Sunset at Sheba (23 page)

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.

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.’

‘Frightened I’ll nip off back?’

O’Hare shook his head with the exhausted petulance of a man in pain. ‘Personally I don’t give a damn if you
do
nip off,’ he said. ‘But I’ve been told to get you back into Plummerton and that’s what I intend to do.’

Sheba receded slowly into the distance and the men in the tender, stupefied by the heat of the sun and uncomfortable with their wounds, stopped their catcalling. They sat now, smoking, their heads rolling to the shaking of the wheels over the rough ground, cursing at every small boulder that jolted their injuries.

Soon after midday they stopped for a meal of coffee and tinned meat and biscuits, those who could climb down from the tender helping those who couldn’t, and afterwards they stretched out in what little shade the tender gave and dragged out their pipes.

‘Going back into business in Plummerton, Poll?’ one of them asked her as she scoured out the cooking pot with sand.

‘None of your affair,’ she snapped back, thinking with a touch of misery that what he had suggested was probably what
would
happen to her. There had been a chance once -not so long ago - that Sammy might at last settle down after his fashion, for there was much they could have done together. There was money in Kimberley for a man who could shoot like Sammy could, and plenty of work for a woman without her having to degrade herself. Fifty years old now, its raucous past long forgotten, Kimberley was a growing city with all its wood and iron buildings gone, and the gum trees tall and straight in its streets. There might have been so much hope in Kimberley.

Polly sighed and climbed to her feet as they began to strike camp.

They had loaded their belongings into the Napier again and got everyone aboard when she heard one of the men shout, and looked up to see the occupants of the tender staring across the veld towards a group of horsemen who were riding towards them.

It was obvious immediately that they were Boers. Even at a distance, Boers looked different with their slouching seat. One or two of the men scrambled awkwardly out of the tender again and stood waiting, their pipes in their mouths, their eyes squinting against the sun.

‘De Wet,’ someone said, putting into words the fear that was at the back of all their minds.

‘God help us, if it is,’ O’Hare commented. ‘He hasn’t been showing much mercy round here.’

The Boers approached with dash and pulled up thirty yards away, a group of drab-looking men in broad-brimmed hats, store suits and cord trousers. There was nothing military about their looks, but in the way they handled their horses and guns there was an air of supreme confidence.

‘Finest light cavalry in the world,’ O’Hare said with a pride in his race he obviously found hard to hold back. ‘Every damned man of them springs from the Voortrekkers who fought against the Kaffirs. Weaklings didn’t survive that sort of work. Wonder what they’re up to.’

He called out to them in English as they approached, asking them what their errand was, and one of the horsemen drew out from the jostling group and cantered towards him. As he took off his broad-brimmed hat and wiped the sweat from the leather lining, Polly saw it was Fabricius. She knew him well by sight, had seen him addressing outdoor meetings in Plummerton and involved in more than one disturbance, calm among the rowdies who were causing the trouble. He had left the smart suit he usually wore behind him now and was dressed in a thick flannel shirt and cord breeches. A rifle lay crosswise on the saddle, and in his belt there was a heavy hunting knife. With that incredibly swift transformation of the Boer commandos, he had left behind the smooth lawyer and become a hard-hitting fighting man.