The Burning Shore Read online

  PRAISE FOR WILBUR SMITH

  ‘Wilbur Smith rarely misses a trick’

  Sunday Times

  ‘The world’s leading adventure writer’

  Daily Express

  ‘Action is the name of Wilbur Smith’s game and he is a master’

  Washington Post

  ‘The pace would do credit to a Porsche, and the invention

  is as bright and explosive as a fireworks display’

  Sunday Telegraph

  ‘A violent saga … told with

  vigour and enthusiasm … Wilbur Smith spins a fine tale’

  Evening Standard

  ‘A bonanza of excitement’

  New York Times

  ‘ … a natural storyteller who moves confidently and

  often splendidly in his period and sustains a flow of

  convincing incident’

  Scotsman

  ‘Raw experience, grim realism, history and romance welded

  with mystery and the bewilderment of life itself’

  Library Journal

  ‘A thundering good read’

  Irish Times

  ‘Extrovert and vigorous … constantly changing incidents

  and memorable portraits’

  Liverpool Daily Post

  ‘An immensely powerful book, disturbing and compulsive,

  harsh yet compassionate’

  She

  ‘An epic novel … it would be hard to think of a theme that

  was more appropriate today … Smith writes with a great

  passion for the soul of Africa’

  Today

  ‘I read on to the last page, hooked by its frenzied

  inventiveness piling up incident upon incident …

  mighty entertainment’

  Yorkshire Post

  ‘There is a streak of genuine poetry, all the more attractive

  for being unfeigned’

  Sunday Telegraph

  ‘ … action follows action … mystery is piled

  on mystery … tales to delight the millions of addicts

  of the gutsy adventure story’

  Sunday Express

  ‘Action-crammed’

  Sunday Times

  ‘Rattling good adventure’

  Evening Standard

  Wilbur Smith was born in Central Africa in 1933. He was educated at Michaelhouse and Rhodes University.

  He became a full-time writer in 1964 after the successful publication of When the Lion Feeds, and has written over thirty novels, all meticulously researched on his numerous expeditions worldwide. His books are now translated into twenty-six languages.

  Also by Wilbur Smith

  THE COURTNEYS

  When the Lion Feeds

  The Sound of Thunder

  A Sparrow Falls

  Birds of Prey

  Monsoon

  Blue Horizon

  The Triumph of the Sun

  THE COURTNEYS OF AFRICA

  Power of the Sword

  Rage

  A Time to Die

  Golden Fox

  THE BALLANTYNE NOVELS

  A Falcon Flies

  Men of Men

  The Angels Weep

  The Leopard Hunts in Darkness

  THE EGYPTIAN NOVELS

  River God

  The Seventh Scroll

  Warlock

  The Quest

  also

  The Dark of the Sun

  Shout at the Devil

  Gold Mine

  The Diamond Hunters

  The Sunbird

  Eagle in the Sky

  The Eye of the Tiger

  Cry Wolf

  Hungry as the Sea

  Wild Justice

  Elephant Song

  WILBUR SMITH

  THE

  BURNING

  SHORE

  PAN BOOKS

  This book is for my wife and the jewel of

  my life, Mokhiniso, with all my love and

  gratitude for the enchanted years that I have

  been married to her.

  First published 1985 by William Heinemann Ltd

  First published by Pan Books 1986

  This electronic edition published 2008 by Pan Books

  an imprint of Pan Macmillan Ltd

  Pan Macmillan, 20 New Wharf Rd, London N1 9RR

  Basingstoke and Oxford

  Associated companies throughout the world

  www.panmacmillan.com

  ISBN 978-0-330-47291-3 PDF

  ISBN 978-0-330-47290-6 EPUB

  Copyright © Wilbur Smith 1985

  The right of Wilbur Smith to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Visit www.panmacmillan.com to read more about all our books and to buy them. You will also find features, author interviews and news of any author events, and you can sign up for e-newsletters so that you‘re always first to hear about our new releases.

  So have I heard on Afric’s burning shore,

  A hungry lion give a grievous roar.

  William Barnes Rhodes, Bombastes Furioso, sc. IV

  Michael awoke to the mindless fury of the guns.

  It was an obscene ritual celebrated in the darkness before each dawn in which the massed banks of artillery batteries on both sides of the ridges made their savage sacrifice to the gods of war.

  Michael lay in the darkness under the weight of six woollen blankets and watched the gunfire flicker through the canvas of the tent like some dreadful aurora borealis. The blankets felt cold and clammy as a dead man’s skin, and light rain spattered the canvas above his head. The cold struck through his bedclothes and yet he felt a glow of hope. In this weather they could not fly.

  False hope withered swiftly, for when Michael listened again to the guns, this time more intently, he could judge the direction of the wind by the sound of the barrage. The wind had gone back into the south-west, muting the cacophony, and he shivered and pulled the blankets up under his chin. As if to confirm his estimate, the light breeze dropped suddenly. The patter of rain on canvas eased and then ceased. Outside he could hear the trees of the apple orchard dripping in the silence – and then there was an abrupt gust so that the branches shook themselves like a spaniel coming out of the water and released a heavy fall of drops on to the roof of the tent.

