Sunset at Sheba (24 page)

He stopped his horse before O’Hare sitting in the tender, in his blue eyes the fixed gaze of the political zealot.

‘I’ve got to ask you where you’re going,’ O’Hare said. ‘This is an area of military operations.’

Fabricius wiped the brim of his hat again with his handkerchief and replaced it on his head.

‘De Wet’s come out of the Salt Pans,’ he said bluntly. ‘He surprised and destroyed a patrol that Ackermann left behind him at Kadhanzi.’

‘How do you know?’

‘A runner arrived in Plummerton Sidings last night.’

‘Does Ackermann know?’

Fabricius’ face altered subtly. ‘It isn’t my duty to act as informer to the British,’ he said.

O’Hare gestured wearily, as though waving aside the hatred in Fabricius’ face. ‘Where are you going now?’ he demanded.

Fabricius’ expression changed secretively again. ‘With the grace of God,’ he said, ‘I’m proposing to protect a few relatives in the area of operations - as are also the rest of us - from the depredations of
both
sides.’

‘You wouldn’t be thinking of joining De Wet, would you?’ O’Hare asked shrewdly.

Fabricius paused, then nodded towards the wounded, watching from behind O’Hare in the tender. ‘By the look of your party, Lieutenant, you’re in no state to stop us if we were.’

‘O’Hare flushed. ‘Where’s De Wet now?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know. But it’ll be a couple of days before Ackermann can be up on him again.’

O’Hare frowned. ‘We can handle De Wet,’ he said with a boldness that even Polly could see he didn’t feel just then.

‘From what Ackermann said, you had already,’ Fabricius commented. ‘But he’s on the move again, in spite of it.’

He glanced at the wounded men in the tender and at O’Hare’s bandaged knee.

‘One would almost have thought you’d bumped into one of his outposts yourself, Lieutenant,’ he commented.

‘Another affair,’ O’Hare muttered. ‘Nothing to do with De Wet.’

‘Schuter?’

As Fabricius spoke Sammy’s name, Polly’s eyes gleamed. Ever since Kitto had first told her she would have to go back to Plummerton Sidings, her mind had been full of half-formed plans for recruiting help. Almost the first thing that had occurred to her in her misery was that Fabricius might be called upon to assist. Knowing his interest in Sammy, he seemed the obvious man to help, and finding him here now lifted her heart with new hope. Whatever else he might choose to do in the face of Kitto’s formidable force, she knew that at least he was in a position to rouse sufficient public opinion to make the activity at Sheba politically dangerous.

O’Hare was looking up at Fabricius now, his hand moving slowly up and down across the bandages on his knee. ‘That sounds like his name,’ he was saying. ‘How do you know about him?’

‘People talk. You look as though you’ve been roughly handled.’

‘He’s up on Sheba,’ O’Hare said sullenly.

‘
“Whoever commands the heights commands the plains,”
‘ Fabricius said. ‘An old maxim the Boer nation used to advantage in two wars with the British.’

O’Hare flushed. ‘Sheba’s a damned awkward place to get at,’ he said with a youthful indignation. ‘It’s only got one slope. The rest’s sheer.’

He stared aggressively at Fabricius for a moment then, wearying of the argument, he raised his hand in a brief gesture of salute.

The Boer nodded, accepting his dismissal, and turned away.

‘Bastard,’ Polly heard O’Hare mutter. ‘I’ll bet he’s going to join De Wet.’ His face wore the baffled expression of a man finding himself involved in civil war and not completely understanding the problem of identifying friend from enemy in a land where all men carried guns.

As Fabricius replaced his hat and loosened his reins, Polly pushed past the men grouped round the tender and ran towards the horsemen. One of them grabbed at her but she brushed his hand aside and stopped in the dry grass before Fabricius, who was swinging his horse in a slow contemptuous circle.

‘Mr Fabricius,’ she called, her eyes bright, her face full of eager hope. ‘Mr Fabricius!’

The Boer jerked his horse’s head up and waited for her.

‘Mr Fabricius,’ she said, reaching for his stirrup. ‘I’ll show you where Sammy Schuter is. They’ve got him trapped up there on Sheba.’

Fabricius’ face hardened. ‘I can do nothing for Sammy Schuter,’ he said coldly, and Polly’s face fell.

‘But I thought you wanted him! They’re trying to kill him!’

‘My authority doesn’t cover the military,
mejuffrouw,’
Fabricius pointed out.

