Devil's Valley (43 page)

“I told you so,” exclaimed Brother Holy in a thundering voice before the next itch convulsed him into a ball.

Most of the spectators, shaken by the accident, gloomily prepared to return home. But Jurg Water was so inspired by the event and by the clouds which continued to churn overhead, that he had a rare moment of inspiration. “If we all fire up into the clouds together,” he proposed, “who knows, we could make the rain come down.”

There was very little discussion. Lukas Death was the only one with open reservations: this was a serious business, he argued, there was too much at stake to rush in blindly without weighing the consequences. But he was soon outshouted. Some might have felt that they owed it to the late Prickhead to succeed the second time round, so that his death would not have been in vain. Others were simply fired by the excitement they’d already worked up and which demanded an outlet.

From the bluegum wood the procession moved downhill to the settlement, where the men scattered among the houses to return within minutes bristling with the most unusual assortment of firearms I’ve ever seen. The latest models, as far as I could judge with my limited knowledge, were Lee-Metfords and Mausers. But there were ancient elephant guns too, which I remembered from history books, and impressive old flintlocks and blunderbusses and double-and triple-barrelled carbines.

Loading was a damn serious business. The men operating muzzle-loaders were allowed to start first, as it was one hell of an elaborate process first to pour a handful of gunpowder down the barrel, followed by a round bullet and a piece of greased cloth pressed into position with a ramrod, after which another handful of gunpowder had to be poured into the pan and the lid closed. Only then could the rifle be cocked, ready to take aim. It took careful planning to make sure that all the preparations would result in a single Big Bang. Lukas Death tried one last time to dissuade the trigger-happy men, but Jurg Water rudely brushed him aside. From a safe distance Petrus Tatters began the countdown. An earsplitting salvo thundered among the high cliffs.

“Got him!” shouted Jurg Water.

“Now you’ve gone too far,” cried Lukas Death. He was trembling, but whether in rage or fear was hard to judge.

A huge bank of thundercloud, hovering directly above the settlement, had begun to twist and writhe about in a most alarming manner, as if it had actually been wounded. The dark boiling mass threw out white scalloped edges as it began to fold into itself. And the wind which had been tugging at us sporadically, began very rapidly to work up a terrifying speed.

Even Hans Magic was beginning to show signs of alarm about the way things were going.

“This is bad,” said Lukas Death, now scared right out of his fucking wits. “I warned you, but you wouldn’t listen. God will not be mocked. We must get back to our houses. Make sure all the doors are bolted and secured.”

In the absence of Brother Holy who was imitating the fucking convolutions of the thundercloud, Lukas stretched out his arm towards his distressed people. In a breaking voice he invoked the love of God, the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the powerful presence of the Holy Ghost to be with us all. Without bothering to say Amen he broke into a trot to get home before the storm broke.

I
N THE BEGINNING all four of us sat in Lukas Death’s voorhuis listening to the wind raging outside. From time to time large objects came hurtling and careening past the windows. Although it was no new experience any more, this time it was more terrifying than before. Nobody spoke. We were all huddled together, yet each was utterly alone.

The darker it became, and the wilder the storm raged outside, the warmer the scorched circle in the middle of the floor felt under our feet. In the deep dusk of the interior it was glowing an unearthly red, as if all the heat of the Seer’s long-ago couplings on his enemy’s grave had been rekindled.

When the thunder started, Dalena rose to cover the few mirrors in the house with cloths. After that she couldn’t sit down again. The storm was growing steadily worse. The violence was unbelievable. It sounded as if the very mountains were falling. It must have been in a storm like this, in prehistoric times, that the earth was torn open and the deep gash of the valley ripped into it. Perhaps that first great battle between the Seer and the Devil was being fought again; for all we knew the whole fucking Book of Revelations was finally being thrown at us. Which would bloody well have served the Devil’s Valley right, I thought: but why the hell should
I
be caught up in it? It was fucking unfair. If God wanted to have it out with this nest of vipers, then by all means, and with my blessing; but keep me out of it.

In the midst of all that noise Dalena suddenly went through to their bedroom, and when she came back she was holding something in her hands. At first I couldn’t make out what it was. But when she opened the front door and it felt as though all the wind in the valley came gushing in to blow the lot of us away, I recognised it. By then it was too late to stop her.

