The Sunbird Page 12

  The closest we could come to a purpose for these cells was to call them ‘the prison’.

  ‘Do I have to do all the work around here?’ Louren sighed. ‘When you’ve just shown me pictures of the war elephants?’

  ‘Elephant stables?’ I asked.

  ‘Very quick, lad!’ Louren clapped me on the shoulder and I blushed. ‘But I believe they are called elephant lines in India.’

  After dinner I worked for an hour in my dark room, developing three rolls of film, and when I was finished I went to look for Louren. He was leaving again early the following morning and there was much for us to discuss.

  He wasn’t in the guest room, nor in the lounge, and when I asked for him, Ral told me, ‘I think he has gone up to the cavern, Doctor. He borrowed a torch from me.’

  Leslie looked at him in a way which was clearly meant to be highly significant, a frown and a quick little shake of the head, but it meant as much to him as it did to me. I went to fetch my own torch, and set off through the silent grove, picking my way carefully around the open excavations. No light showed from the entrance of the tunnel beyond the great wild fig tree.

  ‘Louren!’ I called. ‘Are you there?’ And my voice bounced hollowly from cliff and rock. There was silence once the echoes died, and I went forward into the tunnel. Flashing my torch into the darkness ahead, ducking my head under the zooming flight of the bats, and hearing my own footsteps magnified in the silence.

  I could see no light, and I stopped and called again.

  ‘Louren!’ My voice boomed around the cavern. There was no reply, and I went on down the passage.

  As I stepped out from the mouth of the tunnel, suddenly the beam of a powerful torch flashed from across the cavern shining full in my eyes.

  ‘Louren?’ I asked. ‘It that you?’

  ‘What do you want, Ben?’ he demanded from the darkness behind the torch. He sounded irritable, angry even.

  ‘I want to talk to you about the plans for the next step.’ I shielded my eyes from the beam.

  ‘It can wait until tomorrow.’

  ‘You are leaving early - let’s talk now.’

  I started to cross the cavern towards him, averting my eyes from the dazzling beam.

  ‘Point that light somewhere else, won’t you,’ I protested mildly.

  ‘Are you deaf!’ Louren’s voice rasped, the voice of a man used to being obeyed. ‘I said tomorrow, damn you.’

  I stopped dead, stunned, confused. He had never spoken to me like that in my life before.

  ‘Lo, are you all right?’ I asked anxiously. There was something wrong here in the cavern. I could sense it.

  ‘Ben,’ his voice crackled, ‘just turn around and walk out of here, will you. I’ll see you tomorrow morning.’

  I hesitated a moment longer. Then I turned and walked back down the passage. I hadn’t even had a glimpse of Louren in the darkness beyond the torch.

  In the morning Louren was as charming as only he can be. He apologized handsomely for the previous evening. ‘I just wanted to be alone, Ben. I’m sorry. I get like that sometimes.’

  ‘I know, Lo. I am the same.’

  In ten minutes we had agreed that although the circumstantial evidence of a Phoenician occupation of the city was most encouraging, it was not conclusive. We would not make any public announcement yet, but in the meantime Louren gave me complete carte blanche to proceed with a full-scale excavation and investigation.

  He flew out with the dawn, and I knew he would be in London for breakfast the following morning.

  The weeks that followed Louren’s departure were dissatisfying for me. Although the work on the ruins went forward steadily, and my assistants never faltered in their enthusiasm and industry - yet the results were uniformly disappointing.

  There were other finds, many of them, but they were repetitive. Pottery, beads, even the occasional gold fragment or ornament no longer thrilled me as it had before. There was nothing that added a scrap of knowledge to the store we had accumulated already. I roved the site restlessly, anxiously hovering over a new trench or exposed level, praying that the next spadeful of earth turned would expose an inscribed pallet or the headstone to a burial vault. Somewhere here was the key to the ancient mystery, but it was well hidden.

