley now.’
She stood staring at him, twisting a fold of her dress between her fingers, her eyes soft and tragic.
‘It’s my fault, Sammy,’ she said. ‘I shouldn’t ever have persuaded you.’
‘Forget it, Poll,’ he said shortly. ‘I’d probably have changed me own mind, if you hadn’t changed it for me. But that’s finished with now. I’m going back.’
‘I thought they wanted you out of the way, Sammy.’
‘They do. They still do.’
‘Suppose they tried to knock you off, Sammy. They might have a go.’
Sammy’s face grew hard. ‘They wouldn’t dare,’ he said. ‘They’d better not try. Damn ‘em, they’ve tried everything short of pushing us off the edge of the earth. Well, they’ve brought it on themselves. They should have left us alone. I’m going right back to Plummerton and they can sort it out as it pleases ‘em!’ He paused. ‘I’ll see you safely to the Sidings and on your way, Polly,’ he ended flatly.
She gazed at him for a while. The exultation she had felt that they had put Plummerton behind them had died, and she could taste the acid sourness of disillusion. But Sammy’s face, with its pale ugly eyes determined, made her bite back her protest. She wiped her sweat-damp palms on her skirt.
‘That’s all right, Sammy,’ she said slowly. ‘We’ll go back to Plummerton.’
She tried to smile but managed only a twisted shadow across her lips. When she didn’t stir, he moved restlessly in the saddle.
‘We ought to get moving,’ he pointed out.
Polly was looking at the concertina in the water and, ignoring him, she waded out to it and picked it up, watching the bright streams fall from it.
‘Looks like I’m going to need it after all,’ she said heavily.
She laid it across the back of the little mare then, releasing her skirt so that it fell into the water and clung wetly round her ankles, she held the instrument in place with one hand and reached up for the reins with the other.
‘I’ll pick up a train to Kimberley from the Sidings,’ she said, knowing that once she returned, she probably never would.
Sammy was trying to read what was going on behind the fleeting expressions on her face, then he swung down from the saddle and pointed.
‘We’ll ride north from here,’ he said, ‘then turn east and see what happens.’
‘They’ll pick up the tracks, won’t they, Sammy? Same as before?’
He shrugged. ‘Mebbe,’ he said. ‘What’s the odds though? I’m not bothered much either way anymore. I’m going back. I’ve made up my mind.’
She scooped up her dripping skirt again and waded towards him, leading the grey mare.
Sammy was stuffing the last of the cartridges into his pockets now. He had on the old pepper and salt coat which was too small for him again, and she could see the pockets were stuffed full and heavy, and she guessed it was ammunition.
‘I could do with a bunk up,’ she suggested, eyeing the assorted packages draped from the mare. ‘It’s going to be awkward climbing up there with all the hardware in the way.’