“Dalena!” shouted Lukas Death. “For God’s sake, woman, come back!”

“You didn’t want him back,” she called into the wind as she let go of the battered little box. The wind immediately tore it from her hands. “There goes Little-Lukas,” she said quietly. “Now he’s all over the valley.”

Lukas Death ran after her to bring her back, but she was already inside. It took all four of us to push the door to again.

“Now one can at last be at peace again,” she said with a curious expression of relief on her drawn face.

“How could you do a thing like that?” He grabbed her by the front of her dress and started tugging with a kind of uncontrollable rage that left me dumbstruck.

But with surprising strength Dalena shoved him away. “Let me be, Lukas,” she hissed. “I’ve just about had it with you.”

“How can you humiliate me so in front of other people?” he shouted. “Dalena, have you forgotten that I’m the appointed Judge of the Devil’s Valley?”

She took a deep breath. “Let’s go to the bedroom, Lukas. We can talk there.”

Column of Fire

The two of them withdrew to their bedroom. We remained behind, too dismayed to speak for some time. From behind the closed bedroom door there was a long bout of angry, arguing voices, but at last it subsided. Emma went over to one of the two small windows in the voorhuis to look out.

I followed her. “I’m not sure it’s wise to stand here,” I said, “with all this lightning.”

She shook her head. I should have known. This attraction of the violent and the dangerous. Together with her I stared at the near-continuous lightning. There was almost no interval between the flashes. The whole mountain, heaven and earth, everything, seemed to be going up in flames, alternating between sheet lightning in which whole clouds erupted into fire, and rapid blinding spiderwebs of light that made the sky look like a huge black egg cracking over us. And what would hatch from it, God alone knew. More than once a bolt was followed by a dull thud, a sure sign that something had been hit. But what—chimney, church tower, tree, or cliff?

The light coming from outside turned a strange, venomous green. Inside the deep dark red of the floor was glowing more and more ominously. I had no idea of how long the storm went on. I was too mesmerised by the violence of the spectacle to be conscious of time. If Ouma Liesbet had been right about the lightning-bird, even she could never have anticipated a winged monster quite like this. Forgetting all about our own safety we now stood squarely in front of the window. This time the earth was indeed moving, but not with love. If the lightning chose to strike us, at least we’d go together. It might be a solution for many people, including ourselves.

Somewhere during all that violence Emma suddenly half-turned towards me and caught my arm. I’d also seen it: high up on the slope behind the houses, where dark fingers of virgin forest reached down towards the bluegum wood, a column of fire had sprung up. The lightning must have struck a tree. As we watched, it began to spread at amazing speed, fanned by the wind, until the whole slope was ablaze. It wasn’t surprising, the mountain was so dry, it had just been waiting to be ignited. There was a barren band between the wood and the houses where the goats had stripped the earth of all vegetation, but given the fierceness of the wind still raging in the kloofs, one couldn’t be sure that the flames wouldn’t jump the divide. And within minutes a second fire had started, then a third. We ran to the window opposite. The slopes on that side were burning too. The entire settlement was caught in a circle of fire. And as it became darker, the flames leaped ever higher.

But slowly, almost unnoticeably at first, the fury of the storm began to run out of steam. The thunder withdrew into the distance, down the valley, across the mountains, gone. There were still sporadic flickerings of lightning, like brief flaming afterthoughts, accompanied by the now almost inaudible rumble of thunder shuddering in one’s bones. And then it was over. The wind also died down. But the mountains were still burning.

Greyish Ash

In the hissing silence following the storm we set out into the night. Like two ghosts we wandered through the emptiness of the dark settlement in its ring of fire. There was no light anywhere, as if the inhabitants were scared of attracting attention. No one else had ventured outside. Even in the dark the extent of the destruction was fearsome. The previous storms had been bad enough, but this combination of wind and lightning had been the fucking limit. Several of the houses had been razed to the ground. What had become of the inhabitants was anybody’s guess. And all around us was that infernal circle of fire on the mountain slopes. Thank God it seemed to be working its way upward, not down to the houses. And the flames were slowly burning themselves out.

“Look, this is it,” I said. “Tomorrow we must go. There’s nothing left for us here.”

“If it isn’t too late already,” said Emma.

“We’re still alive.” I took her hands.

