snuggled a little closer. That was a silly question. The old Storm speaking. People have said all there is to say about me, and none of it really mattered a damn. There aren't a lot of people out there to sit in judgement.
Only Pungushe, and he's a very broad-minded gentleman. She laughed again sleepily. Only one person I care about - Daddy mustn't know. I've hurt him enough already So Storm came at last to Chaka's Gate. She came in the beaten and neglected Cadillac, with John on the seat beside her, her worldly possessions crammed into the cab or strapped on the roof and Mark riding his motorcycle escort ahead of her over the rude and bumpy track.
Where the track ended above the Bubezi River, she climbed out and looked around her. Well, she decided after a long thoughtful survey of the towering cliffs, and the river in its bed of green water and white banks, framed by the tall nodding strands of fluffyheaded reeds and great spreading sycamore figs, at least it's picturesque. Mark put John on his shoulder. Tungushe and I will come back with the mules for the rest of your gear. And he led her down the footpath to the river.
Pungushe was waiting for them under the trees on the far bank, tall and black and imposing in his beaded loin cloth. Pungusbe, this is my lady and her name is Vungu Vungu the Storm. I see you, Vungu Vungu, I see also that you are misnamed, said Pungushe quietly, for a storm is an ugly thing which kills and destroys. And you are a lady of beauty. Thank you, Pungushe. Storm smiled at him. But you are also misnamed, for a jackal is a small mean creature. But clever, said Mark solemnly, and John let out a shout of greeting and bounced on Mark's shoulder, reaching out with both hands for Pungushe. And this is my son. Pungushe looked at John. There are two things a Zulu loves dearly, cattle and children. Of the two, he prefers children preferably boy-children. Of all boy-children, he likes best those that are robust, and bold and aggressive. Jamela, I should like to hold your son, he said, and Mark gave John to him. I see you Phimbo, Pungushe greeted the child. I see you little man with a great voice. And then Pungushe smiled that great beaming radiant smile, and John shouted again with joy and thrust his hand in Pungushe's mouth to grab those white shining teeth, but Pungushe swung him up on to his shoulder and laughed with a great hipposnort and carried him up the hill.
So they came to Chaka's Gate, and there was never any doubt, right from that first day.
Within an hour, there was a polite tap on the screendoor of the kitchen and when Mark opened it there stood in a row on the covered stoep all of Pungushe's daughters, from the eldest who was fourteen to the youngest of four. We have come, announced the eldest, to greet Phimbo. Mark looked at Storm inquiringly, and she nodded. The eldest daughter swung John up on to her back with a practised action, and strapped him there with a strip of cotton limbo. She had played nurse-maid to all her brothers and sisters, probably knew more about small children than both Storm and Mark combined, and John took to the froglike position on her back as though he had been born Zulu. Then the little girl bobbed a curtsey to Storm and trotted away, with all her sisters in procession, bearing John off to a wonderland peopled entirely with playmates of endless variety and fascination.
On the third day, Storm began sketching, and by the end of the first week she had taken over the household management on a system that Mark referred to as comfortable chaos, alternating with brief periods of pandemonium.
Comfortable chaos was when everybody ate what they wanted, perhaps chocolate biscuits and coffee for dinner one night and a feast of barbecued meat the next. They ate it where they felt like it, perhaps sitting up in bed or lying on a rug on the sand-bank of the river. They ate when they wanted, breakfast at noon or dinner at midnight, if talking and laughing delayed it that long.
Comfortable chaos was when the dusting of furniture or polishing of floors were forgotten in the excitement of living, when clothes that needed mending were tossed into the bottom of the cupboard, when Mark's hair was allowed to grow in points over the back of his collar. Comfortable chaos ended unpredictably and abruptly to be replaced by pandemonium.
Pandemonium began when Storm suddenly got a steely look in her eye and announced, This place is a pig sty! followed by the snipping of scissors, buckets of steaming water, clouds of flying dust, hanging pots, and flashing needles. Mark was shorn and clad in refurbished clothing, the cottage gleamed and sparkled, and Storm's housekeeping instincts were exhausted for another indefinite period.
And the next day she would be up on Spartan's back, John strapped Zulu-fashion behind her, following Mark on patrol up the valley.
The first time John had been taken on patrol, Mark had asked anxiously, Do you think it's wise to take him, he's still very small? And Storm had replied, I am older and more important than Master John. He fits into my life, not me into his. So John rode patrol on muleback, slept in his apple basket under the stars at night, and took his daily bath in the coot green pools of the Bubezi River, quickly developed an immunity to the occasional tsetse bite, and flourished.
They climbed the steep pathway to the summit of Chaka's Gate, sat with their feet dangling over that fearful drop, and they looked across the whole valley, the far blue hills and the plains and swamps and the wide winding rivers. When I first met you, you were poor, Storm said quietly, leaning against Mark's shoulder with her eyes filled with the peace and wonder of it, but now you are the richest man in the world, for you are the owner of paradise. He took her up the river to the lonely grave below the escarpment. Storm helped him to build a pile of rocks, and to set the cross that Mark had made over it. He told her Pungushe's story of how the old man had been killed, and she cried openly and unashamedly, holding John on her lap, sitting on the gravestone, listening and living every word. I have looked, but never truly seen before, she said, as he showed her the nest of a suribird, cunningly woven of lichen and spider web, turning it carefully so she could peer into the funnel entrance and see the tiny speckled eggs. I never knew what true peace was until I came to this place, she said, as they sat on the bank of the Bubezi in the yellow light of fading day, and watched a kudu bull with long spiral corkscrew horns and chalk-striped shoulders lead his big-eared cows down to the water.
I did not know what happiness was before, she whispered, when they had woken together a little after midnight for no reason and reached for each other in the darkness.
Then one morning she sat up in the rumpled bed, over which John was rampaging unchecked and sowing crumbles of lightly chewed biscuit, and she looked at Mark seriously. You once asked me to marry you, I she said. Would you like to repeat that question, sir? And it was later that same day they heard the axeman at work up the valley.
The blade of a two-handed axe, swung against the hole of a standing hardwood tree, rings like a gunshot, and the sound of it bounced against the cliffs of Chaka's Gate and was flung back to break in dying echoes down the valley, each stroke still lingering on the air while the next cracked off the grey cliffs. There was more than one axernan at work, so that the din was continuous, like the sounds of battle.
Storm had never before seen such a passion of anger on Mark's face. His skin was drained of blood so that the tan of the sun was fever-yellow and his lips seemed frost-bitten and pinched by the force of it. Yet his eyes blazed, and she had to run to match his angry stride as they went up the scree slope from the river beneath the cliff s, and the sound of the axes broke over them, each separate stroke as brutal and shocking as the ones that preceded it.
Ahead of them, one of the lofty leadwoods quivered as though in agony and moved against the sky. Mark