‘But if you want him -’

Fabricius’ face had lost its smooth legal expression and had become icy with the hatred of generations.

‘If there’s anything that I - or any other true Transvaaler for that matter - enjoys seeing,’ he said, ‘it’s the English quarrelling among themselves and trying to kill each other.
“God hath prepared for the wicked the instruments of death.”
‘

‘If you don’t come soon it’ll be too late!’

Fabricius gestured with the rifle, almost as though he were brushing her aside.

‘I needed Schuter,’ he said, ‘for the evidence he could give which might have become a rallying cry for my people. But with the military between us, he’s beyond my reach now.’

‘You’re a lawyer! You know what to do! Isn’t there somebody you can tell?’

‘It’s best that it’s left as it is. It was the English who decided it should be resolved in this way.’ Fabricius shrugged. ‘ “
Who so diggeth a pit shall fall therein!”
‘

Polly’s hands had fallen to her side and she stood before the lawyer, her eyes big and appealing, begging him mutely to help her.

He paused before he went on, one hand stroking his horse’s neck. ‘With the name he’s got and the life he’s led, we could easily make him one of us,
mejuffrouw.’

Polly’s face was blank and bewildered. ‘I don’t understand,’ she said.

Fabricius lifted the hand holding the reins and his horse began to move forward slowly.

‘Patriotism makes use of the strangest weapons,’ he said. ‘He’ll make a most satisfactory martyr.’

Polly ran after him. ‘But he’s not Dutch!’

‘He will be.
After he’s dead.’

Fabricius put his hat on, his face stony, and kicked his horse into a gallop. As he rejoined his followers, they all turned in silence, swinging inwards into a bunch, and cantered quickly away behind him.

Polly halted, the dry grass brushing her skirt, and stared after them, shocked into muteness by the cold-bloodedness of their politics.

O’Hare watched her come to a stop, then he nodded to the driver of the Napier and the vehicle moved up towards her.

She was still staring after Fabricius, her eyes bright and unhappy, anger and misery flushing her cheeks.

‘Damn your bloody patriotism,’ she was saying bitterly. She turned away, blinded with tears, to find the tender alongside her.

‘What’s the trouble?’ O’Hare asked gently.

‘Nothing! Nothing, damn you! Nothing that would interest anybody who’s not human. Only a matter of life and death, that’s all.’

O’Hare stared after her as she moved away, his face pale and strained. Then he shifted uncomfortably in his seat, his teeth clamped on his lower lip in pain as his fingers plucked restlessly at his bandages.

‘I suppose we’d better push on,’ he said uncertainly, half to himself, embarrassed by Polly’s remark.

‘What about the pom-pom, sir?’ The corporal had ridden slowly up alongside. ‘Won’t Colonel Ackermann want it?’

O’Hare’s pain-dimmed eyes clouded, and he paused, unsure of himself, his wound making him unable to make up his mind with any conviction.

‘We’ve got to get this lot to hospital,’ he said. ‘There’s a couple of ‘em pretty bad. We’d probably do well to warn Ackermann too.’ He stared after Fabricius. ‘That damn’ lot are obviously going to tell De Wet where he is,’ he added shrewdly. ‘Their saddlebags were full, I noticed. A sack of meal, biltong and a box of cartridges, I’ll bet.’

He stared after the retreating horsemen then back in the direction they had come, uneasy, limited in his knowledge of the wider complications of military strategy and uncertain what to do for the best.

‘I reckon we’d better carry on,’ he decided finally. ‘Ackermann will want to know.’

The Napier’s engine roared as the driver moved the throttle and it rolled across the uneven ground to where Polly was standing.

The corporal moved up, leading her horse, and passed her the reins.

‘I’ll be obliged if you’ll get aboard, Miss Bolt,’ O’Hare said with a stiff boyish dignity. ‘We’d like to get along now.’

She pulled herself slowly into the saddle, and settled herself, not looking at him, her eyes still on the dwindling cloud of dust thrown up by Fabricius and his little commando.

Her mind was stiff with the knowledge that there was nothing she could do now - nothing. Fabricius’ refusal had made it perfectly clear that whatever she might attempt when she reached Plummerton there was no one there who could save Sammy Schuter. She stared at O’Hare and the corporal with a bitter dislike then, making up her mind quickly, she swung the horse round, sawing savagely at the reins as she spun it on its heels.

‘Here’ - the corporal saw the move too late and tried to head her off -- ‘where do you think you’re going?’

