War Cry. Wilbur Smith

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      ‘My God, fancy Otto allowing me such power.’

      ‘He was a traditionalist. He felt that a mother should take charge of her children’s upbringing. But you will note that I said “in the first instance”. Once Konrad is twenty-five, and takes control of the family’s affairs, he will also assume the role of trustee to his brother, who will then be eighteen years old.’

      ‘So for seven years, Gerhard will have to go cap in hand to Konrad if he ever needs anything?’

      ‘Yes.’

      Athala frowned. ‘It worries me that one brother should have so much power over the other.’

      ‘His Excellency believed very strongly that a family, like a nation, required the strong leadership of a single man.’

      ‘Didn’t he just … I take it that I am provided for.’

      ‘Oh yes, you need not worry on that score. You will retain your own family money, added to which you will keep all the property, jewellery, artworks and so on that you received during your marriage, and receive a very generous annual allowance for the rest of your life. You will also have a place on the board.’

      ‘I don’t care about the damn board,’ Athala said. ‘It’s my boys that I worry about. Where are we meant to live?’

      ‘It is entirely up to you, whether you wish to reside here in Grünwald, or at Schloss Meerbach, or both. His Excellency has set aside monies that are to be spent on the maintenance of the castle and its estate, and on employing all the staff required to maintain the standards he himself demanded. You will be the mistress of Schloss Meerbach once again, if you choose to be so.’

      ‘Until Konrad’s twenty-fifth birthday …’

      ‘Yes, he will be the master then.’

      When Solomons had gone, Athala went upstairs to the playroom where Gerhard was playing. She looked on him as a gift from God, an unexpected blessing whose birth had brought a rare moment of joy to a marriage long past rescuing. Gerhard had been conceived on the very last night that Athala and Otto had slept together. It had been a short, perfunctory coupling and he had been away with Fräulein von Wellberg on the night Gerhard was born. But that only made her baby all the more precious to Athala.

      She wondered how she was going to explain to him that his father was dead. How did one tell a three-year-old that sort of thing? For now, she didn’t have the heart to interrupt Gerhard while he played with the wooden building bricks that were his favourite toy.

      Athala always found her son fascinating to observe as he arranged the brightly coloured bricks. He had an instinctive grasp of symmetry. If he placed one brick of a certain colour or shape on one side of his latest castle, or house, or farm (Gerhard always knew exactly what he was building), then another, identical one had to go on the opposite side.

      She leaned over and kissed his head. ‘My little architect,’ she murmured, and Gerhard beamed with pleasure, for that was his favourite of all her pet names for him.

      I will tell him, Athala told herself, but not yet.

      She gave the news to both her boys after Konrad had come home from school. He was only ten, but already regarded himself as the man of the house. As such, he made a point of not showing any sign of weakness when told that the father he took after so strongly was dead. Instead he wanted to know all the details of what had happened. Had his father been fighting the English? How many of them had he killed before they got him? When Athala had been unable to give him the answers he required, Konrad flew into a rage and said she was stupid.

      ‘Father was quite right not to love you,’ he sneered. ‘You were never good enough for him.’

      On another day, Athala might have smacked him for that, but today she let it go. Then Konrad’s fury abated as fast as it had risen and he asked, ‘If Father is dead, does that mean that I am the Count now?’

      ‘Yes,’ said Athala. ‘You are Graf von Meerbach.’

      Konrad gave a whoop of joy. ‘I’m the Count! I’m the Count!’ he chanted, marching around the playroom, like a stocky little red-headed guardsman. ‘I can do whatever I want and nobody can stop me!’

      He came to a halt by Gerhard’s building, which had risen, brick by brick, until it was almost as tall as its maker.

      ‘Hey Gerdi, look at me!’

      Gerhard looked up at his big brother, smiling innocently.

      Konrad kicked Gerhard’s wonderful construction, scattering its bricks across the playroom floor. Then he kicked it again, and again until it was completely obliterated, and nothing remained but the colourful rubble carpeting the room.

      Gerhard’s little face crumpled in despair and he ran sobbing to his mother.

      As she wrapped her arms around her baby, she looked at the boy count now standing proudly over the destruction he had wreaked and she realized with bitter despair that she had been freed from her husband, only to be enslaved anew by her even more terrible son.

      The skinny little girl wore a pair of jodhpurs that flapped around her thighs, for she lacked the flesh with which to fill them. Her short, black bobbed hair, which was normally unconstrained by bands or clips of any kind, had been pinned into a little bun, to be worn beneath her riding hat. Her freckled face was tanned a golden brown and her eyes were the clear, pure blue of the African skies that had looked down upon every day of her life.

      All around her the grassy hills, garlanded with sparkling streams, stretched away to the horizon as if the Highlands of Scotland had been transported to the Garden of Eden: a magical land of limitless fertility, incomprehensible scale and thrilling, untamed wildness. Here leopards lounged in the branches of trees that were also home to chattering monkeys and snakes, like the shimmering, iridescent green mamba, or the shy but fatally poisonous boomslang. The head-high grass hid lions sharp in fang and claw and, even deadlier still, the buffalo, whose horns could cut deep into a man’s guts as easily as a sewing needle through fine linen.

      The girl barely gave a thought to these hazards, for she knew no other world than this and besides, she had much more important things on her mind. She was stroking the velvet muzzle of her pony, a Somali-bred chestnut mare from which she had been inseparable ever since she had received it as her seventh-birthday present, eight months ago. The horse was called Kipipiri, which was both the Swahili word for ‘butterfly’ and the name of the mountain that stood tall on the eastern horizon, shimmering in the heat haze like a mirage.

      ‘Look, Kippy,’ the girl said, in a low, soothing murmur. ‘Look at all the nasty boys and their horrid stallions. Let’s show them what we can do!’

      She stepped around to the side of the pony and, waving away the offer of a leg-up from her groom, put one foot into the nearest stirrup, pushed off it and sprang up into the saddle as nimbly as a jockey on Derby Day. Then she leaned forward along Kipipiri’s neck, stroking her mane, and whispered in her ear, ‘Fly, my darling, fly!’

      Possessed by an exhilarating swirl of emotions in which pride, anticipation and giddy excitement clashed against nervousness, apprehension and a desperate longing not to make a fool of herself, the girl told herself to calm down. She had long since learned that her beloved Kippy could sense her emotions and be affected by them and the very last thing she needed was СКАЧАТЬ