Текст книги "Leopard Hunts in Darkness"

Автор книги: Wilbur Smith

Соавторы: Wilbur Smith
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"Both the apprentices and Taka-Taka overlooked one of the diamonds," Tungata said softly. "We found the clay shards and a single diamond where they had left it."

"Now you may go to sleep if you are still weary, Nkosi." Vusamanzi gave his permission with a gleam in his rheumy old eyes. "What? You want to hear more? There is nothing else to tell. The tale is finished."

"Where did they take the king's body?" Tungata asked.

"Do you know the place, my wise and revered old father?" Vusamanzi grinned. "It is indeed an unexpected pleasure to find respect and honour for age in the young people of this new age, but to answer your question, son of Kumalo: I do know where the king's body is. The secret was passed to me by my father!

"Can you lead me to the place?"

"Di I not te you that mis place in which we now sit "14 is sacred? It is sacred for good reason!

"My God I"

"Herel both Craig and Tungata exclaimed together I and Vusamanzi cackled happily and hugged his bony old knees, well pleased with their reaction.

"In the morning I will take you to view the site of the king's grave," he promised, "but now my throat is dry with too much talking. Pass the beer-pot to an old man." hen Craig woke, the first morning light was diffusing through the hole in the roof of the I! Tcavern, milky and blued by the smoke from the cooking-fire where the girls were busy preparing the morning meal.

While they breakfasted, and with Vusamanzi's reluctant permission, Craig related in English the outlines of the tale of Loberigula's reburial to Sarah and Sally-Anne. They were both enthralled, and immediately on fire to join the expedition.

"It is a difficult place to reach," the old man buffed, "and it is not for the eyes of mere womenfolk." But Sarah smiled "s head and whispered in her sweetest, stroked the old man his ear, and finally, after a further show of gruff severity, he relented.

Under Vusamanzi's direction, the men made a few simple preparations for the expedition. In one of the ancillary branches of the cavern beneath a flat stone was a hidey, hole containing another kerosene lantern, two native axes and three large coils of good-quality nylon rope which the old man clearly prized highly.

"We liberated this fine rope from the army of Smithy during the bush war," he boasted.

"One great blow for freedom," Craig murmured, and Sally-Anne frowned him to silence.

They set off down one of the branches of the cavern, Vusamanzi leading and carrying one of the lanterns followed by Tungata with one of the rope coils, the girls in the centre, and Craig with a second coil of rope and the orb r lantern in the rear.

Vusamanzi strode along the passage as it narrowed and twisted. When the passage forked, he did not hesitate.

Craig opened his clasp-knife and marked the wall of the right, hand fork, and then hurried to catch up with the rest of the party.

The system of tunnels and caves was a three-dimensional maze. Water and seepage had mined the limestone of the hills until it was as perforated as Gruy&e cheese. In some places they scrambled down rock scree, and at one point they climbed a rough, natural staircase of limestone. Craig blazed every twist and turn of the way. The air was cold and dank and musky with the smell of guano. Occasionally there was a flurry of shadowy wings around their heads, and the shrill squeal of disturbed bats echoed down the passageways.

After twenty minutes they came to an almost vertical drop of glossy smooth limestone, so deep that the lantern glow did not reach the depths. Under Vusamanzi's direction, they secured the end of one coil of nylon rope to a pillar of limestone, and one at a time slid down fifty feet to the next stage. This was a vertical fault in the rock formation, where two geological bodies had shifted slightly and formed an open crack in the depths of the earth. It was so narrow that he could touch either wall, and in the lantern light Craig could just make out the bright eyes of the bats hanging inverted from the rocky roof above them.

Uncoiling the second rope Vusamanzi cautiously climbed down the treacherous floor of the crack. The crack widened as it descended, and the roof receded into the gloom above their heads. It reminded Craig of the great gallery in the heart of Claeops" pyramid, a fearsome cleft through living rock, daAgerously steep, so they had to steady themselves with the rope at every pace. They had almost reached the limit of the rope, when Vusamanzi halted and stood tall on a tilted slab, lit by his own lantern, looking likea black Moses descended from the mountain.

"What is it?" Craig called.

"Come on down!" Tungata ordered, and Craig scrambled down the last slope and found Vusamanzi and the others perched on the rock slab peering over the ledge into the still surface of a subterranean lake.

