Shooting Butterflies Read online

  SHOOTING BUTTERFLIES

  T.M. CLARK

  www.harlequinbooks.com.au

  ALSO BY T.M. CLARK

  My Brother-But-One

  MAPS

  To Shaun,

  My sounding board, and first beta reader. The one who

  tries to change my ‘nonsense’ sentences into language

  that everyone will hopefully understand, and the person

  who is always brutally honest with what I have written.

  Thank you for not being the stereotypical macho

  male, but for being what is perfect for me!

  Love you more.

  To my mother Carole Wilde,

  Because you had a belief in your own

  family who I too grew to love.

  Thanks for always trying to do the best you could

  for us, for your sacrifices along the way.

  Love you Mum.

  CONTENTS

  Also by T.M. Clark

  Maps

  Part One: The Chrysalis

  Chapter 1: The Karoi

  Chapter 2: The School Yard

  Chapter 3: Imbodla’s Race To Survive

  Chapter 4: Carnations

  Chapter 5: New Beginnings

  Chapter 6: The Butterfly Theory

  Chapter 7: Shilo’s Freedom

  Chapter 8: Getting To Know You

  Chapter 9: Love’s First Touch

  Chapter 10: Malabar Farm

  Part Two: The Butterfly

  Chapter 11: Recce Life

  Chapter 12: The Pioneers

  Chapter 13: Finding Shilo

  Chapter 14: The Phoenix

  Chapter 15: Reunion

  Chapter 16: Mhondoro

  Chapter 17: Gabriel

  Chapter 18: Mr Brits

  Chapter 19: The Letter

  Chapter 20: The Meeting

  Chapter 21: Memories And Nightmares

  Chapter 22: The Net Narrows

  Chapter 23: Stolen Moments At Kujana

  Chapter 24: The Eye Of The Storm

  Chapter 25: The Operation

  Chapter 26: The Bush Drum

  Chapter 27: The Trigger

  Chapter 28: Sensory Overload

  Chapter 29: Radio Waves

  Chapter 30: Bunkering Down

  Chapter 31: A Thin Line

  Chapter 32: Nyamhika Nehanda

  Chapter 33: Butterfly Kisses

  Glossary

  Acknowledgements

  Fact vs Fiction

  About the Author

  PART ONE

  The Chrysalis

  CHAPTER

  1

  The Karoi

  Mission Station Outside Sinoia, Southern Rhodesia

  1946

  The hunting dogs went ballistic. Their excited howling rang through the African bush.

  ‘See, told you there were animals here. They have something cornered,’ Kirk said as he ran next to Impendla. ‘Come on, run faster.’

  Impendla stopped.

  ‘No, mukomana Kirk, we go no further. Call your dogs, bring them back.’

  ‘What? No, listen, they have something.’

  The dogs continued their baying, the noise high pitched and foreign in the bush.

  ‘We go no further. Bad muti here. Look,’ Impendla said as he pointed to a few feathers strung together like a bunch of leaves and hung on a tree.

  ‘How can you tell that’s muti? That looks like just some stuff in a tree!’

  ‘No, mukomana. There is evil in this place. We must not go closer.’

  Kirk looked at the tree. Luckily there were no thorns. It was just a leopard tree, its bark changed colour in patches of green and silver. The trunk was slim but solid. The bark was rough beneath his hands, but it made digging the toes of his boots in easier as he climbed up and onto the first branch. He reached downwards, his fingers edging towards the bundle.

  ‘Aiwa, don’t touch that. The Nehanda, she puts those where you must not go. This ground it is sacred to her, like a church is to you. No one must touch that, the tokoloshe will get you. Spirits sent from the Mwari.’

  Kirk laughed. ‘My father says you natives are all talk and there is no such thing as bad magic. And he says your Nehanda and the sangoma are lost souls who need saving.’

  ‘Aiwa!’ Impendla shook his head. ‘Mwari is the one Shona god, the high god.’

  ‘Impendla, you live in the mission. My father taught you in school that there is only one God, and he’s not Shona.’

  ‘There is muti here. The Nyamhika Nehanda, she’s a spirit, the voice of Mwari, and she said her bones would rise up again. We must not be the ones who disturb her. She can be a mhondoro, a lion spirit, and if we disturb her, she can pass into us and then we will hold the spirit.’

  Kirk shook his head. ‘That’s not true, Impendla. Who told you that?’ he asked as he drew his hunting knife and cut the bark twine holding the crude bundle in the tree.

  It tumbled to the ground.

  Kirk shinnied down the tree and kicked it with his foot. The feathers tied around the bundle parted and it split apart. A strong stench of carrion swamped the boys, and something else, something worse than any rotten eggs Kirk had ever smelt.

  For a moment they just looked at it, then Impendla dropped to his knees and hung his head and began to wail. ‘Do you know what you have done, mukomana? You have angered the Mwari.’

  ‘Pish-posh,’ Kirk said, ‘that’s nothing except a bit of powder with a bad smell. The sangoma probably collected it somewhere near the hot springs or something. Come on, I’m going to see what the dogs have got us.’

  He hitched the rifle higher on his shoulder and strode towards the howling dogs, but realising he was alone, he turned back to Impendla. ‘You coming with me?’

  ‘Aiwa. Aiwa.’ Impendla shook his head.

  Kirk shrugged and continued to follow the sound of the dogs, smacking the tall grass away from his face as he went.

  ‘Superstitious native!’ he cursed.

