Authors: Wilbur Smith
In that baptism to flight, the heat that their bodies had
sucked up from the baking earth of the valley was increased even
further by their muscular activity. They could not stop, and they
winged southwards in a cloud that eclipsed the sun, and stretched
from horizon to horizon.
In the cool of the evening this mighty cloud sank to earth and
the trees of the forest could not bear their weight. Branches as
thick as a man’s waist snapped off under the clinging
masses of insects. In the morning the rising heat spurred them
into flight once more, and they rose to darken the heavens and
left the forest stripped bare of its tender spring foliage, so
that the empty twisted branches looked like the limbs of cripples
in a strange dead landscape.
Southwards the endless flights poured across the sky, until
far below them the silver ribbon of water that was the Zambezi
river glinted dully in the shadow of their passing.
T
he whitewashed
walls of Khami Mission Station burned in the noon sunlight with
the eye-aching brilliance of bleached bone. The family dwelling,
surrounded by wide shaded verandas, and roofed with thick dark
thatch, stood a little apart from the church and its attendant
buildings, but all of them seemed to crouch below the line of
wooded hills, the way that chickens huddle below the hen when
there is a hawk in the sky.
From the front steps of the house, the gardens stretched down
past the well to the little stream. At first, nearer the house,
there were roses and bougainvillaea, poinsettia and banks of
phlox, that formed bright bold slashes of colour against a veld
still brown from the long dry winter just passed; but nearer the
stream the fields of maize were tended by convalescents from the
mission clinic, and soon on the tall green plants the immature
cobs would begin to set. Between the rows of corn the earth was
hidden beneath the dark green umbrella leaves of new pumpkin
plants. These fields fed the hundreds of hungry mouths, the
family and servants and sick and converts who came from all over
Matabeleland to this tiny oasis of hope and succour.
On the veranda of the main house, at a bare hand-planed table
of heavy mukwa wood, the family was seated at the midday meal. It
was a meal of steaming salted maize bread baked in the leaves and
washed down with
maas
, the cool thick soured milk from a
stone jug, and, in the opinion of the twins, the grace that
preceded it was disproportionately long for such frugal fare.
Vicky fidgeted and Elizabeth sighed at a volume that was
carefully calculated not to exceed the knife edge beyond which it
would attract her mother’s wrath.
Doctor Robyn St John, the doyenne of Khami Mission, had
dutifully thanked the Almighty for His bounty but was going on,
in conversational tones, to point out to Him that a little rain
soon would help pollination of the immature cobs in the field and
ensure a continuation of that bounty. Robyn’s eyes were
closed, and her features were relaxed and serene, her skin was
almost as unlined as that of Victoria’s. Her dark hair had
the same russet highlights as Elizabeth’s, but there was
just a fine silver mist at her temples to betray her age.
‘Dear Lord,’ she said, ‘in Your wisdom You
have allowed our best cow, Buttercup, to lose her milk. We submit
to Your will which surpasses all understanding, but we do need
milk if this little mission is going to continue to work to Your
glory—’ Robyn paused to let that sink in.
‘Amen!’ said Juba from the far end of the table.
Since her conversion to Christianity, Juba had taken to
covering her huge black melon-sized breasts with a high-buttoned
man’s under-vest, and amongst the necklaces of ostrich
shell and bright ceramic trade beads around her neck hung a
simple crucifix of rolled gold on a fine chain. Apart from that
she was still dressed in the traditional costume of a
high-ranking Matabele matron.
Robyn opened her eyes and smiled at her. They were companions
of many years, since Robyn had rescued her from the hold of the
Arab slaving dhow in the Mozambique channel, long before the
birth of any of the children, when both of them had been young
and unmarried; but it had only been shortly before his
destruction by the Company forces that King Lobengula had at last
given his permission for Juba’s conversion to the Christian
faith.
Juba, the little Dove – how she had changed since those
far-off days. Now she was the senior wife of Gandang, one of the
great indunas of the Matabele nation, brother of King Lobengula
himself, and she had borne him twelve sons, the eldest of whom
was Bazo, the Axe, himself an induna. Four of her younger sons
had died in front of the Maxim machine-guns at the Shangani river
and the Bembesi crossing. Nevertheless, as soon as that brief
cruel little war had ended, Juba had returned to Khami Mission
and to Robyn.
