A Sparrow Falls

Wilbur Smith - A Sparrow Falls

Synopsis:

Mark never heard the Mauser shot for the bullet came ahead of the sound. There was only the massive shock in the upper part of his body, and then he was hurled backwards with a violence that drove the air from his lungs. The earth opened before him, and as he fell there was the sensation of being ingulfed in a swirling vortax of blacknessand he knew for just a fleeting instant of time that he was dead.

From the trenches of France, General Sean Courtney comes back to fame fortune and a seat in the Government. Mark Anders the courageous young South african whom he has come to regard as his own son, returns to nothing, his grandfather murdered, his property seized by an unknown company. At the bottom of the mystery is Sean's son Dirk, the jealous , violent and power-crazed genius whose allconsuming hatred can only end in blood.

WILBUR SMITH - A Sparrow Falls

A sky the colour of old bruises hung low over the battlefields of France, and rolled with ponderous dignity towards the German lines.

Brigadier-General Sean Courtney had spent four winters in France and now, with the eye of a cattleman and a farmer, he could judge this weather almost as accurately as that of his native Africa. It will snow tonight, he grunted, and Lieutenant Nick van der Heever, his orderly officer, glanced back at him over his shoulder. I shouldn't wonder, sir. Van der Heever was heavily laden. In addition to his service rifle and webbing, he carried a canvas kitbag across his shoulder, for General Courtney was on his way to dine as a mess guest of the 2nd Battalion. At this moment the Colonel and officers of the. 2nd Battalion were completely unaware of the impending honour, and Sean grinned in wicked anticipation at the panic that his unannounced arrival would create. The contents of the kitbag would be some small compensation for the shock, for it included half a dozen bottles of pinch bottle Haig and a fat goose.

Nevertheless, Sean was aware that his officers found his informal behaviour and his habit of arriving suddenly in the front lines, unannounced and unattended by his staff, more than a little disconcerting. Only a week before, he had overheard a field telephone conversation on a crossed line between a major and a captain.

The old bastard thinks he's still fighting the Boer War.

Can't you keep him in a cage back there at H. Q.? How do you cage a bull elephant? Well, at least warn us when he's on his way Sean grinned again and trudged on after his orderly officer, the folds of his great-coat flapping about his putteed legs and, for warmth, a silk scarf wrapped around his head beneath the soup-plate shape of his helmet. The boards bounced under his feet and the gluey mud sucked and gurgled beneath them at the passing weight of the two men.

This part of the line was unfamiliar, the brigade had moved in less than a week previously, but the stench was well remembered. The musty smell of earth and mud, overladen with the odour of rotting flesh and sewage, the stale lingering whiff of burned cordite and high explosive.

Sean sniffed it and spat with distaste. Within an hour he knew he would be so accustomed as not to notice it, but now it seemed to coat the back of his throat like cold grease. Once again he looked up at the sky, and now he frowned. Either the wind had shifted into the east a point or two, or they had taken a wrong turning within the maze of trenches, for the low cloud was no longer rolling in the direction that fitted with the map that Sean carried in his head. Nick! Sir? Are you still right?

And he saw at once the uncertainty in the young subaltern's eyes as he looked back. Well, sir -The trenches had been deserted for the last quarter of a mile, not a single soul had they passed in the labyrinth of high earthen walls. We'd better take a look, Nick. I'll do it, sir. Van der Heever glanced ahead along the trench, and found what he was looking for. At the next intersection a wooden ladder was fastened into the wall. It reached to the top of the sand-bagged parapet. He started towards it.

Careful, Nick, Sean called after him. Sir, the young man acknowledged, and propped his rifle before swarming upwards.

Sean calculated they were still three or four hundred yards from the front line yet, and the light was going fast.

There was a purple velvet look to the air beneath the clouds, not shooting light at all, and he knew that, despite his age, van der Heever was an old soldier. The glance he took over the top would be swift as a meerkat looking out of its hole.

Sean watched him crouch at the top of the ladder, lift his head for a single quick sweep and then duck down again.

The hill is too much on our left, he called down.

The hill was a low, rounded mound that rose a mere hundred and fifty feet above the almost featureless plain.

Once it had been thickly forested, but now only the shattered stumps stood waist-high and the slopes were dimpled with shell craters. How far is the farm house? Sean asked, still peering upwards. The farm house was a roofless rectangle of battered walls that stood foursquare facing the centre of the Battalion's sector. it was used as a central reference point for artillery, infantry and aircorps alike. I'll have another look, and van der Heever lifted his head again.

The Mauser has a distinctive cracking report, a high and vicious sound that Sean had heard so often as to be able to judge with accuracy its range and direction.

This was a single shot, at about five hundred yards, almost dead ahead.

Van der Heever's head snapped backwards as though he had taken a heavy punch, and the steel of his helmet rang like a gong. The chin-strap snapped as the round helmet spun high in the air and then dropped to the floorboards in the bottom of the trench and rolled on its rim into a pool of grey mud.

Van der Heever's hands remained locked closed on the top rung of the ladder for a moment, then the nerveless fingers opened, and he tumbled backwards, falling heavily into the bottom of the trench with the skirts of his greatcoat ballooning around him.

Sean stood frozen and disbelieving his mind not yet accepting the fact that Nick was hit, but, as a soldier and a hunter, judging that single shot with awe.

What kind of shooting was that? Five hundred yards in this murky light; one fleeting glimpse of a helmeted head above the parapet; three seconds to set the range and line UP, then another instant of time to sight and fire as the head bobbed up again. The Hun that fired that shot was either a superb marksman with reflexes like a leopard, or the flukiest sniper on the western front.

The thought was fleeting and Sean started forward heavily and knelt beside his officer. He turned him with a hand upon the shoulder and felt the sickening slide in his guts and the cold grip on his chest.

The bullet had entered at the temple and exited behind the opposite ear.

Sean lifted the shattered head into his lap, removed his own helmet and began to unwind the silk scarf from around his head. He felt a desolation of loss.

Slowly he wrapped the boy's head into the scarf, and immediately the blood soaked through the thin material.

It was a futile gesture, but it served to keep -his hands occupied and detract from his sense of helplessness.

He sat on the muddy floorboards, holding the boy's body, his heavy shoulders bowed forward. The size of Sean's bared head was accentuated by the thick curls of dark wiry hair shot through with splashes and strands of grey that sparkled frostily in the fading light. The short thick beard was laced with grey as well, and the big beaked nose was twisted and battered-looking.

Only the black curved eyebrows were sleek and unmarked, and the eyes were clear and dark cobalt blue, the eyes of a much younger man, steady and alert.

Sean Courtney sat for a long time holding the boy, and then he sighed once, deeply, and laid the broken head aside.

He stood up, hefted the kitbag on to his own shoulder, and set off along the communications trench once again.

At five minutes before midnight, the Colonel commanding the 2nd Battalion stooped through the blackout curtains that screened the entrance to the mess, and beat the snow from his shoulders with a gloved hand as he straightened.

The mess had been a German dugout six months before, and was the envy of the brigade. Thirty feet below ground level, it was impregnable, even to the heaviest artillery barrage. The floor was of heavy timber boarding and even the walls were panelled against the damp and the cold.

A pot-bellied stove stood against the far wall, glowing cheerfully.

Gathered about it in a half circle of looted armchairs sat the off -duty officers.

However, the Colonel had eyes only for the burly figure of his General, seated in the largest and most comfortable chair closest to the stove, and he shed his great-coat as he hurried across the dugout. General, my apologies. If I'd known you were coming I was making my rounds. Sean Courtney chuckled and rose ponderously from the chair to shake his hand. It's what I would expect of you, Charles, but your officers have made me very welcome and we have kept a little of the goose for you The Colonel glanced quickly about the circle and frowned as he saw the hectic cheeks and sparkling eyes of some of his younger subalterns. He must warn them of the folly of trying to drink level with the General. The old man was steady as a rock, of course, and those eyes were like bayonets under the dark brows, but the Colonel knew him well enough to guess that he had a full quart of Dimple Haig in his belly, and that something was troubling him deeply. Then it came to him. Of course I'm terribly sorry to hear about young van der Heever sir. Sergeant-Major told me what happened. I Sean made a gesture of dismissal, but for a moment the shadows darkened about his eyes. If I'd only known you were coming up into the line this evening, I would have warned you, sir. We have had the devil of trouble with that sniper ever since we moved up.

It's the same fellow, of course, absolutely deadly. I've never heard of anything like it. Dreadful nuisance when everything else is so quiet. Only casualties we've had all week. What are you doing about him? Sean asked harshly.

They all saw the flush of anger darken his face, and the Adjutant intervened swiftly. I've been on to Colonel Caithness at 3rd Battalion, and we did a deal, sir. He has agreed to send us Anders and f MacDonald You got them! The Colonel looked delighted. Oh I say, that's excellent. I didn't think Caithness would part with hisprizepair. 1They came in this morning, and the two of them have been studying the ground all day. I gave them a free hand, but I understand they are setting up the shoot for tomorrow. The Young Captain who commanded A Company pulled out his watch and studied it a moment. They are going out from my section, sir. As a matter of fact, I was going to go down and give them a send-off, they will be moving into position at half past twelve. If you'll excuse me, sir! Yes, of course, off with you, Dicky, wish them good luck from me. Everybody in the brigade had heard of Anders and MacDonald.

I'd like to meet that pair. Sean Courtney spoke suddenly, and dutifully the Colonel agreed. Of course, I'll come out with you, sir. No, no, Charles, you've been out in the cold all night as it is. I'll just go along with Dicky here. The snow came down thickly out of the utter darkness of the midnight sky. It damped down the night sounds in its thick muffling cloak, muting the regular bursts of a Vickers firing at a hole in the wire on the battalion's left.

Mark Anders sat wrapped in his borrowed blankets and he bowed his head to the book in his lap, adjusting his eyes to the yellow wavering light of the candle-stump.

The rise in temperature that accompanied the first fall of snow and the changed quality of sound entering the small dug-out awakened the man who slept beside him. He coughed, and rolled over to open a chink in the canvas curtain beside his head. Damn, he said, and coughed again, the harsh hammering sound of a heavy smoker. Damn it to hell. It's snowing. Then he rolled back to Mark.

You still reading? he demanded roughly. Always with your nose in a bloody book. You'll ruin your shooting eyes. Mark lifted his head. It's been snowing for an hour already. What you want all that learning for? Fergus MacDonald was not so easily distracted. It won't do you no good. I don't like the snow, said Mark. We didn't reckon on the snow. The snow complicated the task ahead of them. It would cover the ground out there with a sensitive mantle of white. Anybody moving out from the trench into noman's-land would leave tracks that the dawn light would instantly betray to an observant enemy.

A match flared and Fergus lit two Woodbines and passed one to Mark. They sat shoulder to shoulder, huddled in their blankets.

You can call off the shoot, Mark. Tell em to shove it.

You're a volunteer lad. They smoked in silence for a full minute before Mark replied. That Hun is a bad one. If it's snowing, he probably won't be out tomorrow.

Snow will keep him in bed also. Mark shook his head slowly. If he's that good, he'll be out. Yes. Fergus nodded. He's that good. That shot he made last evening, after lying up all day in the cold, then five hundred yards if it was an inch, and in that light, Fergus cut himself off, and then went on quickly, But you're good also, lad. You're the best, boy.

Mark said nothing, but carefully pinched out the glowing tip of the Woodbine.

You're going? Fergus asked. Yes. Get some sleep then, lad. It's going to be a long day. Mark blew out the candle flame as he lay back and pulled the blankets over his head. You get a good sleep Fergus said again. I'll-wake you in plenty of time, and he resisted the paternal urge to pat the thin bony shoulder under the blanket.

The young Captain spoke quietly with one of the sentries on the forward firing step, and the man whispered a reply and pointed with his chin along the darkened trench. This way, sir. He went on down the boards, swaddled in clothing so that he had the shape of a bear, and Sean towered head and shoulders above him as he followed.

Around the next revert, through the soft curtains of falling snow, there was the subdued red glow of a brazier from the shallow dugout in the side of the trench. Dark figures squatted close about it, like witches at a sabbat.

Sergeant MacDonald? One of the figures rose and stepped forward. That's me. There was a cocky, self-assured tone to the reply. Is Anders with you? Present and correct, said MacDonald, and one of the other figures rose from the circle about the brazier and came forward. He was taller, but moved with grace, like an athlete or a dancer.

. You are ready, Anders? the Captain went on, speaking in the soft half-whisper of the trenches, and MacDonald replied for him. The lad is fighting fit, sir. He spoke with the proprietary tone of the manager of a prize-fighter. It was clear that the boy was his property, and that ownership gave him a distinction he would never have achieved on his own.

At that moment another flare burst high overhead, a brilliant white and silent explosion of light, softened by the snow.

Sean could judge a man like he could a horse. He could pick the rotten ones, or the big-hearted, from the herd. It was a trick of experience and some deeper inexplicable insight.

in the light of the flare his eyes flickered across the face of the older Sergeant. MacDonald had the bony undernourished features of the slum-dweller, the eyes too close set, the lips narrow and twisted downwards at the corners.

There was nothing to interest Sean there and he looked at the other man.

The eyes were a pale golden brown, set wide, with the serene gaze of a poet or a man who had lived in the open country of long distant horizons. The lids were held wide open, so that they did not overlap the iris, leaving a clear glimpse of the clean white about the cornea so that it floated free like a full moon. Sean had seen it only a few times before, and the effect was almost hypnotic, of such direct and searching candour that it seemed to reach deep into Sean's own soul.

After the first impact of those eyes, other impressions crowded in. The first was of the man's extreme youth. He was nearer seventeen than twenty, Sean judged, and then saw immediately how finely drawn the boy was. Despite the serenity of his gaze, he was stretched out tight and hard, racked up with strain close to the snapping point.

Sean had seen it so often in the past four years. They had found this child's special talent and exploited it ruthlessly, all of them, Caithness at 3rd Battalion, the ferrety MacDonald, Charles, Dicky and, by association, himself. They had worked him mercilessly, sending him out time and again.

The boy held a steaming tin mug of coffee in one hand, and the wrist that protruded from the sleeve of his coat was skeletal, and speckled with angry red bites of body lice.

The neck was too long and thin for the head it supported, and the cheeks were hollow, the eye-sockets sunken. This is General Courtney, said the Captain; and as the light of the flare died, Sean saw the eyes shine suddenly with anew light, and heard the boy's breath catch with awe. Hello, Anders, I've heard a lot about you, And I've heard about you, sir. The transparent tones of hero-worship irritated Sean. The boy would have heard all the stories, of course. The regiment boasted of him, and every new recruit heard the tales. There was nothing he could do to prevent them circulating. It's a great honour to meet you, sir. The boy tripped on the words, stuttering a little, another sign of the terrible strain he was under, -yet the words were completely sincere.

The legendary Sean Courtney, the man who had made five million pounds on the goldfields of the Witwatersrand and lost every penny of it in a morning at a single coup of fortune. Sean Courtney, who had chased the Boer General Leroux across half of Southern Africa and caught him at last after a terrible hand-to-hand fight. The soldier who had held Bombata's ravaging Zulu impis at the gorge and then driven them on to the waiting Maxims, who had planned with his erstwhile enemy Leroux and helped build the Charter of Union which united the four independent states of Southern Africa into a single mighty whole, who had built another vast personal fortune in land and cattle and timber, who had given up his position in Louis Botha's Cabinet and at the head of the Natal Legislative Council to bring the regiment out to France, it was natural the boy's eyes should shine that way and his tongue trip, but still it annoyed Sean. At fifty-nine I'm too old to play the hero now, he thought wryly, and the flare went down, plunging them back into the darkness. If there's another mug of that coffee, said Sean. It's bloody cold tonight. Sean accepted the chipped enamel mug and hunkered down close to the brazier, cupped the mug between his hands, blowing on the steaming liquid and sipping noisily, and after a moment the others followed his example hesitantly. It was strange to be squatting like old mates with a General and the silence was profound. You're from Zululand? Sean asked the boy suddenly, his ear had picked up the accent, and without waiting for a reply went on in the Zulu tongue, Velapi wena? Where are you from? The Zulu language came naturally and easily to Mark's lips though he had not spoken it for two years. From the north beyond Eshowe, on the Umfolosi River. Yes. I know it well. I have hunted there. Sean changed back to English. Anders? I knew another Anders. He rode transport from Delagoa Bay back in 89. John? Yes, that's it. Old Johnny Anders. Any relation? Your father? My grandfather. My father's dead. My grandfather has land on the Umfolosi. That's where I live. The boy was relaxing now. In the brazier glow, Sean thought he saw the lines of strain around his mouth ironing out. I didn't think you'd know poor folk, like us, sir. Fergus MacDonald spoke with cutting edge in his voice, leaning forward towards the brazier with his head turned towards him so that Sean could see the bitter line of his mouth.

Sean nodded slowly. MacDonald was one of them then.

One of those who were intent on the new order, trade unions and Karl Marx, Bolsheviks who threw bombs and called themselves comrades. Irrelevantly he noticed for the first time that MacDonald had ginger hair, and big golden freckles on the backs of his hands. He turned back to Mark Anders. He taught you to shoot? Yes, sir. The lad grinned for the first time, warmed by the memory. He gave me my first rifle, a Martini Hendry that blew a cloud of gunsmoke like a bush fire but would throw dead true at a hundred and fifty yards. I've hunted elephant with it. A great rifle, Sean agreed, and suddenly across an age difference of forty years they were friends.

Perhaps, for Sean, the recent death of that other bright young man, Nick van der Heever, had left an aching gap in his life, for now he felt a flood of paternal protection for the youngster. Fergus MacDonald seemed to sense it also, for he cut in like a jealous woman. You'd best be getting ready now, lad The smile was gone from Mark's lips, the eyes were too calm, and he nodded his thin neck stiffly.

Fergus MacDonald fussed over the lad, and once again Sean was reminded of a trainer preparing his fighter in the dressing-room. He stripped off the heavy, voluminous great-coat and the battle-dress jacket. Over the long woollen full-length underwear went a woollen shirt and two knitted jerseys. A woollen scarf around the throat.

Then a mechanic's boiler-suit which covered the layers of clothing in a single neat skin that would not snag, or flutter in a breeze to draw an enemy eye. A woollen balaclava over the head, and a leather airman's helmet, and Sean saw the reason. The British steel helmet had a distinctive brim, and anyway was no protection from a Mauser bullet. Keep your nut down, Mark, me boy. Knitted mittens with fingers cut out, and then thick loose gloves over them. Keep the old fingers working, lad. Don't let them stiffen up on you. A small leather shoulder bag that slung comfortably under the left armpit. Ham sandwiches with plenty of mustard, chocolate and barley sugar, just the way you like it. Don't forget to eat, keep you warm. Four full clips Of . 303 cartridges, three slipped into the thigh pockets of the boiler-suit, and one into the special pocket sewn into the forearm of the left sleeve. I waxed each round myself, Fergus announced mainly for the benefit of the listening General. They'll slide in like,- and the simile was crude and obscene, meant to show Fergus scorn of rank and class. But Sean let it pass easily, he was too interested in the preparations for the hunt.

I won't show Cuthbert until the sun is right. Cuthbert? Sean asked, and Fergus chuckled and indicated a third figure that lay quietly at the back of the dugout. It was the first time Sean had noticed him and Fergus chuckled again at his puzzled expression reached out to the reclining figure.