We were above the higher row of houses, behind Tant Poppie’s place, which also lay in ruins. I went cold.

I stole nearer with a hollow feeling in my guts, and shouted her name, but there was no sound from the remains of the house. In the dark it was impossible to make out anything. I could only hope that she’d been out on a call, or that someone else had offered her shelter.

In a way the discovery next door was even worse. It was the forlorn mewing of the cats that drew me closer. And on the front stoep, propped up against the door that had been torn from its hinges, I found Tall-Fransina, half-buried under the debris of a fallen pillar. We kneeled beside her and began to scrape away the rubble. What shocked me most was that her face was covered in ashes. Not the soot of the night’s fires, but whitish, greyish ash that appeared eerily familiar even in the dark. Without saying anything to Emma, I gently wiped it from her face, then bent over to try mouth-to-mouth, but there was no life in her. Together we half-carried, half-dragged her inside and laid her on the big bed. Emma found a candle and lit it. In the dancing light cats approached from all sides to snuggle up against Tall-Fransina’s body as they had done for God knows how many years.

We didn’t speak. We went outside again, leaving the candle burning. I stacked some stones against the front door to prop it into position and keep out the night. For what must have been another hour we continued our speechless wandering among the ruins of the settlement.

Madman

“They’ll all be working to clear up the damage tomorrow,” I said as we turned back to Lukas Death’s house. “They’ll be much too busy to notice. I’ll leave early and wait for you at the rock pool.”

“I’ll help Dalena first,” she said. “I don’t want anyone to get suspicious, not even her.”

“I’ll wait for you.”

“It could take a while, to make absolutely sure.”

“Of course. But don’t be too late. It’s a long way.”

She nodded against my shoulder. “I promise. Before noon, at the latest.”

We turned back.

It was Emma who saw it first, clutching my hand in sudden fright: flames were shooting up from the thatched roof of Lukas Death’s house. It was strange indeed, so long after the storm. And there was no wind any more to blow live coals from the distant mountain fires.

Then I noticed the black figure moving along the ridge of the roof towards the attic stairs. It was too dark to make out who it was.

“Hey!” I shouted. “What the hell are you doing there?” I started running. Emma followed.

The arsonist had seen us. He broke into a huddled trot, scuttling away from the fire. But in his haste he lost his balance, stumbled, caught fire. I heard him shout. He came tumbling down the staircase, a spectacular ball of fire somersaulting in the dark, screaming like a pig.

When he reached the bottom he flung himself to the ground, rolling about to smother the flames. Emma came running past me, plucked the front door open and started shouting hysterically at Dalena and Lukas to wake up and come out. Already the fire in the dried-out thatch was leaping high into the night.

When I reached the madman who was still twisting and thrashing about on the ground, I began to kick at him, but whether to kill the flames or the man I honestly didn’t know.

“Help me,” he groaned, “help me, help me.”

“Jurg, you fucking bastard,” I hissed through my teeth.

I
’VE BEEN SITTING here at the rock pool since God knows when, waiting for Emma to come so that we can tackle the long climb out of the Devil’s Valley. It must be past noon. I’m not sure I can risk going back to look for her, but I can’t stay here either, doing nothing.

I’m tired to the bone. All kinds of memories are hurtling through the fucking tumble-dryer of my mind. The frantic attempts to help Lukas and Dalena save a few odds and ends of furniture, and sheets and pillows, and Lukas Death’s two old rifles from the burning house before the roof fell in. By that time the flames had jumped to the house next door, and the next. Very soon the whole goddamn settlement was burning. Apart from trying to salvage whatever one could grab hold of, there was nothing to be done, not a drop of water to douse the flames. It was a sight, all those soot-stained faces in the wild firelight, the idiots jumping up and down like locusts, ululating and yodelling, laughing and dribbling, children screaming, old people crying, scenes from a pretty old·fashioned kind of hell. A few of the people had been injured, although none as desperately as Jurg Water. From somewhere in the night, to everybody’s relief, Tant Poppie came waddling on to give a hand; but with all her remedies buried under the ruins of her house there wasn’t much she could do. Several of Tall-Fransina’s cats were flayed alive to apply the skins to the wounds of the injured, for what it might be worth. Duck-shit was used as well, and burnt peach-stones, and honey, and whatever came to hand as the night wore on.