  He decided that he would not reach across to his gold half-hunter on the inverted packing-case which acted as a bedside table. It would be time all too soon. So he snuggled down in the blankets and thought about his fear. All of them suffered under the affliction of fear, and yet the rigid conventions under which they lived and flew and died forbade them to speak of it – forbade them to refer to it in even the most oblique terms.

  Would it have been a comfort, Michael wondered, if last night he had been able to say to Andrew as they sat with the bottle of whisky between them, discussing this morning’s mission, ‘Andrew, I’m frightened gutless by what we are going to do’?

  He grinned in the darkness as he imagined Andrew’s embarrassment, yet he knew that Andrew shared it with him. It was in his eyes, and in the way the little nerve twitched and jumped in his cheek so that he had constantly to touch it with a fingertip
to still it. All the old hands had their little idiosyncracies; Andrew had the nerve in his cheek and the empty cigarette-holder which he sucked like an infant’s comforter. Michael ground his teeth in his sleep so loudly that he woke himself; he bit the nail of his left thumb down into the quick and every few minutes he blew on the fingers of his right hand as though he had just touched a hot coal.

  The fear drove them all a little mad, and forced them to drink far too much – enough to destroy the reflexes of normal men. But they were not normal men and the alcohol did not seem to affect them, it did not dull their eyesight nor slow their feet on the rudder bars. Normal men died in the first three weeks, they went down flaming like fir trees in a forest fire, or they smashed into the doughy, shell-ploughed earth with a force that shattered their bones and drove the splinters out through their flesh.

  Andrew had survived fourteen months, and Michael eleven, many times the life-span that the gods of war had allotted to the men who flew these frail contraptions of wire and wood and canvas. So they twitched and fidgeted, and blinked their eyes, and drank whisky with everything, and laughed in a quick loud bray and then shuffled their feet with embarrassment, and lay in their cots at dawn, stiff with terror, and listened for footsteps.

  Michael heard the footsteps now, it must be later than he had realized. Outside the tent Biggs muttered a curse as he splashed into a puddle, and his boots made obscene little sucking noises in the mud. His bull’s-eye lantern glowed through the canvas as he fumbled with the flap and then he stooped into the tent.

  ‘Top of the morning, sir—’ his tone was cheerful, but he kept it low, out of courtesy to the officers in the neighbouring tents who were not flying this morning ‘ – wind has gone sou’-sou’-west, sir, and she’s clearing something lovely, she is. Stars shining out over Cambrai—’ Biggs set the tray he carried on the packing-case and bustled about the tent, picking up the clothing that Michael had dropped on the duckboards the night before.

  ‘What time is it?’ Michael went through the pantomime of awaking from deep sleep, stretching and yawning so that Biggs would not know about the hour of terror, so that the legend would not be tarnished.

  ‘Half past five, sir.’ Biggs finished folding the clothes away, then came back to hand him the thick china mug of cocoa. ‘And Lord Killigerran is up and in the mess already.’

  ‘Bloody man is made of iron,’ Michael groaned, and Biggs picked the empty whisky bottle off the floor beneath the cot and placed it on the tray.

  Michael drained the cocoa while Biggs worked up a lather in the shaving mug and then held the polished steel mirror and the lantern while Michael shaved with the straight razor, sitting up in his cot with the blankets over his shoulders.

  ‘What’s the book?’ Michael demanded, his voice nasal as he pinched his own nostrils and lifted the tip of his nose to shave his upper lip.

  ‘They are giving three to one that you and the major take them both with no butcher’s bill.’

  Michael wiped the razor while he considered the odds. The sergeant rigger who ran the betting had operated his own book at Ascot and Aintree before the war. He had decided that there was one chance in three that either Andrew or Michael, or both of them, would be dead by noon – no butcher’s bill, no casualties.

  ‘Bit steep, don’t you think, Biggs?’ Michael asked. ‘I mean, both of them, damn it?’

  ‘I’ve put half a crack on you, sir,’ Biggs demurred.

  ‘Good on you, Biggs, put on a fiver for me.’ He pointed to the sovereign case that lay beside his watch, and Biggs pressed out five gold coins and pocketed them. Michael always bet on himself. It was a racing certainty: if he lost the bet, it wasn’t going to hurt much, anyway.

  Biggs warmed Michael’s breeches over the chimney of the lamp and then held them while Michael dived out from under the blankets into them. He stuffed his nightshirt into the breeches while Biggs went on with the complicated procedure of dressing his man against the killing cold of flight in an open cockpit. There followed a silk vest over the nightshirt, two cable-stitched woollen fisherman’s jerseys, then a leather gilet, and finally an army officer’s greatcoat with the skirts cut off so that they would not tangle with the controls of the aircraft.