"Now what?" Sally-Anne asked, her voice muted with awe of this deep and secret place.

The lake had filled the limestone shaft. Across the surface, a hundred and fifty feet away, the roof of the shaft dipped into it at the same angle as the floor on which they stood.

Craig used the flashlight that they had salvaged from the wrecked Cessna for the first time. He shone it into the water that had stood undisturbed through the ages so that all sediment had settled out of it, leaving it clear as a trout stream. They could see the inclined floor of the gallery sinking away at the same angle into the depths. Craig F ill switched off the flashlight, conserving the batteries.

"Well, Sam." Craig put one hand on his shoulder. "Here's sh." Tungata's chuckle was your big chance to swim likea ri brief and insincere, and they both looked at Vusamanzi.

"Where now, revered father?"

"When Taka-Taka came to these hills and my grander saved the king's body from defilement, father and my lath J there had been seven long terrible years of drought scorching the land. The level of the water in this shaft was much lower than it is now. Down there," Vusamanzi pointed into the limpid depths, "there is another branch in the rock. In that place they laid Lobengula s body. In the many years since then, good and plentiful rains have blessed the land, and each year the level of these waters has risen. The first time I visited this place, brought here by my father, the waters were below that pointed rock-" Briefly Craig switched on the flashlight and in its beam the splintered limestone lay thirty feet or more below the surface.

"But even then the king's grave was far below the surface."

"So you have never seen the grave with your own eyes?" Craig demanded.

"Never," Vusamanzi agreed. "But my father described it to met Craig knelt at the edge of the lake and put his hand into the water. It was so cold that he shivered and jerked his hand out. He dried it on his shirt, and when he looked up, Tungata was watching him with a quizzical expression.

"Now you just hold on there, my beloved Matabele brother," Craig said vehemently. "I know exactly what that look means and you can forget all about it."

"I cannot swim, Pupho my friend."

"Forget it," Craig advised him.

"We will tie one of the ropes around you. You can come to no harm."

"You know where you can put your ropes."

"The torch is waterproof, it will shine underwater," Tungata went on with equanimity.

"Christ! Craig said bitterly. "African rule number one: when all else fails, look around for the nearest white face."

"Do you remember how you swam across the Limpopo river for a ridiculous wager, a case of beer?" Tungata asked sweetly.

"That day I was drunk, now I'm sober." Craig looked at Sally-Anne for support and was disappointed.

"Not you al soP "There are crocs in the Limpopo, no crocs here she pointed out.

Slowly Craig beg4 nato unbutton his shirt, and Tungata smiled and began readying the rope. They all watched with interest while Craig unstrapped his leg and laid it carefully aside. He stood one-legged in his underpants at the edge of the pool while Tungata fastened the end of the rope around his waist.

"Pupho," Tungata said quietly, "you will need dry clothes afterwards. Why do you wish to wet these?"

"Sarah," Craig explained and glanced at her.

"She is Matabele. Nudity does not offend us."

"Leave him his secrets," Sarah smiled, "though I have none from him." And Craig remembered her nakedness in the water below the bridge. He sat on the edge of the rock slab and pulled off his underpants, tossing them on top of the heap of his clothing. Neither of the girls averted their eyes, and he slid into the water, gasping at the cold. He paddled out gently into the centre of the pool and trod water.

"Time me," he called back to them. "Give me a double tug on the rope every sixty seconds. At three minutes, pull me up regardless, okay?"

"Okay." Tungata had the coils of rope between his feet, ready to feed out.

Craig hung in the water and began to hyperventilate, pumping his lungs likea bellows, purging them of carbon dioxide. It was a dangerous trick, an inexperienced diver could black out from oxygen starvation before the build-up of CO, triggered the urge to breathe again. He grabbed a full lung and flipped his leg and lower body above the surface in a duck dive, and went down cleanly into the cold clear water.

Without a glass face-plate, his vision was grossly distorted, but he held the flashlight beam on the sharp pinnacle of limestone thirty feet below and went down swiftly, the pressure popping and squeaking in his ears.

He reached it and gave himself a push off from the rock.

He was going down more readily now as the water pressure compressed the air in his lungs and reduced his buoyancy.

