The Angels Weep 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

  THE ANGELS WEEP

  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.

  The novels of 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

  The Burning Shore

  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 ANGELS

  WEEP

  PAN BOOKS

  First published 1982 by William Heinemann Ltd

  First published by Pan Books 1983

  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 978-0-330-47287-6 in Adobe Reader format

  ISBN 987-0-330-47286-9 in Adobe Digital Editions format

  ISBN 987-0-330-47289-0 in Microsoft Reader format

  ISBN 987-0-330-47288-3 in Mobipocket format

  Copyright © Wilbur Smith 1982

  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.

  But man, proud man,

  Dress’d in a little brief authority,

  Most ignorant of what he’s most assur’d,

  His glassy essence, like an angry ape,

  Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven

  As make the angels weep.

  Measure for Measure

  William Shakespeare

  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

  PART ONE

  Three horsemen rode out from the edge of the forest with a restrained eagerness that not even weary weeks of constant searching could dull.

  They reined in, stirrup to stirrup, and looked down into another shallow valley. Each stalk of the dry winter grass bore a fluffy seed-head of a lovely pale rose colour, and the light breeze stirred them and made them dance, so that the herd of sable antelope in the gut of the valley seemed to float belly-deep in a bank of swirling pink mist.

  There was a single herd bull. He stood almost fourteen hands tall at the withers. His satiny back and shoulders were black as a panther’s, but his belly and the intricate designs of his face-mask were the startling iridescent white of mother-of-pearl. His great ridged horns, curved like Sala-din’s scimitar, swept back to touch his croup, and his neck was proudly arched as that of a blood Arabian stallion. Long ago hunted to extinction in his former southern ranges, this noblest of all the antelopes of Africa had come to symbolize for Ralph Ballantyne this wild and beautiful new land between the Limpopo and the wide green Zambezi rivers.

  The great black bull stared arrogantly at the horsemen on the ridge above him, then snorted and tossed his warlike head. Thick dark mane flying, sharp hooves clattering over the stony ground, he led his chocolate-coloured brood mares at a gallop up and over the far ridge, leaving the watching men mute at their grandeur and their beauty.

  Ralph Ballantyne was first to rouse himself and he turned in the saddle towards his father.

  ‘Well, Papa,’ he asked, ‘do you recognize any landmarks?’

  ‘It was more than thirty years ago,’ Zouga Ballantyne murmured, a little frown of concentration puckering an arrowhead in the centre of his forehead, ‘th
irty years, and I was riddled with malaria.’ Then he turned to the third rider, the little wizened Hottentot, his companion and servant since those far-off days. ‘What do you think, Jan Cheroot?’

  The Hottentot lifted the battered regimental cap from his head, and smoothed the little peppercorns of pure white wool that covered his scalp. ‘Perhaps—’

  Ralph cut in brusquely, ‘Perhaps it was all merely a fever dream.’

  The frown on his father’s handsome bearded features sharpened, and the scar upon his cheek flushed from bone-porcelain to rose, while Jan Cheroot grinned with anticipation; when these two were together it was better entertainment than a cock-fight any day.

  ‘Damn it, boy,’ Zouga snapped. ‘Why don’t you go back to the wagons and keep the women company.’ Zouga drew the thin chain from his fob pocket and dangled it before his son’s face. ‘There it is,’ he snapped, ‘that’s the proof.’

  On the ring of the chain hung a small bunch of keys, and other oddments, a gold seal, a St Christopher, a cigar-cutter and an irregular lump of quartz the size of a ripe grape. This last was mottled like fine blue marble and starred through its centre with a thick wedge of gleaming native metal.

  ‘Raw red gold,’ said Zouga. ‘Ripe for the picking!’

  Ralph grinned at his father, but it was an insolent and provocative grin, for he was bored. Weeks of wandering and fruitless searching were not Ralph’s style at all.

  ‘I always suspected that you picked that up from a pedlar’s stall on the Grand Parade at Cape Town, and that it’s only fool’s gold anyway.’

  The scar on his father’s cheek turned a darker furious red, and Ralph laughed delightedly and clasped Zouga’s shoulder.

