Читать книгу Warlord - James Steel, James Steel - Страница 15

Alex taps the end of a wedge into a log with a sledgehammer and then pounds away at it, swinging the hammer high and smashing down blows repeatedly with all his might.

He is splitting logs out on the estate. The wood divides neatly and the two halves fall over and rock back and forth on the ground until they are still. Alex stands frozen for a long time, looking down at them with the hammer still held in his hands, its head resting on the ground.

That evening he finds he can’t sit still in the drawing room by the fire and starts wandering around the huge, silent house. He opens doors into long-forgotten rooms and stands looking at the dustsheets covering the furniture, remembering scenes from his childhood.

Some of them are happy but a lot are uncomfortable: the noise of angry shouting and blows from his parents’ room, his father passed out drunk on the dining room floor with the dogs settled around him for company.

He walks around the main hall with its large portraits of Devereuxs hung between the high stained-glass windows. He stares up at the pictures: an Elizabethan knight with his head held rigid by a huge lace collar worn over a breastplate, a fleshy Georgian reclining in front of a bucolic scene on the estate, a pompous Victorian in a black uniform with his sword held stiffly at his side.

Communing with his ancestors, that’s what he’s doing. Reliving the sense of what it means to be a Devereux. Throughout the ages they were soldiers – hardly any merchants or lawyers and certainly no priests or artists. Active, restless, aggressive men who had served the Crown all over the world, commanding troops and smiting its enemies with sword and shot. The house is littered with relics from their campaigns, shields and spears from Asia and Africa.

His father might have been an ineffectual aberration but with Alex the genes are back on track. From his army schooling at Wellington (motto ‘Sons of Heroes’) to his professional career, he is an aggressive and successful commander of men. It’s what he does.

He looks at the dark doorway into the tower and crosses over to it, not turning on the light, he knows the distances. As he walks up the stone stairs each step becomes slower than the last until he pauses on a landing by a suit of armour and walks down a narrow, low corridor.

He used to play a game here with his sister, Georgina, when they were children, daring each other to come to this place. His hand finds the light switch and clicks it on. A weak bulb illuminates the short passageway.

Staring at him from the wall at the end of the corridor is a small picture, a foot high with a small title under it: Sir Henry Devereux, 1294–1356.

When Sir Henry had inherited the Devereux lands and title, they had fallen into decay and were under threat from the lawlessness of the times. He had immediately set about the problem by visiting every village in his lands and those just across the border from his and making a point of hanging a man in every one. From then on he was known as Black Hal and is still regarded as a bogeyman in the family.

The head and shoulders painting is by an itinerant Italian painter, with the crude flattened perspective of the day. It looks very formulaic and he is dressed in his armour in a very stiff pose. Even so, the artist has captured something about the man – there is a cold look in his eyes that warned of cruel violence if he was crossed.

Alex stands and looks at him for a while before switching out the light and returning down the darkened tower.

Eve’s father, Laurent, looks round the circle of men.

‘So, what are we going to do?’

He is fifty but looks seventy; his face is worn and creased like an old shoe. His eyes are rheumy and his voice rasps. He wears a tattered brown suit jacket, jeans and a grubby blue baseball cap and is sitting on a three-legged stool outside his shack in the refugee camp.

Sitting on logs and beer crates around him are the men of his extended family and in a half circle in front of him are the men of Gabriel’s family. Some older women sit on the ground behind them. A week has passed since Gabriel staggered back in from his disaster at Pangi market. He sits to one side of the circle, his face still horribly swollen, his body covered in cuts and bruises.

The two families have come together to discuss what to do with him and Eve. She is squatting behind the shack with her two sisters as her fate is decided.

Laurent scans the ring of fourteen older men around him looking gloomy and awkward, holding their chins in their hands. Their faces are lined with fear from the perpetual uncertainty that they live with and their skin is grey rather than black from lack of food. Kivu has rich soils and high rainfall but no one can grow any proper crops because they never know when the militias will come and steal them, so they subsist on cassava – easy to grow but nutritionally poor.

No one wants to respond to Laurent’s question but Gabriel’s uncle Alphonse is famously tactless. ‘Well, it doesn’t look good for her. I mean, first she produces a muzunga and then she gets raped. I think she’s cursed. Why else did the Kudu Noir come for her? Evil attracts evil, that’s what I say. Besides she stinks of piss.’

There is outraged murmuring and head-shaking from Eve’s family but none actively disagree with him: he has said what they are all thinking. She is a burden on them with her wound.

Gabriel clears his throat. Since he heard the news about her rape, he has been thinking about something and knows he has to come out with it now.

‘Well, I want to get married to her.’

‘What!’ There is an outburst from his family.

His father, Bertrand, turns and looks at him. ‘What do you mean, you stupid child? She’s been raped, she’s probably got HIV! She leaks piss the whole time. How can you marry a girl like that?’