The steep rocky floor of the pool flew in a myopic blur past his face, and he rolled on his side and scanned the walls of gleaming limestone on each side for an opening.

There was a double tug on the rope around his waist: one minute gone, and he saw the entrance to the tomb below him. It was an almost circular opening in the left-hand wall of the main gallery, and it reminded Craig of the empty eye-socket in a human skull.

He sank down towards it and put out a hand to brace himself on the limestone sill above the opening. The mouth of the tomb was wide enough for a man to stoop through. He ran his hand over the walls and they were polished by running water and silky with a coating of slime. Craig guessed that this was a drain-hole from the earth's surface carved out of the limestone by the filtering of rain waters over the millennia.

He was suddenly afraid. There was something forbidding and threatening about this dark entrance. He glanced back towards the surface. He could see the faint reflected glow of old Vusamanzi's lantern forty feet above him, and the icy water sapped his vitality and courage. He wanted to thrash wildly back towards the surface, and he felt the first involuntary pumping of his lungs.

Something tugged at his waist, and for an instant he teetered on the edge of wild Panic before he realized it was the signal. Two minutes almost his limit.

He forced himself forward into the entrance of the tomb. It angled gently upwards again, round as a sewer pipe. Craig swam for twenty feet flashing the torch beam ahead of him, but the water was turning murky and dark as he stirred up the sediment from the floor.

Abruptly the passagended and he ran his hand over rough rock. His lungm were beginning to pump in earnest and there was a singing in his ears, his vision was clouded with swirling sediment and the beginnings of dizzy vertigo, but he forced himself to stay on and examine the end of the tunnel from side to side and top to bottom, running his free hand over it.

Quickly he realized that he was feeling a wall of limestone masonry, packed carefully into place to block off the tunnel, and his spirits plunged. The old witch-doctors had once again sealed Lobengula's tomb, and in the brief seconds he had left, he realized that they had made a thorough job of it.

His searching fingers touched something with a smooth metallic feel lying at the foot of the wall. He took it up and turned away from the wall, shoving himself down the passage, with panic and the need for air rising in him. He reached the main gallery again, still carrying the metallic object in one hand.

High above him, the lantern glowed and he swam upwards, with his senses beginning to flutter likea candle flame in the wind; darkness and stars of light played before his eyes as his brain starved and he felt the first deadly lethargy turning his hands and his foot to lead.

With a jerk, the rope around his waist came tight, and he felt himself being drawn swiftly upwards. Three minutes, and Tungata was pulling him out. The lantern light spun dizzily overhead as he windmilled on the end of the rope, and he could not pre vent himself, he tried to breathe and freezing water shot down his throat and went into his lungs, stinging like the cut of a razor.

He exploded out through the surface, and Tungata was waist-deep, hauling double-handed on the life-line. The instant he broke through, Tungata seized him, a thick muscled arm around his chest, and he dragged Craig to the edge.

The two girls were ready to grab his wrists and help him up onto the slab. Craig collapsed on his side, doubled up likea foetus, coughing and heaving the water from his lungs and shaking violently with cold.

Sally-Anne rolled him onto his stomach and bore down on his back with both hands. Water and vomit shot up his throat, but his breathing gradually eased and at last he sat up wiping his mouth. Sally-Anne had stripped off her own shirt and was chafing him vigorously with it. In the lantern light his body was dappled blue with cold and he was still shivering uncontrollably.

"How do you feel?" Sarah asked.

"Bloody marvelous," he gasped. "Nothing likea bracing dip "He's all right," Tungata assured them, "as soon as he St. arts snarling, he's all right." Craig cupped his hands over the chimney of the lantern for warmth and gradually his shivering eased. Sarah leaned across to Tungata, and with a wicked smile directed at Craig's naked lower body, whispered something.

"Right on! Tungata chuckled, imitating a black Amen, can accent. "And what's more, these honkys ain't got no rhythm neither." Craig quickly reached for his underpants, and Sally, Anne rushed loyally to his defence. "You're not seeing him at his best, that water is freezing." Craig's hands were stained red, brown with rust, they marked his underpants and he remembered the metal object he had found at the wall of the tomb. It lay where he had dropped it at the" edge of the slab.