  ‘Oh, Papa, if I truly believed that, do you think I would waste weeks of my time? What with the railroad building and the dozen other balls I am juggling, would I be here, instead of in Johannesburg or Kimberley?’

  He shook Zouga’s shoulder gently, the smile no longer mocking. ‘It’s here – we both know it. We could be standing on the reef at this very moment, or it could be just over the next ridge.’

  Slowly the heat went out of Zouga’s scar, and Ralph went on evenly. ‘The trick, of course, is to find it again. We could stumble over it in the next hour, or search another ten years.’

  Watching father and son, Jan Cheroot felt a small prick of disappointment. He had seen them fight once before, but that was long ago. Ralph was now in the full prime of his manhood, almost thirty years of age, accustomed to handling the hundreds of rough men that he employed in his transport company and his construction teams, handling them with tongue and boot and fist. He was big and hard and strutty as a game cock, but Jan Cheroot suspected that the old dog would still be able to roll the puppy in the dust. The praise name that the Matabele had given Zouga Ballantyne was ‘Bakela’, the Fist, and he was still fast and lean. Yes, Jan Cheroot decided regretfully, it would still be worth watching, but perhaps another day, for already the flare of tempers had faded and the two men were again talking quietly and eagerly, leaning from their saddles towards each other. Now they seemed more like brothers, for although the family resemblance was unmistakable, yet Zouga did not seem old enough to be Ralph’s father. His skin was too clear and unlined, his eye too quick and vital and the faint lacing of silver in his golden beard might have been merely the bleaching of the fierce African sun.

  ‘If only you had been able to get a sun-sight, the other observations you made were all so accurate,’ Ralph lamented. ‘I was able to go directly to every cache of ivory that you left that year.’

  ‘By that time the rains had started.’ Zouga shook his head. ‘And, by God, how it rained! We hadn’t seen the sun for a week, every river was in full spate, so we were marching in circles, trying to find a ford—’ He broke off, and lifted the reins in his left hand. ‘But I’ve told the tale a hundred times. Let’s get on with the search,’ he suggested quietly, and they trotted down off the ridge into the valley, Zouga stooping from the saddle to examine the ground for chips of broken reef, or swivelling slowly to survey the skyline to try and recognize the shape of the crests or the blue loom of a distant kopje against the towering African sky, where the silver fair-weather cumulus sailed high and serene.

  ‘The only definite landmark we have to work on is the site of the ruins of Great Zimbabwe,’ Zouga muttered. ‘We marched eight days due westwards from the ruins.’

  ‘Nine days,’ Jan Cheroot corrected him. ‘You lost one day when Matthew died. You were in fever. I had to nurse you like a baby, and we were carrying that damned stone bird.’

  ‘We couldn’t have made good more than ten miles a day,’ Zouga ignored him. ‘Eight days’ march, not more than eighty miles.’

  ‘And Great Zimbabwe is there. Due east of us now.’ Ralph reined in his horse as they came out on the next ridge. ‘That is the Sentinel.’ He pointed at a rocky kopje, the distant blue summit shaped like a crouching lion. ‘The ruins are just beyond, I would never mistake that view.’

  For both father and son the ruined city had a special significance. There within the massive stone-built walls Zouga and Jan Cheroot had found the ancient graven bird images that had been abandoned by the long-vanished inhabitants. Despite the desperate straits to which they had been reduced by fever and the other hardships of the long expedition from the Zambezi river in the north, Zouga had insisted on carrying away with him one of the statues.

  Then many years later it had been Ralph’s turn. Guided by his father’s diary and the meticulous sextant observations that it contained, Ralph had once again won through to the deserted citadel. Though he had been pursued by the border impis of Lobengula, the Matabele king, he had defied the king’s taboo on the holy place and had spirited away the remaining statues. Thus all three men had intimate knowledge of those haunting and haunted ruins, and as they stared at the far hills that marked the site, they were silent with their memories.

