A Falcon Flies (56 page)

‘Where is the medicine, the
umuthi
, of Manali?'

‘It was long ago finished, together with the powder and shot for the gun. Everything was finished long ago,' the woman shook her head, ‘long, long ago, and when it was finished, the people no longer came with gifts to feed us.' It was suicidal to remain in a malarial area without supplies of quinine. Fuller Ballantyne of all people knew that. The acknowledged world expert on malarial fever and its treatment – how could he have neglected his own often-repeated advice. She found the reasons almost immediately, as she opened his mouth, forcing open his lower jaw despite his feeble protests.

Most of his teeth had been rotted out by the disease, and his throat and palate were covered by the characteristic lesions. She released his jaw, allowing him to close the ruined mouth, and gently she touched the bridge of his nose, feeling the soggy collapsing bone and gristle. There could be no doubt at all, the disease was far advanced, had long ago begun its final assault upon the once magnificent brain. It was syphilis, in the terminal stages, the general paralysis of the insane. The disease of the lonely man that led inevitably to this lonely madman's death.

As Robyn worked, so her horror and revulsion gave way swiftly to the compassion of the healer, to the sympathy of one who had lived with human weakness and folly and had come far along the road of understanding. She knew now why her father had not turned back when his supplies of vital medicines ran perilously low, the half-destroyed brain had not recognized the dangers which he had previously described so clearly.

She found herself praying for him as she worked, praying silently but with the words coming more readily than they usually did.

‘Judge him as he was, Oh Lord, judge him by his service in your name – not by his small sins, but by his great achievements. Look not upon this ruined pathetic thing, but on the strong and vital man who carried your work forward without flinching.'

As she prayed, she lifted the heavy kaross off his legs, and the smell of corruption made her blink and the frail figure began immediately to struggle with renewed strength, that needed both Juba and the Mashona woman to control.

Robyn stared at the legs, and realized the other reason why her father had never left this land. He had been physically unable to do so. The splints that held the leg had been whittled out of native timber. The leg had been fractured, probably at more than one place below the hip. Perhaps the hip joint itself had gone, that vulnerable neck of the femur. But what was certain was that the breaks had not mended cleanly. Perhaps the bindings of the splints had been too tight, for the deep suppurating ulcerations went down to the very bone, and the smell was a solid jarring thing.

Quickly she covered his lower body, there was nothing she could do until she had her medical chest and instruments, and now she was merely inflicting unnecessary pain and humiliation. Her father was still struggling and bleating like a petulant child, rolling his head from side to side, the toothless mouth darkly agape.

The Mashona woman leaned over him, and took one of her own dark tight breasts in her hand, squeezing out the nipple between her fingers, and then she paused and looked up shyly, imploringly at Robyn.

Only then did Robyn understand, and respecting the privacy of woman and the poor maimed thing that had been her father, she dropped her eyes and turned away towards the entrance of the cave.

‘I must fetch my
umuthi
. I will return here later tonight.'

Behind her, the childlike bleats gave way abruptly to small snuffling sounds of comfort.

Robyn felt no shock or outrage as she went down the steep pathway in the moonlight. Instead she felt immense pity for Fuller Ballantyne who had made the full circle back to infancy. She felt also a deep gratitude to the woman, and a sense of wonder at her loyalty and dedication. How long had she stayed on with Fuller Ballantyne after all reason for staying was gone?

She remembered her own mother, and her devotion to the same man, she remembered Sarah and her child still waiting patiently beside a far-off river. And then there was Robyn herself, come so far and so determinedly. Fuller Ballantyne always had the power to attract as powerfully as he could repel.

H
olding Juba's hand for her own comfort as well as that of the child, Robyn hurried along the moonlit path on the bank of the river, and with relief saw the glow of the camp fires in the forest ahead of her. On the return journey she would have bearers to carry her medical chest, and armed Hottentot musketeers as escort.