She had clapped her heels into the horse’s flanks now and was clattering down the rise in a flat gallop the corporal couldn’t hope to match with his injured leg, heading away from the cloud of dust Fabricius had left.

‘Come back here!’

The Army Service Corps driver circled the Napier up alongside the corporal.

‘Let her go, Corporal,’ O’Hare said wearily. He indicated the stripes on the corporal’s arm. ‘You won’t lose your skaters for her. She can do no harm and she’s not our concern. We’ve got a job to do that’s more important than a little tart who got herself mixed up with a murderer.’

When Polly hauled in the gasping horse alongside the small Egyptian cotton tent they had pitched for a headquarters, the top of Sheba was already apricot-tinted with the lowering sun.

Soldiers ran up to meet her as she reined in, and one of the troopers grabbed at her bridle as she came to a stop.

The big figure of Le Roux appeared beside her, his pale eyes glittering in a grinning face.

‘So you couldn’t do without us,’ he said, reaching up. ‘Let Fricki Le Roux lift you down.’

‘I’ll get down myself, thank you,’ she snapped, lashing at him with the slack of the reins. ‘You keep your dirty hands to yourself!’

His face went dark but as he grabbed her and dragged her struggling from the horse, Winter came up behind him immediately and grabbed the collar of his shirt.

Le Roux’s grip relaxed at once and Polly stumbled free. As Winter released him, Le Roux rubbed his throat.

‘Ach,
throw her to the boys,
jong,’
he snarled, his sullen face red. ‘A woman like her don’t deserve mercy.’

He turned to Polly, his pale eyes cold. ‘It’s a good job for you,’ he went on slowly, ‘that we’ve got an audience. I’ll see you tonight after I come off duty on the horse lines.’

Polly stared after him as he turned away. ‘Thanks, Mr Winter,’ she said shakily. ‘I suppose he reckons I’m fair game, and maybe I am. All the same, if I’d been properly dressed then he’d ‘a’ got a hatpin in his eye for his trouble.’

His lean face set, Kitto pushed angrily through the group of men round Winter, and stopped in front of Polly. ‘What the devil are you doing back here?’ he demanded.

‘I came back because you’re trying to kill him,’ Polly said fiercely. For the life of her, now that she was in the camp again she couldn’t think of any other sensible reason for her impulsive valueless gesture, nothing beyond a vague hope that by her presence she might prevent murder. She had an uneasy sense still of having betrayed Sammy and felt the need to make amends by suffering with him.

‘We can do without women around at a time like this,’ Kitto was saying waspishly. ‘I’ve a damned good mind -’ he stopped, at a loss to know what to do, aware that he couldn’t put her under arrest or confine her physically.

‘Keep her out of my way, Winter,’ he said finally in a harsh voice. ‘We’ll take her back with us tomorrow. It’ll be all over then. The men have got their tails up now.’

Polly choked with anger. ‘My God,’ she said, ‘you’ve even got a timetable for it!’

The wind was rising a little now, blowing the dust in swirls through the camp, and ruffling the bloody pinions of the few vultures still crouching among the remains of the dead horses, too gorged to move.

The troopers sat in the fading light, huddled in blankets more to keep out the flying particles of sand than for warmth, wiping the dirt from their weapons and drinking strong coffee full of grounds and yellow with tinned milk. The Kaffirs were preparing a meal at a string of smoking fires and the Army Service Corps mechanics probed gingerly at the engine of Kitto’s Rolls-Royce alongside which Plummer’s two vehicles, as though recruited into the army, had been parked with geometrical precision, canvas covers stretched over the open tonneaus to keep out the dirt.

In the horse lines, the animals had humbly turned their rumps to the weather and bowed their heads, their tails whipped along their bodies by the wind. Kitto was standing alone in the tent, his eyes on the angular shadow of the pompom beyond the abandoned armoured car. His head was bent to avoid the flypaper one of the Kaffir servants had hung from the apex of the canvas, and his hand rested on an oilcloth-covered table spread with maps and scattered with binoculars, compasses and weapons. For the last hour he had been studying his watch, his thin, too-handsome figure fidgeting to finish off the affair before it got out of hand.

There had been no attempt all day from either side to move into the open, and the gun had stood in the sunshine, the heat haze over the metal almost fluidly solid in the glare. Then towards the end of the afternoon the wind had crept round to the north-west, bringing the dust down from the Kalahari, and the sand had begun to pile up against its wheels and find its way into every cranny and corner and sift in little dunes on the mudguards of the armoured car.