The Leopard Hunts in Darkness (46 page)

‘Of course, it was a lie,’ he guessed flatly.

‘It was a lie,’ she admitted. ‘The Shona soldiers were waiting for me. Forgive me, lord.’

‘It does not matter any longer,’ he answered.

‘Not for me, lord,’ she pleaded. ‘Do not do anything for me. I am a daughter of Mashobane. I can bear anything these Shona animals can do to me.’

He shook his head sadly, and at last reached out and touched her lips with the tips of his fingers. His hand was trembling like that of a drunkard. She kissed his fingers. He dropped his hand
and, turning, trudged wearily back to the thatched shelter. The soldiers made no effort to prevent him.

Peter Fungabera looked up as he approached and motioned to the empty canvas chair. Tungata sat down and his body slumped.

‘First,’ Tungata said, ‘the woman must be untied and clothed.’

Peter gave the order. They covered her and led her away to one of the hutments.

‘My lord—’ she strained back against their grip, her face turned piteously to him.

‘She must not be ill-treated in any way.’

‘She has not been,’ Peter said. ‘She will not be, unless you make it necessary.’

He pushed a bowl of maize cake towards Tungata. He ignored it.

‘She must be taken out of the country and delivered to a representative of the international Red Cross in Francistown.’

‘There is a light aircraft waiting at Tuti airfield. Eat, Comrade, we must have you strong and well.’

‘When she is safe, she will speak to me – radio or telephone – and give me a code-word that I will arrange with her before she leaves.’

‘Agreed.’ He poured hot sweet tea for Tungata.

‘We will be left alone together to agree on the code.’

‘You may speak to her, of course,’ Peter nodded. ‘But in the middle of this parade ground. None of my men will be closer than a hundred yards to you, but there will be a
machine-gun trained upon you at all times. I will allow you precisely five minutes with the woman.’

‘I
have failed you,’ Sarah said, and Tungata had forgotten how beautiful she was. His whole being ached with longing for her.

‘No,’ he told her, ‘it was inevitable. There is no blame to you. It was for duty, not for yourself that you came out of hiding.’

‘My lord, what can I do now?’

‘Listen,’ he said, and spoke quietly and quickly. ‘Some of my trusted people have escaped from the scourge of Fungabera’s Third Brigade – you must find them. I
believe they are in Botswana.’ He gave her the names and she repeated them faithfully. ‘Tell them—’ She memorized all that he told her, and repeated it to him perfectly.

From the corner of his eye Tungata saw the guards at the edge of the parade ground start towards where they stood alone in the centre. Their five minutes together was up.

‘When you are safe, they will allow us to speak on the radio. To let me know that all is well, you will repeat to me, “Your beautiful bird has flown high and swiftly”. Repeat
it.’

‘Oh my lord,’ she choked.

‘Repeat it!’

She obeyed, and then flung herself into his arms. She clung to him, and he to her.

‘Will I ever see you again?’

‘No,’ he told her. ‘You must forget me.’

‘Never!’ she cried. ‘Not if I live to be an old woman – never, my lord.’

The guards dragged them apart. A Land-Rover drove out onto the parade ground. They hustled Sarah into it.

The last he saw of her was her face in the rear window, looking back at him – her beautiful beloved face.

O
n the third day, they came to fetch Tungata from his cell and take him up to Peter Fungabera’s command post on the central kopje.

‘The woman is ready to speak to you. You will converse only in English. Your conversation will be recorded.’ Peter indicated the transistor tape deck beside the radio apparatus.
‘If you do attempt to slip in any Sindebele message, it will be translated later.’

‘The code we have arranged is in Sindebele,’ Tungata told him. ‘She will have to repeat it.’

‘Very well. That is acceptable, but nothing else.’ He looked Tungata over critically. ‘I am delighted to see you looking so well again, Comrade, a little good food and rest
have worked wonders.’

Tungata wore faded suntans, but they were freshly laundered and pressed. He was still gaunt and wasted, but his skin had lost the dusty grey look and his eyes were clear and bright. The swelling
of the adder bite on his cheek had abated, and the scab covering it looked dry and healthy.