Only then Sean realized it was a dummy, but in the light of the brazier the features were realistic and the helmeted head rode at a natural angle on the shoulders. The model ended abruptly at the hips and below it there was only a broom handle. I'd like to know how you are going to do it? Sean addressed the question to young Mark Anders, but Fergus replied importantly. Yesterday the Hun was shooting from low on the northern slope of the hill. Mark and me worked out the angles of the two shots he made and we've got him pegged to within fifty yards. He may change position, Sean pointed out. He'll not leave the north slope. It's in shadow all day, even if the sun comes out. He will want to shoot from shade into light. Sean nodded at the logic of it. Yes, he agreed, but be may shoot from a stand in the German line. And Mark answered quietly, I don't think so, sir. The lines are too far apart here', the German line ran across the crest of the hill, he'd want a shorter range. No, sir, he's shooting from close in. He makes a stand in no-man's land, probably changes it every day, but each time he comes close as he can get to our lines while still staying in the shadow. The boy had not tripped on a single word now that his mind had locked on to the problem. His voice was low and intense. I picked out a good stand for the lad, just beyond the farm house. He can cover the whole of the northern slope at less than two hundred yards. He'll move out now and settle in while it's still dark. I'm sending him out early. I want him to make his move before the Hun. I don't want the lad walking on top of the bastard in the dark. Fergus MacDonald took over from Mark with an air of authority. Then we both wait until the light is good and clean, then I start working with Cuthbert here, he patted the dummy and chuckled again. It's damned difficult to give him a nice natural look, like some stupid rooky sticking his head -up to take a first look at France. If you let the Hun get too long a look at him, then he'll tumble to the trick, but if you make it too quick, he won't get a chance for a shot.

No, it's not easy. Yes, I should imagine, Sean murmured wryly, that it's the most dangerous and difficult part of the whole thing.

And he saw the deadly expression flit across Fergus MacDonald's face before he turned to Mark Anders. Another mug of coffee, lad, and then it's time to be getting on. I want you in place before the snow stops. Sean reached into the breast of his great-coat and brought out the silver flask that Ruth had given him on the day the regiment sailed. Put some fangs in the coffee. He offered the flask to Mark.

The boy shook his head shyly. No thank you, sir. Makes me see squill. Don't mind if I do, sir. Fergus MacDonald reached swiftly across the brazier. The clear brown liquid glugged freely into his own mug.

The Sergeant-Major had sent out a patrol before midnight to cut a lane through the wire in front of A Company.

Mark stood at the foot of the trench ladder and changed his rifle from the right hand; another flare burst overhead and in its light Sean saw how intent the boy was on his task. He pulled back the bolt of the rifle, and Sean noted that he was not using the standard No. 1 short Lee-Enfield, which was the work-horse of the British army, but that he favoured the American P-4 which also fired the . 303

calibre but had the longer barrel and finer balance.

Mark stripped two clips of ammunition into the magazine and closed the bolt, levering a round of carefully selected and waxed ammunition into the breach.

In the last light of the flare he looked across at Sean, and nodded slightly. The flare died and in the darkness that followed Sean heard the quick light steps on the wooden ladder. He wanted to call good luck after the boy, but suppressed the whim and instead patted his pockets for his cheroot case.

, Sir Shall we get on back, sir? the Captain asked quietly. Off with you, growled Sean, his voice gruff with the premonition of coming tragedy. I'll stay on a while. Though he could give no help, somehow it seemed like deserting the boy to leave now.

Mark moved quickly along the line that the patrol had laid to guide him through the wire. He stooped to keep contact with the line in his left hand, and he carried the PJ4 in his right. He lifted his feet carefully, and stepped lightly, trying not to scuff the snow, trying to spread his weight evenly on each foot so as not to break the crust.

Yet every time, a flare went up, he had to fall face forward and lie still and huddled, a dark blot in the electric glare of light against the sheet of white, screened only by the persistently falling veils of snow. When he scrambled up in the darkness and moved on, he knew he left a disturbed area of snow. Ordinarily it would not have mattered, for in the barren, shell-churned wilderness of no-man's-land, such light scrabble marks passed unnoticed. But Mark knew that in the first cold light of dawn an unusual pair of eyes would be scrutinizing every inch of the ground, hunting for just this kind of sign.

Suddenly, colder than the icy snow-laden air against his cheeks, was the deep chill of loneliness. The sense of vulnerability, of being pitted against a skilled and implacable enemy, an invisible, terrifying, efficient adversary who would deliver instant death at the slightest error.

The latest flare sank and died, and he scrambled to his feet and blundered to the dark, jagged wall of the ruined farm house. He crouched against it, and tried to control his breathing for this newly conceived terror threatened to smother him. it was the first time it had come upon him.

Fear he had known, had lived with it as his constant companion these last two years, but never this terrible paralysing terror.

When he touched his fingers of his right hand to his ice-cold cheek, he felt the tremble in them, and in sympathy his teeth chattered in a short staccato rhythm. I can't shoot like this, he thought wildly, clenching his jaw until it ached and locking his hands together and holding them hard against his groin, and I can't stay here. The ruin was too obvious a stand to make. It would be the first point the German sniper would study. He had to get out of there, and quickly. Back to the trenches. Suddenly his terror was panic, and he lifted himself to begin the crazed flight back, leaving his rifle propped against the ruined wall. Bist du da? a voice whispered softly near him in the darkness. Mark froze instantly. Ja! The reply was further along the wall and Mark found the rifle with his left hand settling naturally on to the stock and his right curling about the pistol grip, forefinger hooking over the trigger.

Women, wir gehen zurUck. Close beside Mark, sensed rather than seen in the darkness, passed a heavily laden figure. Mark swung the rifle to follow him, his thumb on the safety-catch ready to slip it. The German stumbled heavily in the treacherous snowy footing, and the wiring tools he carried clanked together. The man cursed. Scheisse! Halt den Mund, snapped the other, and they moved on back towards the German line above them on the crest of the hill.

Mark had not expected a wiring detail to be out in this weather. His first thought had been for the German sniper, but now his mind leaped forward at this hidden good fortune.

The patrol would lead him through the German wire, and their heavy blundering tracks would hide his own from the sniper.

It was only when he had decided this that he realized with surprise that his panic had passed, his hands were rock steady and his breathing was deep and slow. He grinned without humour at his own frailty and moved forward lightly after the German patrol.

They were a hundred paces beyond the farm house when it stopped snowing. Mark felt the slide of dismay in his chest. He had relied heavily on the snow holdin& at least until dawn, but he kept on after the patrol. They were moving faster and more confidently as they neared their own lines.

Two hundred yards below the crest Mark left them to go on alone, and began working his way sideways around the slope, groping his way painstakingly through the heavily staked wire, until at last he recognized and reached the stand that he and Fergus had picked out through binoculars the previous afternoon.

The main trunk of one of the oaks that had covered the hill had fallen directly down the slope, pulling up a great matted tangle of roots from the soft high-explosive ploughed earth.

Mark crawled among the tangle of roots; selecting the side which would be in deepest shadow from the winter-angled sun, he wriggled in on his belly until he was half covered by them, but with head and shoulders able to turn to cover the full. curve of the northern slope ahead of him.

Now his first concern was to check the P-14 carefully, paying particular attention to the vulnerable, high-mounted Bisley-type rear sight to make sure that it had not been knocked or misaligned during the journey across noman's-land. He ate two of the ham sandwiches, drank a few rationed mouthfuls of sweet coffee and adjusted the woollen scarf over his mouth and nose, for warmth and to prevent the steaming of his breath. Then he laid his forehead carefully against the wooden butt of his rifle. He had developed the knack of instant sleep, and while he slept it snowed again.

When Mark woke in the sickly grey light of dawn, he was blanketed by the fine white flakes. Careful not to disturb them, he lifted his head slowly, and blinked his eyes rapidly to clear them. His fingers were stiff and cold; he worked them steadily in the gloves, forcing warm blood to flow.

He had been lucky again, twice in one night was too much. First the patrol to lead him through the wire and now this thin white coat of natural camouflage to blend his shape with the tangled roots of the oak. Too much luck, the pendulum must swing.

Slowly the darkness drew back, widening his circle of vision, and as it expanded so the whole of Mark's existence came to centre in those two wide golden brown eyes. They moved quickly in the pattern of search, touching in turn each irregularity and fold, each feature, each object, each ting colour or texture of snow and mud and earth, contras each stump of shattered timber or fallen branch, the irregular rim of every shell hole, looking for shadows where they should not have been, seeking the evidence of disturbance beneath the new thin coat of snow, seeking, searching for life, literally for life.

The snow stopped again a little before nine, and by noon the sky had lightened and there were holes in the cloudcover, a single watery ray of sun fell and moved like a searchlight across the southern slope of the hill. Right, Cuthbert, let's draw some Hun fire. Fergus had marked each of the German sniper's kills on the trench map the Sergeant-Major had loaned him. There were two black spots close to each other in the same section of trench. At those places the parapet was too low for the commanding bulk of the hill that commanded the front line. After five men had been killed at those two spots the parapet had been raised with sand-bags and crudely lettered notices warned the unwary.

KEEP YOUR HEAD DOWN. SNIPER AT WORK. The two black spots were only fifty paces apart, and Fergus guessed that the sniper had achieved his successes here by waiting for a victim to pass down the trench. He would get a glimpse of a head in the first gap, and would be aiming into the second gap with his finger on the hairtrigger as the man passed it. He explained this to Sean Courtney as he made his preparations, for by this time Sean was so intrigued by the hunt that only a major German offensive would have lured him back to his headquarters.

During the morning he had spoken to his aide-de-camp over the field telephone, and told them where they could find him in an emergency.

But make sure it's an emergency, he had growled ferociously into the headset. I'll draw him from south to north, Fergus explained, that will force the bloody Hun to turn away from Mark's stand, it will give the lad an extra second while he swings back towards the ridge. Fergus MacDonald was good with the dummy, Sean had to concede it. He carried it two feet higher than natural man height, to compensate for the raised parapet, and he gave it a realistic roll of the shoulders, like a hurrying man as he passed it through the first gap.

Sean, the young Captain and the beeffy red-faced Sergeant-Major were waiting with a half dozen other ranks beyond the second gap, watching Fergus come down the boards towards them steadily.

Instinctively they all drew breath and held it as he came up to the second gap, all of them tensed with suspense.

Up the slope of the hill, the Mauser cracked, like a bullwhip on the icy air, and the dummy kicked sharply in Fergus MacDonald's hands.

Fergus jerked it down out of sight, and fell to his knees to examine the neat round hole punched through the papiermAche head.

oh shit! he whispered bitterly. Oh, shit all over itVWhat is it, MacDonald? The bloody Hun, oh, the sodding bastard MacDonald! He's picked the same stand as my boy. Sean did not understand for a moment. He's in among the oak trunks, he's sitting right on top of Mark. They picked the same stand. The vicious stinging discharge of the Mauser was so close, so high and sharp, that for a few seconds afterwards, Mark's ear-drums buzzed with the mosquito hum of auditory memory.

For seconds he was stunned, frozen with the shock of it.

The German sniper was somewhere within twenty feet of where he lay. By some freak of coincidence, he had chosen the same point on the slope as Mark. No, it was no freak of coincidence. With the hunter's eye for ground, both men had selected the ideal position for their common purpose to deliver swift death from hiding. The pendulum of Mark's fortune had swung to the other end of its arc.

Mark had not moved in the seconds since the Mauser shot, but every sense was heightened by the adrenalin that sang through his veins and his heart beat with a force that seemed to reverberate against the cage of his ribs.

The German was on his left, higher up the slope, slightly behind his shoulder. The left was his unprotected side, a -ay from the tangled oak roots.

He trained his eyes around, without moving his head, and in the periphery of his vision saw another of the fallen oak trunks close by. He did not move for another full minute, watching for the flicker of movement in the corner of his eye. There was nothing, and the silence with awesome and oppressive, until a Spandau fired a shot burst, a mile or more away down the line.

Mark began to turn his head towards the left, as slowly as a chameleon stalking a fly. Gradually the distortion of periphery vision cleared and he could sweep the whole of the slope above him.

The nearest oak trunk had been savaged with shrapnel, all the bark was torn away and raw chunks of timber ripped from it. It had fallen across a hollow in the earth, forming a bridge; and although the snow had piled up against it, there was a narrow gap between earth and oak. The gap was perhaps three inches wide at the centre, and Mark could see reflected light from the snow beyond.

At that moment, a minute blur of movement snapped his eyes in his skull. It was a fleeting movement of a mere sixteenth of an inch, but it riveted Mark's attention. He stared for fully five seconds, before he realized what he was seeing.

Beyond the screening end of the oak trunk, the very tip of a Mauser barrel protruded. It had been bound with burlap to break the stark outline and to prevent reflection of light off metal, but the cruel little mouth of the muzzle was uncovered.

The German was lying behind the oak log, like Mark, his right flank protected, facing half-way from Mark, and less than twenty feet separated them.

Mark watched the tip of the Mauser barrel for ten minutes more, and it did not move again. The German had stillness and patience. Once he had reloaded, he had frozen again into that rigour of watchfulness. He's so good that there is no way I can clear the shot, Mark thought. If I move an inch, he'll hear me, and he'll be fast. Very fast. To get a clear shot, Mark would have to move back twenty feet or more, and then he would be looking directly into the muzzle of the Mauser; a head-on shot, with the German alerted by his movements. Mark knew he could not afford to give away that much advantage, not against an adversary of this calibre.

The long still minutes crawled by without any break in tension. Mark had the illusion that every nerve and sinew of his body was quivering visibly, but in reality the only movement was in the glove of his right hand. The fingers moved steadily in a kneading motion, keeping supple and warm, and the eyes moved in Mark's skull, swivelling slowly back and forth across the battered trunk of the oak, blinking regularly to clear the tears that tension and the icy air induced. What the hell is happening up there? Fergus MacDonald fretted nervously, peering into the lens of the periscope that allowed the observer to keep well down below the sand-bagged parapet. The boy is pinned down. General Sean Courtney did not remove his own eyes from the other periscope, but swung it slightly, sweeping back and forth across the slope.

Try the Hun with Cuthbert again. I don't think he'll fall for it again, Fergus began to protest immediately, looking up with those close-set eyes, rimmed with pink now by the cold and the strain of waiting. That's an order, Sergeant. Sean Courtney's broad forehead wrinkled and the dark brows drew sharply together, his voice growled like an old lion and the dark-blue eyes snapped. The power and presence of the man in this mood awed even Fergus MacDonald. Very well, sir, he muttered sulkily, and went to where the dummy was propped against the firing step.

The lash of the Mauser cracked again, and at the shock Mark Anders eyelids blinked twice very quickly and then flared wide open. The golden brown eyes stared fixedly up the slope intent as those of the hunting peregrine.

The instant after the shot, he heard the rattle of the Mauser bolt being drawn back and then thrust forward to reload, and again the tip of the hessian-wrapped muzzle stirred slightly, but then Mark's eyes flicked sideways.

There had been another movement, so fine that it might have gone unnoticed by eyes less keen. The movement had been a mere breath, and it had been in the narrow three-inch gap between the oak trunk and the snow-coated earth. just that one brief stir and then stillness once more.

Mark stared into the gap for long seconds, and saw nothing. Merely shadow and undefined shape, trickily reflected light from the snow beyond. Then suddenly, he was seeing something else.

It was the texture of cloth, a thin sliver of it in the narrow gap, then his eyes picked up the stitched seam in the grey cloth, bulging slightly over the living flesh beneath.

There was some small portion of the German's body showing through the gap. He was lying close up on the far side of the log, and his head was pointed in the direction from which the muzzle of the Mauser projected.

Carefully Mark proportioned the man's body in his imagination. Using the rifle muzzle as his only reference point, he placed the man's head and shoulders, his trunk and his hips Yes, his hips, Mark thought. That is his hip or upper thigh, and then there was a change in the light. The sun found a weak spot in the cloud cover overhead and the light brightened briefly.

In the better light, Mark made out a small portion of a German service belt, with the empty loop which should have held a bayonet. It confirmed his guess. Now he knew that the slight bulge in the field grey material was caused by the head of the femur where it fitted into the cup of the pelvic girdle. Through both hips, Mark thought coldly. It's a pinning shot, and then there is the femoral artery - Carefully he began to work the glove off his right hand.

He must roll on his side, and swing the long barrel of the P-4 through an arc of over ninety degrees, without making the least sound. Please, God, Mark asked silently, and began to make the move. Achingly slowly, the barrel of his rifle swung and, at the same time, he began to transfer his weight on to his other side It seemed to be a complete round of eternity before the P. I 4 pointed into the narrow gap below the oak trunk, and Mark was doubled up, straining to keep the barrel bearing from this unnatural position. He could not slip the safetycatch from the rifle before firing; even that tiny metallic snick would alert the German.

He curled his finger on the trigger, and took up the pull, feeling the dead lock of the safety mechanism. He aimed carefully, his head twisted awkwardly, and he began to push the safety-catch acrosswithhis thumb, while holding pressure on the hair trigger. it had to be done smoothly, so as not to pull his aim off the sliver of grey uniform cloth.

The thunder of the shot seemed to bounce against the low grey sky, and the bullet crashed through the tiny gap.

Mark saw the impact of it, the rubbery shock of metal into flesh.

He heard the German cry out, a wild sound without form or meaning, and Mark swept back the bolt of the P-4, and reloaded with instinctive dexterity. The next shot blended with the echo of the first, coming so close together that they seemed as one. The jacketed bullet crashed through the gap, and this time Mark saw blood spurt, a bright scarlet spray of it that splattered the snow, turning swiftly to pale pink as it was diluted by the melt of its own heat.

Then there was nothing in the gap, the Germ an had been thrown back by the impact, or had rolled aside. Only the smear of pink stained snow.

Mark waited, a fresh cartridge in the breach of the P. I 4, turned now to face the oak trunk, tensed for the next shot.

If it had not been a decisive wound, the German would be coming after him, and he was ready for the snap shot.

He felt coldly unemotional, but vitally aware, his every fibre and nerve pitched to its utmost, his vision sharp and bright and his hearing enhanced.

The silence drew out for a while longer, and then there was a sound. For a moment Mark did not recognize it, then it came again. The sound of a man sobbing.

It came stronger now, more hysterical, gut-racking. Ach, mein Gatt, mein Heber Gatt -'the man's voice, pitiful, broken. Dos Blut, ach Gatt, dos Blut. Suddenly the sound was tearing at Mark's soul, cutting deeply into his being. His hand began to shake, and he felt the tremor of his lips once again. He tried to clench his jaw, but now his teeth were chattering wildly. Stop it, oh God, stop it, he whispered, and the rifle fell from his hands. He pressed his mittened hands to his ears, trying to shut out the terrible sounds of the dying German. Please, please, Mark pleaded aloud. Stop it, please.

And the German seemed to hear him. Hill mir, Heber Gatt, dos Blut! His voice was broken by the wet helpless sounds of his despair.

Suddenly Mark was crawling forward, through the snow, blindly up the slope. I'm coming. It's all right, he muttered. Only stop it.

He felt his senses swaying.

Ach mein Heber Gatt, ach, meine Mutti. . . Oh Jesus, stop it. Stop it.

Mark dragged himself around the end of the oak log.

The German was half propped against the log. With both hands he was trying vainly to stem the fountain of bright pulsing arterial blood that flowed through his fumbling fingers, The two bullets had shattered both his hips, and the snow was a sodden mushy porridge of blood.

He turned his face to Mark, and already it was drained of all colour, a shiny greyish white, slick with a fine sheen of perspiration. The German was young, as young as Mark, but swiftly approaching death had smoothed out his features so he seemed younger still. It was the face of a marble angel, smooth and white, and strangely beautiful, with blue eyes in pale blue sockets, a burst of pale golden curls escaping from under the helmet on the smooth pale forehead.

He opened his mouth and said something that Mark did not understand, and the teeth were white and even, beyond the full pale lips.

Then, slowly, the German sagged back against the log still staring at Mark. His hands fell away from his groin and the regular pulsing spurt of blood from the shattered flesh slowed and shrivelled away. The pale blue eyes lost their feverish lustre, and dulled, no longer focused.

Mark felt a thread pull in the fabric of his mind, like silk beginning to tear. it was almost a physical thing, he could hear it beginning to give way inside him.

His vision wavered, the dead German's features seemed to run like melting wax, and then slowly reformed again.

Mark felt the tear widening, the silken veil of his reason ripping through; beyond it was a dark and echoing chasm.

The dead German's features went on reforming, until they hardened and Mark was looking into his own face as through a wavering distorted mirror. His own haunted face, the eyes golden brown and terrified, the mouth that was his mouth opened, and a cry came from it that was the despair and the agony of all the world.

