The Angels Weep - Smith Wilbur - Страница 148

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The pencil started to race across the empty page, and the woman moved in his mind and spoke aloud in his ears. He turned the page and wrote on, then, almost before he realized it, the exercise book was filled with his pointed pea ky handwriting and outside the porthole by his head the day was lightening.

Ever since Janine Carpenter could remember, there had always been horses in her father's stables at the Eback of the veterinary dispensary. When she was eight her father had taken her out for the first time with the local hunt. Just after her twenty-second birthday, a few months before she had left home for Africa, she had been awarded her hunt buttons.

The mount that Roland Ballantyne had given her was a beautiful chestnut filly without any other marking. She was curried to a gloss so that she shone in the sunlight like wet red silk. Janine had ridden her often before. She was fleet and strong, and there was an accord between them.

Roland rode his stallion. It was an enormous black beast he called "Mzilikazi" after the old king. The veins stood out under the skin of his shoulders and belly like living serpents. The great black bunch of his testicles was crudely and overpoweringly masculine. When he laid back his ears and bared his teeth, the mucous membrane in the corner of his savage eyes was the colour of blood. There was an arrogance and menace in him that frightened Janine, and yet excited her also. Horses and rider were of a pair.

Roland Ballantyne wore brown whipcord breeches and high boots boned to glossy perfection. The short sleeves of the crisp white shirt were stretched tightly across the hard smooth muscle of his upper arms.

Janine was certain that he always wore white to contrast against the deep tan of his face and arms. She thought he was impossibly handsome, and that cruel and ruthless streak in him made him all the more attractive than mere good looks alone could ever do.

Last night in the bed in her bachelor flat she had asked him, "How many men have you killed?" "As Many as necessary," he had replied, and though she thought that she hated war and death and suffering, it excited her in a way she could not control. Afterwards he had laughed easily and said, "You are a kinky little bitch, did you know that?" She had hated him for understanding and she had been desperately ashamed, and so angry that she had gone for his eyes with her nails. He had held her down effortlessly, and still chuckling he had whispered in her ear until she lost control again.

Now when she looked up at him riding beside her, she felt the lingering fear of him and the goose-flesh on her arms and the hard ball of excitement in the pit of her stomach.

They rode up to the top of the hills, and he reined the stallion down. It danced in a tight little circle, picking up its hooves delicately and tried to nuzzle her filly, but Roland pulled its head away and pointed at the horizons that fell away into blue distances in every direction.

"Everything you can see from here. Every blade of grass, every grain of earth, all of it belongs to the Ballantynes. We fought for it, we won it it's ours and anyone who wants to take it away from us will have to kill me first." The idea of anyone or anything doing that was ludicrous. He was a young god, one of the immortals.

He dismounted and led the horses to one of the tall ms asa trees.

He tied them, and then reached up and lifted her down from the saddle.

He walked her to the edge of the precipice, and held her against him, her back to his chest, so that she could look out and see it all.

"There it is!" he said. "Just look at it." It was beautiful, rich golden grasslands and graceful trees, waters that flowed in the small clear streams or shone like mirrors where the dam walls held them back, the tranquil herds of big red cattle, as red as the rich earth beneath their hooves, and arched above it all the high cloud-dappled blue of the African sky.

"It needs a woman to love it as I love it," he said, "A woman to breed fine sons to cherish it, to hold it as I will hold it." She knew what he was going to say then, and now that it was about to happen, she felt numbed and confused. She felt herself beginning to tremble against him.

"I want you to be that woman," Roland Ballantyne said, and she began to weep uncontrollably.

The NCOs of Ballantyne's Scouts clubbed together to give their colonel and his new lady an engagement party.

They held it in the sergeants" mess at the Thabas Indunas barracks. The officers and the wives of the regiment were all invited so that when Roland and Janine drove up in the Mercedes, there was a packed crowd waiting on the front veranda to meet them. Led by Sergeant-Major Gondele, they launched into a rollicking but un tuneful rendition of "For they are jolly good fellows."

"Damn good thing you don't fight like you sing, "Roland told them.

"Your backsides would have more holes than a sieve by now." He treated them with a rough paternal severity and affection, the total easy assurance of the dominant male, and they worshipped him openly. Janine understood that. She would have been surprised if it were otherwise.

What did surprise her was the brotherhood of the Scouts. The way that officers and men, black and white, were held together by an almost tangible bond of trust and accord.

She sensed that it was something stronger than even the strongest family ties, and later when she spoke to Roland about it, he replied simply, "When your life depends on another man, you come to love him."

They treated Janine with enormous respect, almost awe. They called her "Donna" if they were Matabele and "Ma'am" if they were white, and she responded immediately to them.

Sergeant-Major Gondele personally fetched her a gin that would have stunned an elephant, and looked hurt when she asked for a little more tonic. He introduced her to his wife. She was a pretty plump daughter of a senior Matabele tribal chief, "which makes her a sort of princess, Roly explained. She had five sons, the exact number that Janine and Roly had decided upon, and she spoke excellent English, so she and Janine were immediately in deep and earnest conversation, from which Janine was at last distracted by a voice at her elbow.

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