Peter Fungabera nodded to the guard captain and he passed the radio microphone to Tungata and pressed the ‘record’ button on the tape deck.

‘This is Tungata Zebiwe.’

‘My lord, this is Sarah.’ Her voice was scratchy and distorted by static, but he would have known it anywhere. The ache of longing filled his chest.

‘Are you safe?’

‘I am in Francistown. The Red Cross are caring for me.’

‘Do you have a message?’

She replied in Sindebele. ‘Your beautiful bird has flown high and swiftly.’ Then she added, ‘I have met others here. Do not despair.’

‘That is good – I want you to—’

Peter Fungabera reached across and took the microphone from his hand. ‘Excuse me, Comrade, but I am paying for the call.’ He held the microphone to his lips and depressed the
transmit button. ‘Transmission ends,’ he said, and broke the connection.

He tossed the microphone casually to the guard captain. ‘Have the tape translated – by one of the Matabele trusties – and bring me a copy immediately.’ Then he turned
back to Tungata.

‘Your little holiday is over, Comrade, now you and I have work to do. Shall we go?’

H
ow long would he be able to draw out the search for Lobengula’s grave, Tungata wondered. For every hour he could gain would have value
– another hour of life, another hour of hope.

‘It is almost twenty years since my grandfather took me to visit the site. My memory is unclear—’

‘Your memory is as brilliant as that sun up there,’ Peter told him. ‘You are renowned for your ability to remember places and faces and names, Comrade, you forget that I have
heard you speak in the Assembly, without notes. Besides which, you will have a helicopter to ferry you directly to the site.’

‘That will not work. The first time I went was on foot. I must go back the same way. I would not recognize the landmarks from the air.’

So they went back along the dirt roads that Tungata and old Gideon had bussed over so many years before, and Tungata genuinely could not find the starting place – the fall of rocks in the
old river course and the kopje shaped like an elephant’s head. They spent three days searching, with Peter Fungabera becoming more and more short-tempered and disbelieving, before they
stopped at the tiny village and trading-store that was the last reference point that Tungata could remember.

‘Hau! The old road. Yes, the bridge was washed away many years ago. It was never used again. Now the new road goes so and so—’

They found the overgrown track at last and four hours later reached the dry river-bed. The old bridge had collapsed into a heap of shattered concrete already overgrown with lianas, but the rock
wall upstream was exactly as Tungata had remembered it and he experienced a pang of nostalgia. Suddenly old Gideon seemed very close to him, so much so that he glanced around and made a small sign
with his right hand to appease the ancestral spirits and whispered, ‘Forgive me, Baba, that I am going to betray the oath.’

Strangely the presence that he sensed was benign and fondly indulgent, as Old Gideon had always been. ‘The path lies this way.’ They left the Land-Rover at the broken bridge and
continued on foot.

Tungata led with two armed troopers at his back. He set an easy pace, that chafed Peter Fungabera who followed behind the guards. As they went, Tungata could allow his imagination to wander
freely. He seemed to be part of the exodus of the Matabele people of almost a hundred years before, an embodiment of Gandang, his great-great-grandfather, faithful and loyal to the end. He felt
again the despair of a defeated people and the terror of the hard-riding white pursuit that might appear at any instant from the forest behind them, with their chattering three-legged machine-guns.
He seemed to hear the lament of the women and the small children, the lowing of herds as they faltered and fell in this hard and bitter country.

When the last of the draught oxen were dead, Gandang had ordered the warriors of his famous Inyati regiment into the traces of the king’s remaining wagon. Tungata imagined the king, obese
and diseased and doomed, sitting up on the rocking wagon box staring into the forbidding north, a man caught up in the millstones of history and destiny and crushed between them.

‘And now the final betrayal,’ Tungata thought, bitterly. ‘I am leading these Shona animals to disturb his rest once again.’

Three times, deliberately, he took the wrong path, drawing it out to the very limit of Peter Fungabera’s patience. The third time, Peter Fungabera ordered him stripped naked and his wrists
and ankles bound together, then he had stood over him with a cured hippo-hide whip, the vicious kiboko that the Arab slave-traders had introduced to Africa, and he thrashed Tungata like a dog until
his blood dripped into the sandy grey earth.