The last shreds of Mark's reason whipped away on the tempest of horror, and he heard himself screaming, and felt his feet running under him, but there was only blackness in his head, and his body was light and without weight, like the body of a bird in flight.

The German machine-gunner cocked the Maxim with a single savage wrench on the crank handle, and traversed sharply left, at the same time depressing the thick waterjacketed barrel of the weapon until it pointed directly down the slope below the sand-bagged emplacement towards the British lines.

The single wildly running figure was angling away towards the left, and the gunner pulled the wooden butt of the Maxim into his shoulder and fired a single short traversing burst, aiming a fraction low to counteract the natural tendency to shoot high at a downhill target.

Mark Anders hardly felt the mighty hammer strokes of the two bullets that smashed into his back.

Fergus MacDonald was crying. That surprised Sean, he had not expected it. The tears slid slowly from pinkrimmed eyes, and he struck them away with a single angry movement. Permission to take out a patrol, sir? he asked, and the young Captain glanced uncertainty at Sean over the Sergeant's shoulder.

Sean nodded slightly, a mere inclination of the head. Do you think you can find volunteers? the Captain asked uncertainly, and the red-faced Sergeant answered gruffly. There'll be volunteers, sir, the lads have a feeling for what that youngster did. Very well, then, as soon as it's dark. They found Mark a little after eight o'clock. He hung in the rusting barbed wire at the bottom of the slope, like a broken doll. Fergus MacDonald had to use a pair of wire-cutters to cut him down, and it took them nearly another hour to get him back to the British lines, dragging the stretcher between them through the mud and slushy snow. He's dead, said General Courtney, looking down at the white drained face on the stretcher in the lantern light.

No, he's not, Fergus MacDonald denied it fiercely. They don't kill my boy that easy. The locomotive whistled shrilly as it clattered over the steelwork of the bridge. Silver steam flew high in a bright plume, and then smeared back on the wind.

Mark Anders leaned far out over the balcony of the single passenger carriage and the same wind ruffled the soft brown wing of his hair and a spattering of ash particles from the furnace stung his cheek, but he screwed up his eyes and looked down into the bed of the river as they roared across.

The water flowed down under the dipping reeds, and then met the pylons of the bridge and swirled sullenly, flowing green and strong and full down to the sea. Water's high for this time of year, Mark muttered aloud. Grandpapa will be happy, and he felt his lips tugging up into the unaccustomed smile. He had smiled only infrequently during the past months.

The locomotive hurtled across the steel bridge, and threw itself at the far slope. Immediately, the beat of its engine changed and its speed bled away.

Mark stooped and hefted his old military pack, opened the gate of the balcony and clambered down on to the steel steps, hanging with one arm over the racing gravel embankment.

The train slowed rapidly as the incline steepened and he swung the pack off his shoulder and leaned far out to let it drop as gently as possible on to the gravel. It bounced once and went bounding away down the embankment, crashing into the shrubbery like a living animal in flight.

Then he swung down towards the racing earth himself and, judging his moment finely as the train crested the ridge, he let go to hit the embankment on flying feet, throwing his weight forward to ride the impact and feel the gravel sliding under him.

He stayed upright, and came to a halt as the rest of the train clattered past him, and the guard looked out sternly from the last van and called a reprimand. Hey, that's against the law. Send the sheriff, Mark shouted back, and gave him an ironic salute as the locomotive picked up speed on the reverse slope with explosive grunts of power, the rhythm of the tracks rising sharply. The guard clenched a fist and Mark turned away.

The jolt had hurt his back again and he slipped a hand into his shirt and ran it around under his armpit as he started back along the tracks. He fingered the twin depressions below the shoulder blade and marvelled again at how close one of them was to the bony projections of the spine. The scar tissue had a silky, almost sensuous feel, but they had taken long months to close. Mark shuddered involuntarily as he remembered the rattle of the trolley that carried the dressings, and the impassive almostmasculine face of the matron as she stuffed the long cotton plugs into the open mouths of the bullet wounds; he remembered also the slow tearing agony as the bloody dressing was pulled out again with the glittering steel forceps, and his own breathing sobbing in his ears and the matron's voice, harsh and impersonal. Oh, don't be a baby! Every day, day after day, week after week, until the hot feverish delirium of the pneumonia that had attacked his bullet-damaged lung had seemed a blessed relief. How long had it been, from the V. A. D. Station in a French field with the muddy snow deeply rutted by the ambulances and the burial details digging graves beyond the tented hospital, to the general hospital near Brighton and the dark mists of pneumonia, the hospital ship home down the length of the Atlantic, baking in the airless tropics, the convalescent hospital with its pleasant lawns and gardens - how long? Fourteen months in all, months during which the war which men were already misnaming Great had ended. Pain and delirium had clouded the passage of time, yet it seemed a whole lifetime.

He had lived one life in the killing and the carnage, in the pain and the suffering, and now he was reborn. The pain in his back abated swiftly. It was almost mended now, he thought happily, and he pushed away the dark and terrible memories and scrambled down the embankment to retrieve his pack.

Andersland was almost forty miles downstream, and the train had been behind schedule it was noon already. Mark knew that he would not make it before the following evening, and strangely, now that he was almost home, the sense of urgency was gone.

He moved easily, falling into that long, familiar stride of the hunter, easing the pack on his back slightly as soon as the newly healed wounds stiffened, feeling the good sweat springing cool on his face and through the thin cotton of his shirt.

Absence of so many years had sharpened his appreciation of the world through which he moved, so that which before had warranted only passing attention became now a new and unfamiliar delight.

Along the banks the dense riverine bush was alive with riad life. The bejewelled dragonflies that skimmed the surface on transparent wings or coupled in flight, male upon female, his long glittering abdomen arched to join with hers; the hippopotamus that burst through the surface in an explosive exhalation of breath, and stared at Mark upon the bank with pink watery eyes, flicking the tiny ears, and wallowing like a gargantuan black balloon in the green swirling current.

It was like moving through an ancient Eden, before the coming of man, and suddenly Mark knew that this solitude was what his body and mind needed to complete the healing process.

He camped that night on a grassy bluff above the river, above the mosquitoes and the unpleasant darkness of the thick bush.

A leopard woke him after midnight, sawing hoarsely down in the river bottom, and he lay and listened to it moving slowly upstream until he lost it among the crags of high ground. He did not sleep again immediately, but lay and examined, with the pleasure of anticipation, the day ahead of him.

For every day of the past four years, even the very bad days of darkness and ghosts, he had thought of the old man. Some days it had been only a fleeting thought, on other days he had dwelt upon him as a homesick schoolboy tortures himself with thoughts of home. The old man was home, of course, both the mother and father Mark had never known. Always there from his first vaguest memory to the present, unchanging in his strength and quiet understanding.

Mark felt a deep physical pang of longing, as he recalled clearly a picture of the old man sitting on the hard carved rocker on the wide boarded stoep, the crumpled old khaki shirt, crudely patched and in need of laundering, open at the neck to expose a fuzz of silver-white chest hair; the neck and jowls wrinkled like those of a turkey cock, but a face burned dark brown and pelted with five days growth of silver stubble that sparkled like glass chips; the huge moustaches of glistening white, the ends curled with beeswax into fearsome spikes, the wide terai hat pulled low over the bright toffee-coloured humorous eyes. The hat was always in place, sweat-soaked and greasy around the band, but never removed, not even at mealtimes, nor, Mark suspected, in the big brass bed at night.

Mark remembered him pausing from working with the whittling knife, rolling the quid from one cheek to the other, then letting fly at the old five-gallon Tate and Lyle golden syrup can that was his spittoon. Hitting solidly at ten feet, spilling not a single drop of the dark brown juice, and then continuing the story as though there had been no interruption. And what stories! Stories to start a small boy's eyes popping from their sockets and wake him in the night to peer fearfully under the bed.

Mark remembered the old man in small things, stooping to take up a handful of his rich soil and let it run through his fingers, then wiping them on the seat of his pants with the proud fierce expression on his withered old features. Good land, Andersland, he would say, and nod like a sage. Mark remembered him in the big things, standing tall and skinny beside Mark in thick thorn bush with the big old Martini Hendry rifle bellowing and smoking, the recoil shaking his frail old body as, like a black mountain, the buffalo bull came down upon them, blood mad and crazed with its wounds.

Four years since last he had seen him, since last he had heard news of him. At first he had written, long homesick letters, but the old man could not read nor write. Mark had hoped that he might take them to a friend, the postmistress perhaps, and that they might read them to him and write back to Mark.

it had been a vain hope. The old man's pride would never allow him to admit to a stranger that he could not read.

Nevertheless, Mark had continued to write, once every month for all those long years; but only tomorrow he would have his first news of the old man in all that time.

Mark slept again for another few hours, then built up the fire again in the darkness before dawn and brewed coffee. He was moving again as soon as it was light enough to see his feet on the path.

From the escarpment he watched the sun come up out of the sea. There were mountains of cumulus thunder clouds standing tall over the distant sea, and the sun came up behind them so that they glowed with red and roses, wine and deep purples, each cloud etched in outline by brilliant red-gold and shot through with shafts of light.

At Mark's feet the land dropped away into the coastal low-lands, that rich littoral of densely forested valleys and smooth golden grassy hills that stretched to the endless white beaches of the Indian Ocean.

Below where Mark stood, the river tumbled over the edge of the escarpment, leaping in sheets of white and silver from wet black rock to deep dark pools which turned upon themselves in foam like huge wheels, as though they rested before the next wild plunge downwards.

Mark began to hurry for the first time, following the steep path downwards with the same urgency as the river, but it was midmorning before he came out on to the warm and drowsing sweep of land below the escarpment.

The river widened, and became shallower, changing its mood completely as it meandered between the exposed sandbanks. There were new birds here, different beasts in the forest and upon the hills, but now Mark had no time for them. Hardly glancing at the flocks of long, heavybeaked storks and scimitar-billed this on the sandbanks, even when the hadedah this rose with their wild insanely ringing shrieks of laughter, he hurried on.

There was a place, unmarked except for a small tumbled cairn at the foot of a huge wild fig tree, that had a special significance to Mark, for it marked the western boundary of Andersland.

Mark stopped to rebuild the cairn among the grey scaly roots that crawled across the earth like ancient reptiles, and while he worked, a flock of fat green pigeons exploded on noisy wings from the branches above him where they had been feeding on the bitter yellow fruit.

When Mark went on beyond the fig tree, he walked with a new lightness and resilience to his step, a new set to his shoulders and a new brightness in his eyes, for he walked once again on Andersland. Eight thousand acres of rich chocolate loamy ground, four miles of river frontage, water that never failed, softly rounded hills covered with thick sweet grass, Andersland, the name the old man had given it thirty years before.

Half a mile further on, Mark was about to leave the river and take a short cut across the next ridge to the homestead, when there was a distant but earth-trembling thud, and immediately afterwards the faint sound of human voices on the still warm air.

Puzzled, Mark paused to listen, and again the thudding sound, but this time preceded by the crackling and snapping of branches and undergrowth. The unmistakable sound of timber being felled.

Abandoning his original intention, Mark kept on down the river, until he emerged suddenly from forest into open country that reminded him at first of those terrible devastated fields of France, torn and ravaged by shell and high explosive until the raw earth lay exposed and churned.

There were gangs of dark men in white linen dhotis and turbans felling the heavy timber and clearing out the undergrowth along the river. For a moment Mark did not understand who these strange men were, and then he remembered reading a newspaper report that Hindu labourers were being brought out in their thousands from India to work for the new sugar cane estates. These were the wiry, very dark-skinned men that worked now like a colony of ants along the river. There were hundreds of them, no, Mark realized that they were in their thousands - and there were oxen teams as well. Big spans of heavy, strong-looking beasts plodding slowly as they dragged the fallen timber into rows for burning.

Not truly understanding what he was seeing, Mark left the river and climbed the slope beside it. From the crest he had a new uninterrupted view across Andersland, and beyond, eastwards towards the sea.

The devastation stretched as far as he could see, and now there was something else to ponder. The land was going to the plough, all of it. The forest and grazing land had been torn out, and the trek oxen moved slowly over the open ground, one team following the next, the rich chocolate earth turning up under the plough shares in thick shiny welts. The cries of the ploughmen and the muted popping of the long trek whips carried to where Mark stood, bewildered, upon the slope of the hill.

He sat down on a boulder and for almost anhourwatched the men and the oxen at work, and he was afraid. Afraid for what this all meant. The old man would never let this happen to his land. He had a hatred of the plough and the axe; he loved too deeply the stately trees which now groaned and crackled as they toppled. The old man hoarded his grazing like a miser, as though it were as precious as its golden colour suggested. He would never allow it to be turned under, not if he were alive.

That was why Mark was afraid. If he were alive. For, God knows, he would never sell Andersland.

Mark did not truly want to know the answer. He had to force himself to rise and go down the hill.

The dark turbaned labourers did not understand his questions, but they directed him with expressive gestures to a fat babu in a cotton jacket who strutted importantly from work gang to work gang, snapping at a naked black back with a light cane or pausing to write a laborious note in the huge black book he carried.

He looked up, startled, and then immediately became obsequious in the presence of a white man. Good day, master, He would have gone on, but the shiny acquisitive eyes darted over Mark and they saw how young he was, unshaven, his cheap army issue suit was stained with travel and rumpled from having been slept in. It was obvious he carried his entire worldly possessions in his back pack. To tell the truth, we are not needing more men here. His manner changed instantly, becoming lordly. I am being in charge here. Good. Mark nodded. Then you can tell me what these men are doing on Andersland. The man irritated him, he had known so many like him in the army, bully those below and lick the backsides of those above. Beyond doubt we are making ground clear for sugar. This ground belongs to my family, said Mark, and instantly the man's manner changed again. Ah, good young master, you are from the company at Ladyburg? No, no, we live here. In the house, Mark pointed at the ridge of the hill, beyond which lay the homestead, this is our ground. The babu chuckled like a fat dark baby, and shook his head. Nobody living here now. Alas! The company owns everything. And he made a wide gesture that took in the whole landscape from escarpment to the sea. Soon everything is sugar, you will see, man. Sugar, sugar. And he laughed again.

From the ridge the old homestead looked the same, just a green-painted roof of corrugated iron showing above the dark green of the orchard, but as Mark came up the overgrown path past the hen coops, he saw that all the window panes had been removed, leaving blank dark squares, and there was no furniture on the wide stoep. The rocker was gone, and there was a sag to the roof timbers at one end of the veranda; a drainpipe had come loose and hung away from the wall.

The garden had the wild untended look of neglect, the plants beginning to encroach on the house itself. The old man had always kept it trimmed and neat with the leaves swept up daily from under the trees and the white-painted beehives set up in orderly rows in the shade. Somebody had robbed the hives with brutal carelessness, smashing them open with an axe.

The rooms were bare, stripped of anything of possible value, even the old black wood-burning stove in the kitchen, everything except the Tate and Lyle spittoon on the stoep which lay on its side; its spilled contents had left a dark stain on the woodwork.

Mark wandered slowly from room to empty room, feeling a terrible sense of loss and desolation as the windblown leaves rustled under his feet, and the big black and yellow spiders watched him with myriad glittering eyes from the webs they had spun in the corners and across the jambs of the doorways.

Mark left the house and went down to the small family graveyard, feeling a quick lift of relief when he realized there were no new graves there. Grandmother Alice, her eldest daughter, and her cousin who had died before Mark was born. Still three graves, the old man was not there.

Mark drew a bucket from the well and drank a little of the cold sweet water, then he wandered into the orchard and picked a hatful of guavas and a ripe yellow pineapple.

In the backyard strutted a young cockerel who had escaped the plunderers. Mark had to hunt him for half an hour before a stone brought him down off the roof in a squawking flutter of feathers.

Plucked and cleaned, he went into the canteen over the fire that Mark made in the backyard, and while he boiled, Mark had a sudden thought.

He went back into the old man's bedroom and in the far corner, where the big brass bed had once stood, he knelt and felt for the loose board. He prised the single nail that held it down with his clasp knife and then lifted the plank.

He reached down into the opening below and brought out first a thick bundle of envelopes tied with a strip of raw hide. Mark riffled the edge of the pack and saw that not a single envelope had been opened. They were all addressed in his own spiky hand. They had been carefully stored in this hiding place. Yet not all Mark's letters were there. The sequence ended abruptly and Mark, checking the last letter, found it postmarked eleven months previously. Mark felt a choking sensation in the base of his throat, and the sharp sting of tears.

He placed the bundle of letters aside and reached again into the opening to bring out the Mazzawatee tea caddy, with the picture of the grandmother in steel-rimmed spectacles on the lid. It was the old man's treasure-chest.

He carried the can and the bundle of letters out into the backyard for the late afternoon light was going fast in the unlit rooms. He sat on the kitchen step, and opened the tea caddy.

There were forty gold sovereigns in a leather purse, some of them had the bearded head of Kruger the old president of the South African Republic, the others of Edward and George. Mark slipped the purse into the inner pocket of his jacket and in the fading light examined the rest of the old man's treasure. Photographs of grandmother Alice as a young woman, yellowed and dog-eared with age, a wedding certificate, old newspaper clippings from the Boer War, cheap articles of women's jewellery, the same as those that Alice wore in the photographs, a medal in a presentation case, a Queen's South Africa medal with six bars including those for Tugela, Ladysmith and the Transvaal campaigns, Mark's own school reports from the Ladyburg School and then the diploma from the University College at Port Natal - these the old man valued especially, with the illiterate's awe of learning and the written word. He had sold some of his prize livestock to pay for Mark's education, he rated it that highly. Nothing in the tea caddy, apart from the sovereigns, was of any value, but it had all been precious beyond price to the old man. Carefully Mark re-packed the tin and placed it in his back-pack.

in the last light of day Mark ate the stringy cockerel and the fruit, and when he rolled into his blanket on the wooden kitchen floor he was still thinking.

He knew now that the old man, wherever he had gone, had intended returning to Andersland. He would never have left that precious hoard behind unless that had been his intention.

A boot in the ribs brought Mark awake, and he rolled over and sat up, gasping with the pain of it. On your feet! Get your arse moving, and keep it going. it was not yet fully light, but Mark could make out the man's features. He was clean-shaven with a heavy smooth jaw, and his teeth seemed to have been ground down to a flat even line, very white against the dark suntan. His head was round, like a cannon ball, and gave the impression of vast weightiness, for he carried it low on a thick neck like a heavyweight boxer shaping up. Up! he repeated, and drew back the scuffed brown riding-boot again.

Mark came up on his feet and squared to defend himself. He found the man was shorter than he was, but he was stocky and solid, with broad thick shoulders and the same weightiness in his frame. This is private property, we don't want tramps hanging about. I'm not a tramp, Mark started, but the man cut him short with a snort of brusque laughter. You with the fancy clothes, and the Rolls parked at the door, you had me fooled for a moment there. My name is Mark Anders, he said. This land belongs to my grandfather, John Anders -He thought he saw something move in the man's eyes, a change in the set of his mouth, doubt or worry perhaps.

He licked his lips, a quick nervous gesture, but when he spoke his voice was still flat and quiet. I don't know nothing about that, all I know is this land belongs to the Ladyburg Estates now, and I am the foreman for the company, and neither me nor the company wants you hanging around here, he paused and settled on his feet, dropping his shoulders and pushing out his heavy jaw, and one other thing I know is I like to break a head now and then, and I haven't broken one for God knows a long time. They stared at each other, and Mark felt a sudden hot rush of anger. He wanted to take up the man's challenge, even though he realized how powerful and dangerous he was. He had the look of a killer, and the weight and the strength, but Mark felt himself coming into balance, his own shoulders dropping.

His tormentor saw it also and his relish was obvious. He smiled thinly, clenching his jaw around the smile so that the cords stood out in his throat, swaying slightly up on to the balls of his feet. Then suddenly Mark felt revolted and sickened by the presence of violence. There had been too much of it in his life already, and there was no reason to fight now. He turned away and picked up his boots.

