tailboard, falling face forward onto the pile of dead and wounded men in the back.
Louren smashed a new route through a belt of scrub thorn, avoiding the mined trail, and then angled back to pick it up farther out.
The firing from the ridge died away as the forest blanketed us. I watched the column of black sooty smoke climbing up into the flushed evening sky, pleased that I had denied them the spoils of victory, and suddenly I found myself shaking like a man in high fever. Icy waves of shock and reaction engulfed me.
‘Are you all right, Ben?’ Louren called to me.
‘Yes, I’m fine,’ I answered and looked down at the pathetic blanket-wrapped bundles at my feet.
All that night we crawled southwards, jolting and bumping over the rough ground, often losing the track and having to search for it, shivering in the cold of an African night when the wind blew through the shattered windscreen.
In a dawn that was grape-purple and smoky blue I asked Louren to stop the Land-Rover. The troopers helped me to dig a shallow grave in the sandy bottom land between two kopjes. I lifted Xhai out of the Land-Rover still wrapped in the dark grey police blanket and he was as light as a sleeping child in my arms. I laid him in the earth and we stood around in a circle and looked down at him. Blood had soaked through the blanket and dried in a black stain.
I nodded at the troopers. ‘All right. Cover him.’ They did it quickly and went back to the Land-Rover. It was still cold, and I shivered in my thin cotton shirt. Up on the kopje an old bull baboon barked, his cry boomed across the valley.
I followed the troopers back to the Land-Rover and climbed up beside them. As we drove on I looked back, and saw a herd of buffalo moving out of the bush. They were grazing, heads down and tails swinging towards Xhai’s grave. This was where my brother belonged, with the animals in the wilderness he loved.
‘I’m very much afraid that they have slipped back across the river,’ the assistant commissioner of police told me. ‘There is nothing we would have liked more than to get our hands on this fellow Mageba.’
We had flown out with MacDonald in the police helicopter to Bulawayo two days before. Louren had left me to help the Rhodesian police as best I could while he sent for the Lear and went on direct to Johannesburg. Now I was having a final debriefing at police headquarters, while a charter flight stood by to take me back to the City of the Moon.
The assistant commissioner was a tall man with a military set to his shoulders, and a brush of closely cropped grey hair. His face was seamed and furrowed and burned darkly by a thousand suns. There were ribbons on his chest that I recognized, the emblems of courage and honour.
‘He is top of our list of the chaps we’d like to meet, actually. A nasty piece of work, but then you’d know that as well as anybody.’ And he turned those steely grey eyes on to me, giving me the feeling that I was being interrogated.
‘I know him,’ I agreed. My part in the hi-jacking incident was common knowledge.
‘What do you make of the man?’
‘He is an intelligent man, and he has a presence. There is something about him.’ I tried to find the words to describe him. ‘He’s the type of man who sets out to get what he wants, and the type that other men will follow.’
‘Yes,’ the assistant commissioner nodded. ‘That’s a fair summation of our own intelligence. Since he joined them there has been an escalation of hostile activity from our friends across the river.’ He sighed, and massaged his iron-grey temples. ‘I thought we might have got him this time. They left their dead unburied, and made a run for the river. We could only have missed them by minutes.’
He walked down with me to where a police car waited under the jacaranda trees with their clouds of purple blossom.
‘What news have you of MacDonald?’ I asked as we stood beside the police car.
‘He will be all right. They saved both legs.’
‘I am glad.’
‘Yes,’ agreed the assistant commissioner. ‘He is a good type. Wish we had more of them. By the way, Doctor, we would rather you kept mum about this business. We don’t like to make too much fuss about these incidents. Rather playing into their hands, you know. Gives them the publicity they want.’
We shook hands and he turned and strode back into the building. As we drove through the busy streets and I saw the smiles on the faces around me, I wondered why anybody should want to destroy this society - and if they succeeded, with what would they replace it?
It seemed natural to think then of the City of the Moon. A great civilization, a nation which held dominion over an area the size of Europe, a people who built great cities of stone and sent their ships in trade to the limits of the known world. All that remained of them were the few poor relics which we had so laboriously gleaned. No other continent was so fickle in the succour it gave to men, to raise them up so swiftly and then to pluck them down and devour them so that they were denied even a place in her memory. A cruel land, a savage and merciless land. It was a wonder that so many of us loved her so deeply.
My return to the City of the Moon was disappointing. After the events of the last few days it was an anti-climax. It seemed that the others had hardly noticed my absence.
‘Did you enjoy yourself?’ Sally asked over the typewriter and a pile of translation sheets.
‘Well, it was interesting.’
‘That’s good. What happened to your eyelashes?’ she asked and without waiting for an answer began pounding the keyboard with two fingers, biting her tongue with concentration, pausing only to push her hair off her cheek with the back of one hand.
‘Glad you are back, Ben,’ said Eldridge Hamilton. ‘I’ve been wanting to talk to you about this.’ And he led me to a table on which a portion of one of the scrolls was spread. I didn’t seem to be able to concentrate. Suddenly, for the first time in my life I felt that it was ancient and unimportant compared with the blood that I so recently had seen spurt fresh and red.
Ral and Leslie had obviously used my absence to scheme out an approach. Ral spoke for both of them, with