It was the shame and humiliation of the beating rather than the pain that had made Tungata turn back and pick up his landmarks again. When he reached the hill at last, it appeared ahead of them
with all the suddenness that Tungata recalled so vividly from his first visit.

They had been following a deep gorge of black rock, polished by the roaring torrential spates of the millennia. The depths were studded with stagnant green pools in which giant whiskered catfish
stirred the scummy surface as they rose to feed, and lovely swallow-tailed butterflies floated in the heated air above, gems of scarlet and iridescent blue.

They came around a bend in the gorge, clambering over boulders the size and the colour of elephants, and abruptly the surrounding cliffs opened and the forest fell back. Before them, like a vast
monument to dwarf the pyramids of the pharaohs, the hill of Lobengula rose into the sky.

The cliffs were sheer and daubed with lichens of twenty different shades of yellow and ochre and malachite. There was a breeding colony of vultures in the upper ledges, the parent birds sailing
gracefully out over the heated void, tipping their wings in the rising thermals as they banked and spiralled.

‘There it is,’ Tungata murmured. ‘
Thabas Nkosi
, the hill of the king.’

The natural pathway to the summit followed a fault in the rock face where limestone overlaid the country rock. At places it was steep and daunting and the troopers, weighted with packs and
weapons, glanced nervously over the drop and hugged the inner wall of rock as they edged upwards, but Peter Fungabera and Tungata climbed easily and sure-footed over even the worse places, leaving
the escort far below.

‘I could throw him over the edge,’ Tungata thought, ‘if I can take him unawares.’ He glanced back and Peter was ten paces below him. He had the Tokarev pistol in his
right hand and he smiled like a mamba.

‘No,’ he warned, and they understood each other without further words. For the moment Tungata put away the thought of vengeance and went on upwards. He turned a corner in the rock
and they came out onto the crown of the hill, five hundred feet above the dark gorge.

Standing a little apart, both of them sweating lightly in the white sunlight, they looked down into the deep wide valley of the Zambezi. On the edge of their vision, the wide waters of the
man-made lake of Kariba glinted softly through the haze of heat and blue smoke from the first bush-fires of the dry season. The troopers came off the path with transparent relief, and Peter
Fungabera looked expectantly at Tungata.

‘We are ready to go on, Comrade.’

‘There is not much further to go,’ Tungata answered him.

Over the crest of the cliff the rock formation had eroded and broken up into buttress and tumbled ramparts, the trees that had found purchase in the cracks and crevices had intertwined their
root systems over the rock-face like mating serpents, while their stems were thickened and deformed by the severe conditions of heat and drought.

Tungata led them through the broken rock and tortured forest, into the mouth of a ravine. At the head of the ravine grew an ancient
ficus Natalensis
, the strangler fig tree, its fleshy
limbs of blotched yellow loaded with bunches of bitter fruit. As they approached it a flock of brown parrots, green wings flagged with bright yellow, that had been feasting on the wild figs,
exploded into flight. At the base of the
ficus
tree, the cliff was segmented, and the roots had found the cracks and forced them apart.

Tungata stood before the cliff and Peter Fungabera, suppressing an exclamation of impatience, glanced at him and saw his lips were moving silently, in a prayer or entreaty. Peter Fungabera began
to examine the cliff-face more carefully, and realized with rising excitement that the cracks in the rock were too regular to be natural.

‘Here!’ he shouted to his troopers, and when they hurried forward, he pointed out one of the blocks in the face, and they set to work on it with bayonets and bare hands.

Within fifteen minutes of sweaty labour, they had worked the block free, and it was now clear that the face was in reality a wall of carefully fitted masonry. In the depths of the aperture left
by the block, they could make out a second wall of masonry.

‘Bring the prisoner,’ Peter ordered. ‘He will work in the front rank.’

By the time it was too dark to go on, they had opened an aperture just wide enough for two men to work shoulder to shoulder in the outer wall, and had begun on the inner wall. In the forefront,
Tungata was able to confirm what he had guessed on his first visit to the tomb so long ago – the signs that he had noticed then and concealed from old grandfather Gideon were even more
apparent on the inner wall of the tomb. They helped salve his conscience and ease the pain of oath-breaking.