The man watched him dress, disappointed perhaps, but ready for further confrontation. When he swung his pack up on to his shoulder, Mark asked, What's your name?

The man answered him lightly, still keyed up for violence. My friends call me Hobday, he said. Hobday who? Just Hobday! I won't forget it, said Mark. You've been a real brick, Hobday. He went down the steps into the yard, and fifteen minutes later when Mark looked back from the ridge where the Ladyburg road crossed on its way northwards, Hobday was still standing in the kitchen yard of Andersland, watching him intently.

Fred Black watched Mark come up the hill. He leaned against the rail of the dipping tank and chewed steadily on his quid of tobacco, stringy and sun-blackened and dry as a stick of chewing tobacco himself .

Although he was one of John Anders cronies, and had known Mark since he was a crawler, it was clear he did not recognize him now. Mark stopped fifteen paces off and lifted his hat. Hello, Uncle Fred, Mark greeted him, and still it was a moment before the older man let out a whoop and leapt to embrace Mark. God, boy, they told me you'd got yourself killed in France. They sat together on the rail of the cattle pen, while the Zulu herd boys drove the cattle below them through the narrow race, until they reached the ledge from which they made the wild scrambling leap into the deep stinking chemical bath, to come up again, snorting fearfully, and swim, nose up, for the slope ramp beyond. He's been dead almost a year, no, longer, over a year now, lad, I'm sorry. I never thought to let you know. Like I said, we thought you were dead in France. That's all right, Uncle Fred. Mark was surprised that he felt no shock. He had known it, accepted it already, but there was still the grief that lay heavy on his soul. They were both silent for a longer time, the old man beside him respecting his grief. How did he -'Mark hesitated over the word, how did he go? Well, now. Fred Black lifted his hat and rubbed the bald pink pate lovingly. It was all a bit sudden like. He went off to poach a little biltong with Piet Greyling and his son up at Chaka's Gate. Vivid memories crowded back for Mark. Chaka's Gate was the vast wilderness area to the north where the old man had taught him the craft of the hunter. Years before, back in 1869 it had been declared a hunting reserve but no warden had been appointed, and the men of northern Natal and Zululand looked upon it as their private hunting reserve. On the fifth day, the old man did not come back into camp. They searched for him another four days before they found him. He paused again and glanced at Mark. You feeling all right, boy? Yes, I'm all right. Mark wondered how many men he had seen die, how many he had killed himself, and yet the death of one more old man could move him so. Go on, please, Uncle Fred. Piet said it looked like he had slipped while he was climbing a steep place, and he had fallen on his rifle and it had gone off. It hit him in the stomach. They watched the last ox plunge into the dip, and Fred Black climbed stiffly down from the pole fence. He held the small of his back for a moment. Getting old, he grunted, and Mark fell in beside him as they started up towards the house. Piet and his boy buried him there. He wasn't fit to bring back, he'd been in the sun four days. They marked the place and made a sworn statement to the magistrate when they got back to Ladyburg.

Fred Black was interrupted by a cry and the sight of a female figure racing down the avenue of blue gum trees towards them, slim and young, with honey brown hair in a thick braid bouncing on her back, long brown legs and grubby bare feet beneath the skirts of the faded cheap cotton skirt. Mark! she cried again. Oh Mark! But she was close before he recognized her. She had changed in four years. Mary. The sadness was still on Mark, but he could not talk further now. There would be time later. Even in the sadness, he could not miss the fact that Mary Black was a big girl now, no longer the mischievous imp who once had been below his lordly notice when he had been a senior at Ladyburg High School.

She still had the freckled laughing face and the prominent, slightly crooked front teeth, but she had grown into a big, wide-hipped, earthy farm girl, with a resounding jolly laugh. She was as tall as Mark's shoulder and her shape under the thin, threadbare cotton was rounded and full; she had hips and buttocks that swung as she walked beside him, a waist like the flared neck of a vase and fat heavy breasts that bounced loosely at each stride. As they walked, she asked questions, endless questions in a demanding manner, and she kept touching Mark, her hand on his elbow, then grabbing his hand to shake out the answers to her questions, looking up at him with mischievous eyes, laughing her big ringing laugh. Mark felt strangely restless.

Fred Black's wife recognized him from across the yard and let out a sound like a milk cow too long deprived of her calf. She had nine daughters, and she had always pined for a son. Hello, Aunt Hilda, Mark began, and then was folded into her vast pneumatic embrace.

You're starved, she cried, and those clothes, they stink.

You stink too, Marky, your hair, you'll be sitting on it next. The four unmarried girls, supervised by Mary, set the galvanized bath in the centre of the kitchen floor and filled it with buckets of steaming water from the stove. Mark sat on a stool on the back veranda with a sheet around his shoulders, while Aunt Hilda sheared him of his long curling locks with a huge pair of blunt scissors.

Then she drove her daughters protesting from the kitchen. Mark fought desperately for his modesty, but she brushed his defence aside. An old woman like me, you haven't got anything I haven't seen bigger and better. She stripped him determinedly, hurling the soiled and rumpled clothing through the open doorway to where Mary hovered expectantly. Wash them, child, and you get yourself away from that door. Mark blushed furiously and dropped quickly into the water.

In the dusk, Fred Black and Mark sat together on the coping of the well in the yard, with a bottle of brandy between them. The liquor was the fierce Cape Smokewith a bite like a zebra stallion, and after the first sip Mark did not touch his glass again. Yes, I've thought about that often, Fred agreed, already slightly owl-eyed with the brandy. Old Johnny loved that land of his. Did he ever speak of selling it to you? No, never did. I always thought he'd be there for ever.

Often talked of being buried next to Alice. He wanted that. When did you last see Grandpapa, Uncle Fred? Well, now, he rubbed his bald head thoughtfully, it would be about two weeks before he left for Chaka's Gate with the Greylings. Yes, that's right. Held been into Ladyburg to buy cartridges and provisions. Pitched up here one night in the old scotch-cart, and we had a good old chat He didn't say anything then, about selling? No, not a word The kitchen door flew open, spilling yellow lantern light into the yard, and Aunt Hilda bellowed at them. Food's up. Come along now, Fred, don't you keep that boy out there, teaching him your evil ways, and don't you bring that bottle into this house. You hear me! Fred grimaced, poured the last three inches of dark brown liquor into his tumbler and shook his head at the empty bottle. Farewell, old friend. He sent it sailing over the hedge, and drained the tumbler like medicine.

Mark was crowded into the bench against the kitchen wall with Mary on one side of him and another of the big buxom daughters on the other. Aunt Hilda sat directly opposite him, shovelling food on to his plate, and loudly berating him if his rate of ingestion faltered. Fred needs somebody here to help him now. He's getting old, though the old fool doesn't know it. Mark nodded, his mouth so full he was unable to reply, and Mary reached across him for another hunk of home-baked bread that was still warm from the oven. Her big loose breast pressed against Mark and he almost choked. The girls don't get much chance to meet nice boys stuck out here on the farm. Mary shifted in her seat, and her upper thigh came firmly against Mark's. Leave the lad alone, Hilda, you scheming old woman, Fred slurred amiably from the head of the table. Mary, give Mark some more gravy on those potatoes. The girl poured the gravy, steadying herself as she leaned over towards Mark by placing her free hand on Mark's leg above the knee. Eat -up! Mary's done you a special milk tart for afters. MarYs hand still rested on his leg, and now it moved slowly but purposefully upwards. Instantly Mark's entire attention focused on the hand and the food turned to hot ashes in his mouth. Some more pumpkin, Marky? Aunt Hilda asked with concern, and Mark shook his head weakly. He could not believe what was happening below the level of the table and directly in front of Mary's mother.

He felt a rising sense of panic.

As casually as he could in the circumstances, he dropped one hand into his lap, and without looking at the girl, gripped her wrist firmly. Have you had enough, Mark? Yes, oh yes, indeed, Mark agreed fervently, and tried to drag Mary's hand away, but she was a big powerful lass and not easily distracted. Clear Mark's plate, Mary love, and give him some of your lovely tart. Mary seemed not to hear. Her head was bowed demurely over her plate, her cheeks were flushed bright glowing pink, and her lips trembled slightly. Beside her, Mark writhed and squirmed in his seat. Mary, what's wrong with you, girl? Her mother frowned with irritation. Do you hear me, child? Yes, Mother, I hear you. At last she sighed and roused herself. She stood up slowly and reached for Mark's plate with both hands, while he sagged slightly on the bench, weak with relief.

Mark was exhausted from the long day's march and the subsequent excitement, but though he fell asleep almost instantly, it was a sleep troubled by dreams.

Through a ghostly, brooding landscape of swirling mist and weird unnatural light, he pursued a dark wraith, but his legs were slowed, as though he moved through a bath of treacle, and each pace was an enormous effort.

He knew the wraith that flitted through the mist ahead of him was the old man, and he tried to cry out, but though he strained with open mouth no sound came. Suddenly a small red hole appeared in the wraith's dark back and from it flowed a bright pulsing stream of blood, and the wraith turned to face him.

For a moment he looked into the old man's face, the intelligent yellow eyes smiled at him over the huge spiked mustache, and then the face melted like hot wax and the pale features of a beautiful marble statue came up like a face through water. The face of the young German, at last Mark cried out and fell to cover his face. in the darkness he sobbed softly, until another sensation came through to his tortured imagination.

He felt a slow cunning caress. The sobbing shrivelled in his throat, and gradually he abandoned himself to the wicked delight of his senses. He knew what was coming, it had happened so often in the lonely nights and he welcomed it now, drifting up slowly out of the depths of sleep, At the edge of his awareness there was a voice now, whispering, crooning gently. There now, don't fuss, there now, it's all right now, it's going to be all right. Don't make that terrible noise. He came awake gradually, for long moments not realizing that the warm firm flesh was reality. Above him were heavy white breasts, hanging big and heavy to sweep across his chest white bare skin shining in the moonlight that spilled through the window above his narrow steel bed. Mary will make it better, the voice whispered with husky intensity. Mary? he choked out the name, and tried to sit up, but she pushed him back gently with her full weight on his chest. You're mad.

He began to struggle, but her mouth came down over his, wet and warm and all engulfing, and his struggles abated at the shock of this new sensation. He felt his sense whirl giddily.

Against the rising turmoil within him, was balanced the terrible things that he knew about women. Those strange and awful things that the regimental chaplain had explained to him, the knowledge that had sustained him against all the blandishments of the bold little poules of France and the ladies who had beckoned to him from the dark doorways of London's back streets.

The chaplain had told them how two equally evil terrible consequences came from unlawful union with a woman.

Either there was a disease that was without cure, which ate away the flesh, left a rotting hole in a man's groin and finally drove him insane, or there was a child without a father, a bastard to darken a man's honour.

The threat was too much, and Mark tore his mouth free from the girl's sucking hungry lips and the thrusting, driving tongue. Oh God! he whispered. You'll have a baby. That's all right, silly, she whispered in a cheerful husky voice. We can get married.

She shifted suddenly as he lay stunned by this intelligence, and she swung one knee over his supine body, pinning him under the heavy soft cushion of her flesh, smothering him with the fall of bright clinging hair. No. He tried to wriggle out from under her. No, this is mad. I don't want to marry, Yes, there, oh yes. For another instant he was paralysed by the feeling of it, and then with a violent wrench he toppled her over. She fell sideways, her hands clutched wildly at his shoulders for an instant before she went over the side of the bed.

The washstand crashed over, and the thud of the girl's big body upon the floorboards echoed through the silent sleeping house.

For a moment afterwards the echoes died, the silence re turned and then was split by a chorus of screams from the bedroom of the younger girls across the passage.

What is it? bellowed Fred Black, from the big bedroom. There's somebody in the house. Get him, Fred, don't just lie thereWhere's my shotgun? Help, papa! Help! With a single bound, Mary leapt up from the bedroom floor, snatched her nightgown off the chair and swept it over her head. Mary! Mark sat up, he wanted to explain, to try and tell her about the chaplain. He leaned towards her and even in the faint moonlight he could see the fury that contorted her features.

mary! He did not have time to avoid the blow, it came full-armed and flat-handed, smashing into the side of his head with a force that rattled his teeth and starred his vision. She was a big strong girl. When his head cleared, she was gone, but his ear still sang with the sound of a thousand wild bees.

A dusty Daimler lorry pulled up beside Mark as he trudged along the side of the deeply rutted road with thick glass growing along the central hump.

There was a middle-aged man and his wife in the front seat, and he called to Mark. Where are you going, son? Ladyburg sir. Jump in the back, then. Mark rode the last twenty miles sitting high on bagged maize, with a coop of cackling hens beside him and the wind ruffling his stiff newly cropped hair.

They rattled over the bridge across the Baboon Stroom, and Mark marvelled at how it had all changed. Ladyburg was no longer a village, but a town. It had spread out as far as the stream itself, and there was a huge new goods yard below the escarpment in which half a dozen locomotives busily shunted trucks heavily laden with freshly sawn timber from the mills, or with bagged sugar from the new factory.

The factory itself was a monument to the town's progress, a towering structure of steel girders and huge boilers.

Smoke and steam boiled from half a dozen stacks to form a grey mist that smeared away on the gentle breeze.

Mark wrinkled his nose at the faint stink of it on the wind, and then looked with awe down Main Street. There were at least a dozen new buildings, their ornate fagades decorated with scrolls of ironwork, and beautifully intricate gables, stained glass in the main doors and the owner's name and date of construction in raised plaster lettering across the front; but these were all overshadowed by a giant structure four stories tall, crusted with ornamentation like a wedding cake of a wealthy bride. Proudly it bore the legend Ladyburg Farmers Bank. The driver of the truck dropped Mark on the sidewalk in front of it, and left him with a cheery wave.

There were at least a dozen motor vehicles parked among the scotch-carts and horse-drawn carriages, and the people on the streets were well dressed and cheerfullooking, the citizens of a prosperous and thriving community.

Mark knew one or two of them from the old days, and as he trudged down Main Street with his pack stung over one shoulder, he paused to greet them. There was always a momentary confusion until they recognized him, and then, But, Marky, we heard, we thought you'd been killed in France. It was in the Gazette. The Land Deeds Registrar's Office was in the sprawled labyrinth of Government offices behind the Magistrate's Court and Police Station. There had been plenty of time to think on the long journey up from Andersland, and Mark knew exactly what he was going to do, and in what order.

There was a cramped space in the front of the office with an uninviting wooden bench, and a plain deal counter.

There was an elderly clerk with nearsighted eyes behind steel-rimmed spectacles, and a peaked green eyeshade on his forehead. He looked like an ancient crow in his black alpaca jacket with paper guards over his cuffs, and a bony beak of a nose, as he crouched over his desk making a Herculean task of stamping a pile of documents.

He worked on for a few minutes. Mark patiently read the Government notices that plastered the walls, until the clerk looked up at last with the exasperated air of a man interrupted in a labour that might alter the destiny of mankind. I'd like to look at a land deed, please sir A certain piece of extinguished quit-rent land situate in the division of Ladyburg being Err. No. 42 Of Division A of One. The farm known as ANDERSLAND . . .

Deed of Transfer passed in favour of Ladyburg Estates Ltd registered at Ladyburg on ist day of June, 19. rg.

Knowall men whom it may concern that DENNIS PETERSEN

appeared before me, Registrar of Deeds, he, the said appearer, being duly authorized by a power of attorney executed at Ladyburg on the 12th day of May, 1919, by JOHN ARCHIBALD ANDERS which power was witnessed in accordance with law . . . and that the said appearer declared that his principal had truly and legally sold. . .

Mark turned to the next document.

Agreement of Sale of Immovable property That TOHNARCHIBALD ANDERS, hereinafter known as the Seller, and LADYBURG ESTATES LTD hereinafter known as the purchaser, the Farm known as ANDERSLAND, together with all improvements and buildings, standing crops, implements and livestock for the consideration of Three Thousand Pounds Sterling In witness whereof the parties set their hand.

JOHN ARCHIBALD ANDERS (his mark) X For and on behalf of LADYBURG ESTATES LTD DIRK COURTNEY (DIRECTOR) As witnesses of the above:PIETER ANDRIES GREYLING CORNELIUS JOHANNES GREYLING Mark frowned at the two names. Piet Greyling and his son had accompanied the old man up to Chaka's Gate almost immediately after witnessing the Deed of Sale, and they had found him dead a few days later and buried him out there in the wilderness.

General Power of Attorney in favour of DENNIS PETERSEN.

I, the undersigned, JOHN ARCHIBALD ANDERS do hereby empower the above-mentioned DENNIS signed JOHNARCHIBALD ANDERS X (his mark)

as witness PIETER ANDRIES GREYLING.

CORNELIUS JOHANNES GREYLING.

Mark pored over the bundle of stiff legal parchment with its fancy printing and red wax seals with dangling ribbons of watered silk. Carefully he copied out the names of the parties involved in the transaction into his notebook and when he had finished, the clerk who had been jealously watching his precious papers reclaimed them and reluctantly handed over an official receipt for the five-shilling search fee.

The office of the registrar of companies was directly across the narrow lane, and here Mark was received in a different mood. The keeper of this gloomy cavern was a young lady dressed in severe dove-grey jacket and long sweeping skirt which was at odds with her lively eyes and pert air.

The pretty little face, with freckled snub nose, lit with a quick appreciative smile as Mark came in through the door and within minutes she was helping him in a comradely and conspiratorial manner as he perused the memoranda and articles of association of Ladyburg Estates Ltd. Do you live here? asked the girl. I haven't seen you before. No, I don't, Mark answered warily without looking up at her. He was finding it difficult to concentrate on the documents, and he remembered vividly his last encounter with a young girl. You're lucky. The girl sighed dramatically. It's so dull here, nothing to do after work in the evenings. She waited hopefully, but the silence drew out.

The Directors of Ladyburg Estates were Messrs Dirk Courtney and Ronald Beresford Pye, but they held only a single share each, just sufficient to qualify them to act as officers of the company.

The other nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-eight ordinary fully paid up five-shilling shares were held by the Ladyburg Farmers Bank. Thank you very much, said Mark, returning the file to the girl while avoiding her frank gaze. Could I see the file for Ladyburg Farmers Bank please?

She brought it promptly.

The one million one-pound shares of the Ladyburg Farmers Bank were owned by three men, all of them Directors of the Company.

Dirk Courtney: Ronald Beresford Pye: Dennis Petersen: Mark frowned, the web was tangled and intricately woven, the same names again and again. He wrote the names into his notebook. My name is Marion, what's yours? Mark, Mark Anders. Mark, that's a strong romantic name. Have you read Julius Caesar? Mark Antony was such a strong romantic character. Yes, agreed Mark. He was. How much do I owe you for the search fee? , oh, I'll just forget about that. No, look don't do that, I want to pay. All right then, if you want to.

At the door he paused. Thanks. he said shyly. You were very kind. Oh it's a pleasure. If there's anything else, well, you know my name and where to find me. Then suddenly and unaccountably, she blushed scarlet. To hide it, she turned away with the files. When she looked again, he was gone, and she sighed, holding the files to her plump little bosom.

Mark found the accounts of the old man's estate filed with the Master of the Court almost contemptuously under the heading Intestate Estates less than 100 pounds.

on the credit side were listed two rifles and a shotgun, four trek oxen and scotch-cart, sold at public auction to realize eighty-four pounds sixteen shillings. On the debit side were legal and commission fees accruing to one Dennis Petersen, and costs of winding up the estate.

The total was one hundred and twenty-seven pounds; the account had been in deficit, a distribution had been made and the estate closed. John Archibald Anders had gone, and left hardly a ripple behind him, not even the three thousand pounds he had been paid for Andersland.

Mark hefted his pack again and went out into the brilliant sunlight of afternoon. A water cart was moving slowly down Main Street drawn by two oxen, its sprinklers pouring fine jets of water into the roadway to lay the thick dust.

Mark paused and inhaled the smell of water on dry earth, and looked across the street at the towering building of the Ladyburg Farmers Bank.

