Camacho's face shone like the full moon as he smiled. That is very good. Very good, much ivory, we find your father, you see, we find him damn soon.'
Before noon the following day Camacho, with a great deal of shouting and swishing of the kurbash, marched a hundred strong healthy men into the camp. 'I find you porters, ' he announced. 'Plenty porters, damn good, hey? ' The Christian girl Sarah was waiting beside the grave again when Robyn came down through the acacia forest the following afternoon.
The child saw her first and ran to greet her, he was laughing with pleasure, and Robyn was struck once again by the familiarity of his face. It was something about his mouth and his eyes. The resemblance to somebody she had known was so forcible that she stopped dead and stared at him, but could not recapture the memory before the boy took her hand and led her to where his mother waited.
They went through the little ritual of changing the flowers on the grave and then settled side by side on a fallen acacia branch. It was cooler in the shade and in the branches above their heads a pair of shrikes hunted little green caterpillars. The birds were black and white across the back and wings, but their breasts were a striking shade of crimson that glowed like the blood of a dying gladiator, and Robyn watched them with rare pleasure while she and Sarah talked quietly.
Sarah was telling her about her mother, how brave and uncomplaining she had been in the terrible heat of the Kaborra-Bossa where the black ironstone cliffs turned the gorge into a furnace. It was the bad season, Sarah explained. 'The hot season before the rains break. ' Robyn recalled her father's written account of the expedition in which he had laid the blame for the delays upon his subordinates, old Harkness and Commander Stone, so that they had missed the cool season, and entered the gorge in the suicide month of November. Then when the rains came, the fever came with it, Sarah went on. 'It was very bad. The white men and your mother became sick very quickly. ' Perhaps her mother had lost much of her immunity to malaria during the years in England while she waited for her husband's summons. 'Even Manali himself became sick. it was the first time I had seen him sick of the fever. He was filled with the devils for many days, the expression described vividly the delirium of malaria] fever, Robyn thought. 'So he did not know when your mother died.'
They were silent again. The child, bored by the interminable talk of the two women, threw a stone at the birds in the acacia branches above their heads, and with a flash of their marvelous crimson breasts the two shrikes winged away towards the river, and again the child engaged Robyn's attention. It was as if she had known that face all her life.
My mother? ' Robyn asked, still watching the child. Her water turned black, ' said Sarah simply. The blackwater fever, Robyn felt her skin prickle. When malaria changed its course, attacking the kidneys and transforming them into thin-walled sacks of clotted black blood, that could rupture at the patient's smallest movement.
The blackwater fever, when the urine changed to dark mulberry-coloured blood, and few, very few victims, ever recovered. She was strong, Sarah went on quietly. 'She was the last of them to go. ' She turned her head towards the other neglected graves. The curly pods of the acacia were scattered thickly over the unadorned mounds. 'We buried her here, while Manali was still with his devils.
But later, when he could walk he came with the book and said the words for her. He built the cross with his own hands.'
Then he went away again? ' Robyn asked.
No, he was very sick, and new devils came to him.
He wept for your mother. ' The thought of her father weeping was something so completely alien that Robyn could not imagine it. 'He spoke often of the river that had destroyed him.'
Through the acacia trees there were glimpses of the wide green river, and both their heads turned towards it naturally. He came to hate that river as though it was a living enemy that had denied him a road to his dreams. He was like a man demented, for the fever came and went. At times he would battle with his devils, shouting his defiance the way a warrior giyas at the enemy host. ' The giya was a challenge dance with which the Nguni warrior baits his adversary. 'At other times he would speak wildly of machines that would tame his enemy, of walls that he would build across the waters to carry men and ships up above the gorge. ' Sarah broke off, her lovely dark moon face stricken with the memory, and the child sensed her distress and came to her, kneeling on the earth and laying his dusty little head in her lap. She stroked the tight cap of curls with an absentminded caress.
With a sudden little chill of shock Robyn recognized the child. Her expression changed so drastically that Sarah followed the direction of her gaze, looking down with all her attention at the head in her lap, then up again to meet Robyn's eyes. It did not really need words to pass, the question was posed and answered with silent exchange of feminine understanding, and Sarah drew the child towards her with a protective gesture. It was only after your mother. . . ' Sarah began to explain and then fell silent, and Robyn went on staring at the little boy. It was Zouga at the same age, a dusky miniature Zouga. It was only the colour of his skin which had prevented her from seeing it immediately.
Robyn felt as though the earth had lurched beneath her feet, then it steadied again and she felt a strange sense of release. Fuller Ballantyne was no longer the godlike figure hewn from unforgiving, unbending granite that had overshadowed her entire life.
She held out both her hands to the child and he went to her unhesitatingly, trustingly. Robyn embraced him, and his skin was smooth and warm as she kissed him.
He wriggled against her like a puppy, and she felt a deep glow of affection and of gratitude to the child. He was very sick, said Sarah softly, 'and alone. They had all gone or died, and he was sad, so that I feared for his life.'
Robyn nodded understanding. 'And you loved him? 'There was no sin in it, for he was a God, said Sarah simply. No, thought Robyn with intense relief. 'He was a man, and I, his daughter, am a woman.'
In that moment she knew that she never need again feel shame and guilt for her body and the demands and desires which sprang from it. She hugged the child who was proof of her father's humanity, and Sarah smiled with relief.
For the first time in her life Robyn was able to fate the fact that she loved her father, and she understood part of the compulsion that over the years had grown stronger rather than dwindling.
The longing she had felt for the father had been submerged completely by the awe and majesty of the legend.
Now she knew why she was here, on the banks of this majestic river, on the very frontier of the known world.
She had come not to find Fuller Ballantyne, but to discover rather the father and the self that she had never known before. Where is he, Sarah, where is my father? Which way did he go? ' she demanded eagerly, but the