Now she smiled back at Robyn. Her face was a glossy full moon,
the silky black skin stretched tightly over the layers of fat.
Her dark eyes sparkled with a lively intelligence, and her teeth
were a perfect and unblemished white. On her vast lap, within the
circle of her arms, each as thick as a man’s thigh, she
held Robyn St John’s only son.
Robert was not quite two years old, a thin child, without his
father’s rugged bone structure but with the same strange
yellow-flecked eyes. His skin was sallow from regular doses of
anti-malarial quinine. Like many infants born of a mother on the
verge of menopause, there was a quaint old-fashioned solemnity
about him, like a little old gnome who had already lived a
hundred years. He watched his mother’s face as though he
had understood each word she uttered.
Robyn closed her eyes again, and the twins who had perked up
at the prospect of a final amen glanced at each other, and
slumped with resignation.
‘Dear Lord, Thou knowest of the great experiment upon
which Thy humble servant will embark before this day ends, and we
are certain of Your understanding and protection during the
dangerous days ahead.’
Juba’s understanding of the English language was just
sufficient to follow this injunction, and the smile faded from
her face. Even the twins looked up again, both of them so
troubled and unhappy that when Robyn sounded the long-awaited
‘Amen’, neither of them reached for the platters or
jugs.
‘Victoria, Elizabeth, you may begin,’ Robyn had to
prompt them, and they chewed dismally for a while.
‘You never told us it was to be today,’ Vicky
spoke up at last.
‘The young girl from Zama’s kraal is a perfect
subject, she started her chills an hour ago, I expect her fever
to peak before sundown.’
‘Please, Mama.’ Elizabeth jumped up from her seat
and knelt beside Robyn with both arms around her waist, her
expression stricken. ‘Please don’t do it.’
‘Now don’t be a silly girl, Elizabeth,’
Robyn told her firmly. ‘Return to your seat and eat your
food.’
‘Lizzie is right.’ Vicky had tears in her green
eyes. ‘We don’t want you to do this. It’s so
dangerous, so horrible.’
Robyn’s expression softened a little, and she placed one
narrow but strong brown hand on Elizabeth’s head.
‘Sometimes we have to do things that frighten us.
It’s God’s test of our strength and faith.’
Robyn stroked the lustrous dark hair back from Elizabeth’s
forehead. ‘Your grandfather, Fuller
Ballantyne—’
‘Grandfather was touched,’ Vicky cut in quickly.
‘He was crazy mad.’
Robyn shook her head. ‘Fuller Ballantyne was a great man
of God, there were no limits to his vision and courage. It is
only the mean little people who call such men mad. They doubted
him, as they now doubt me, but as he did, I shall prove the
truth,’ she said firmly.
The previous year Robyn had, in her professional capacity as
Medical Superintendent of Khami Mission, submitted a paper to the
British Medical Association in which she set out the conclusions
of twenty years’ study of tropical malarial fever.
At the beginning of the paper she had scrupulously
acknowledged the work of Charles Louis Alphonse Laveran who was
the first to isolate the malarial parasite under microscopic
examination, but then Robyn had gone on to postulate that the
periodic paroxysms of chill and fever that characterized the
disease were coincident with the segmentation of these parasites
in the patient’s bloodstream.
The august members of the British Medical Association were
well aware of Robyn’s reputation as a political
troublestirrer, a radical who flew in the face of their
conservative convictions. They had never forgiven nor forgotten
that she had impersonated a man to attend medical school and had
desecrated their exclusive masculine preserve by obtaining her
medical qualification under false colours. They recalled with
pain the furore and scandal that she had conjured up when the
governors of St Matthew’s Hospital, London, where she had
received her training, had attempted, quite reasonably, to revoke
her doctorate. Sourly they had looked on as she published a
series of highly successful books, culminating in the infamous
Trooper Hackett of Matabeleland
, a vicious attack on the
Company in which a great deal of the association’s funds
were invested.