  Apart from the lack of progress on the excavation, my relationship with Sally had deteriorated in some subtle fashion which I was at a loss to explain. Naturally there had been no opportunity for any physical intimacy since the arrival of the others at the City of the Moon. Sally was adamant in her determination not to allow our affair to become common knowledge. My amateurish manoeuvrings to get her alone were deftly countered. The nearest I came to success was when I visited her at the cavern during the day. Even here she had her assistant with her, and often Heather Willcox as well.

  She seemed withdrawn, taciturn, even surly. She worked over her easel with a fierce concentration during the day, and she usually slipped away to her hut immediately after dinner. Once I followed her, knocking softly on the door of her hut, then hesitantly pushing the door open when there was no reply. She was not there. I waited in the shadows, feeling like a peeping Tom, and it was after midnight before she returned, slipping out of the silent grove like a ghost and going directly to her room where Leslie had long ago switched out the light.

  It was distressing for me to see my laughing Sally so withdrawn, and finally I visited her at the cavern.

  ‘I want to talk to you, Sal.’

  ‘What about?’ She looked at me with mild surprise, as though it were the first time in days that she had noticed me. I sent the young African assistant away and prevailed on Sally to join me on the rocks beside the emerald pool, hoping that its beauty and associations would soften her mood.

  ‘Is something wrong, Sal?’

  ‘Good Lord, should there be?’ It was an awkward unsatisfying conversation. Sally seemed to feel I was prying into affairs that did not concern me. I felt my anger rising, and I wanted to shout at her, ‘I am your lover, damn you, and everything you do concerns me!’

  But good sense prevailed, for I am sure presumption of that magnitude from me would have severed the last tenuous threads of our relationship. Instead I took her hand and, hating myself for the blush that burned my cheeks, I told her softly, ‘I love you, Sally. Just remember that - if there is ever anything I can do—’

  I think it was probably the best thing I could have said, for immediately her hand tightened on mine and her face softened, her eyes went slightly misty.

  ‘Ben, you are a sweet dear person. Don’t take any notice of me for a while. I’ve just got the blues, there is nothing anybody can do about it. They will go on their own, if you don’t fuss.’

  For a moment she was my old girl again, a smile quivering precariously on the corners of her mouth, and in those great green eyes.

  ‘Let me know when it’s over, won’t you?’ I stood up.

  ‘That I will, Doctor. You’ll be the first to know.’

  The following week I flew back to Johannesburg. There was the Annual General Meeting of the trustees of the Institute which I could not avoid, and I was committed to a series of lectures for the Faculty of Archaeology at the University of Witwatersrand.

  I was scheduled to be away from the site for eleven days. I left it all in Peter Willcox’s safe hands, after extracting from him a promise that he would cable me immediately if any new development broke.

  The three girls fussed around me, packing my case, making a picnic lunch for me to eat on the plane, and lining up to kiss me goodbye at the airstrip. I must admit that I rather enjoyed all the attention.

  I have often found that living too close to any problem narrows one’s view of the whole. Three hours after leaving the City of the Moon, I made a minor breakthrough. If there had been walls and towers standing on the ruined foundations, then the rock must have been brought from nearby. The obvious place was from the cliffs themselves. Somewhere in those cliffs, close to the city, there wa
s a quarry.

  I would find it, and from its extent I would calculate the actual size of the city.

  For the first time in weeks I felt good, and the days that followed were gratifying and solidly enjoyable. The meeting of the trustees was the type of festive affair which can be expected when funds are unlimited and prospects are favourable. From the Chair Louren was most complimentary when he renewed my contract as Director of the Institute for a further twelve months. To celebrate the thirty per cent rise in my remuneration, he invited me to a dinner at his home where forty people sat down at the yellow wood table in the huge dining-room, and I was the guest of honour.

  Hilary Sturvesant, in a gown of yellow brocade silk and wearing the fabled Sturvesant diamonds, gave me her almost undivided attention during the meal. I have a weakness for beautiful things, particularly if they are women. There were twenty of them there that night, and in the drawing-room afterwards I held court like royalty. The wine had loosened my tongue, and washed away my confounded shyness. No matter that Hilary and Louren had probably primed the other guests to make a fuss of me, for when at two o’clock in the morning I went down to the Mercedes with Hilary and Louren escorting me I swaggered along seven feet tall.