For a brief moment, he touched the idea of crossing and entering, demanding of the men in there what had made the old man change his firm resolve to die and be buried on Andersland, how the money had been paid to him, and what he had done with it.

But the idea passed swiftly. The men who worked in that building were creatures of a different breed from the penniless grandson of an illiterate hard-scrabble farmer.

There were orders in society, unseen barriers which a man could not cross, even if he had a university diploma, a military medal for gallantry and an honourable discharge from the army.

That building was the shrine of wealth and power and influence, where dwelt men like giants, like gods. The likes of Mark Anders did not barge in there demanding answers to unimportant questions about an old man of no account. Intestate estate less than 100 pounds, Mark whispered aloud, and set off across town, towards the clanking, buffing sounds of the railway goods yard. Yes, agreed the station master, Piet Greyling was a mainline loco driver, and his son fired for him, but they threw in their time months ago, back in 1919, both of them. He rubbed his chin thoughtfully. No, I don't know where they were headed, just too damned happy to see them go, I guess. Oh, yes, now I come to think on it, the son did say something about they were going up to Rhodesia. Going to buy a farm, or something, and the man chuckled. Buy a farm! With what, I wonder, wishes and dreams, not on the salary of a loco driver or fireman. The board room of the Ladyburg Farmers Bank occupied half of the top floor of the building; one set of floor-to ceiling windows faced eastwards to catch the cool sea breeze on hot summer days, the other windows faced the tall escarpment. This made a fine backdrop to the town, and gave an interesting aspect to the huge room with its high ornately plastered ceiling where dancing white cherubs bearing bunches of grapes were suspended upsidedown, frozen in their endless jollification.

The walls were panelled in dark mahogany that set off the green velvet curtaining with golden corded edges.

The carpet was green also, and thick enough to muffle the hoofs of a cavalry charge. The board room table was of marble with golden ormolu work, vine leaves and nude female figures clambering up the legs, playing harps or dancing demurely.

At one end of the table, a man stood respectfully, a man with the short neck and heavy shoulders of a wrestler. The seat of his khaki breeches was shiny from the saddle, and his boots were dusty from hard riding. He twisted the rim of a slouch hat nervously between his fingers.

Opposite where he stood at the far end of the marble table, another man slouched elegantly in the leather-padded chair. Even seated, it was clear that he was a big man, the shoulders under the expensive British broadcloth were wide and powerful.

However, his head was nicely balanced on these shoulders, a glorious head of lustrous but skilfully barbered hair, dark curls that extended low down on to his cheeks into magnificent sideboards. The strong smoothly shaven chin had the jut and set of a man accustomed to command, a wide determined mouth and perfect white teeth with which he now nibbled thoughtfully at his lower lip. A small frown formed a bird's foot at the bridge of his nose, between the dark intelligent eyes, and one carefully manicured fist supported his chin as he listened quietly. Anyway, I thought you might like to know, mr Courtney, the speaker ended lamely, and shuffled his dusty boots on the thick carpet. For a long moment there was silence. The man glanced uneasily at the other two gentlemen who flanked Dirk Courtney, but then flicked back to the central figure.

Dirk Courtney dropped his hand into his lap, and the frown cleared. I suspect you did the right thing, Hobday. He smiled slightly, a smile that enhanced his powerful good looks. You can rest in the antechamber. The clerk there will find refreshment for you, but I will want to talk to you again. . . Yes, sir, Mr Courtney, sir-'The man crossed to the door with alacrity, and as it closed behind him the two men flanking Dirk Courtney burst out together. I told you at the time something like this would happen, But you told us he had been killed. I never liked the idea. Oh, I thought it was going too far this time They spoke across each other, quick breathless outbursts while Dirk Courtney sat with an enigmatic halfsmile hovering on his lips, examining with attention the diamond on the little finger of his right hand, turning the big white stone to catch the light from the windows so that it flicked spots of brilliant light across the ceiling high above where he sat.

After a few minutes, the two of them faltered into silence, and Dirk Courtney looked up politely. Have you both finished? I found that most helpful, constructive, imaginative. He looked from one to the other expectantly, and then when they were silent he went on, Unfortunately, you are not in possession of all the facts, Here is some more news for you. He arrived in town this morning, and he went straight to the Land Deeds, from there to the Register of Companies, the Master's Office -There was a fresh outburst of lamentation from his listeners, while Dirk Courtney selected a cigar from the humidor and prepared it carefully, cutting the end with a goldplated pocket-knife and moistening it between his lips, then he held it poised between thumb and forefinger while he waited for silence again. Thank you, gentlemen, but as I was saying, the gentleman in question then went down to the goods yard, and began making inquiries about Greyling and son. This time they were silent, exchanging appalled and disbelieving glances, and the silence drew out while Dirk Courtney struck a Swan Vesta and waited for the sulphur to burn off before he lit the cigar. It was all your idea, said Ronald Pye. He was at least thirty years senior to Dirk Courtney. Once prosperously bulging flesh had sagged beneath his expensive waistcoat, his jowls drooped also, like the wattles of a rooster, and his cheeks were mottled with faded freckles and old man's blemishes, little darker liver spots. His hair also had faded and thinned, stained only by residual traces of the fiery ginger it had once been. But his prominent ears stood out from his head, giving him an alert listening look, like a desert fox, and his eyes had a fox's cunning glitter as they watched Dirk Courtney's face. Yes, Dirk Courtney agreed. Most ideasaround here are mine indeed. That's why the net reserves of the Farmers Bank have increased from one and a half to fifteen million pounds in the ten years since I started contributing my ideas Ronny Pye went on staring at him, regretting bitterly for the ten thousandth time in those ten years that he had ever been tempted to sell control of the bank to this young adventurer, this elegant buccaneer.

God knows, there had been occasion for doubt, for caution, and he had hesitated long enough before accepting the fantastic offer that Dirk Courtney had made. He had known too much of the lad's history, how he had left his home here in Ladyburg in unsavoury circumstances, estranged from his father and family.

Then, years later, he had sauntered into Ronald Pye's office, unannounced and unheralded, and made his offer.

He had seen at a glance that the boy had grown into a hard man, but the offer had been too good to dismiss, and then immediately after, he had begun to hear the dark rumours that followed the man as vultures follow the lion.

He should have been warned, the fact that Dirk Courtney could offer six hundred thousand pounds in cash for sixty percent of the Bank's shares and support the offer with a Bank guarantee from Lloyds Bank of London was, in itself, enough to give substance to the dark rumours. How often does an honest man make that kind of money in a few short years, he asked himself.

In the end the money had tempted Ronny Pye, that and the chance to score over an old enemy, General Sean Courtney. He had delighted in the prospect of setting up the estranged son, setting him up in almost baronial circumstances in the very centre of Courtney country. The delight in doing so had swung the balance, spite and six hundred thousand pounds cash money.

It had been a bad bargain. I was against this from the beginning, he said now. My dear Pye, you are against every new idea, on principle. Yet only a week ago you were swooning like a virgin bride over the balance sheet of Ladyburg Estates, and Zululand sugar. Dirk stood up from the chair. His full height was imposing, he smoothed his hair lightly with both hands while his cigar was gripped between strong white teeth, then he arranged the folds of his cravat, touching the pearl pin before swinging away and striding to the far wall of the board room.

He drew down the rolled map of Zululand and north Natal that covered half the wall, and stood back from it.

The boundary of every farm was marked in large-scale topography. The farms belonging to Ladyburg Estates had been carefully shaded in green chalk. They made an impressive sweep of colour from sea to mountains, a great phalanx of land and natural wealth. There it is now, gentlemen, the scheme that you opposed so violently. He smiled again. It was too rich for your watery blood. The smile faded, and he scowled. When he scowled, the line of the wide mouth became bitter and the set of the lustrous eyes altered, with a mean pinched expression. The key to the whole thing was here on the Umfolosi, the water, we had to have it or none of it made sense. One stupid, stubborn, uneducated old bastard, he cut it off abruptly, and in a moment his smile was back, the voice tight with excitement. It is all ours now, the full south bank of the river, and it's not going to end there!

His spread hands clammed down on the map, hooked like claws. Here, he said, and here, and here, his hands marched northwards greedily.

He swung away from the map, laughing, and cocked his big handsome head at them. Look at you, he laughed. It's running down your legs, you're so terrified, and all because I'm making you rich. Dennis Petersen spoke now. He was the same age as Ronny Pye, married to his sister, and, but for that connection, he would never have been seated at the ormolu.

marble table, for he was the least significant of the three men. His features were indefinite and slightly blurred, his body in expensive clothing was pudgy and shapeless while the colour of his eyes was difficult to fathom. What are we going to do? he asked, and though his hands were clasped in his lap, it seemed that he was actually wringing them plaintively. We? Dirk asked kindly, and crossed to his chair. We, my dear Dennis? he patted the man's shoulder like a father, despite the age difference. We aren't going to do a thing. You just go back to your own office now, and I will tell you about it once it's over. Listen, Dirk. Dennis lifted his chin firmly. No more of that, that rough stuff, do you hear? Then he saw Dirk's eyes and dropped his chin. Please, he mumbled.

Dirk chuckled. Off you go and do your sums, both of you, add up the money. Don't worry about a thing. He helped them from their seats, a hand on each shoulder, and shepherded them towards the door. We have a board meeting tomorrow at nine o'clock, Dennis, I will be discussing the new extraction plant at Stanger. I will want the figures, make sure I have them. Alone for a moment, Dirk Courtney's face changed and the eyes narrowed. He pressed out the stub of the cigar in the onyx ashtray as he crossed to the door that led to the antechamber. Hobday, he called softly. Come in here a moment, please. There are occasions in a hunter's experience when a spoor begins hot and true and then fades. Mark remembered a hunt like that which he and the old man had made up near Chaka's Gate. Dead spoor, gone away, he muttered aloud now, and stood uncertainly in the main street of Ladyburg. There seemed no way that he might find the old man's grave. No way that he could bring the body back and rebury it beside Alice on Andersland.

Less important was the money that the old man had been paid for Andersland. Three thousand pounds. It was a vast fortune in Mark's eyes and it would be good to know what had happened to it. With that amount, he could afford land of his own somewhere.

Then Mark faced the issue he had avoided up until now and admitted that there was just one more faint chance, but he felt his stomach tighten at what he had to do. With a physical effort he steeled himself and set off steadily down the street towards the towering building of the Ladyburg Farmers Bank. He had not reached it before the church clock on the spire at the end of the street sounded the hour, five clear chimes that echoed across the valley, and a dozen bank employees came out in a group through the front door, smiling and chatting gaily in the relief of the day's work ended, while a uniformed guard began closing and locking the solid mahogany doors.

Mark felt a sneaking sense of relief, and he turned away.

I'll come back tomorrow, he told himself firmly.

The boarding house behind the church offered dinner and a bed for seven shillings and sixpence, and Mark thought about it for only a moment. The sovereigns that he had from the old man's hoard might have to carry him long and far.

He went on out to the bridge over the Baboon Stroom.

and climbed down on to the bank, moving upstream to find a place to cam There was a fine site, with trees and firewood a quarter of a mile above the bridge, but when Mark went down the bank to the water, he could smell the stink of it before he touched the surface with the canteen; he paused, squatting on his haunches.

There was a thick soapy scum thrown up along the edge, and it had coated the stems of the reeds. For the first time Mark realized that the reeds were dead and brown, and that the water bubbled with sullenbeads of gas. He scooped a handful and sniffed at it, then flicked it away with disgust and stood up, wiping his hand on the seat of his pants.

There was a big yellow fish, at least four pounds in weight, its swollen belly upwards and rotting opaque eyes bulging from its head as it floated in the sluggish current, turning gently in the eddy at the edge of the reeds. Mark watched it with a feeling of disquiet, of foreboding, as though that poisoned and rotting carcass had some special significance in his life. He shuddered softly and turned away, climbed the bank again and shouldered his pack.

He made his way upstream, Pausing now and then to peer down into the river-bed, until he was opposite the steel structure of the new sugar mill; here the waters of the stream boiled and steamed with wisps of pale gas that hung like mist in the stiff brown reeds. Around the next bend, he came upon the effluent pipe, a six-inch black iron pipe that stuck out over the far side of the bank from which the hot, steaming discharge poured in a continuous stream.

A change in the breeze carried the acrid chemical stench of it to where Mark stood, and he coughed and turned away.

A hundred yards further upstream, the clear water chuckled through clean stands of green reeds that bowed and swung gracefully on the breeze, and Mark saw the deep waving shape of an eel in the pool beyond, and watched the small black and pink crabs scurrying across the sugarwhite sand below the surface.

He found another camp site on the first slope of the escarpment, beside a waterfall and its slowly swirling pool.

In the trees above him, the ferns hung like soft green veils, and when he stripped his clothing and went into the pool, the water was a cool and refreshing delight.

He shaved with the old cut-throat, sitting naked on a mossy rock beside the pool. He dried himself on his shirt and then rinsed it out and hung it beside the small bright fire to dry, and while he waited for the canteen to boil he wandered, bare to the waist, on to the open slope and looked down into the valley.

The sun was already touching the rim of the escarpment, and its low rays were ruddy and warm rose. They burnished the iron roofs of the town, and tinted the column of smoke that rose from the chimney stack of the sugar mill to a beautiful golden bronze. The smoke rose tall into the evening sky, for the breeze had dropped in that peculiar stillness and hush of the African evening.

Movement caught his eye, and he blinked to clear his vision.

There was a hunting party in the open land beyond the town. Even at this distance, Mark could tell they were hunters. Four horsemen moving slowly in a group, one with a rifle or shotgun held against his hip, its barrel pointing to the sky as he leaned forward intently in the saddle.

The other three were armed also; he could see the guns in the scabbards at their knees, and they also had that intent air of suppressed excitement, the air of the hunter. Ahead of the group was a single figure, a Zulu in ragged cast-off western clothing but he led the horsemen in the characteristic attitude of the tracker, trotting in that deceptively fast gait of the Zulu, head down, eyes on the ground, carrying a stripped reed in one hand, the tracker's wand to part the grass, or touch the spoor.

idly Mark wondered what they were hunting, so close to town, and on the bank of that dying and poisoned river, for they were coming along the same trail that Mark had followed to the escarpment.

The light was going swiftly now, the shining beacons of the iron roofs winked out swiftly as the sun went below the crest, but in the last of the light, Mark saw the leader of the group of horsemen rein in his mount and straighten in the saddle. He was a stocky figure, sitting square on his mount. The man looked up towards the escarpment where Mark stood, then the light was gone and the group became a dark blob against the darkening land.

Vaguely disturbed, and troubled by the day just past, by the cold memories of the old man, by the sadness of that dying river, and at last by that distant figure, Mark crouched over his fire, munching his stew of tinned bully and then sipping his coffee.

When at last he pulled on his coat and rolled into his blanket close beside the fire, he could not sleep. The sense of disquiet seemed to grow rather than abate, and he found himself wondering again what four horsemen could find to hunt on the edge of a busy town. Then he thought again about the way that they had followed his own path along the river, and the disquiet deepened, sleep receded.

Suddenly he remembered how the old man would never sleep beside his cooking fire. I learned that when we was a chasing the Boer. A light in the night brings things other than moths, lions, hyenas and men. He could almost hear the old man's voice saying it, and he rose immediately, with the blanket still around his shoulders, and moved away up the slope fifty yards until he found a hollow filled with dead leaves.

Sleep came at last and the soft skirt of it was falling lightly across his eyes when a Scops owl called in the forest near him; instantly he was fully awake. It was a familiar night sound, but this one had jarred some deep chord in him. The imitation had been clever, but it did not deceive an ear so closely tuned to the sounds of the wild.

Tense and listening, Mark lifted his head slowly and peered down the slope. His fire was a puddle of pink embers and above him the shapes of the trees were dark and fluffy against a crisp sky of white stars.

The owl called again down near the pool, and, at the same moment, Mark heard something move stealthily near him in the darkness, something big and heavy, the brush brush of footfalls in the dead leaves. Then there was silence again.

Mark strained his eyes and ears into the darkness, but it was impenetrable under the trees.

Far below in the valley, a locomotive whistled three times, the sound carrying clearly in the stillness, and then there was the huff and puff of the train pulling out from the goods yard and settling into a steady rhythmic beat of boiler and tracks.

Mark tried to put that sound beyond his hearing, trying to filter it out so that he could discern the closer softer sounds in the night around him.

Something moved down the slope, he heard the silky soft whisper of it and then he saw movement, outlined against the glowing ashes of his fire, a man's booted legs stepped out of the darkness and halted beside the fire, standing completely still.

Nearer Mark, there was another movement, a stir of impatient feet in dead leaves, and then, unmistakably, the metallic snick of gun-metal as a safety-catch was slipped to the fire position. The sound struck like electricity along Mark's nerve ends, and his breath caught in his throat. It was very close, six feet away, and now he thought he could make out the loom of the man against the stars. He was standing almost on top of Mark's bed in the hollow, staring down at the fire beside the camp.

The man at the fire spoke now, softly, but his voice carried clearly. The bastard has gone, he's not here. He stooped to the pile of dry firewood that Mark had cut and stacked. He threw a piece on to the embers, and sparks flew upwards in a fiery spiral and the branch flamed, throwing out a circle of yellow light.

Then he exclaimed sharply, His pack is still here, and he hefted the shotgun expectantly, glaring into the night. Remember, there's a hundred pounds on it. The words and the way the man was handling the shotgun made his intention clear beyond doubt. Mark felt the warm flood of adrenalin rush through his body, and he was poised and quivering with suppressed energy, ready to burst into explosive movement in an instant.

The man near him moved again, and Mark heard the muted tap of metal on metal, the sound of the man's breathing also, hoarse with tension, and then suddenly and with devastating shock, bright white light split the darkness. A lantern beam swivelled and then fastened on Mark's blanket-wrapped crouching f arm.

In the instant before he moved, Mark saw the shape of the man beyond the dazzle of the light. He carried the lantern in his right hand holding it high, at the level of his head, and the rifle was in his left hand, hanging at the trail.

He was completely unprepared to find Mark lying almost at his feet, and his shout was wild. He's here. My God. He tried to bring up the rifle, but his right hand held the lantern. Shoot! Shoot, damn it" another voice shouted, a voice somehow familiar, and beside Mark the man dropped the lantern and began to swing up the rifle. Mark launched himself straight at him.

He used the man's own momentum, taking the upswing of the rifle; seizing the muzzle of the barrel in one hand and the stock in the other, he smashed the weapon into the man's face with the full weight and force of his body behind it. He heard gristle and bone crunch, while the solid impact of the steel breach striking into the man's face was transmitted through the rifle into his arms, jarring him to the shoulders.

The man went over backwards, with a cry that bubbled with the quick burst of blood into his nose and mouth.

Mark bounded over him and ran at the slope.

Behind him there was a chorus of shouts and cries, and then the blain, blain of a shotgun and the double glow of the muzzle flashes. Mark heard the heavy charges of shot slash into the leaves beside him, and something burned his upper arm like the sting of a wild bee.

The light. Get the lightVThere he is, don't let him get away. A rifle fired three times in quick succession, it sounded like a . 303 Lee-Enfield. The bullet hit a rock and howled away into the sky, another thumped into a tree trunk close beside him as he ran.

Mark fell heavily in the dark and felt his ankle go, the pain of it exploded up his leg into his groin and lower belly.

He rolled on to his knees, and the beam of the lantern swept over, and then fastened hungrily on him. We've got him.

A fusillade of shots, and a triumphant chorus of shouts.

The shot and bullets shattered the air around him, one so close that the whip of it deafened one ear and he threw himself forward at the slope.

The pain in his foot made Mark cry out. It was white hot shooting agony that burst from his ankle and broke like brilliant phosphorescent surf against the roof of his skull, but he drove himself on, soaked with sweat, swerving as he ran, sobbing and hobbling on the damaged leg.

They were spread out in the bush behind him, and it seemed that the slope was tiring them quickly, men accustomed to riding horseback, for the cries were becoming strained and breathless, edged with worry and the first fear that their quarry might escape them.