"Part of a trek chain," he said, as he picked it up. "From an ox wagon." Vusamanzi had been squatting silently on one side, at the edge of the lantern light. Now he spoke. "That chain was from the king's wag4. My grandfather used it to lower the king's body down the shaft." "So you have found the king's grave?" Tungata asked.

This mundane little scrap of metal was for all of them the proof that changed fantasy to factual reality.

"I think so," Craig began strapping on his leg, "but we will never know for certain." They all watched his face and waited. Craig suffered another paroxysm of coughing, then his breathing settled and he went on, "There is a passage, just as Vusamanzi described. It is about another fifteen feet below that pinnacle and it goes off to die left, a round opening with a shaft that rises sharply. About twenty feet from the entrance, the shaft has been blocked with masonry, big blocks and lumps of limestone, packed closely together. There is no way of telling how thick the wall is, but one thing is certain, it is going to take a lot of work to get through it I had about twenty seconds" endurance at the face, not long enough to prise out even a single block.

Without diving apparatus, nobody is going to get past that seal." Sally-Anne was shrugging on her damp shirt over her white bra, but she stopped and stared at him challengingly.

"We can't just give up, Craig darling, we can't just walk away and never know. It would eat me up not knowing a mystery like that! I'd never be happy, never again as long as I lived."

"I'm open to suggestions," Craig agreed sarcastically.

"Anybody got a scuba tucked in their back pocket? How about paying Vusamanzi a goat and he can make the water jump aside, shades of Moses and the Red Sea."

"Don't be flippant, "said Sally-Anne.

"Come on somebody, be intelligent and inventive what? No takers?

Okay, then let's get back to where there ri is a re and a little sun light." Craig dropped the rusted piece of chain back into the pool.

"Sleep well, Lobengula, "the one who drives like the wind", keep your fire-stones beside you, and shala ease, stay in peace!" he climb back up through the maze of passages and inter leading caverns was a dismal and silent procession, although Craig checked and remarked each turn and juncture as he passed it.

When they reached the main cavern again, it took only a few minutes to blow the embers on the hearth to flames and boil a canteen of water.

The strong, over sweetened tea warmed away the last of Craig's chills and heartened them all.

must return to the village," Vusamanzi told them. "If the Shana soldiers come and do not find me, they will become suspicious they will begin to bully and torture my women. I must be there to protect them, for even the Shana fear my magic." He gathered up his pouch and cloak and his ornately carved staff. "You must remain in the cavern at all times. To leave it is to risk discovery by the soldiers. You have food and water and firewood and blankets and paraffin for the lanterns, there is no need for you to go out. My women will come to you the day after tomorrow with food and news of the Shana." He went to kneel before Tungata. "Stay in peace, great prince of Kumalo. My heart tells me that you are the leopard-cub of the prophecy, and that you will find a way to free the spirit of Lobengula."

"Perhaps I will return here one day with the special machines that are necestry to reach the king's resting place."

"Perhaps," Vusamanz'iagreed. "I will make sacrifice and consult the spirits, They might condescend to show me the way." At the entrance of the cave he paused and saluted them. "When it is safe, I shall return. Stay in peace, my children." And then he was gone.

"Something tells me it's going to be a long, hard time," said Craig, "and not the most attractive place to pass it." They were all active and restlessly intelligent people, and the confinement began to irk almost immediately.

Tacitly they divided the cavern, a communal area around either end for each couple.

the hearth and a private area at The seepage of water down the rock face when collected in a clay pot was sufficient for all their needs, including ablutions, and there was a vertical pothole shaft in one of the passages which served as a natural latrine. But there was nothing to read and a lack that Craig felt keenly no writing material. To alleviate the boredom, Sarah began teaching Sally-Anne Sindebele, and her progress was so rapid that she could soon follow ordinary conversation and respond to it fairly fluently.

Tungata recovered rapidly during those days of enforced inactivity. His gaunt frame filled out, the scabs on his face and body healed rapidly, and he regained his vitality. It was often Tungata who led the long rambling discussions at the fireside, and that irrepressible sense of humour that Craig remembered so well from the old days began to break through the sombre moods that had at first overwhelmed him.

When Sally-Anne made a disparaging remark about the neighbouring South African state and its apartheid polities, Tungata contradicted her with mock severity.