  This new-found confidence carried me through the series of four lectures at the University of Witwatersrand, the first of which was attended by twenty-five students and faculty members, the latter outnumbering the former two to one. The word got out, however, and my final venue was changed to one of the main lecture theatres to handle the audience of 600 that turned up. I was an unqualified success. I was prevailed upon to return at an early date - and there was an unsubtle hint from the Vice-Chancellor of the University that the Archaeology Chair would fall vacant the following year.

  For the last three days of my visit I spent every minute at the Institute. With relief I found that not much had suffered in my absence, and my multitudinous staff had kept things running smoothly.

  The bushman exhibition in the Kalahari Room was completed, and open to the public. It was magnificently executed, and the central figure of the main group reminded me sharply of my little friend Xhai. The model was depicted in the act of painting on the stone wall of a cave abode. With his stoppered buck-horn paint pots, and reed pipes and brushes, I imagined that this was how the artist who had painted my white king had worked. It gave me an odd sensation, as though two millennia had rolled away, as though I could send my mind back along the years. I spoke of it to Timothy Mageba.

  ‘Yes, Machane. I have told you before that you and I are marked. We have the sign of the spirits on us, and we have the sight.’

  I smiled and shook my head. ‘I don’t know about you, Timothy, but I’ve never been able to pick a winner—’

  ‘I am serious, Doctor,’ Timothy rebuked me. You have the gift. It is merely that you have not been taught to develop it.‘

  I will accept hypnotism, but talk of clairvoyance, necromancy, mantology and the like leaves me feeling embarrassed. To divert the conversation from me and my gifts, I asked, ‘You have told me before that you are also marked by the spirits…’

  Timothy looked at me steadily from out of those disturbing black eyes. At first I thought I had insulted him by my thinly disguised question, but suddenly he nodded that cannon-ball head. He stood up, closed and locked the door of his office before returning to his seat. Quickly he stripped shoe and sock from his right foot, and showed it to me.

  The deformity was shocking, although I had seen photographs of it before. It was of fairly common occurrence among the Batonga tribe of the Zambezi Valley. There had been a paper on it published in the British Medical Journal during 1969. The condition was known as ‘ostrich-foot’, and consisted of a massive division between the metatarsus of the big toe and the second toe. The effect was to make the foot resemble the claw of an ostrich or predatory bird. Timothy was obviously very sensitive about this deformity, and almost immediately replaced his sock and shoe. I realized later that he had shown it to me in a deliberate attempt to enlist my sympathy, to create a bond between us.

  ‘Both feet?’ I asked, and he nodded. ‘There are many people in the Zambezi Valley with feet like that,’ I told him.

  ‘My mother was a Batonga woman,’ he answered. ‘It was this mark that qualified me for training in the mysteries.’

  ‘Does it hinder you at all?’ I asked.

  ‘No,’ he answered brusquely, and then went on almost defiantly in Batonga, ‘We men of the cloven feet outrun the fleetest antelope.’

  It was a beneficial mutation then, and I would have enjoyed discussing it further but I was warned by Timothy’s expression. I realized the effort it had taken him to show me.

  ‘Will you have some tea. Doctor?’ He reverted to English, closing the subject. When one of his young African assistants had poured cups of strong black tea for us, Timothy asked, ‘Please tell me how the work at the City of the Moon is progressing, Doctor.’

  We chatted for another half hour, then I left him.

  ‘You must excuse me now, Timothy. I am flying back tomorrow morning early and there is still much to do.’

  I was awakened by a soft but insistent knocking on the door of my suite in the Institute. I switched on the bedside light and saw that the time was three o’clock in the morning.

  ‘Who is there?’ I called and the knocking stopped. I slipped out of bed, shrugged into a dressing-gown and slippers, and started for the front door, when I realized the risk I was taking. I went back to my bedroom and took the big ugly automatic .45 from the drawer. Feeling a little melodramatic, I pumped a round into the chamber and went back to the front door.

