The Sound of Thunder(9)

The night came early, but still the wind roared and buffeted them in the gloom.

‘It will drop in an hour or so, then we’ll get the rain. We’ll try and find shelter while there’s still light enough to see.’

On the reverse slope of a kopje they found an overhang of rock and offloaded the packs beneath it. While Sean pegged the horses out on their head ropes to prevent them walking away before the storm, Mbejane cut grass and piled it into a mattress on the rock floor beneath the overhang. Huddled in their oilskins they ate biltong and cold mealie bread and afterwards Mbejane withdrew discreetly to the far end of the shelter and disappeared under his blankets. He had that animal knack of being able to sleep instantly and completely even under the most adverse conditions.

‘All right, boy. Get into your blankets.’

‘Can’t I just …’ Dirk began his nightly protest.

‘No, you can’t.’

‘I’ll sing for you,’ Ruth offered.

‘What for?’ Dirk was puzzled.

‘A sleepy-time song – haven’t you ever had a lullaby?’

‘No.’ But Dirk was intrigued. ‘What you going to sing?’

‘Into your blankets first.’

Sitting beside Sean in the darkness, very conscious of his bulk and the touch of his shoulder against hers, the muted roar of the wind as her accompaniment – Ruth sang.

First the old Dutch folksongs, ‘Nooi, Nooi’ and ‘Jannie met die Hoepel been’, then other old favourites like ‘Frère Jacques’. Her voice meant something to each of them.

Mbejane woke to the sound of it and it made him remember the wind on the hills of Zululand and the singing of the young girls in the fields at harvest-time. It made him glad he was going home.

To Dirk it was the voice of the mother he had hardly known. A safe sound – and soon he slept.

‘Don’t stop,’ whispered Sean.

So she sang for him alone. A love-song from two thousand years ago, filled with all the suffering of her people, but with joy in it also. The wind died away while she sang and her voice died away with it into the vast silence of the night.

The storm broke. The first thunder crashed and the lightning forked jagged-blue through the clouds. Dirk whimpered a little but slept on.

In the stark, blue light Sean saw that Ruth’s cheeks were wet with tears and when the darkness closed around them again she started to tremble against him. He reached out for her and she clung to him, small and warm against his chest, and he could taste the salt of her tears on his lips.

‘Sean, we mustn’t.’

But he lifted her and held her across his chest as he walked out into the night. The lightning blazed again and lit the land with startling brilliance so he could see the horses huddling heads down, and the crisp outline of the kopje above them.

The first raindrops splashed against his shoulders and into his face. The rain was warm and he walked on carrying Ruth. Then the air was filled with rain, an encompassing pearly mist of it in the next flash of lightning, and the night was filled with the odour of rain on dry earth – a clean warm smell.





– 5 –

In a still morning, washed so clean by the rain that they could see the mountains, blue and sharp on the southern horizon, they stood together on the crest of the kopje.

‘That’s the tail of the Drakensberg, we’ve cleared it by twenty miles. There’s very little chance of a Boer patrol this far out. We can ride by day now. Soon we’ll be able to work in again and meet the railway beyond the battle lines.’

Because of the beauty of the morning, of the land that dripped away into the great, grassy bowl that was Natal, and of the woman that stood beside him, Sean was gay.

Because of the promise of an end to the journey and the promise of a new one with this woman as his companion, he was content.

When he spoke she turned slowly to look up at him, her chin lifting in acknowledgement of his superior height. For the first time Sean realized that his own mood was not reflected in her eyes.

‘You are very lovely,’ he said, and still she remained silent, but now he could recognize the shadows in her eyes as sorrow or something even stronger.

‘Ruth, you’ll come with me?’

‘No.’ She shook her head slowly, regretfully. The fat black python of hair rolled across her shoulder and hung down against the honey chamois leather of her jacket.

‘You must.’

‘I cannot.’

‘But, last night.’

‘Last night was madness … the storm.’

‘It was right. You know that.’

‘No. It was the storm.’ She looked away from him towards the sky. ‘And now the storm is ended.’