"No, no, Pendula-" Tungata had given her the Matabele name of "the one who always answers back" no, Pendula, rather than condemning them, we black Africans should give thanks for them every time we pray! For they can bring a hundred tribes together with a single rallying cry. It is only necessary for one of us to stand up and shout, "Racist Apartheid Boers!" and all the others stop beating each other over the head and for a moment we become a band of brothers." Sally-Anne clapped her hands. "I'd love to hear you make that speech at the next meeting of the Organization for African Unity!" Tungata chuckled at her, they were becoming good friends. "Another thing we have to be grateful for-" he went on.

"Tell me more, "she incited him.

"Those tribes down there are some of the fight ingest niggers in Africa," Tungata obeyed. "Zulus and Xhosas and Tswanas. We have got our hands full with the Shana.

Imagine if that lot were turned loose on us also. No, from now on my motto is going to be "Kiss an Afrikaner every day'T "Don't encourage him," Sarah pleaded with Sally-Anne.

"One day he is going to talk like this in front of people who will take him seriously." At other times Tungata relapsed back into those intense and dark moods. "It is like Northern Ireland or Palestine, only a hundred times bigger and more complex. This conflict between ourselves and the Shana is a microcosm of the entire problem of Africa."

"Do you see a solution?" Sally-Anne demanded.

"Only a radical and difficult one," he told her. "You see, the European powers in their nineteenth-century scramble for Africa divided the continent up amongst themselves with no thought for tribal boundaries, and it is an entrenched article of the Organization for African Unity that these boundaries are sacrosanct. One possible solution would be to overturn the article and repartition the continent along tribal b(*;ndaries, but after the terrible experience of partitior*ig India and Pakistan, no rational person would support that view. The only other solution seems to me to be a form of federal government, based loosely on the American system, with the state divided into tribal provinces possessing autonomy in their own affairs." Their talk ranged across time, and for the entertainment and instruction of the two girls, both Craig and Tungata related the history of this land between the Limpopo and Zambezi rivers, with each of them concentrating on the role played by their own nations and families in the discovery and occupation and the strife that had torn it.

Twice on successive days their talk at the hearth was interrupted by sounds from the world outside the cavern the unmistakable whistling, clattering roar of a helicopter rotor hammering through the air in coarse pitch setting, and they fell silent and looked up at the roof of stone above them until the sound faded. Then the talk would turn to their chances of escape from the forces that pursued and hunted them so relentlessly.

Every second day the women came from Vusamanzi's village, travelling in the darkness of predawn to elude the es in the sky above them. They brought food and news.

ey The Third Brigade troopers had come to the village, surrounding it first and then storming in and ransacking the huts. They had cuffed one of the young girls and they had shouted threats and badgered the old man, but Vusamanzi had faced them down with dignity and in the end his formidable reputation for magic had protected them.

The soldiers had left without stealing much of value, without burning a single hut or killing more than a few chickens but they had promised to return.

However, a massive manhunt was still in progress over the entire area. On foot and from the helicopters the Shana scoured the forest and hills during the hours of daylight and hundreds of the escapees from the camp had already been recaptured. "The girls had seen them being transp reported in heavy trucks, naked and chained together.

As far as vusamanzi knew, the Shana had not yet discovered the wrecked Cessna, but it was still extremely dangerous, and Vusamanzi had ordered the girls to impress upon them they must remain in the cavern. He would come to them in person when he judged it safe to do so.

This news depressed them all and it took all Craig's best storytelling and clowning to lighten the mood in the cavern. He turned their attention back to their perennially favourite topic, the tomb of Lobengula and the vast fortune they liked to believe it contained. They had already discussed in detail the equipment that would be needed to enable a team of divers to open the tomb and reach the burial area, and now Sally-Anne asked Tungata, "Tell us, Sam, if there were a treasure, and if you could reach it, and if it were as rich as we hope, how would you use it?" 11 think it would have to be treated as belonging to the Matabele people. It would have to be placed in trust and used for their benefit, firstly to procure for them a better political dispensation. To be pragmatic, a negotiator with that sort of financial clout behind him would find it easier to get the attention of the British Foreign Office and the American State Department. He could prevail upon them to intervene. The government in Harare would have to take them seriously, options which are at present closed to us would become accessible."

"After that, it would finance all sorts of social programmes education, health, the forwarding of women's rights," Sarah said, for the moment her timidity put aside.