Mark was trying to think between the bursts of agony with which each step racked him. He thought to drop into thick cover and lie until they passed him, but they were too close for that, and they had a tracker with them, a tracker who had brought them unerringly to his camp, even in darkness. To lie down now would be surrender and suicide, but he could not go on much longer. Already the pain was threatening to swamp him, there was a sound in his head like great wings and his vision was starting to break up and star.

He fell to his knees and vomited, gagging and choking on the acid gall of it, and within seconds the voice of the pursuit was closer and more urgent. He dragged himself up, and the lantern beam caught him squarely, a rifle bullet disrupted the air about his head so that he staggered as he blundered onwards, using the screen of bush to avoid the beam of light. Quite suddenly he felt the ground tilt upwards under his feet sharply.

He lost his footing again, but in the same movement rolled to his feet and stumbled over a lip on to level ground where there was the sudden sugary crunch of gravel under his feet. Three stumbling paces and he came down heavily, his feet knocked out from under him and as he went down, steel smeared the skin from his outflung forearm.

He lay panting and blinded for long seconds and heard the hunters bay like hounds down the slope. The sound goaded him and he groped with outstretched hands for purchase to push himself on to his feet once more.

He found the cold smooth steel that had tripped him; it trembled like a living thing under his hands. It came to him then that he had climbed the embankment of the railway line and fallen across the rails of the permanent way.

He pushed himself to his knees, and now he heard the deep panting rush in the night; suddenly the whole slope of the escarpment was lit by reflected light that swung dramatically and brightened like daylight as the locomotive he had heard leaving the goods yard in the valley came roaring out of the deep cutting that skirted the steepest part of the escarpment, before crossing the deep gorge of the river.

The long white beam of the lamp struck him like a solid thing and he flung up his arm to shield his eyes and rolled off the rails, crouching down on the gravel on the opposite side to that of his pursuers.

In the light of the locomotive lamp, Mark saw a stocky agile figure come up the embankment at a run. He ducked across the tracks, directly under the roaring throbbing loco.

The dazzle of light prevented Mark seeing his face, yet there was something familiar in the way the man moved and held his shoulders.

The engine came thundering down on Mark, and as it drew level a spurt of steam from the driving pistons scalded him with its hot breath. Then it was past and there was just the dark blurred rush of the boxcars above him.

Mark dragged himself upright, balancing on his good foot and struck the streams of sweat from his eyes, peering upwards to judge his moment.

When it came, he almost missed it; his hands were slippery with sweat and the railing was almost jerked from his grip even though the train had lost much of its speed and power on the slope.

The strain in his shoulder shot an arrow of pain along his arm, and he was torn off his feet, swinging against the side of the boxcar while he grappled wildly for a grip with his other hand.

He found purchase and clung on to the side of the boxcar, his feet still free but scrabbling for the footplates, and at that moment hands like steel claws seized his injured ankle, the full weight of a heavy body bore him down, racking him out against the side of the car.

Mark screamed with the unbearable white-hot pain of the grip on his ankle, and it took all his strength and courage to maintain his double grip on the rail.

His body was penduluming, as the man who held him was himself swung off the ground and then came back to skid and run in the loose gravel of the embankment, as though he were driving a dog-sledge.

Mark twisted his head back and judged the white blob of the man's face and aimed the kick with his free foot, but it was an impossible target. At that instant the sound of the locomotive altered, as it hit the steel of the bridge where it crossed the deep gorge of the river.

The uprights of the bridge sprang out of the rushing corridor of blackness; Mark heard the deadly hiss of the riveted steel girders flit past his head, and at the same moment the grip on his leg was released. He clung with his remaining strength and resolve to the railing of that goods truck, while the train rocketed over the bridge and ploughed on steadily up the slope, until it burst at last over the crest on to the level ground of the plateau. It picked up speed sharply, and Mark dragged himself inch by agonized inch up the railing, until at last he tumbled over the side of the open boxcar on to the load of sugar sacks and lay face downwards, sobbing for each breath, while he rode the high storm surf of pain from his leg.

The cold roused him at last. His sweat-sodden coat was turned icy by the rush of night air and he crawled painfully forward towards the shelter of the high steel side of the car. He checked quietly and found with relief that his purse and notebook were still in his pocket.

Suddenly he was aware that he was not alone and fresh panic gripped him.

Who's that? he croaked, recoiling quickly into a defensive attitude.

A voice answered quickly in deep Zulu. I mean no harm, Nkosi, and Mark felt a quick rush of relief. A man crouched against the side of the car, out of the wind, and it was clear that he was as alarmed by Mark's presence as Mark had been by his. I mean no harm, lord. I am a poor man without the money to pay to ride the steamer. My father is sick and dying in Tekweni, Durban town. Peace, grunted Mark in the same language. I am a poor man also. He dragged himself into shelter beside the Zulu, and the movement twisted his ankle and he gasped at the fresh pain. Hau! the black man's eyes caught the starlight as he peered at Mark. You are hurt. My leg, Mark grunted, trying to ease it into a more comfortable position, and the Zulu leaned forward and Mark felt his gentle hands on the ankle. You are without shoes? The man was surprised at Mark's torn and bloodied feet. I was chased by bad men. Ha, the Zulu nodded, and Mark saw in the starlight that he was a young man. The leg is bad. I do not think the bone is broken, but it is bad. He untied the small pack beside him and he took out some article of clothing. Deliberately he began to tear the material into strips. No, Mark protested sharply. Do not destroy your clothes for me. He knew how each article of western clothing, however ragged and threadbare, was treasured. It is an old shirt, said the Zulu simply and began to bind up the swollen ankle skilfully. When he had finished, it felt easier.

Wgi ya bone, I praise you, Mark told him, and then he shivered violently as the delayed but icy fist of shock clamped down on him; he felt nausea rise in his throat and he shivered again.

The Zulu took the blanket from around his own shoulders and placed it carefully over Mark. No. I cannot take your blanket. The blanket smelled of smoke from a dung fire, and of the Zulu himself, the earthy African tang. I cannot take it. You need it, said the Zulu firmly. You are sick. Very well, Mark muttered, as another shivering fit caught him. But it is a large blanket, big enough for two It is not fitting. Come, said Mark roughly, and the Zulu hesitated a moment longer before drawing closer and taking up a fold of the woollen blanket.

Shoulder to shoulder, they sat on into the night, and Mark found himself dropping into a haze of exhaustion and pain, for the swollen ankle still beat like a drum. The Zulu beside him was silent, and Mark thought he slept, but as the train slowed after two hours hard run across the plateau, he whispered quietly, This is Sakabula halt. It stops here for to let the other train pass. Mark remembered the desolate siding with its double loop of line. No buildings and only a signboard to identify it. He would have lapsed once more into half sleep, but something warned him, a strange sense of danger which he had developed so acutely in France.

He shrugged aside the blanket, and dragged himself up on his knees to peer ahead. The track came into the siding on a gentle curve, and the silver rails glittered in the lamp of the locomotive.

Far ahead was the sign-post of the halt, stark white in the beam from the locomotive, but there was something else. Parked on the track beside the halt was a dark vehicle, a heavy lorry, and its headlights still burned. In the puddle of yellow light Mark made out the dark shapes of waiting men. Alarm jarred his bowels and clutched at his chest with a cold cramping fist.

A motor lorry from Ladyburg could not have reached here ahead of them, but a telegraph message could have alerted I must go, Mark blurted, and with stiff fingers he hooked a sovereign out of his money belt and pressed it quickly into the Zulu's hand. There is no call for -'the man began, but Mark cut him off brusquely. Stay in peace. He dragged himself to the side of the car furthest from the waiting men, and lowered himself down the steel ladder until he hung just above the tracks.

He waited for the locomotive to slow down, groaning and creaking and sighing steam, and then he braced himself and dropped - trying to take most of his weight on his good leg.

He collapsed forwards as he struck the ground; ducking his head, he rolled on to his shoulders and, drawing up his knees, went down the embankment like a rubber ball.

In the dry pale grass beside the line, he did not rise but dragged himself on elbows and belly to a low dark Thorn bush, fifty yards from the rails. Slowly he worked himself under its low branches and lay face down, gritting his teeth against the dull beat of his ankle.

The train had halted with its van level with Mark's hiding place; the guard climbed down, flashing his lantern, while from the head of the train a group of men, each one carrying a lantern, hurried back towards him, searching the open trucks as they came.

Mark could see they were all armed, and their voices carried loudly as they called explanations to the driver and fireman who leaned from the cab of the locomotive. What's the trouble? You've got a fugitive from justice aboard. Who are you? We're special constables. Who's the fellow? He robbed a bank -'He killed four men in LadyburgHe jumped your train on the escarpment Don't take any chances, you fellows, the bastard is a killer -They came swiftly down the train, talking loudly and calling to each other to bolster their courage, and at the last moment Mark remembered the Zulu. He should have warned the man, but he had been too concerned with his own danger. He wanted to shout now, warn him to run, but he could not bring himself to do it. The Zulu would be all right, they would not shoot when they saw he was a black, they might slap him around a little and throw him off The Zulu darted out from between two of the boxcars from where he had climbed down on to the coupling. He was a dark flitting shape, and somebody yelled a warning.

Immediately there was a shot.

Mark saw the dust from the bullet fly in the lamplight, and the Zulu swerved and ran directly out into the open grassland. Half a dozen shots ripped the night, the muzzle flashes were angry red blooms in the night, but the Zulu ran on.

One of the men on the track dropped to his knee, and Mark saw his face white and eager in the light of the torches. He aimed deliberately, and his rifle kicked up sharply.

The Zulu collapsed in the grass without a cry, and they raced forward in an excited pack to gather around his body. Oh, Jesus, it's only a black. There was confused angry discussion and argument for five minutes, and then four of them took an arm and leg each and carried the Zulu between them to the parked lorry.

The black man's head lolled back, almost sweeping the earth, his mouth gaped open and the blood that dripped from it was black as tar in the lamplight and his head swung loosely to the uneven stride of the men who carried him. They lifted him into the back of the lorry.

The north-bound train came thundering through the siding, its whistle shrilling on a high piercing shriek, and then it was gone on its way to Ladyburg.

The men climbed into the lorry and the engine fired, and it moved away with its headlights sweeping sky and earth as it pitched over the bumpy track.

The stationary train whistled mournfully and it began to roll forward, rumbling slowly over the tracks. Mark crawled out from his hiding-place beneath the bush, and hopped and stumbled after it, catching it just before its speed built up.

He crawled over the sugar bags into the lee of the steel side, and found the Zulu had left his blanket. As he wrapped it around his icy body, he felt the guilt flood over him, guilt for the man's death, the man who had been a friend then the guilt turned to anger.

Bitter corrosive anger that sustained him through the night as the train rushed southwards.

Fordsburg is a squalid suburb of Johannesburg, three hundred miles from the golden grassy hills of Zululand and the beautiful forested valley of Ladyburg. It is an area of mean cottages, tiny workers houses of galvanized iron on timber frames, each with a bleak little garden. In some of the gardens there were brave and defiant shows of bright blooms, barbeton daisies, carinas and flaming red poinsettia, but in most of them the bare untended earth, patched with black-jack and khaki-bush, told of the tenants indifference.

Over the narrow streets and crowded cottages, the mine dumps held majestic sway, towering table-topped mountains of poisonous yellow earth from which the gold had been extracted. The cyanide process of extraction ensured that the earth of the dumps was barren and sterile. No plants grew upon them, and on windy days the yellow dust and grit whipped over the grovelling cottages beneath them.

The dumps dominated the landscape, monument to the antlike endeavours of man, symbols of his eternal greed for gold. The mine headgears were spidery steel structures against the pale cloudless blue of the highveld winter sky.

The huge steel wheels on their heights spun endlessly, back and forth, lowering the cages filled with men deep into the earth, and rising again with the ore bins loaded with the gold-rich rock.

Mark made his way slowly down one of the narrow, dusty streets. He still limped slightly, and a cheap cardboard suitcase carried the few possessions he had bought to replace those he had lost on the escarpment.

The clothes he wore were an improvement on the shapeless demobilization suit that the army had given him. His flannels were neatly creased and the blue blazer fitted his good shoulders and narrow flanks, the open-necked white shirt was snowy clean and set off the smooth brown skin of his neck and face.

He reached the cottage numbered fifty-five on the gate, and it was a mirror image of those on each side and opposite. He opened the gate and went up the short flagged path, aware that somebody was watching him from behind the lace curtain in the front room.

However, when he knocked on the front door it was only opened after a delay of many minutes, and Mark blinked at the woman who stood there.

Her dark short hair was freshly combed, and the clothes she wore had clearly been hastily put on in place of dowdier dress. She was still fastening the belt at her slim waist. it was a dress of pale blue with a design of yellow daisies, and it made her appear young and gay, although Mark saw at once that she was at least ten years older than he was. Yes? she asked, tempering the abrupt demand with a smile. Does Fergus MacDonald live here? He saw now that she was good-looking, not pretty, but fine-looking with good bones in her cheeks and dark intelligent eyes. Yes, this is Mr MacDonald's house. There was a foreign inflection in her voice that was intriguing. I am Mrs MacDonald. Oh, he said, taken by surprise. He had known Fergus was married. He had spoken about it often, but Mark had never really thought about his wife before, not as a real flesh and blood woman, and certainly not one like this. I am an old friend of Fergus'from the army. Oh, I see, she hesitated. My name's Mark, Mark Anders. Instantly her attitude changed, the half smile bloomed and lit her whole face.

She gave a small gasp of pleasure. Mark, of course, Mark. She took his arm impetuously and drew him over the threshold. He has spoken of you so often, I feel I know you so well. Like a member of the family, like a brother, she still had his arm, standing close to him, laughing up at him. Come in, Mark, come in.

I am Helena. Fergus MacDonald sat at the head of the deal table in the dingy kitchen. The table was covered with sheets of newsprint instead of a cloth and Fergus hunched over his plate, and scowled angrily as he listened to Mark's account of his flight from Ladyburg. The bastards, they are the enemy, Mark. The new enemy. ) His mouth was filled with potato and heavily spiced boerewors, thick farmer's sausage, and he spoke through it. We are in another war, lad, and this time they are worse than the bloody Hun. More beer, Mark. Helena leaned across to fill his tumbler from the black quart bottle. Thank you. Mark watched the foaming head rise in his glass, and he pondered Fergus' statement. I don't understand, Fergus. I don't know who these men are, I don't know why they tried to kill me. They are the bosses, lad. That's who we are fighting now. The rich, the mine-owners, the bankers, all those who oppress the working man. Mark took a long swallow of his beer, and Helena smiled at him from across the table. Fergus is right, Mark. We have to destroy them. And she began to talk. It was strange confusing talk from a woman, and there was a fanatical light in her dark eyes.

The words had a compelling power in her clear articulate voice with its lilting accent, and Mark watched the way she used her hands to emphasize each point. They were neat strong hands with gracefully tapered fingers and short nails. The nails were clean and trimmed but the first two fingers of her right hand were stained pale yellow. Mark wondered at that, until suddenly Helena reached across and took a cigarette from the packet at Fergus'elbow.

Still talking, she lit the cigarette from a match in her cupped hands, and drew deeply before exhaling forcibly through pursed lips. Mark had never seen a woman smoke before, and he stared at her. She shook her head vehemently.

The history of the people's revolt is written in blood.

Look at France, see how the revolution sweeps forward in Russia. The short dark shining curls danced around her smooth pale cheeks, and she pursed her lips again to drag at the cigarette, and in some strange fashion Mark found the mannish act shocking, and exciting.

He felt his groin clenching, the tight swollen hardening of his flesh, beyond his reason, far beyond his control.

His breathing caught with shock and embarrassment, and he leaned back and slipped one hand into his trouser pocket, certain that both of them must be aware of his shameful reaction, but instead Helena reached across the table and seized his other wrist in a surprisingly powerful grip.

We know our enemy, we know what must be done and how we must do it, Mark. Her fingers seemed to burn like heated iron into his flesh, he felt dizzy with the force of it. His voice was hoarse as he forced himself to reply. They are strong, Helena, powerful No, no, Mark, the workers are strong, the enemy are weak, and smug. They suspect nothing, they wallow like hogs in the false security of their golden sovereigns, but in reality they are few and unprepared. They do not know their own weakness, and as yet the workers do not realize their great strength. We will teach them. You're right, lass. Fergus wiped the gravy from the plate with a crust of bread and stuffed it into his mouth. Listen to her, Mark, we are building a new world, a brave and beautiful new world. He belched loudly and pushed his plate away, leaving both elbows on the table. But first we have to tear down and destroy this rotten, unjust and corrupt society. There will be hard fighting, and we will need good hard fighting men. He laughed harshly and slapped Mark's shoulder. They'll call for MacDonald and Anders again, lad, you hear me. There is nothing for us to lose, Mark. Helena's cheeks were flushed. Nothing but our chains, and there is a whole world to win. Karl Marx said that, and it's one of the great truths of history. Helena, are you, he hesitated to use the word, are you and Fergus, well I mean, you aren't Bolsheviks are you? That's what the bosses, and their minions, the police, call us. She laughed contemptuously. They try to make us criminals, already they fear us. With reason, Mark, we will give them reason. No, lad, don't call us Bolsheviks. We are members of the communist party, dedicated to universal communism.

I'm the local party secretary and shop steward of the mineworkers union for the boilermakers shop. Have you read Karl Marx? Helena demanded. No. Mark shook his head, dazed and shocked, but still sexually excited by her to the edge of pain. Fergus a Bolshevik? A bomb-throwing monster? But he knew he was not.

He was an old and trusted comrade. I will lend you my copy. Come on, lass, Fergus chuckled, and shook his head. We are going too fast for the lad. He's got a right barmy look right now. He leaned over and placed an affectionate arm around Mark's shoulders, drawing him close. Have you a place to stay, lad? A job? A place to go? No. Mark flushed. I haven't, Fergus. Oh, yes you have, Helena cut in quickly. I have fixed the bed in the other room, you'll stay there, Mark. Oh, but I couldn't -It's done, she said simply. You'll stay, lad. Fergus squeezed him hard. And we'll see about a job for you tomorrow, you're book-learned.

You can read and write and figure, it will be easy to fix you. I know they need a clerk up at the pay office, and the paymaster is a comrade, a member of the party. I'll pay you for lodging. Of course you will, Fergus chuckled again, and filled his glass to the brim with beer. It's good to see you again, son and he raised his own glass. Send down the line for MacDonald and Anders, and warn the bastards we are coming! He took a long swallow, the pointed Adam's apple bobbing in his throat, then wiped the froth from his upper lip with the back of his hand.

The regimental chaplain had called it the sin of Onan, while the rankers had many more ribald terms for it, toss the caber or visit Mrs Hand and her five daughters. The chaplain had warned of the dire consequences that it would bring, failing sight, and falling hair, a palsied shaking hand and at last idiocy and the insane asylum. Mark lay in the narrow iron bed and stared with unseeing eyes at the faded pink rose-pattern wallpaper of the tiny room. It had the musty smell of being long closed, and there was a wash-basin in an iron frame with an enamel basin against the far wall. A single unshaded bulb hung on a length of flex from the ceiling, and the white plaster around it was fly-speckled; even at the moment three drowsy flies sat on the flex in a stupor. Mark swivelled his attention to them, trying to put aside the waves of temptation that flowed up through his body.

Light steps in the passage stopped opposite his bedroom door, and now there was a tap on the woodwork. Mark? He sat up quickly, letting the single thin blanket fall to

his waist. May I come in? Yes, he husked, and the door swung open. Helena crossed to his bed. She wore a gown of light pink shiny material that buttoned down the front; the skirt opened at each step and there was a glimpse of smooth white flesh above her knees.

She carried a slim book in one hand. I said I would lend it to you, she explained. Read it, Mark. She held out the volume.

The Communist Manifesto was the title, and Mark took it from her, opening it at random. He bowed his head over the open pages to cover the confusion into which her near presence plunged him. Thank you, Helena. He used her name for the first time, wanting her to leave and yet hoping she would stay.