Her relief was short-lived, for as she answered the challenge of the Hottentot sentry and entered the circle of firelight, a familiar figure rose from beside the camp fire and came striding to meet her, tall and powerful, golden-bearded and handsome as a god from Greek mythology, and every bit as wrathful.

‘Zouga!' she gasped. ‘I didn't expect you.'

‘No,' he agreed icily. ‘I'm sure that you did not.'

‘Why?' she thought desperately. ‘Why must he come now? Why not a day later, when I have had time to clean and treat my father? Oh God, why now? Zouga will never understand – Never! Never! Never!'

R
obyn and her escort could not hope to keep pace with Zouga. They fell swiftly behind him as he climbed the pathway in the night, months of hard hunting had toned him to the peak of physical condition and he ran at the hill.

She had not been able to warn him. What words were there to describe the creature in the cave on the hilltop. She had told him simply:

‘I have found Pater.'

It had deflected his anger instantly. The bitter accusations shrivelled on his tongue, and the realization dawned in his eyes.

They had found Fuller Ballantyne. They had accomplished one of the three major objectives of the expedition. She knew that Zouga was already seeing it in print, almost composing the paragraph that would describe the moment, imagining the newspaper urchins shouting the headlines in the streets of London.

For the first time in her life she came close to hating her brother, and her voice was crisp as hoar-frost as she told him, ‘And don't you forget it was me. I was the one who made the march and broke trail, and I was the one who found him.'

She saw the shift in his green eyes in the firelight.

‘Of course, Sissy.' He smiled at her thinly, an obvious effort. ‘Who could ever forget that? Where is he?'

‘First I must assemble what I need.'

He had stayed with her until they reached the foot of the hill, and then had been unable to restrain himself. He had gone at the slope at a pace that none of them had been able to equal. Robyn came out in the little clearing in front of the cave. Her heart was racing and her breathing ragged from the climb so that she had to pause and fight for breath, holding one hand to her breast.

The fire in front of the cave had been built up to a fair blaze, but it left the depths of the cave in discreet shadow. Zouga stood in front of the fire. His back to the cave.

As Robyn regained her breath, she went forward. She saw that Zouga's face was deathly pale, in the firelight his sun-bronzing had faded to a muddy tone. He stood erect, as though on the parade ground, and he stared directly ahead of him.

‘Have you seen Pater?' Robyn asked. His distress and utter confusion gave her a sneaking and spiteful pleasure.

‘There is a native woman with him,' Zouga whispered, ‘in his bed.'

‘Yes,' Robyn nodded. ‘He is very sick. She is caring for him.'

‘Why did you not warn me?'

‘That he is sick?' she asked.

‘That he had gone native.'

‘He's dying, Zouga.'

‘What are we going to tell the world?'

‘The truth,' she suggested quietly. ‘That he is sick and dying.'

‘You must never mention the woman.' Zouga's voice, for the first time that she could remember, was uncertain, he seemed to be groping for words. ‘We must protect the family.'

‘Then what must we tell about his disease, the disease that is killing him?'

Zouga's eyes flickered to her face. ‘Malaria?'

‘The pox, Zouga. The French sickness, the Italian plague – or, if you prefer it, syphilis, Zouga. He is dying of syphilis.'

Zouga flinched, and then he whispered, ‘It's not possible.'

‘Why not, Zouga?' she asked. ‘He was a man, a great man – but a man nevertheless.' She stepped past him. ‘And now I have work to do.' An hour later when she looked for him again, Zouga had gone back down the hill to the camp beside the river pools. She remained to work over her father for the rest of that night and most of the following day.

By the time she had bathed and cleaned him, shaved off the infested body hair and trimmed the stringy beard and locks of yellowed hair, treated the ulcerations of his leg, she was exhausted both physically and emotionally. She had seen approaching death too many times not to recognize it now. She knew that all she could hope for was to give comfort and to smooth the lonely road that her father must travel.

