them again and went to hide in the bush before ixhegu returned.
$you saw all this, Pungushe? Mark asked. What I did not see, I read in the spoor. Now I understand about the fourth man. Tell me what happened that dayIxhegu was sitting there, smoking his pipe, Pungushe pointed down into the water-course. And the silent one came and stood here, even where we now sit, and he looked down at your grandfather without speaking, holding his isibamu, his rifle, thus. What did ixhegu do then? Mark asked. He felt nauseous with the horror of it. He looked up and asked a question in a loud voice, as a man does when he is afraid, but the silent one did not reply. Then? I am sorry, jamela, knowing that ixhegu was of your blood, the telling o it gives me pain. Go on, said Mark. Then the silent one fired once with his rifle, and ixhegu fell face down in the sand. He was dead? Mark asked, and Pungushe was silent a moment. He was not dead. He was shot here, in the belly. He moved, he cried out. The silent one fired again? Mark felt the acid bite of vomit in the back of his throat.
Pungushe shook his head. What did he do? He sat down on the bank, here where we sit, and he smoked silently, watching the old man ixhegu lying down there in the sand, until he died. How long did he take to die? Mark asked in a choked, angry voice.
Pungushe swept a segment of the sky to indicate two hours of the sun's course. At the end ixhegu was calling out in Zulu as well as his own language. What did he say, Pungushe? He asked for water, and he called to God and to a woman who might have been his mother or his wife. Then he died. Mark thought about it with surges of nausea alternating with flashes of bitter hating anger, and racking grief. He tried to imagine why the killer had let his victim die so slowly, and it was many minutes before he remembered that the story must have already been arranged that the old man was to die in a hunting accident. No man accidentally shoots himself twice. The body was to have only one gunshot wound.
But, the stomach was always the most agonizing wound. Mark remembered how the got -wounded screamed in the trenches as they were being carried back by the stretcher-bearers.
grieve with you, jarnela.
mark roused himself at Pungushe's words. What happened after ixhegu died? The other two men, the old bald one and the young loud one, came from the camp. All three of them talked here, beside the body. They talked for a long time, with shouting and red angry faces, and they waved their hands thus, and thus. Pungushe imitated men in heated argument. One pointed here, another pointed there, but in the end the silent one spoke and the other two listened. Where did they take him? First they opened his pockets, and took from them some papers and a pouch. They argued again, and the silent one took the papers and put them back in the dead man's pockets, Mark realized the wisdom of this. An honest man does not rob the corpse of an accident victim. Then they carried him up the bank, and this way, Pungushe stood and led Mark four hundred yards into the forest, below the first steep gradient of the escarpment. Here they found a deep ant-bear hole, and they pushed the old man's body down into it. Here? Mark asked. There was short rank grass and no sign of a cairn nor a mound. I see nothing. They collected rocks from the cliff there and placed them in the hole on top of the body, so that the hyena would not dig it out. Then they covered the rocks with earth, and they smoothed it with a tree branch.
Mark went down on one knee and inspected the ground. Yes, he exclaimed. There was a very shallow depression in the earth, as though it had subsided a little over an excavation.
Mark drew his sheath-knife and blazed four of the nearest trees, making it easier to return to this place, and he built a small pyramid of rocks on the depressed saucer of earth.
When he had finished, he asked Pungushe, Why did you not tell anybody of this before? Why did you not go to the police in Ladyburg?
jamela, the madness of white men does not concern me.
Also it is a very long journey to Ladyburg, to the policeman who would say, Ho, kaffir, and what were you doing in the Bubezi Valley to see such strange events? Pungushe shook his head. No, jamela, sometimes it better for a man to be blind and deaf. Tell me truly, Pungusbe. If you saw these men again, would you remember them? All white men have faces like boiled yams, red, lumpy and without shape. Then Pungushe remembered his manners. Except you, jamela, who are not so ugly as all thatThank you, Pungushe. So you would not know them again? The old bald one and the young loud one I might know Pungushe furrowed his brow in thought.
And the silent one? Mark asked. Ho. Pungushe's brow cleared. Does one forget what a leopard looks like? Does one forget the killer of men? The silent one I would remember at any time and in any place. Good! Mark nodded. Go back home now, Pungushe. He waited until the big Zulu was out of sight among the trees, then Mark went down on his knees and removed his hat. Well, Pops, he said, I'm not very good at this. But I know you'd have liked to have the words said. His voice was so hoarse and low that he had to clear his throat loudly before he went on.
The house on Lion Kop was shuttered, and the furniture all under white dust sheets, but the head servant met Mark in the kitchen yard. Nkosi has gone to Tekweni. He left two weeks ago.
He gave Mark a breakfast of grilled bacon and fried eggs.
Then Mark went out and mounted his motorcycle again.
It was a long hard run down to the coast, and Mark had plenty of time to think as the dusty miles spun away under the wheels of the Ariel Square Four.
He had left Chaka's Gate within hours of finding the old man's grave, going instinctively to one man for advice and guidance.
He had wanted Marion to come with him, at least as far as Ladyburg where she could have stayed with her sister.
However Marion had refused to leave her home or her garden, and Mark had felt secure in the knowledge that Pungushe would be sleeping in the toolshed behind the stables to guard the homestead in Mark's absence.
Mark had waded the river and trudged up the slope below to the beginning of the track where he kept the motorcycle in its thatched shelter.
It had been a slow, bumpy journey in the dark, and he had reached Lion Kop in the dawn to find Sean Courtney had moved his household to Durban.
Mark rode through the gates of Emoyeni in the late afternoon, and it was like coming home again.
Ruth Courtney was in the rose garden, but she dropped the basket of cut flowers and lifted her skirts to her knees as she ran to meet him, the wide-brimmed straw hat flying from her head and hanging by its ribbon around her throat and her delighted spontaneous laughter ringing like a young girl's. Oh Mark, we've missed you so. She took him in a motherly embrace, kissing both his cheeks. How brown and hard you look, and you've filled out beautifully. She held him at arm's length and felt his biceps in mock admiration before embracing him again. The General will be delighted to see you. She took Mark's arm and led him towards the house. He hasn't been well,