  ‘Who is it?’ I repeated.

  ‘It’s me. Doctor. Timothy!’

  I hesitated a moment longer - anybody could call themselves Timothy.

  ‘Are you alone?’ I asked in Kalahari bushman.

  ‘I am alone, Sunbird,’ he answered in the same language, and I slipped the pistol into my pocket and opened the door.

  Timothy was dressed in dark blue slacks and a white shirt with a windcheater thrown over his shoulders and I noticed immediately that there were spots of fresh blood on the shirt and that there was a rather grubby cloth wrapped around his left forearm. He was clearly much agitated, his eyes wide and staring in the light, and his movements jerky and nervous.

  ‘Good God, Timothy, are you all right?’

  ‘I’ve had a terrible night, Doctor. I had to see you right away.’

  ‘What have you done to your arm?’

  ‘I cut it on the window pane of my front door, I fell in the dark,’ he explained.

  ‘You’d better let me have a look at it.’ I went towards him.

  ‘No, Doctor. It’s only a scratch What I have come to tell you is more important.’

  ‘Sit down at least,’ I told him. ‘Can I get you a drink?’

  ‘A drink, thank you, Machane, as you can see I am upset and nervous. That is how I came to injure my arm.’

  I poured both of us whisky, and he took his glass in his right hand and continued moving nervously around my sitting-room while I sat in one of the big leather armchairs.

  ‘What is it, Timothy?’ I prompted him.

  ‘It is difficult to begin, Machane, for you are not a believer. But I must convince you.’

  He broke off and drank whisky, before turning to face me.

  ‘Yesterday evening we spoke at length about the City of the Moon. Doctor, you told me how there are mysteries there that still baffle you.’

  ‘Yes.’ I nodded encouragement.

  ‘The burial grounds of the ancients,’ Timothy went on ‘You cannot find them.’

  ‘That is true, Timothy.’

  ‘Since then I have thought heavily on this matter.’ He changed into Venda, a language better suited for the discussion of the occult. ‘I went back in my memory over all the legends of our people.’ I imagined vividly how he must have thrown himself into hypnotic trance to search. ‘And there was something
there, like a shadow beyond the firelight, a dark memory that eluded me.’ He shook his head and turned away, pacing restlessly, sipping at his drink, muttering softly to himself as though he still searched in the dark archives of his mind.

  ‘It was no use, Doctor. I knew it was there, but I could not grasp it. I despaired of it, and at last I slept. But it was a sleep greatly troubled by the dream demons - until at last…’ he hesitated, ‘… my grandfather came to me.’

  I stirred uneasily in my chair. Timothy’s grandfather had lain twenty-five years in a murderer’s grave.

  ‘All right. Doctor.’ Timothy saw my small movement of disbelief, and changed smoothly to English. ‘I know you do not believe such things can happen. Let me explain it in terms you can accept. My imagination, heated by my search for a long-forgotten fragment of knowledge, threw up a dream image of my grandfather. The one from whom the knowledge was learned in the first place.’

  I smiled to cover my spooky feelings; at this time of night with this half-demented black man talking of dark things, I felt myself falling under his spell.

  ‘Go on, Timothy.’ I tried to say it lightly, but my voice croaked a little.

  ‘My grandfather came to me, and he touched my shoulder and he said. “Go with the blessed one, to the Hills of Blood and there I will make the mysteries known to you and open up the secret places.”’

  I felt my skin prickle. Timothy had said ‘The Hills of Blood’, and nobody had told him that name.

  ‘The Hills of Blood,’ I repeated.

  That is the name he used,‘ Timothy agreed. ’I can only believe he meant your City of the Moon.‘

  I was silent; reasonable man at war with primitive superstitious man within me.

  ‘You want to come with me tomorrow, Timothy?’ I asked.

  ‘I will go with you,’ Timothy agreed. ‘And perhaps I will be able to show you something for which you search - then again I may not be able to.’