She leaned over him a little, looking at the open book, and the bodice of her gown fell apart an inch. Mark looked up, and saw the incredibly silky sheen where the beginning of one white breast pressed against the lace that edged the neck of the gown. Swiftly he dropped his eyes again, and they were both silent until Mark could stand it no longer, and he looked up at her. Helena, he began, and then stopped. There was a smile, a secret womanly smile on her lips, lips that were slightly parted and moist in the harsh electric light. The dark eyes were half hooded but glowed again with that fierce fanatical light, and her bosom beneath the pink satin rose and fell with quick soundless breathing.

He flushed a sultry red under the dark tan of his cheeks and he rolled abruptly on to his side, drawing up his knees.

Helena straightened up slowly, still smiling. Goodnight, Mark. She touched his shoulder, fire sprang afresh from her finger-tips and then she turned and went slowly towards the door. The slippery material of the gown slid softly across the tight double rounds of her buttocks. I'll leave the light on. She looked back at him, and now the smile was knowing. You'll want to read. The Pay Office of Crown Deep Mines Ltd was a long austere room where five other clerks worked at high desks set in a line down one wall. They were mostly men in advanced middle age, two of them sufferers from phthisis, that dreaded disease of the miners in which the rock dust from the drills settled in the lungs, building up slowly until the lung turned to stone and gradually crippled the man. Employment in the mine offices was a form of pension. The other three were grey and drab men, stooped from poring over their ledgers. The atmosphere in the office was quiet and joyless, as in some monastic cloister.

Mark was given charge of the files and personnel R to Z, and the work was dull and repetitive, soon becoming automatic as he calculated overtime and leave pay, made deductions for rent and union fees and struck his totals. It was drudgery, not nearly enough to engage a bright and active young brain, and the narrow confines of the office were a cage for a spirit that was at home in the wide open sweep of sky and veld and had known the cataclysmic universe of the battlefields of France.

On the weekends, he escaped from his cage and rode on an old bicycle for miles into the open veld, following dusty paths along the base of the rocky kopjes on which grew the regal candelabra of giant aloes, their blooms burning in bright scarlet against the clear pale blue of the highveld sky. He sought seclusion, wilderness, secret places far from other men, but it seemed that always there were the borders. of barbed wire to limit his range; the grasslands had gone to the plough, the pale dust devils swirled and danced over red earth from which the harvest had been stripped, leaving the dried sparse stubble of maize stalks.

The great herds of game that once had covered the open grassland to the full range of the eye were long gone, and now small scrub cattle, multi-coloured and scrawny, grazed in mindless bovine herds tended by almost naked black piccaninnies who paused to watch Mark pedalling by, and greeted him with solemnity which turned to wideeyed pleasure when he returned the greeting in their own language.

Once in a while Mark would start a small grey duiker from its lay and send it bounding and bouncing away through the dry grass with small sharp harris and ears erect, or else catch a glimpse of a springbuck drifting elusive as smoke across the plain, lonely survivors of the long rifles.

Then the delight of their wild presence stayed long with him, warming him on the dark cold ride home.

He needed these times of quiet and solitude to complete the healing process, not only of the Maxim bullet wounds in his back but of the deeper wounds, soul damage caused by too early an exposure to war in all its horror.

He needed this quietness also to evaluate the swift rush of events that filled his evenings and nights in direct contrast with the grey drudgery of his working days.

Mark was carried along by the fanatical energy of Fergus MacDonald and Helena. Fergus was the comrade who had shared with him experience that most men never knew, the stark and terrible involvement of combat. He was also much older than Mark, a paternal figure, filling a deep need in his life. It was easy to suspend the critical faculties and believe; not to think, but to follow blindly wherever Fergus bitter restless energy led them.

There was excitement and a sense of commitment in those meetings with men like him, men with an ideal and a sense of destiny. The secret meetings in locked rooms with armed guards at the doors, the atmosphere quivering with the promise of forbidden things. The cigarette-smoke spiralling upwards until it filled the room with a thick blue haze, like incense burning at some mystic rite; the faces shining with sweat and quiet frenzy of the fanatic, as they listened to the speakers.

Harry Fisher, the Chairman of the Party, was a tall fierce man with a heavy gut, the brawny shoulders and hairy muscular arms of a boilermaker, an unkempt shock of coarse wiry black hair laced with strands of silver and dark burning eyes. We are the Party, the praetorian guard of the proletariat, and we are not bound by law or the ethical considerations of the bourgeois age. The Party in itself is the new law, the natural law of existence. Afterwards he shook hands with Mark, while Fergus stood by with paternal pride. Fisher's grip was as fierce as his stare. You're a soldier, he nodded. We will need you again, comrade. There is bloody work ahead. The disquieting presence of the man stayed to haunt Mark long afterwards, even when they rode home in the crowded tramcar, the three of them squeezed into a double seat so that Helena's thigh was pressed hard against his.

When she spoke to him, she leaned sideways, her lips almost touching his cheek, and her breath smelling of liquorice and cigarettes, a smell that mingled with the cheap flowery perfume she wore, and the underlying musky warmth of her woman's body.

There were other meetings on the Friday evenings, great raucous shouting gatherings where hundreds of white miners crowded into the huge Fordsburg Trades Union Hall, most of them boozy with cheap brandy, loud and inarticulate and spoiling for trouble. They roared like the crowd at a bull fight as the speakers harangued them; occasionally one of the audience climbed on to his chair to sway there, shouting meaningless confused slogans until his laughing comrades dragged him down.

One of the most popular speakers at these public meetings was Fergus MacDonald, he had a dozen tricks to excite his audience, he probed their secret fears and twisted the probe until they howled half in pain and half in adulation. You know what they are planning, the bosses, you know what they are going to do? First they will fragment the trades A thunderous ugly roar, that shook the windows in their frames, and Fergus paused on the stage, sweeping his sparse sandy hair back off his forehead and grinning down at them with his thin bitter mouth until the sound subsided.

the trade that took you five years to learn, they will split it up and now there will be three unskilled men to do your job, with only a year's training to learn that fragment, and they will pay them a tenth of the wage you draw.

A storming roar of No! and Fergus flung it back at them. Yes! he shouted. Yes! Yes! And yes again. That is what the bosses are going to do. But that's not all, they are going to use blacks in your jobs, black men are going to take those jobs away from you, black men who will work for a wage that you cannot live on. They screamed now, frantic with anger, a terrible anger which had no object on which to focus. What about your kids, are you going to feed them on mealies, are your wives going to wear limbo? That's what will happen, when the blacks take your jobs! No! they roared. No! VWorkers of the world, Fergus shouted at them, workers of the world unite, and keep our country white! The bellow of applause, the rhythmic stamp of feet on the wooden floor lasted for ten minutes, while Fergus strutted back and forth across the stage, clasping his hands above his head like a prize-fighter. When at last the cheering faltered, he flung back his head and bellowed the opening line of The Red Flag.

The entire hall came crashing to its feet, and stood at attention to sing the revolutionary song: Then raise the scarlet standard high, Within its shade we'll live or die.

Tho cowards flinch and traitors sneer, We'll keep the red flag flying here, Mark walked home with the MacDonalds in the frosty night, their breathing smoking like ostrich plumes in the lights of the street lamps. Helena walked between the men, a small dainty figure in her black overcoat with rabbit-fur collar and a knitted cap pulled down over her head.

She had slipped a hand into the crook of the elbows of each of them, a seemingly natural impartial gesture, but there was a disturbing pressure of fingers on the hard muscle of Mark's upper arm, and her hip touched his as she skipped occasionally to catch the longer stride of the men. Listen, Fergus, what you were saying there in the hall doesn't make sense, you know, Mark broke the silence, as they turned into the home street. You can't have it both ways, workers unite and keep it white. Fergus chuckled appreciatively. You're a bright lad, comrade Mark. But, I'm serious, Fergus, it's not the way Harry FisherOf course not, lad. Tonight I was shovelling up swill for the hogs. We need them fighting mad, we have things to tear down, bloody work to do. He stopped and turned to face Mark over the woman's head. We need cannon fodder, lad, and plenty of it. So it won't be like that? Mark asked. No, lad. It will be a beautiful brave new world. All men equal, all men happy, no bosses, a workers state.

Mark tried to control his pricking nagging doubts.

u keep talking of fighting, Fergus. Do you mean that, literally? I mean, will it be a shooting war? A shooting war, comrade, a bloody shooting war. just like the revolution in Russia, where comrade Lenin has shown us the way. We have to burn away the dross, we have to soak this earth with the blood of the rulers and the bosses, we have to flood it with the blood of their minions the petit bourgeois officer's class of the police and military. What will Mark almost said we but it would not come to his lips. He could not make that commitment. What will you fight with? Fergus chuckled again, and winked slyly. Mum's the word, lad, but it's time you knew a little more. He nodded.

Yes, tomorrow night, he decided.

On Saturday there was a bazaar being held in the Trades Hall, a Women's Union fund-raising drive for building the new church. Where the crazed mob had screamed murder and bloody revolution the previous night, now there were long trestle tables set out and the women hovered over their displays of baked and fancily iced cakes, trays of tarts, preserved fruit in jars and jams.

Mark bought a packet of tarts for a penny and he and Fergus munched them as they wandered idly down the hall, stopping at the piles of second-hand clothing while Fergus tried a maroon cardigan, and, after careful deliberation, purchased it for half a crown. They reached the top of the hall, and stood beneath the raised stage.

Fergus surveyed the room casually and then took Mark's arm and led him up the steps. They crossed the stage quietly, and went in through a door in the wings, into a maze of small union offices and storerooms, all deserted now on a Saturday afternoon.

Fergus used a key from his watch-chain to unlock a low iron door, and they stooped through it. Fergus relocked behind him, and they went down a narrow flight of steps that descended steeply. There was a smell of damp and earth, and Mark realized that they were descending to the cellars.

Fergus tapped on the door at the bottom of the stairs, and after a moment a single eye regarded them balefully through a peep hole. All right, comrade. Fergus MacDonald, a committee member. There was the rattle of chains and the door opened. A disgruntled, roughly dressed man stood aside for them. He was unshaven and sullen, and against the wall of the tiny room was a table and chair, still spread with the remains of a meal and the crumpled daily newspaper.

The man grunted, and Fergus led Mark across the room and through another door into the cellars.

The floor was earthen and the arched columns were in raw unplastered brick. There was the stench of dust and rats, stale dank air in confined space. A single bulb lit the centre starkly, but left the alcoves behind the arches in shadow. Here, lad, this is what we are going to use There were wooden cases stacked neatly to the height of a man's head in the alcoves, and the stacks were draped with heavy tarpaulin, obviously stolen from the railway yards for they were stencilled SAR and H.

Fergus lifted the edge of one tarpaulin, and grinned that thin humourless smile. Still in the grease, lad. The wooden cases were branded with the distinctive arrow-head and W. D. of the British War Department, and below that the inscription: 6 pieces.

Lee-Enfield Mark 1! (CNVD).

Mark was stunned. Good God, Fergus, there are hundreds of them. That's it, lad, and this is only one arsenal, There are others all along the Rand. He lifted another tarpaulin, walking on down the length of the cellar. The ammunition cases, with the quickrelease catches on the detachable lids that were painted 1000 rounds . 303. We have enough to do the job. Fergus squeezed Mark's arm, and led him on.

There were racks of rifles now, ready for instant use, blued steel glistening with gun oil in the electric light.

Fergus picked out a single rifle and handed it to Mark. This one has got your name on it. Mark took the weapon, and the feel of it in his hands was terribly familiar. It's the only one we've got, but the moment I saw it, I thought of you. When the time comes, you'll be using it. the P. 14 sniper's rifle had that special balance that felt just right in his hands but made Mark sick in the stomach.

He handed it back to Fergus without a word, but the older man winked at him before racking it again carefully.

Like a showman, Fergus had kept the best for last. With a flourish he whipped the canvas off the heavy weapon, with its thick, corrugated water-jacketed barrel, that squatted on its steel tripod. The Maxim machine gun, in its various forms, had the dubious distinction of having killed more human beings than any other single weapon that man destructive genius had been able to devise.

This was one of that deadly family, the Vickers-Maxim

. 303 Mark IV. B, and there were boxes stacked beside it.

Each containing a belt Of 250 rounds. The gun could throw those at 2440 feet per second and at a Cycle rate Of 750

rounds a minute. How about that, comrade? You asked what we are going to fight with, how will that do for a beginning?

In the silence Mark could hear faintly, but distinctly, the sound of children's laughter from the hall above them.

Mark sat alone upon the highest crest of the low kopjes that stretched into the west, black ironstone ridges breaking out of the flat dry earth like the crested back of a crocodile surfacing from still lake water.

The memory of the hidden arsenal had stayed with him through the night, keeping him from sleep, so that now his eyes felt gritty and his skin stretched tight and dry across the bones of his cheeks.

Lack of sleep had left him with that remote feeling, a lightness of thought, detached from reality, so now he sat in the bright sunlight blinking like a day-flying owl, and looking like a stranger into his own mind.

He felt a rising sense of dismay as he realized how idly he had drifted along the path that had brought him here to the very brink of the abyss. It had taken the feel of the P. I 4 in his hands, and the laughter of children to bring him up at the end of a rope.

All his training, all his deepest beliefs were centred on the sanctity of law, on the order and responsibilities of society. He had fought for that, had spent all of his adult life fighting for that belief. Now suddenly he had drifted, out of apathy, to the camp of the enemy; already he was numbered with the legions of the lawless, already they were arming him to begin the work of destruction. There was no question now that it was merely empty rhetoric shouted at gatherings of drunken labourers, he had seen the guns. It would be cruel and without mercy. He knew Harry Fisher, had recognized the forces that drove him. He knew Fergus MacDonald, the man had killed before and often; he would not flick an eyelid when he killed again.

Mark groaned aloud, aghast at what he had let happen to himself. He who knew what war really was, he who had worn the king's uniform, and won his medal for courage.

He felt the oily warmth of shame in his throat, a gagging sensation, and, to arm himself against future weakness of this same kind, he tried to find the reasons why he had been drawn in.

He realized now that he had been lost and alone, without family or home, and Fergus MacDonald had been the only shelter in the cold. Fergus the older comrade of shared dangers, whom he had trusted without question. Fergus the father figure, and he had followed again, grateful for the guidance, not questioning the destination.

There had, of course, been Helena as well and the hold she had over him, the tightest grip any human could have over another. He had been, and still was, totally obsessed with her. She had awakened his long suppressed and tightly controlled sexuality. Now it was but a breath away from bursting the wall he had built to dam it; when it burst, it might be a force he could not control, and that thought terrified him almost as much as the other.

He tried now to separate the woman from her womanhood, tried to see the person beyond this devastating web she wove around his senses, and he succeeded in as much that he realized that she was not a person he could admire, not the mother he would choose for his children. Also, she was the wife of an old comrade who trusted him completely.

Now he felt he was ready to make the decision to leave, and to carry that resolve through firmly.

He would leave Fordsburg immediately, leave Fergus MacDonald and his dark, cataclysmic schemes. He felt his spirits lighten instantly at the prospect. He would not miss him, nor that drab monastic pay office with its daily penance o boredom and drudgery. He felt the bright young spirit of anticipation flame again.

He would leave Fordsburg on the next train, and Helena. Immediately the flame flickered and his spirit plunged. There was a physical pain in his groin at the prospect, and he felt the cracks open in the dam wall of his passions.

It was dark when he left his bicycle in the garden shed, and he heard voices raised jovially in the house and bursts of laughter. Lights blazed beyond the curtained kitchen windows and when he stepped into the room there were four men at the table. Helena crossed quickly and hugged him impulsively, laughing, with high spots of colour in her cheeks, before taking his hand and leading him to the table. Welcome, comrade. Harry Fisher looked up at Mark with those disturbing eyes and the shock of dark wiry hair hanging on to his forehead. You are in time to join the celebration. Grab the lad a glass, Helena, laughed Fergus, and she dropped his hand and hurried to the cupboard to fetch a glass and fill it with black stout from the bottle.

Harry Fisher raised his own glass to Fergus. Comrades, I give you the new member of the Central Committee Fergus MacDonald. Isn't it wonderful, Mark? Helena squeezed Mark's hand. He's a good man, growled Harry Fisher. The appointment isn't too soon. We need men with Comrade MacDonald's guts. The others nodded agreement over their stout glasses, the two of them were both members of the local committee of the party; Mark knew them well from the meetings. Come, lad. Fergus made room for him at the table and he squeezed in beside him, drawing all their attention. And you, young Mark, Harry Fisher laid a powerful hairy hand on his shoulder, we are going to issue your party card How about that, lad! Fergus winked and nudged Mark in the ribs. Usually it takes two years or more, we don't let the rabble into the party, but you've got friends on the Central Committee now. Mark was about to speak, to refuse the honour he was being accorded. Nobody had asked him, they had taken it that as he was Fergus protege, he was for them. Mark was about to deny it, to tell them the decision he had made that day, when that sense of danger warned him. He had seen the guns, if he was not a friend then he was an enemy with a fatal secret. A secret that they could not risk. He had no doubts at all about these men, now. If he was an enemy, then they would see that he never passed that secret on to another man. But the moment for refusal had passed. Comrade MacDonald, I have a mission for you. It is urgent, and vital. Can you leave your work for two weeks? I've got a sick mother, Fergus chuckled. When do you want me to go, and what do you want me to do? I want you to leave, say Wednesday, that will give me time to give you your orders and for you to make your arrangements. Harry Fisher took a swallow of stout and the froth stayed on his upper lip I'm sending you to visit all the local committees, Capetown, Bloemfontein, Port Elizabeth, so that each of them can be coordinated. Mark felt a guilty lift of relief at the words, there would be no confrontation with Fergus now. He could merely slip away while he was gone on his mission. Then he glanced up and was startled by the gaze that Helena had fastened upon him. She stared at him with the fixed hungry expression of a leopard watching its prey from cover in the last instant before its spring.

Now when their eyes met, she smiled again that secret knowing smile, and the tip of her pink tongue dabbed at her slightly parted lips.

Mark's heart pounded to the point of physical pain and he dropped his eyes hurriedly to his glass. He was to be alone with Helena, and the prospect filled him with dread and a surging passionate heat.

Mark carried Fergus cheap and badly battered suitcase down to the station, and as they took the short cut across open veld, the thick frost crunched like sugar under their feet, and sparkled in myriad diamond points of light in the first rays of the sun.

At the station they waited with four other members of the party for the southbound mail, and when at last it came, puffing hoarsely, shooting steam high into the frosty air, it was thirty-five minutes late. Thirty-five minutes late is almost early for the railways, Fergus laughed, and shook hands with each of them in turn, slapping their shoulders before scrambling up the steel ladder into the coach. Mark passed his suitcase up through the open window. Look after Helena, lad, and yourself. Mark stood and watched the train run out southwards, shrinking dramatically in size until the sound of it was a mere whisper fading to nothingness. Then he turned and started up the hill towards the mine just as the hooters began their mournful wailing howl that echoed off the yellow mesas of the dumps, summoning the disorderly columns of men to their appointed labours. Mark walked with them, one in a thousand, distinguished from the others neither in appearance nor achievement. Once again he felt a sense of seething discontent, a vague but growing knowledge that this was not all that was life, not all that he was capable of doing with his youth and energy; and he looked curiously at the men who hurried with him towards the iron gates at the mine hooter's imperious summons.

All of them wore that closed withdrawn look, behind which Mark was convinced lurked the same misgivings as now assaulted him. Surely they also felt the futility of the dull daily repetition, the young ones at least must feel it.

The older and greyer must regret it; deep down they must mourn for the long sunny days, now past, spent toiling in endless drudgery for another man's coin. They must mourn the fact that when they went, they would leave no footprints, no ripple on the surface, no monument, except perhaps a few sons to repeat the meaningless cycle, all of them interchangeable, all of them dispensable.

