You are hurt. ' Robyn was running towards him. It's a scratch.'
Zouga unwound the bandanna from around his throat and pressed it to the wound in his hip as he strode away towards his tent, forcing himself not to favour it with a limp. He had to get away quickly for the reaction was on him, he felt dizzy and nauseated, the wound stung abominably, and he did not want anybody to see that his hands were trembling. I reset the shoulder, Robyn told Zouga as she bound up his hip wound. 'I don't think there is anything broken, and it went in again very neatly, but you, ' she shook her head, 'you won't be able to march with that. Every step will pull against the stitches.'
She was right, it was four days before the march could begin, and Camacho Pereira put that time to good use.
He had left an hour after Robyn reset his dislocated shoulder, four paddlers taking a dugout canoe down the Zambezi with the current. When they would have pulled into the bank to make camp, Camacho snarled at them from the bows where he crouched, hugging the injured arm, that even after being set and strapped into a sling, still ached so fiercely that it lit little white sparks of agony behind his closed eyelids every time he tried to doze.
He also would have liked to rest, but his hatred drove him onwards, and the dugout canoe arrowed down- current under a fat yellow moon that paled slowly at the coming of the new day.
Camacho went ashore on the south bank of the Zambezi at noon at the small native village at Chamba, a hundred miles below Tete.
He paid off the crew of the dugout and he hired two bearers to carry his rifle and blanket roll. Then he set off again immediately along the network of narrow foot paths that crisscross the entire African continent like the blood vessels of a living body, laid down by wandering men and migrating animals over the centuries.
Two days later he reached the Hyena Road that runs from the mountains of Dismay, Inyangaza, to the sea.
The Hyena Road was a secret track. Although it paralleled the old road from the coast to Vila Monica, it kept forty miles north of it, following the course of the Pungwe river so that there would be water for the multitudes who unwillingly used the road on their long, last journey from their homeland to other lands, other continents.
Vila Monica was the last outpost of the Portuguese administration in East Africa. A decree by the Governor in council forbade any man, black or white, Portuguese or foreigner, to journey beyond that clay-walled fort towards the haunting range of mountains with the chilling name. It was for this reason that the Hyena Road had been secretly opened by enterprising men, and pushed up through the dense forests of the lower slopes to the bleak and open grasslands atop the mountains.
The march from Chamba to the Pungwe river was a hundred and fifty miles. To make it in three days with the agony of a healing shoulder was good going, and once they reached it, the temptation to rest was almost irresistible. But Camacho kicked his two bearers to their feet and drove them with stinging words and lash along the deserted road towards the mountains.
The road was twice as wide as any of the other footpaths they had followed to reach it, wide enough for a double column rather than the Indian file that was the usual order of African travel. Although the surface had been beaten hard by the passage of thousands of bare feet, it was a source of satisfaction to Camacho that the road had clearly not been used for many months, except by the occasional herd of antelope, and once, perhaps a week before, by an old bull elephant, whose huge piles of dung had long dried out. The caravan has not passed yet, Camacho muttered, as he scanned the trees ahead for the shapes of the vultures and searched without success for the sly skulking shapes of hyena in the undergrowth beside the road.
True there were human bones scattered along the route, here and there the thick knuckle of the thigh bone that had defied even the iron jaws of the scavengers, or other splintered fragments that they had overlooked, but even these were dried out and bleached white. They were the debris of the previous caravan that had passed this way three months before.
He had reached the road in time, and now he hurried along it, pausing now and then to listen or to send one of the bearers up a tree to search ahead.
However, it was two days later that they heard the first faint sound of many voices, and this time Camacho himself climbed to the highest fork of one of the umsisa trees beside the track, and peering ahead he saw the vultures circling, a wide slow wheel of tiny black specks turning against the silver and blue ranges of cloud, as though caught in a hidden vortex of the high heavens.
He sat in the fork thirty feet above the ground, while the sound of voices grew stronger, became the sound of singing. This was no sound of joy, but a terrible mourning dirge, slow and heartbreaking rising and fading as flukes of the breeze and folds of the ground blanketed the sound, but each time it came back a little stronger, until Camacho could make out far away the head of the column, like the head of a maimed serpent writhing out of the forest into an open glade a mile ahead.
He slid down the trunk of the umsisa, and hurried forward. There was an armed party ahead of the main column, five blacks dressed in the tatters of cast-off European-style clothing and carrying muskets, but at their head was a white man, a little man with a face like a vicious gnome, wrinkled and burned darkly by the sun.
The thick drooping black mustache was laced with grey, but he stepped out with a bouncing elastic stride and he recognized Camacho from two hundred paces and snatched his hat off his head and waved it.
He shouted 'Camacho! ' and the two men ran to embrace, and then hold each other at arm's length, laughing with pleasure. It was Camacho who sobered first, the laughter changing to a scowl as he said, Alphonse, my beloved brother, I have bad tidings the worst possible. 'The Englishman? ' Alphonse was still smiling, he had a tooth missing from the front of his upper jaw, which made the cold humourless smile seem less dangerous than it really was. Yes, the Englishman, ' Camacho nodded. 'You know of him? 'My father sent a message. I know. ' Alphonse was the Governor of Quelimane's eldest surviving son, fullblooded Portuguese by the lawfully wedded bride who had come out forty years previously from Lisbon, a pale sickly mail-order bride, who had borne three sons in swift succession, the first two of which had succumbed to malaria and infantile dysentery even before the appearance of the little wizened yellowed mite whom they had named Alphonse Jose Vila y Pereira, and expected to bury with his brothers before the end of the rains. However, it was the mother they had buried in the end, and the child had flourished at the breast of a black wet nurse. He did not go north, then? ' Alphonse demanded, and Camacho, dropped his eyes guiltily, for he was speaking to the eldest, full-blooded and legitimate son.
Camacho himself was a bastard and a half-breed, son of one of the Governor's once beautiful Mulatto concubines, now fat and faded and forgotten in one of the back rooms of the seraglio. He was not even recognized as a son, but had to bear the ignominious title of nephew.
This in itself was enough for him to show respect for the other, but added to this Alphonse was as determined as their father had been at the same age, though even crueller and harder. Camacho had seen him sing a plaintive