Naturally the honourable members of such an august body were
above such mundane emotions as envy and malice, so none of them
had grudged her the princely royalties from her publications, and
when some of Robyn’s outrageous theories on tropical
diseases had finally been proven accurate, and after they had
been brought under pressure by Oliver Wicks who was Robyn’s
champion and editor of the
Standard
, they had
magnanimously retracted their previous refutations. Nevertheless,
when Dr Robyn St John, previously Codrington,
née
Ballantyne, finally succeeded in hoisting and hanging herself on
her own audacity and presumption, the members of the British
Medical Association would not be numbered amongst the company of
her mourners.
Thus, they read the first part of Robyn’s latest paper
on malarial fever with mild alarm. Her theory on the coincidence
of parasite segmentation and patient temperature-change could
only add lustre to her reputation. Then, with mounting joy, they
came to the second part, and realized that once more she had
placed herself and her reputation in jeopardy. Since Hippocrates
had first described the disease, in the fifth century
BC
, it had been an
uncontested fact that malaria, as its name implied, was
transmitted by the foul airs of swampy ground and poisonous
nights. Robyn St John postulated that this was fallacy, and that
it was transmitted from a sufferer to a healthy victim by the
physical transfer of blood. Then, incredibly, her paper went on
to suggest that the carrier agents were the flying mosquitoes
that were usually associated with the swamps and marshy ground
where the disease proliferated. As proof, Robyn cited her
discovery, by microscopic examination, of the malarial parasite
in the stomach contents of the insects.
Offered such an opportunity, her peers in the British Medical
Association had been unable to resist the temptation to embark on
an orgy of derision. ‘Doctor St John should not allow her
penchant for lurid fiction to intrude upon the sacred grounds of
medical research,’ wrote one of her more charitable
critics. ‘There is not the remotest shred of evidence that
any disease can be transferred in the blood, and to look to the
agency of flying insects to affect this mischief is not far
removed from belief in vampires and werewolves.’
‘They scoffed at your grandfather also.’
Robyn’s chin was up now as she addressed her family, and in
this mood the strength and determination of her features were
daunting. ‘When he refuted their belief that yellow jack
was an infectious or a contagious disease, they challenged him to
provide proof.’
The twins had heard this piece of family history a dozen times
before, so they both paled in anticipatory nausea.
‘He went into that fever hospital where all those
eminent surgeons were gathered, and he collected a crystal glass
of the yellow vomit from one of the patients who was dying of the
disease, and he toasted his fellow surgeons with the glass and
then he quaffed it down in front of them all.’
Vicky covered her own mouth, and Elizabeth gagged softly and
turned icy pale.
‘Your grandfather was a courageous man, and I am his
daughter,’ Robyn said simply. ‘Now eat up your lunch.
I expect you both to assist me this afternoon.’
B
ehind the
church stood the new ward that Robyn had built since the death of
her first husband in the Matabele war. It was an open-sided
godown with low waist-high walls. The thatched roof was supported
on upright poles of mopani. In hot weather the breeze could blow
through the structure unhindered, but in the rains or when it
turned cold, then woven grass mats could be unrolled to close in
the walls.
The sleeping-mats were laid out in rows upon the clay floor,
no attempt being made to separate families, so that healthy
spouses and offspring were camped with the sick and suffering.
Robyn had found it better to turn the ward into a bustling
community rather than have her patients pine to death. However,
the arrangement was so congenial and the food so good, that it
had been difficult to persuade patients to leave after their cure
had been effected, until Robyn had hit upon the ruse of sending
all convalescents, and their families, to work in the fields or
at building the new wards. This had dramatically reduced the
clinic’s population to manageable proportions.
Robyn’s laboratory stood between the church and the
ward. It was a small rondavel with adobe walls, and a single
window. Shelves and a workbench ran around the entire curved
inside wall. In pride of place stood Robyn’s new
microscope, purchased with the royalties of
Trooper
Hackett
, and beside it her working journal, a thick
leather-bound volume in which she was now noting her preliminary
observations.