'Well, I still think it died of a heart attack,' Sean could suppress his envy no longer, and Garry rounded on him furiously.
'We all know what a clever dick you are. But when you shoot your first lion, then you can come and talk to me, smarty pants. All you are good for is a few little old impala!" It was a long speech, delivered in white heat, and Garry never stumbled nor stuttered once. It was the first time Shasa had seen him stand up to Sean's casual bullying, and he waited for Sean to assert his authority. For seconds it hung in the balance, he could see Sean weighing it up, deciding whether to tweak the spikes of hair at Garry's temple or to give him a chestnut down the ribs. He could see also that Garry was ready for it, his fists clenched and his lips set in a pale determined line. Suddenly Sean grinned that charming smile.
'Only kidding,' he announced airily, and turned back to admire the tiny bullet-hole in the skull. 'Wow! Right between the eyes? It was a peace offering.
Garry looked bemused and uncertain. It was the first time that had forced Sean to back down, and he wasn't able immediately grasp that he had succeeded.
Shasa stepped up and put his arm around Garry's shoulders. 'E you know what I'm going to do, champ? I'm going to have the he fully mounted for the wall in your room, with eyes and everythin he said.
For the first time, Shasa was aware that Garry had develope hard little muscles in his shoulders and upper arm. He had alwa, thought him a runt. Perhaps he had never truly looked at the chi] before.
Then suddenly it was over, and the servants were breaking camp an packing the tents and beds on to the trucks, and appallingly th prospect of the return to Weltevreden and school loomed ahead c them. Shasa tried to keep their spirits jaunty with stories and song on the long drive back to H'am Mine but with every mile the boy were more dejected.
On the last day when the hills which the Bushmen call the 'Plac, of All Life' floated on the horizon ahead of them, detached from th earth by the shimmering heat mirage, Shasa asked, 'Have you gentle men decided what you are going to do when you leave school?" I was an attempt to cheer them up, more than a serious enquiry. 'Who about you, Sean?" 'I want to do what we have been doing. I want to be a hunter, or] elephant hunter like great-grand-uncle Sean." 'Splendid? Shasa agreed. 'Only problem I can see is that you are at least sixty years too late." 'Well then,' said Sean, Tll be a soldier - I like shooting things." A shadow passed behind Shasa's eyes before he looked at Michael.
'What about you, Mickey?" 'I want to be a writer. I will work as a newspaper reporter and in my spare time I'll write poetry and great books." 'You'll starve to death, Mickey,' Shasa laughed, and then he swivelled around to Garry who was leaning over the back of the driving seat.
'What about you, champ?" 'I'm going to do what you do, Dad." 'And what is it ! do?" Shasa demanded with interest.
'You are the chairman of Courtney Mining and Finance, and you tell everybody else what to do. That's what I want to be one day, chairman of Courtney Mining and Finance." Shasa stopped smiling and was silent for a moment, studying the child's determined expression, then he said lightly, 'Well then, it looks as though it's up to you and me to support the elephant hunter and the poet." And he ran his hand over Garry's already unruly hair. It no longer required any effort to make an affectionate gesture towards his ugly duckling.
They came singing across the rolling grasslands of Zululand, and they were one hundred strong. All of them were members of the Buffaloes and Hendrick Tabaka had carefully picked them for this special honour guard. They were the best, and all of them were dressed in tribal regalia, feathers and furs and monkey-skin capes, kilts of cow-tails. They carried only fighting-sticks, for the strictest tradition forbade metal weapons of any kind on this day.
At the head of the column Moses Gama and Hendrick Tabaka trotted. They also had set aside their European clothing for the occasion, and of all their men they alone wore leopard-skin cloaks, as was their noble right. Half a mile behind them rose the dust of the cattle herd.
This was the lobola, the marriage price, two hundred head of prime beasts, as had been agreed. The herd-boys were all of them sons of the leading warriors who had ridden in the cattle trucks with their charges during the three-hundred-mile journey from the Witwatersrand. In charge of the herd-boys were Wellington and Raleigh Tabaka and they had detrained the herd at Ladyburg railway station. Like their father, they had discarded their western-style clothing for the occasion and were dressed in loincloths, and armed with their fighting-sticks, and they danced and called to the cattle, keeping them in a tight bunch, both of them excited and filled with self-importance by the task they had been allotted.
Ahead of them rose the high escarpment beyond the little town of Ladyburg. The slopes were covered with dark forests of black wattle and all of it was Courtney land, from where the waterfall smoked with spray in the sunlight around the great curve of hills. All ten thousand acres of it belonged to Lady Anna Courtney, the relict of Sir Garrick Courtney and to Storm Anders, who was the daughter of General Sean Courtney. However, beyond the waterfall lay a hundred choice acres of land which had been left to Sangane Dinizulu in terms of the will of General Sean Courtney, for he had been a faithful and beloved retainer of the Courtney family as had his lath Mbejane Dinizulu before him.
The road descended the escarpment in a series of hairpin bend and when Moses Gama shaded his eyes and stared ahead, he so another band of warriors coming down it to meet them. They we many more in number, perhaps five hundred strong. Like Mose party they were dressed in full regimentals, with plumes of fur an feathers on their heads and war rattles on their wrists and ankle The two parties halted at the foot of the escarpment, and from hundred paces faced each other, though still they sang and stampe and brandished their weapons.
The shields of the Zulus were matched, selected from dapple cowhides of white and chocolate brown, and the brows of the wal riors that carried them were bound with strips of the same dapple hide while their kilts and their plumes were cow-tails of purest whit They made a daunting and warlike show, all big men, their bodie gleaming with sweat in the sunlight, their eyes bloodshot with din and excitement and the pots of millet beer they had already downec Facing them Moses felt his nerves crawl with a trace of the terra that these men had for two hundred years inspired in all the other tribes of Africa, and to suppress it he stamped and sang as loudly a his Buffaloes who pressed closely around him. On this his weddinl day, Moses Gama had put aside all the manners and mores of th west, and slipped back easily into his African origins and his hear pumped and thrilled to the rhythms and the pulse of this horst continent.
From the Zulu ranks opposite him sprang a champion, a magnificent figure of a man with the strip of leopard skin around hi, brow that declared his royal origins. He was one 'of Victorin Dinizulu's elder brothers, and Moses knew he was a qualified lawyel with a large practice at Eshowe, the Zululand capital, but today he was all African, fierce and threatening as he swirled in the giya, the challenge dance.
He leapt and spun and shouted his own praises and those of his family, daring the world, challenging the men who faced him, while behind him his comrades drummed with their sticks on the ravhide shields, and the sound was like distant thunder, the last sound that a million victims had ever heard, the death-knell of Swazi and Xhosa, of Boer and Briton in the days when the impis of Chaka and Dingaan and Cetewayo had swept across the land, from Isandhlawana, the Hill of the Little Hand, where seven hundred British infantry were cut down in one of the worst military reverses that England had ever suffered in Africa, to the 'Place of Weeping' which the Boers named 'Weenen' for their grief for the women and children who died to that same dreadful drum roll when the impis came swarming down across the Tugela river, to a thousand other nameless and forgotten killing grounds where the lesser tribes had perished before the men of Zulu.