Three days north, Limp Kao sniffed at the air. There were clouds, but clouds didn’t always mean rain. He’d seen them all: thin ones, curly ones, puffy ones, ones that seemed to dodge and dart about the sky like hyenas after a hare. It was the dark ones that held promise.
‘The earth is releasing her smells,’ he said to the group waiting anxiously for his prediction.
‘I think you’re right, old father. I think this time it really will come. We’ll start out for the river.’
‘Someone’s coming,’ Kabas said suddenly.
Koerikei put his hand over his eyes and squinted into the distance. A puff of dust on the horizon turned slowly into a shimmering dot until finally a figure separated out of the rippling heat and Toma arrived, out of breath, at their sides.
‘Where’s everyone? Why have you come alone?’
‘They are dead.’
A hushed silence fell over the group.
‘Dead?’
‘Balip and I borrowed the white man’s sheep. We were caught. The white man pointed his fire stick at Balip, and he flew up in the sky. Then he landed like a rock on the ground and blood ran from his heart. They tied me up. The next day I got away. When I arrived at the camp there was only the blood and bones in the dust. The vultures had been already.’
‘You are telling the truth?’ Koerikei asked.
‘Yes. Everyone is dead except Smoke in the Eyes. They took her.’
‘They’ve got Zokho?’
‘Yes.’
‘How did you get away?’
‘The white man’s son. He cut me loose and let me go.’
They looked at each other.
‘The white man’s son? You want us to believe that?’
‘It’s true. He’s a strange one, Uncle, with eyes the colour of the sky, and he speaks like us, !Khomani.’
‘It can’t be.’
‘They have one of our people there, too. I don’t know him. He’s friendly with this boy.’
‘Tell us from the beginning.’
Toma related every detail from the time he and Balip had sat in the tree waiting for darkness, to seeing his friend killed and dragged off. When he came to the part where Roeloff offered him water, he was stopped by Limp Kao and asked to repeat it. The story ended and he had to tell it several more times to make sure no one had missed anything.
The men sat back on their heels, faces creased in thought. They’d always managed to evade the white hunters. Toma was telling them strange things.
‘We have to go back for Smoke in the Eyes.’
‘They will be expecting us, Kabas,’ Limp Kao said. ‘It would be foolishness. We are this many,’ he opened and closed his fists twice. ‘I say we wait for three moons to die, then take them in the night.’
‘I say we go now,’ Kabas insisted.
A roll of thunder clapped over their heads and they looked at each other.
‘Rain!’
‘The gods have spoken,’ Koerikei said. ‘It’s decided. We will go to the river, wait three moons like Limp Kao said, then come back.’
The sky closed like a tortoise withdrawing into its shell, shutting out the light, and the wind started its wicked dance over the veld, flattening skerms, hearths, erasing all trace of settlement. It came down hard and furious and they ran about filling their ostrich-egg containers with the precious water, laying hides in shallow depressions to catch what they could from the sky. But as suddenly as the rain had started, it stopped, and the sun bragged spitefully through the clouds. Minutes later there was only the soft, springy feeling under their feet to tell them the gods had been kind, the intoxicating smell of wet sand. But the rainy season was started. They had water. Soon the land would swell with plant and animal life.
Chapter Three
Roeloff sat in the shade of a large rock on the hill with Ratel and Riempie, sorting out stones for his sling. Twa had made the sling out of a leather strap and two thongs and had taught Roeloff how to use it, and he went everywhere hitting targets. He had become quite a good marksman and occasionally killed small animals for the Koi-na, who were used to him and his pranks. Kupido told him his sling wasn’t as fast as Twa’s arrow, but that his eyes, clearer than the old bosjesman’s, resulted in a hit every time and that the Koi-na were grateful for the wild birds he brought to their pots.
He fitted a stone into the sling and hurled it across the sand.
‘Sa!’
The dogs scooted after it, and brought it back.
He had half an eye on the sheep to his left, the other on Twa, waist-high in an old aardvark hole with a digging stick, looking for beetles whose larvae would be removed and body juices used to provide poison for his arrows. The hunter in him was in the mood for wild meat, he said, and he was on the lookout for game which he would share with his people. Dressing the arrow had to be done with care as even a scratch on a finger could prove fatal. Twa’s hands were riddled with cuts and scratches and to avoid contact, he applied the poison directly onto the shaft with a stick. Roeloff hurled a stone in his direction, knocking over the oval shard of ostrich eggshell in which the beetles were being collected.
‘Kudu!’ Twa shook his fist, imitating Willem Kloot.
‘Just making sure you’re awake,’ Roeloff laughed.
He heard galloping and looked up. In the distance he saw the horseman, an imposing figure in black. He watched his father gallop up the path to the house. Grootbaas. Or was it Jan Joubert who was grootbaas of the Karoo? Big and brooding, he was a force to be reckoned with, but he didn’t have Willem Kloot’s presence. The very greyness of his father’s eyes and the set of his jaw demanded respect. Thinking of his father made Roeloff sad. A terrible strangeness had settled between them since the night of the killing. He could no longer join in when the mood to be congenial struck his father, couldn’t look him in the eye. It had separated them, that rush of excitement he’d sensed in his father when the bosjesman boy was lifted from his feet. His father now also beat a regular path to the door of the Jouberts, where Oom Jan’s widowed sister had moved in. Drieka was a younger version of her brother, but whereas Oom Jan was blunt and you knew what he thought, Drieka was sly, with a deadly sting. Her true nature had surfaced when, as an overnight guest in their house a year before with her husband before he choked on a meat bone and went straight to heaven, she called Sanna a lazy Hottentot who didn’t know her place. The Koi-na didn’t like being called Hottentot, and Sanna, especially, coming from the Cape, took particular offence. The Koi-na would never speak back to the grootbaas, but Sanna sometimes defied his father who, surprisingly, took no action to remedy her behaviour. Perhaps it was because she had been his mother’s servant, and looked after all of them. If anyone crossed Sanna, she said nothing. She just pushed out that bottom lip and burned the food. When Drieka made the comment and humiliated her in front of everyone in the kitchen, Sanna put out the mugs for coffee, and in Drieka’s she put a heaped teaspoon of stomach powder. Drieka spent most of the visit out in the veld.
