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"What has happened to the white farmers that lived here?" Craig asked.
"Gone! they told him proudly. "Our warriors drove them back to where they came from and now the land belongs to the children of the revolution." They were six years old, but still they had the revolutionary cant word-perfect.
Each of the children had a slingshot made from old rubber tubing hanging from his neck, and around his naked waist a string of birds that he had killed with the slingshot: larks and warblers and jewelled sun birds Craig knew that for their noon meal they would cook them whole on a bed of coals, simply letting the feathers sizzle off and devouring the tiny blackened carcasses with relish. Old Bawu Ballantyne would have strapped any herdboy that he caught with a slingshot.
The herd boys followed Craig back to the road, begged another piece of candy from him and waved him away like an old dear friend. Despite the goats and songbirds, Craig felt again the overwhelming affection for these people.
They were, after all, his people and it was good to be home again.
He stopped again on the crest of the hills and looked down on the homestead of King's Ly
Craig drove down and parked beside the dip tank. The tank was dry, and half-filled with dirt and rubbish. He went past it to the squatters" encampment. There were half a dozen families living here. Craig scattered the yapping cur dogs that rushed out at him with a few well-aimed stones, then he greeted the old man who sat at one of the fires.
"I see you, old father." Again there was delight at his command of the language. He sat at the fire for an hour, chatting with the old Matabele, the words coming more and more readily to his tongue and his ear tuning to the rhythm and nuances of Sindebele. He learned more than he had in the four days since he had been back in Matabeleland.
"They told us that after the revolution every man would have a fine motor-car, and five hundred head of the best white man's cattle." The old man spat into the fire. "The only ones with motorcars are the government ministers.
They told us we would always have full bellies, but food costs five times what it did before Smith and the white men ran away. Everything costs five times more sugar and salt and soap everything." During the white regime a ferocious foreign exchange control system and a rigid internal price control structure had isolated the country from the worst effects of inflation, but now they were experiencing all the joys of re-entering the international community, and the local currency had already been devalued twenty per cent.
"We ca
Craig left him muttering and frowning over the smoky fire and walked up to the house. As he climbed the steps to the wide front veranda, he had a weird premonition that his grandfather would suddenly come out to meet him with some tart remark. In his mind's eye he saw again the old man, dapper and straight, with thick silver hair, skin like ta
"Home again, Craig, dragging your tail behind you!" However, the veranda was littered with rubble and bird droppings from the wild pigeons that roosted undisturbed in the rafters.
He picked his way along the veranda to the double doors that led into the old library. There had been two huge elephant tusks framing this doorway, the bull which Craig's great-great-grandfather had shot back in the 1860s.
Those tusks were family heirlooms, and had always guarded the entrance to King's Ly
He went into the derelict house. The shelving and built-in cupboards and floorboards had been stripped out by the squatters in the valley for firewood, the window, panes used as targets by small black boys with slingshots.
The books, the portrait photographs from the walls, the carpets and heavy furniture of Rhodesian teak were all gone. The homestead was a shell, but a sturdy shell. With an open palm Craig slapped the walls that great-greatandfather Zouga Ballantyne had built of hand-hewn gr stone and mortar that had had almost a hundred years to cure to adamantine hardness. His palm made a solid ringing tone. It would take only a little imagination and a deal of money to transform the shell into a magnificent home once again.
Craig left the house and climbed the kopje behind it to the walled family cemetery that lay under the msasa trees beneath the rocky crest.
There was grass growing up between the headstones. The cemetery had been neglected but not vandalized, as had many of the other monuments left from the colonial era.
Craig sat on the edge of his grandfather's grave and said, "Hello, Bawu. I'm back," and started as he almost heard the old man's voice full of mock scorn speaking in his mind.
"Yes, every time you bum your arse you come ru
"I dried up, Bawu," he answered the accusation aloud and then was silent. He sat for a long time and very slowly he felt the tumult within him begin to subside a little.