  ‘I still wonder, who were the men who built Zimbabwe?’ Ralph asked at last. ‘And what happened to them?’ There was an uncharacteristic dreamy tone to his voice, and he expected no answer. ‘Were they the Queen of Sheba’s miners? Was this the Ophir of the Bible? Did they carry the gold they mined to Solomon?’

  ‘Perhaps we will never know.’ Zouga roused himself. But we do know they valued gold as we do. I found gold foil and beads and bars of bullion in the courtyard of Great Zimbabwe, and it must be within a few miles of where we stand that Jan Cheroot and I explored the shafts that they drove into the earth, and found the broken reef piled in dumps ready for crushing.’ Zouga glanced across at the little Hottentot. ‘Do you recognize any of this?’

  The dark pixie face wrinkled up like a sun-dried prune as Jan Cheroot considered. ‘Perhaps from the next ridge,’ he muttered lugubriously, and the trio rode down into the valley that looked like a hundred others they had crossed in the preceding weeks.

  Ralph was a dozen strides ahead of the others, cantering easily, swinging his mount to skirt a thicket of the dense wild ebony, when abruptly he stood in the stirrups, snatched his hat from his head and waved it high.

  ‘Tally ho!’ he yelled. ‘Gone away!’

  And Zouga saw the burnt gold flash of fluid movement across the far slope of open ground.

  ‘Three of the devils!’ Ralph’s excitement and his loathing were clear in the pitch and timbre of his voice. ‘Jan Cheroot, you turn ‘em on the left! Papa, stop them crossing the ravine!’

  The easy manner of command came naturally to Ralph Ballantyne, and the two older men accepted it as naturally, while none of them questioned for an instant why they should destroy the magnificent animals that Ralph had flushed from the ebony thicket. Ralph owned two hundred wagons, each drawn by sixteen draught oxen. King’s Lynn, Zouga’s estates, taken up with the land grants that the British South Africa Company had issued to the volunteers who had destroyed the Matabele king’s impis, covered many tens of thousands of acres that were stocked with the pick of the captured Matabele
breeding herds running with blood bulls imported from Good Hope and old England.

  Father and son were both cattlemen, and they had suffered the terrible depredations of the lion prides which infested this lovely land north of the Limpopo and Shashi rivers. Too often they had heard their valuable and beloved beasts bellowing in agony in the night, and in the dawn found their ravaged carcasses. To both of them, lions were the worst kind of vermin, and they were elated with this rare chance of taking a pride in broad daylight.

  Ralph yanked the repeating Winchester rifle from the leather scabbard under his left knee, as he urged the chestnut gelding into full gallop after the big yellow cats. The lion had been the first away, and Ralph had only a glimpse of him, sway-backed and swing-bellied, the dense dark ruff of his mane fluffed out with alarm, padding majestically on heavy paws into the scrub. The older lioness followed him swiftly. She was lean and scarred from a thousand hunts, blue with age across the shoulders and back. She went away at a bounding gallop. However, the younger lioness, unaccustomed to men, was bold and curious as a cat. She was still faintly cub-spotted across her creamy gold belly, and she turned on the edge of the thicket to snarl at the pursuing horseman. Her ears lay flat against her skull, her furry pink tongue curled out over her fangs, and her whiskers were white and stiff as porcupine quills.

  Ralph dropped his reins onto the gelding’s neck, and the horse responded instantly by plunging to a dead stop and freezing for the shot, only the scissoring of his ears betraying his agitation.

  Ralph tossed up the Winchester and fired as the buttplate slapped into his shoulder. The lioness grunted explosively as the bullet thumped into her shoulder, angled for the heart. She went up in a high sunfishing somersault, roaring in her death frenzy. She fell and rolled on her back, tearing at the scrub with fully extended yellow claws, and then stretching out in a last shuddering convulsion before slumping into the softness of death.

  Ralph pumped a fresh round into the chamber of the Winchester, and gathered up the reins. The gelding leaped forward.

  Out on the right Zouga was pounding up the lip of the ravine, leaning forward in the saddle, and at that moment the second lioness broke into the open ahead of him, going for the deep brush-choked ravine at a driving run, and Zouga fired still at full gallop. Ralph saw dust spurt under the animal’s belly.