He paused at the gates, standing aside while the stream of humanity flowed past him, and slowly the sense of excitement built up in him, the certainty that there was something, some special and worthwhile task for him to perform. Some special place that waited for him, and he knew he must go on and find it.

He hurried forward, suddenly grateful to Fergus MacDonald for placing this pressure on him, for forcing him to face himself, for breaking the easy drifting course he had taken since his flight from Ladyburg. You are late, Anders. The supervisor looked up from his ledgers severely, and each of his juniors repeated the gesture, a long row of them with the same narrow disapproving expressions. What have you got to say? I merely called in to clean out my desk, said Mark smiling, the excitement still on him. And to throw in my time.

The disapproving expressions changed slowly to shock.

It was dusk when Mark opened the back gate of the cottage and went up the short walk to the kitchen. He had walked all day at random, driven on restlessly by a new torrent of energy and exciting thoughts; he had not realized how hungry he was until he saw the lights in the window and smelled the faint aroma of cooking.

The kitchen was deserted, but Helena called through from the front. Mark, is that you? Before he could answer, she appeared in the kitchen door, and leaned one hip against the jamb. I thought you weren't coming home tonight. She wore the blue dress, and Mark knew now that it was her best, reserved for special occasions, and she wore cosmetics, something that Mark had never seen her do before. There were spots of rouge on her cheeks and her lips were painted, giving new lustre to her usually sallow skin. The short dark hair was newly washed, shiny in the lamplight, and brushed back, caught over one ear with a tortoise-shell clasp.

Mark stared at her. Her legs were smooth and'sleek in silken stockings, the feet neatly clad in small pumps. Why are you staring, Mark? You are -'Mark's voice turned husky, and caught. He cleared his throat. You are very pretty tonight. Thank you, sir. She laughed, a low throaty chuckle, and she did a slow pirouette, flaring the blue filmy skirt above the silken legs. I'm glad you like it. Then she stopped beside him and took his arm. Her touch was a delicious shock, like diving into a mountain pool. Sit down, Mark. She led him to the chair at the head of the table. Let me get you a nice beer. She went to the ice box, and while she pulled the cap on the bottle and poured, she ran on gaily. I found a goose at the butcher's, do you like roast goose? Saliva poured from under Mark's tongue. I love it. With roast potato and pumpkin pie. For that I would sell my soul. Helena laughed delightedly, it wasn't one of Mark's usual shy and reserved replies. There was a sense of excitement surrounding him like an aura this evening, echoing her own excitement.

She brought the two glasses, and propped one hip on the table. What shall we drink to? To freedom, he said without hesitation, and a good tomorrow. I like that, she said, and clinked his glass, leaning over him so that the bodice of her dress was at the level of his eyes. But why only tomorrow, why can't the good times start right now this minute? Mark laughed. All right, here's to a good tonight and a good tomorrow. Mark! Helena pursed her lips in mock disapproval, and immediately he blushed and laughed in confusion. Oh no, I didn't mean, that sounded dreadful. I didn't I bet you say that to all the girls. Helena stood up quickly. She did not want to embarrass him and break the mood, so she crossed to the stove. It's ready, she announced, if you want to eat now. She sat opposite him, anticipating his appetite, buttering

the thick slices of bread with yellow farm butter and keeping his glass fully charged.

Aren't you eating? I'm not hungry. It's good, you don't know what you are missing. Better than your other girls cooked for you? she demanded playfully, and Mark dropped his eyes to his plate and busily loaded his fork. There weren't any girls. Oh, Mark, you don't expect me to believe that! A handsome young fellow like you, and those French girls. I bet you drove them mad. We were too busy, and besides, -he stopped. Besides what! she insisted, and he looked up at her, silent for a moment, and then he began to talk. It was suddenly so easy to talk to her, and he was buoyed up with his new jubilant mood and relaxed with the food and drink in his belly. He talked to her as he had never talked to another human being& and she answered him with the frankness of another man. Oh, Mark, that's nonsense. Not every woman is sick, it's only the street girls. Yes, I know. I didn't believe every girl, but well, they are the only ones that a man can, he broke off. And the others get babies, he went on lamely.

She laughed and clapped her hands with delight. Oh, my darling Mark. It's not that easy, you know. I have been married for nine years and I've never had a baby. Well, Mark hesitated. Well, you are different. I didn't mean you, when I said those things. I meant other girls. I'm not sure if that's meant to be a compliment or an insult, she teased again. She had known he was a virgin, of course. There was that transparent shining innocence that glowed from him, his unpractised and appealing awkwardness in the presence of women, that peculiar shyness that would pass so soon but which now heightened her excitement, rousing her in some perverse way. She knew now why some men paid huge sums of money to despoil innocence; she touched his bared forearm now, delighting in the smooth hardness of young muscle, unable to keep her hands off him.

Oh, it was a compliment, Mark answered her hurriedly. Do you like me, Mark? Oh, yes. I like you more than I've ever liked any other girlYou see, Mark, she leaned closer to him, her voice sinking to a throaty whisper. I'm not sick, and I'm not going to have a baby, ever. She lifted her hand and touched his cheek. You are a beautiful man, Mark. I liked you from the first moment I saw you coming up the walk like a stray puppy. She stood up slowly and crossed to the kitchen door, deliberately she turned the key and flipped up the light switch. The small room was dark, but for the shaft of light from the hallway. Come, Mark. She took his hand and drew him to his feet. We are going to bed now. At the door to Mark's bedroom she reached up on tiptoe and kissed his cheek lightly, and then without another word she let his hand drop and glided away from him.

Uncertainly Mark watched her go, wanting to call to her to stay, wanting to ran after her, and yet relieved that she had gone, that the headlong rush into the unknown had abruptly halted. She reached the door of her own bedroom and went through without looking back.

Torn by conflicting emotions, he turned away and went through into his own room. He undressed slowly, disappointment now stronger than relief, and while he folded his clothing, he listened to her quiet movements in the room beyond the thin wall.

He climbed at last into the narrow iron bed, and lay rigid until he had heard the light switch click next door; then he sighed and picked up the book from his bedside table; he had not yet read it through, but now the dull political text might divert his emotions enough to allow him to sleep.

The latch of his door snapped softly. He had not heard her in the passage, and she stepped into the room. She wore the gown of slippery peach-coloured satin and she had recombed her hair and retouched her cheeks and lips.

Carefully, she closed the door and crossed the room with slow swaying hips under the moving satin.

Neither of them spoke as she stopped by the side of his bed.

Have you read it, Mark? she asked softly.

Not all of it. He placed the book aside. Well, this isn't the time to finish it, she said, and deliberately opened the gown, slipped it from her shoulders and dropped it over the back of the chair.

She was naked, and Mark gasped. She was so smooth.

He had not expected that somehow, and he stared at her as she stood close beside him. Her skin had an olive creaminess, like old porcelain, a sheen that caught the light and glowed. Mark felt his whole body rocked by the exquisite tension of arousal, and he tried feebly to thrust it aside. He tried to think of Fergus, of the trust that had been placed in him. Look after Helena, lad, and yourself Her breasts were big for the slimness of her body, already they hung heavily, almost overripe, drooping smooth and round with startlingly large nipples, rosy brown and big as ripe grapes. They swung weightily as she moved closer to him, and he saw that there were sparse dark hairs curling from the puckered aureole around the nipples.

There was hair also curling out in little wisps from under her arms, dark glossy hair, and a huge wild bush of it below the smooth creamy slightly bulging belly.

The hair excited him, so dark and crisp against the pale skin, and he stared at it, transfixed. All thoughts of honour and trust faded, he felt the dam wall inside him creak and strain.

She reached out and touched his bare shoulder, and it convulsed his body like a whip-lash. Touch me, Mark, she whispered, and he reached out slowly, hesitantly, like a man in a trance, and touched with one finger the smooth ivory warmth of her hip, still staring fixedly at her. Yes, Mark. That's right. She took his wrist and slowly drew his hand upwards, so that the tips of his fingers traced featherlike over her flank and the outline of her ribs. Here, Mark, she said, and here. The big dark nipples contracted at the touch of his fingers, changing shape, thrusting out and hardening, swelling and darkening. Mark could not believe it was happening, that woman's flesh could react as swiftly and dramatically as a man's.

He felt the dam break, and the flood came pouring through the breach. Too long contained, too powerful and weighty to resist, it poured through his mind and body, sweeping all restraint before it.

With a choking cry, he seized her around the waist with both arms, and drew her fiercely to him, pressing his face into the smooth soft warmth of her naked belly. Oh, Mark! she cried, and her voice was hoarse and shaking with lust and triumph, as she twisted her fingers into the soft brown hair and stooped over his head.

The days blurred and telescoped together, and the universe shut down to a tiny cottage in a sordid street. Only their bodies marked the passage of time sleeping and waking to love until exhaustion overtook them and they slept again to wake hungry, ravenous for both food and loving.

At first he was like a bull, charging with a mindless energy and strength. It frightened her, for she had not expected such strength from that slim and graceful body.

She rode with his strength, little by little controlling and directing it, changing its course, and then she began gently to teach.

Long afterwards, Mark would think back on those five incredible days and realize his great good fortune. So many young men must find their own way into the uncharted realms of physical love-making, without guide, accompanied usually by a partner making her own hesitant first journey into the unknown. Did you know that there is a tribe in South America, Mark, that have a rule that every married woman must take one young warrior of the tribe and teach him to do what we are doing? she asked, as she knelt beside him in one of the intervals of quiet between the storms. What a shame, he smiled lazily. I thought we were the first two ever to think of it. He reached out for the pack of Needlepoint cigarettes on the bedside table and lit two of them.

Helena drew upon hers and her expression was fond and proud. He had changed so swiftly and radically in the last few days, and she was responsible for that. This new assurance, this budding strength of purpose. The shyness and reticence were fading. He spoke now in a way that he had never spoken before, calmly and with authority.

Swiftly he was becoming a full man, and she had had a hand in it.

Mark believed that each new delight was the ultimate one, but she proved him wrong a dozen times. There were things that, had he heard them spoken of might have appalled andrevolted him, but when they happened the way Helena made them happen, they left only wonder and a sense of awe. She taught him a vast new respect for his own body, as it came at last fully alive, and he became aware of new broad reaches and depths of his own mind.

For five days neither of them left the cottage; then on the sixth day there was a letter brought by a uniformed postman on a bicycle and Mark, who accepted it, recognized immediately Fergus MacDonald's cramped and laboured. hand. Guilt hit him like a fist in the stomach;

the dream shattered like fragile crystal.

Helena sat at the newspaper-covered table in the kitchen with the now soiled peach gown open to the waist and read the letter aloud, mocking the writer with the inflection of her voice as he reported a string of petty achievements, applause at party meetings where a dozen comrades had gathered in a back room, messages of loyalty and dedication to bring back to the Central Committee, commitment to the cause and promises of action when the time to strike was ripe.

Helena mocked him, rolling her eyes and chuckling when he asked after Mark, was he well and happy, was Helena looking after him properly.

She drew deeply on the stub of the cigarette and then dropped it into the dregs of the coffee cup at her elbow, where it was extinguished with a sharp hiss. This simple action caused in Mark an unnatural reaction of revulsion.

Suddenly he saw her clearly, the sallow skin wrinkled finely in the corners of her eyes as her youth cracked away like old oilpaint; the plum-coloured underlining of the eye sockets, the petulant quirk of her lips and the waspish sting to her voice.

Abruptly, he was aware of the squalid room, with the greasy smell of stale food and unwashed dishes, of the grubby and stained gown and the pendulous droop of the big ivory-coloured breasts beneath the gown.

He stood up and left the room.

Mark, where are you going? she called after him. I'm going out for a while. He scrubbed himself in the stained enamel bath, running the water as hot as he could bear it so that his body glowed bright pink as he towelled himself down.

At the railway booking office he stood for nearly half an hour, reading the long lists of closely printed timetables pasted to the wall.

Rhodesia. He had heard they needed men on the new copper mines. There was still a wilderness up there, far horizons and the great wild game, lakes and mountains and room to move.

He moved to the window of the booking-office and the clerk looked out at him expectantly. One second-class single to Durban, he said, surprising himself. He was going back to Natal, to Ladyburg. There was unfinished business there, and answers to search for.

An unknown enemy to find and confront.

As he paid for the ticket with the old man's sovereigns, he had a vivid mental picture of the old man on the stoep of Andersland, with his great spiky whiskers and the old terai hat pulled low over his pale calm eyes. Mark knew then that this had been only a respite, a hiatus, in which he had found time to heal and gather courage for the task ahead.

He went back to collect his belongings. There was not much to pack, and he was in a consuming hurry now.

he swept his few spare shorts and clean socks into the cardboard suitcase, he was suddenly aware of Helena's presence, and he turned quickly. She had bathed and dressed and she stood in the doorway watching him, her expression too calm for the loneliness in her voice.

You are going. It was a statement, not a question. Yes, he answered simply, turning to snap the catches on the case. I'm coming with you. No. I'm going alone. But, Mark, what about me?

I'm sorry, Helena. I'm truly sorry. But don't you see, I love you, her voice rose in a low wall of despair. I love you, Mark darling, you can't go.

She spread her arms to block the doorway.

Please, Helena. We both knew it was madness. We both knew there was nothing for us. Don't make it ugly now, please let me go. No. She covered her ears with both hands. No, don't talk like that. I love you. I love you.

Gently he tried to move her from the doorway.

I have to go. My train, Suddenly she flew at him, vicious as a wounded leopard.

He was unprepared, and her nails raked long bloody lines across his face, narrowly missing his eyes. You bastard, you selfish bastard, she shrieked. You're like all of them, and she struck again, but he caught her wrists. You're all the same, you take, you take He turned her, wildly struggling, and tipped her back on to the bed. Abruptly the fight went out of her and she pressed her face into the pillow. Her sobs followed Mark as he ran down the passage, and out of the open front door.

It was more than three hundred miles to the port of Durban on the coast, and slowly the train huffed up the great barrier of the Drakensberg Mountains, worming its way through the passes until at last it plunged joyously over the escarpment and ran lightly down into the deep grassy bowl of the eastern littoral, dropping less steeply as it neared the sea and emerged at last into the lush semitropical hot-house of the sea-board with its snowy white beaches and the warm blue waters of the Mozambique current.

Mark had much time to think on the journey down, and he wasted most of it in vain regrets. Helena's cries and accusations echoed through his mind while the cold grey stone of guilt lay heavily in the pit of his stomach, whenever he thought of Fergus MacDonald.

Then, as they passed through the town of Pietermaritzburg and began the last leg of the journey, Mark put aside guilt and regret, and began to think ahead.

His first intention had been to return directly to Ladyburg, but now he realized that this was folly. There was an enemy t here, a murderous enemy, a hidden enemy striking from cover, a rich enemy, a powerful enemy, who could command a bunch of armed men who were ready to kill.

Mark thought then of those bloody attacks that he and Fergus had made in France. Always the first move had been to identify and mark the enemy, locate where he was lying, find his stance and assess him. How good was he, was his technique rigid, or was he quick and changeable? Was he sloppy, so that the hunters could take risks, or were risks suicidal? We got to try and guess the way the bastard's thinking, lad - was Fergus first concern, before they planned the shoot. I've got to find who he is, Mark whispered aloud, and guess the way the bastard is thinking. One thing at least was clear, a hundred pounds was too high a price in blood money for such an insignificant person as Mark Anders; the only thing that could possibly make him significant in anyway was his relation to the old man and to Andersland. He had been seen at Andersland by both the Hindu babu and the white foreman. Then he had brazened into the town asking questions, perusing documents. Only then had they come after him. The land was the centre of the puzzle, and he had the names of all the men who had any interest in the sale.

Mark lifted his suitcase down from the luggage rack and, holding it on his lap, hunted for and found his notebook.

He read the names: DIRK COURTNEY, RONALD PYE, DENNIS PETERSEN, PIET GREYLING and his son CORNELFUS.

His first concern must be to find out all he could about those men, find out where each was lying, find his stance and assess him, decide which of them was the sniper.

While he did this, he must keep his own head well down below the parapet. He must keep clear of enemy country, and enemy country was Ladyburg.

His best base would be Durban city itself; it was big enough to absorb him without comment, and, as the capitol of Natal, he would have many sources of information there, libraries, government archives, newspaper offices.

He began making a list of all possible sources in the back of the notebook, and immediately found himself regretting bitterly that Ladyburg itself was closed to him. Records in the Lands Office and Company Registers for the district were not duplicated in the capital.

Suddenly he had a thought. Damn it, what was her name" Mark closed his eyes, and he saw again the bright, friendly and cheerful face of the little girl in the Companies office in Ladyburg. Mark, that's a strong romantic name, He could even hear her voice, but the train was sliding into the platform before her name came to him again.

Marion! and he scribbled it into the notebook.

He climbed down on to the platform, carrying his case, and joined the jostling throng of travellers and welcomers.

Then he set out to find lodgings in the city.

A penny copy of the Natal Mercury led him through its small advertisements to a rooming house in Point Road, down by the docks. The room was small, dark and smelled of those gargantuan cockroaches that infest the city, swarming up from the sewers each evening in shiny black hordes, but the rental was only a guinea a week, and he had the use of the lavatory and shower room across. the small enclosed yard.

That night he wrote a letter: Dear Marion, I don't suppose you remember me, my name is Mark Anders, the same as Mark Antony! I have thought of you often since I was compelled to leave Ladyburg unexpectedly before I had a chance to see you again Tactfully he avoided any mention of the research work he wanted undertaken. That could wait for the next letter.

He had learned much about women recently, and he addressed the letter simply to Miss Marion, Registrar's Office, Ladyburg.

Mark started the following morning at the City Library, walking up Smith Street to the four-storied edifice of the Municipal Buildings. It looked like a palace flanked by the equally imposing buildings of the Royal Hotel and the cathedral, with the garden square neatly laid out in front of it, bright with spring blooms.

He had another inspiration as he approached the librarian's desk. I'm doing research for a book I intend writing Immediately the grey-haired lady who presided over the dim halls and ceiling-high racks of books softened her severe expression. She was a book person, and book people love other book people. Mark had the key to one of the reading rooms given him, and the back copies of all the Natal newspapers, going back to the time of the first British occupation, were put at his disposal.

There was immediately a temptation for Mark, voracious reader that he was, to lose himself in the fascination of history printed as urgent headlines, for history had been one of Mark's favourite subjects both at Ladyburg School and at University College.

He resisted the temptation and went at once to the drawers that contained the copies of the Ladyburg Lantern and Recorder. The first copies were already yellowing with age and tore easily, so he handled them with care.

The first mention of the name Courtney, leapt at him in thick black headlines on one of the earliest copies from

1879.

Ladyburg Mounted Rifles massacred at Isandhlwana.

Colonel Waite Courtney and his men cut down to a man.

Blood-crazed Impis on the rampage.

Mark guessed that this must refer to the founder of the family in Ladyburg; after that the name cropped up in nearly every issue, there were many Courtneys and all of them lived in the Ladyburg district, but the first mention of Dirk Courtney came in 1900.

Ladyburg welcomes one of its Favourite Sons.

Hero of the Anglo-Boer War Returns.

Colonel Sean Courtney purchases Lion Kop Ranch.

Ladyburg welcomes the return of one of her favourite Sons after an absence of many years. There are very few of us who are not acquainted with the exploits of Colonel Sean Courtney, D. S. O D. C. M and all will recall the major role he played in the establishment of the prosperous gold-mining industry on the Witwatersrand. . .

A long recital of the man's deeds and reputation followed, and the report ended, Colonel Courtney has purchased the ranch Lion Kop from the Ladyburg Farmers Bank. He intends making this his home and will plant the land to timber. Major Courtney is a widower and is accompanied by his ten-year-old son, Dirk.

The ancient report shocked Mark. He had not realized that Dirk Courtney was the son of his old General. The big, bearded, hook-nosed man he had met that snowy night in France, the man whom he had immediately respected and liked, no, more than liked. The man whose vital force and presence, together with his reputation, had roused in him an almost religious awe.