Gabriel knows it is a ridiculous idea but since he saw her after it happened he has been mixed up with conflicting emotions. He feels a failure for losing all his money but he feels that he can still give her love to make up for the wrong that has been inflicted on her. He is young and strong, he will make it work. Someone will show compassion in this country.

He has been thinking it through and has some answers for his father. ‘We can send her to Panzi hospital.’

‘What?’

‘It’s that place in Bukavu where they stitch up rape victims. They can test her for HIV and if they can stitch her up then we can get married.’

‘Oh, and how much is that going to cost? You haven’t got any money, if you hadn’t noticed!’ The loss has had to be shared by Gabriel’s family who are very angry about it.

Eve’s father senses he is onto something here though. Normally they would have to pay a dowry to marry her off anyway, and they know she is damaged goods, so this might be a way out of the problem.

‘Well, we can give some money,’ he suggests. He looks round at his male relatives. They look unenthusiastic but they don’t disagree.

‘Yes!’ Gabriel is encouraged. ‘We could split it – if they give half then I’ll get the other half.’

‘And how are you going to get that? You haven’t got any stock left.’ His father is always hard on him. But his father is also right, his capital has been wiped out.

However, Gabriel has been thinking of something else radical whilst he’s been lying in his hut recovering.

‘I’ll go to the mines! I’ll make a packet there!’

There’s an intake of breath around the circle.

His father looks at him. ‘Don’t be ridiculous, people die in the mines the whole time! The militia will just steal your money.’

‘Well, it’s dangerous everywhere, isn’t it!’ Gabriel glares back at him and jabs a hand towards his bruised and cut face.

Bertrand grumbles and looks down.

Alex wakes up in the morning after his evening of communing with his ancestors and knows that he will make the decision to call Fang.

As soon as he heard the idea of the mission, a certainty arose in his mind that he shouldn’t do it and yet in exactly the same instant another feeling arose in his heart that he would do it. It was really just a matter of time until his rational side came up with a series of arguments to justify the decision.

Who was he trying to kid that he would be happy living the rest of his life as a provincial gentleman, fossicking around in the rose garden pinning up trellises?

Sure he has all the money he needs now but that hasn’t proved to be the point. His dream of domestic contentment is eluding him like smoke: the more he frantically tries to grasp it, the more it dissipates.

Instead, what he finds is that whenever he sits still his cloud of personal demons settles on him like horseflies, biting and goading him to move on. Is this some curse of the Devereuxs? The restlessness that drove his father to drink?

He remembers a line from Latin lessons at school. In The Aeneid it is said of Achilles: ‘His fame and his doom went hand in hand.’

Is that him? Driven on by an aggressive nature, an illustrious history and a need to compensate for the failings of his father, into ever-greater acts of daring that will eventually undo him?

He lies in bed and thinks, ‘Am I afraid of peace? Why must I always be at war?’

In the end he is just like Black Hal, an aggressive character with a need to offset his internal conflicts by imposing control on external anarchy. Kivu will be a brave new world and his personal salvation all rolled into one.

Alex gets up, goes for his run and thinks about the problem as he slogs up a hill.

What was it that Camus said? ‘All great ideas have absurd beginnings.’ They all sound ridiculous when you first hear them because they are so radically different from what has been before. But after the idea has been implemented it becomes the orthodoxy and no one can think of doing it any other way. Maybe Fang’s vision is the new world order for developing countries.

He could call Yamba or Col and just discuss it? They are his two partners in Team Devereux, the mainstays of his military operations. Both are in their late forties so in their company it is Alex who is the young challenger. Yamba Douala is a tall, severe-looking Angolan who fought for the legendary South African 32 Battalion in the long bush war in his country. He is a thinker, he wanted to be a surgeon when he was a boy and is currently using his money from their last operation to set up a health clinic back in his home province in Angola.

Colin Thwaites is a short, aggressive Northerner, formerly a sergeant major in the Parachute Regiment’s elite Pathfinder unit. He is currently using his money from their last operation to get drunk in a large house he has bought for himself outside Blackburn where he grew up.

As Alex comes back down the hill towards the house, he finally resorts to the lowest common denominator approach to the problem.

‘If the Chinese don’t recruit me they will just get someone else to do it. The project is going to happen, so it might as well be me.’ It is not actually a logical argument but in his suggestible state of mind it works for him.

He showers, has breakfast and sits down at his large desk in his study. He picks up the phone and thinks whom he will call first.

Advice is what we ask for when we know the decision we are going to take but are not yet ready to take it.

Of the two men, Yamba is the more prone to hypothetical discussions. Col’s blunt nature means he needs to make a black and white decision on an issue in a maximum of three seconds and is usually pretty scathing about it when he does.

Alex dials a number in Angola and waits as it rings.