  By this time Michael was so heavily padded that he could not bend to pull on his own footwear. Biggs knelt in front of him and snugged silk undersocks over his bare feet, then two pairs of woollen hunting socks, and finally eased on the tall boots of tanned kudu skin that Michael had had made in Africa. Through their soft, pliable soles, Michael had touch and feel on the rudder bars. When he stood up, his lean muscular body was dumpy and shapeless under the burden of clothing, and his arms stuck out like the wings of a penguin. Biggs held the flap of the tent open, and then lit his way along the duckboards through the orchard towards the mess.

  As they passed the other darkened tents beneath the apple trees Michael heard little coughs and stirrings from each. They were all awake, listening to his footsteps pass, fearing for him, perhaps some of them cherishing their relief that it was not they who were going out against the balloons this dawn.

  Michael paused for a moment as they left the orchard and looked up at the sky. The dark clouds were rolling back into the north and the stars were pricking through, but already paling out before the threat of dawn. These stars were still strange to Michael; though he could at last recognize their constellations, they were not like his beloved southern stars – the Great Cross, Achernar, Argus and the others – so he lowered his gaze and clumped after Biggs and the bobbing lantern.

  The squadron mess was a ruined labourers’ chaumière which they had commandeered and repainted, covering the tattered thatch with tarpaulin so that it was snug and warm.

  Biggs stood aside at the doorway. ‘I’ll ’ave your fifteen quid winnings for you when you get back, sir,’ he murmured. He would never wish Michael good luck, for that was the worst of all possible luck.

  There was a roaring log fire on the hearth and Major Lord Andrew Killigerran was seated before it, his booted feet crossed on the lip of the hearth, while a mess servant cleared the dirty plates.

  ‘Porridge, my boy,’ he removed the amber cigarette holder from between his even white teeth as he greeted Michael, ‘with melted butter and golden syrup. Kippers poached in milk—’

  Michael shuddered. ‘I’ll eat when we get back.’ His stomach, already knotted with tension, quailed at the rich smell of kippers. With the co-operation of an uncle on the general staff who arranged priority transport, Andrew kept the squadron supplied with the finest fare that his family estates in the highlands could provide – Scotch beef, grouse and salmon and venison in season, eggs and cheeses and jams, preserved fruits – and a rare and wonderful single malt whisky with an unpronounceable name that came from the family-owned distillery.

  ‘Coffee for Captain Courtney,’ Andrew called to the mess corporal, and when it came he reached into the deep pocket of his fleece-lined flying jacket and brought out a silver flask with a big yellow cairngorm set in the stopper and poured a liberal dram into the steaming mug.

  Michael held the first sip in his mouth, swirling it around, letting the fragrant spirit sting and prickle his tongue, then he swallowed and the heat hit his empty stomach and almost instantly he felt the charge of alcohol through his bloodstream.

  He smiled at Andrew across the table. ‘Magic,’ he whispered huskily, and blew on his fingertips.

  ‘Water of life, my boy.’

  Michael loved this dapper little man as he had never loved another man – more than his own father, more even than his Uncle Sean who had previously been the pillar of his existence.

  It had not been that way from the beginning. At first meeting, Michael had been suspicious of Andrew’s extravagant, almost effeminate good looks, his long, curved eyelashes, soft, full lips, his neat, small body, dainty hands and feet, and his lofty bearing.

  One evening soon after his arrival on the squadron, Michael was teaching the other new
chums how to play the game of Bok-Bok. Under his direction one team formed a human pyramid against a wall of the mess, while the other team attempted to collapse them by taking a full run and then hurling themselves on top of the structure. Andrew had waited for the game to end in noisy chaos and had then taken Michael aside and told him, ‘We do understand that you hail from somewhere down there below the equator, and we do try to make allowances for you colonials. However—’

  Their relationship had thenceforth been cool and distant, while they had watched each other shoot and fly.

  As a boy, Andrew had learned to take the deflection of a red grouse, hurtling wind-driven only inches above the tops of the heather. Michael had learned the same skills on rocketing Ethiopian snipe and sand-grouse slanting on rapid wingbeat down the African sky. Both of them had been able to adapt their skills to the problem of firing a Vickers machine-gun from the unstable platform of a Sopwith Pup roaring through the three dimensions of space.

  Then they watched each other fly. Flying was a gift. Those who did not have it died during the first three weeks; those who did, lasted a little longer. After a month Michael was still alive, and Andrew spoke to him again for the first time since the evening of the game of Bok-Bok in the mess.

  ‘Courtney, you will fly on my wing today,’ was all he said.

  It was to have been a routine sweep down the line. They were going to ‘blood’ two new chums who had joined the squadron the day before, fresh from England with the grand total of fourteen flying hours as their combined experience. Andrew referred to them as ‘Fokker fodder’, and they were both eighteen years of age, rosy-faced and eager.