When she had done all that was possible, she covered him with a clean blanket and then tenderly caressed the short soft hair which she had so lovingly trimmed. Fuller opened his eyes. They were a pale empty shade of blue, like an African summer sky. The last sunlight of the day was washing the cave, and as Robyn leaned over him, it sparkled in her hair in chips of ruby light.

She saw something move in the empty eyes, a shadow of the man who had once been there, and Fuller's lips parted. Twice he tried to speak and then he said one word, so husky and light that she missed it. Robyn leaned closer to him.

‘What is it?' she asked.

‘Helen!' This time clearer.

Robyn felt the tears choke up her throat at the sound of her mother's name.

‘Helen.' Fuller said it for the last time, and then the flicker of comprehension in his eyes was gone.

She stayed on beside him, but there was nothing more. That name had been the last link with reality and now the link was broken.

As the last light of the day faded, Robyn lifted her eyes from her father's face and for the first time realized that the tin chest was missing from the ledge at the back of the cave.

U
sing the lid of his own writing-case as a desk, screened from the camp by the thin wall of thatch, Zouga worked swiftly through the contents of the chest.

His horror at the discovery of his father had long ago been submerged by the fascination of the treasures which the chest contained. The disgust, the shame, would return again when he had time to think about it, he knew that. He knew also that there would be hard decisions to make then, and that he would have to use all his force of personality and of brotherly superiority to control Robyn, and make her agree to a common version of the discovery of Fuller Ballantyne and a tactful description of the circumstances to which he had been reduced.

The tin chest contained four leather and canvas-bound journals, each of five hundred pages, and the pages were covered on both sides either with writing or with hand-drawn maps. There was also a bundle of loose sheets, two or three hundred of them tied together with plaited bark string, and a cheap wooden pen case with a partition for spare nibs, and cut-outs for two ink bottles. One bottle was dry, and the pen nibs had obviously been sharpened many times, for they were almost worn away. Zouga sniffed the ink in the remaining bottle. It seemed to be an evil-smelling mixture, of fat and soot and vegetable dyes that Fuller had concocted when his supplies of the manufactured item were exhausted.

The last journal and most of the loose pages were written with this mixture, and they had faded and smeared, making the handwriting that much more difficult to decipher, for by this stage Fuller Ballantyne's hand had deteriorated almost as much as his mind. Whereas the first two journals were written in the small, precise and familiar script, this slowly turned into a loose sloping scrawl as uncontrolled as some of the ideas expressed by it. The history of his father's madness was plotted therein with sickening fascination.

The pages of the leatherbound journals were not numbered, and there were many gaps between the dates of one entry and the next, which made Zouga's work easier. He read swiftly, an art he had developed when acting as regimental intelligence officer with huge amounts of reading, reports, orders and departmental manuals to get through each day.

The first books of writing were ground that had been travelled before, meticulous observations of celestial position, of climate and altitude, backed up by shrewdly observed descriptions of terrain and population. Sandwiched between these were accusations and complaints about authority, whether it was the directors of the London Missionary Society, or ‘The Imperial Factor' as Fuller Ballantyne referred to the Foreign Secretary and his department in Whitehall.

There were detailed explanations of his reasons for leaving Tete and travelling south with a minimally equipped expedition, and then, quite suddenly, two pages devoted to an account of a sexual liaison with an ex-slave girl, an Angoni girl whom Fuller had christened ‘Sarah' and who he suspected was about to bear his child. His reasons for abandoning her at Tete were direct and without pretence. ‘I know that a woman, even a hardy native, carrying a child would delay me. As I am on God's work, I can brook no such check.'

Although what Zouga had seen on the hilltop should have conditioned him for this sort of revelation, still he could not bring himself to terms with it. Using his hunting-knife, whetted to a razor edge, he slit the offending pages from the journal, and as he crumpled them and threw them in the camp fire he muttered, ‘The old devil had no right to write this filth.'

Twice more he found sexual references which he removed from the journal, and by then the handwriting was showing the first deterioration, and passages of great lucidity were followed by wild ravings and the dreams and imaginings of a diseased mind.