‘Yes.’

Roeloff knew she was lying, but took it out of respect.

‘Go safely, Eyes of the Sky. If you see rain, tell it to come this way.’

‘Thank you, and thank you, old father.’

Then he was gone, galloping quickly over the veld. The visit had refreshed him, rested his horse, and he was eager to find the sheep and then go home. An old route he’d once taken with Twa came up on his left, and a feeling of longing welled up in him. He was less than an hour from the place where he was born. His thoughts went for a moment to his family, the people on Kloot’s Nek, then he forced them out as he’d done so many times in the past.

It was late afternoon when he stopped near a clump of thorn bushes to rest and have something to eat. What had attracted him to this particular spot he didn’t know, but he found a recent upheaval of sand, as if something had been unearthed and reburied. He looked more closely and saw that someone had squatted there, the heels dug deeply into the sand, the footprints narrow and small.

He got down on his knees and started to burrow with his hands. Minutes later he lifted out an ostrich egg from the sand, warm from nestling in the baked earth, with a tiny hole in it and a wad of dry grass stuck in it to stop it up. The hunters had ostrich eggs with water buried all over the Karoo for passing travellers.

‘So you’ve been here, and had a drink.’

He reburied the egg and got to his feet. He was tempted to leave there some memento of his presence, but decided against it. They would think the water poisoned, and it wasn’t his intention to thwart a lifesaving tradition.

Where are you, Zokho? Are you near?

He walked around, inspecting the ground, and found tracks leading to a clump of bushes hardly two hundred yards to his left. His heart hammered against his chest.

‘Zokho!’

There was no answer, only the soft swoop of a lone vulture overhead.

He walked towards the spot where he thought she was hiding. It was different from the time he’d found her alone in the veld. Then there was wild expectation and Zokho had run to him. Now there was distance and guilt.

He reached the bush and went behind it. She wasn’t there. He went to a second, smaller bush, and found her crouched with her head between her knees. If he hadn’t been looking for her, he would have gone right past, so well did she blend in with her surroundings.

‘So. This is where you have run to.’

She got up and, without acknowledging him, started to walk. The kaross was tied around her waist, and there was no sign in the taut belly to show that she’d recently given birth, except for the breasts, large and pearlike, streaking milk.

He came up alongside. ‘I’m talking to you.’

She continued walking.

He stepped in front of her.

‘Why have you run away? Left our baby?’

She scratched at something in the sand with her stick.

‘I’m talking to you, look at me!’

The digging stick dropped from her hand and she looked up. Had she been angry or hurt, it would have shown feeling, but she looked at him as if she was seeing him for the first time.

‘You have nothing to say?’

She took the kaross from her waist and threw it over her shoulders to cover her breasts, closing herself off to him.

‘I told you I didn’t want to stay on the farm.’

‘That’s why you left our child by himself?’

‘That and other things.’

‘What other things?’

‘You know very well what other things.’

‘You had our baby. You left him unattended. Anything could have happened to him. What kind of mother does that?’

Defiance crept into her eyes.

‘What is your complaint? You want the white man’s daughter, you can have her now. Zokho wasn’t good enough to marry.’

‘If you were angry with me, that’s one thing. Didn’t you care about him?’

‘I don’t want him! And I left him the night he was born. Under a tree for the jackals! Your cripple saved him from death!’

The words struck at his heart and he flinched. ‘Jackals? What are you talking about?’

‘Ask Twa. He’ll be happy to tell you how he brought the baby back to life the next day.’

Roeloff looked at her. He was stunned. The Zokho he knew was playful and innocent, there was no evil in her. He got on his horse. What there had been between them died there in the veld, by her actions, her words. What she’d done amounted to the same as stopping his heart beating with her hands. No law could make it right. Not the Sonqua’s, not anyone’s. She was out of his hands. Even if any part of him felt sorry, he could not do anything.

‘I’ve hurt you now. Are you satisfied?’

He was too stunned to respond.

Zokho pulled her kaross about her and stepped past him to continue her journey.

He sat in the saddle and watched her, a solitary steenbok who knew her way in the veld. That was the difference between them. Not that she was Sonqua, that her gods were not his, but that she could walk away. Unhurried. Free. The old father was right, he didn’t understand. He didn’t want to.

‘Goodbye, Smoke in the Eyes,’ he said softly to himself.

The kaross grew smaller and smaller in the distance. When she had become one with the veld, he turned and rode steadily into the wind, letting it dry his eyes.

Chapter Thirteen

Neeltje waited six days for his return with the sheep and ten more for him to emerge from his quarters after a sickness that bore no physical evidence other than silence. She knew from Twa, who had come back two weeks before, that Zokho had left and wasn’t returning, but she didn’t press for details. Twa knew more than he was saying, having met Roeloff on his way back from the Hantamberge, and she could see for herself that Roeloff was torn by some private pain.

She was in the kitchen holding Harman, keeping an eye on her father who was sitting in a chair near the door cutting out a pair of veldskoene for himself out of animal hide. The paralysis had weakened his limbs and he couldn’t stand up for long, but he had regained his speech and had recovered all his strength in his arms. He was using this time to make shoes, oil his guns, mend the tears in the wagon’s canvas top, and generally to fix things for which he had no time when he was up and about.

‘Pa, are you strong enough to hold Harman? I see Roeloff out there, I want to talk to him. I also want Twa to slaughter a chicken for supper. Our chickens have increased, we have more now than we have sheep. I can put Harman down if you don’t think you can manage.’

‘I can manage.’