"You would use it to make land-purchases to add to the existing tribal trust lands Craig added, "financial assistance to the peasant farmers, aid for tractors and machinery, blood, stock improvement programmes."

"Craig," Sally-Anne laid her hand on his good leg, "isn't there any way at all to Ach the burial chamber? Couldn't YOU try another dive?"O "My precious girl, for the hundredth time, let me explain that I could probably move a single rock with each dive, and twenty dives would kill me." oh God, it's so frustrating!" Sally-Anne jumped up and began pacing up and down between them and the fire. "I feel so helpless. If we don't do something, I'm going to go mad. I feel as though I am suffocating I need a good breath of oxygen. Can't we just go outside for a few minutes?" And then immediately, she answered herself.

"That just isn't on, I know. Forgive me. I'm being silly." She looked at her wristwatch. "My God, I've lost all track of time, do you realize it's after midnight already?" Craig and Sally-Anne lay on their mattress of cut grass and tanned skins, holding each other close and whispering with their lips touching each other's ears so as not to disturb the other pair at their end of the cavern.

"I am ashamed of my part in having him imprisoned. He is such a marvelous man, darling, sometimes I feel so humble when I listen to him." "He might just make it to greatness," Craig agreed.

Coming back here to free him may be the most important thing that you and I ever do in our lives."

"If we get away with it," Craig qualified.

"There must be some justice in this naughty world."

"It's a nice thought."

"Kiss me goodnight, Craig." Craig loved to listen to her sleeping, the gentle sound of her breathing, and to feel the total relaxation of her body against his, with only the occasional little snuggling movement in his arms, but tonight he could not follow her into sleep.

Something was snagged in his subconscious likea burr in his sock, and the longer he lay, the fiercer became its irritation. Something somebody had said that evening, he figured it that far, but every time it started to rise to the he tried too hard and it sank away surface of his mind, again. At last he resorted to the old trick of emptying his mind, imagining a wastepaper-basket, and as each unbidden thought came, he tore it in half, crumpled it, and dropped it into the imaginary basket.

"Christ!" he said loudly, and sat bolt upright. Sally-Anne came up beside him, pushing the hair was jolted awake and out of her eyes, and mumbling drowsily.

"What is it?"Tungata called across the cavern.

"Oxygen!" cried Craig. Sally-Anne had said, "I am suffocating I need a good breath of oxygen."

"I don't understand," Sally' Anne mumbled, still more asleep than awake.

"Darling, wake up! Come on!" He shook her gently.

"Oxygen! The Cessna is equipped for high-altitude flight, isn't it?"

"Oh sweet heavens," she stared at him. "Why didn't we think of it before?"

"Life-jackets do you have them?"

"Yes. When I was doing the flamingo survey over Lake Tanganyika, I had to have them installed. They are under the seat cushions."

"And the oxygen system, is it a recycling circuit?"

"Yes."

"Pupho!" Tungata had lit the lantern and carried it across to them with Sarah naked and unsteady on her feet trailing behind him likea sleepy puppy. "Tell us, Pupho, what is happening?"

"Sam, you beauty," Craig grinned at him, as he reached for his pants. "You and rare going for a little walk."

"Now?"

"Now, while it is still dark." here was e oug moon to light their way as far as 'i Vusaman s "Village. They bypassed the hilltop, not wanting to alarm the old man. A village dog yapped at them, but they found the footpath and hurried along it.

Morning found them still on the footpath.

Twice they were forced to take cover. The first time was when they almost ran head-on into a patrol of camouflage clad Shana troopers.

Tungata, who was on point, warned Craig with the hand-signal for dire danger. They lay in arM

Ir F

thick yellow stand of elephant grass beside the path and watched them go padding silently past. Afterwards, Craig found that his heart was racing and his hands shaking.

"I'm getting too old for this, "he whispered.

"Me too," Tungata agreed.

The second time they were warned by the whacking beat of helicopter rotors, and they dived into the ravine beside the path. The ungainly machine dragon-flyed down the far crest of the valley, with a machine-gunner in the fuselage port and the helmeted heads of an assault squad popping up behind him like poisonous green toadstools.

The helicopter passed swiftly and did not return.

They overran the spot where they had originally intersected the footpath, and had to back-track for almost a mile, so it was late afternoon when they approached the wreck site.