  The howls of the dogs became more frantic and he began to a run. Hunting for meat rations for the kitchen in the mission station had recently become one of his responsibilities and he took it seriously. His father had told him if the boys didn’t get fresh meat, the people would eat only vegetables and sadza for dinner.

  He hated the vegetables Sister Mary always put on his tin plate, and couldn’t understand why he should be grateful for mushy carrots, smelly turnips and a wild spinach mixture that tasted terrible. But since he always felt hungry he knew better than to complain about the food, because his father would make him feed his meal to someone in the sick bay. So he made sure they shot something each day, a rabbit or a fat guineafowl. Sometimes he’d shoot a small duiker and the tender meat would be used to make biltong to store in the pantry.

  The thicket of trees and tangled bushes that pressed up next to the grassland narrowed, pushing Kirk forward. He broke through the long grass into a clearing and stopped dead. His father’s dog pack yipped and yelped even more now he had joined them, and they knew they would be rewarded for doing their job.

  In a tree was a black woman, screeching and throwing bean pods. Although the pods hit the dogs every now and again, they were well trained and kept their prey cornered. As one dog fell back, another rushed to take its place. Their heads swung to check that he’d seen what they’d acquired for him, and they wagged their tails excitedly and yelped a few more times.

  ‘Heel!’ he shouted, and the dogs backed away and came to stand at his side. Quiet but alert, their ears erect, not ready to give up on their prey just yet. The oldest bitch whined. ‘Heel, Mylani!’ he commanded.

  She rushed closer to his side and sat close beside him, submissive to her little master, but sh
e remained alert and watched the tree.

  Kirk stared as the woman climbed down and approached him, her knobkerrie raised. She shouted at him in a native language he couldn’t understand. He couldn’t even catch a few words, it was gibberish to his ears.

  Her chest was bare and painted in white, with dark red stripes and dots across her belly. At her waist she wore a leather thong decorated with strips of different animal skins that had curled as they dried. Many of the pieces of skin flashed different colours as the hair had not been removed from them, and the leather was untanned. But his eyes were drawn to the mummified remains attached to the bottom of each strip. Small cats, rodents and even tiny jackal heads all seemed to look at him at once, their beady black eyes taking him by surprise.

  Kirk took a step backwards. He pulled his hat off his head and crossed his chest. ‘God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Ghost,’ he said as he repeated the cross.

  His other hand touched Mylani’s back and she growled, her hackles standing up. He gripped the skin on her neck, more to steady himself than to stop her aggression towards the stranger. Mylani snarled.

  But his eyes were no longer on the witch.

  In the lower branches of the tree, just high enough not to be mauled by any passing hyena, were five children, not much older than him. Three boys and two girls. They were hanging by their feet like pigs in the smokehouse. The boys had fresh warrior marks carved in the skin on their faces. Across their young cheeks and over their chests the blood, red even on black skin, was akin to battle paint on a warrior. Bound to the side of each boy was an assegai and a small fighting shield.

  The girls were also suspended by their feet, hanging like huge cocoons around the tree. Mummified animals were arranged on their skin skirts, which dangled around their necks like the lace collars the white ladies wore to church on a Sunday. The girls’ chests were bare and he could see that each girl had just started to come into her bosom, the tiny nubs hardly visible beneath the patterns that had been painted on their bodies in the same white and red that decorated the sangoma. Their eyes were blank in death, the flies thick all over their lips and crawling inside their noses.

  He closed his eyes to try to erase the scene and put his hands over his ears as the children called to him in his head.

  ‘Help us, help us.’

  But when he opened his eyes, he could still see them. The image was real, but their earth-bound calls for help had long since been squelched.

  Mylani took a step forward and her growl changed pitch. Kirk quickly looked back to the sangoma. She seemed afraid to come closer to the dogs but stood shouting and waving her knobkerrie around, gesturing at him. She began to sing. It was unlike any singing he’d ever heard, and he’d listened to lots of black people singing, in church, while they tended the garden, even when they were clearing trees in the forest. The singing quietened the children’s voices in his head, but it made the dogs more aggressive.

  The sangoma ignored the warning from his dogs and stepped closer. Kirk didn’t see the knobkerrie swing, but Mylani dropped to the dirt and was instantly silenced.

  Suddenly Impendla was behind him, pulling him away. As Kirk turned to run, his father’s rifle slipped from his shoulder to fall in the dust.

  ‘Mhanya!’ Impendla shouted as Kirk turned back to retrieve it. ‘Leave it. She’s going to kill you!’

  Kirk ran.

  The boys fled back through the grass, the dogs with them, as if they realised their roles had changed from the hunters to those being hunted. The sangoma pursued them, wielding her deadly knobkerrie.

  Impendla tripped and Kirk stopped to help his friend up. ‘Come on, come on,’ he said. Now that he was running he didn’t want to stop. He wanted to get as far away from the dead children in the tree as they could. Away from poor Mylani lying dead. Away from the sangoma.

  The boys ran for the safety of the mission station. The dogs ran too, their pink tongues lolling out the side of their mouths, saliva drooling.

  ‘Mhanya,’ Impendla said as he hurried Kirk on when Kirk slowed. They could no longer hear the sangoma chasing them but they knew she was out there still.

  At last the mission came into sight, the wood smoke from the donkey boiler curling into the green canopy of bushland around it. They could hear the sounds of men cultivating the vegetable field, the heavy thud of budzas as they dug furrows and removed unwanted weeds, an easy rhythm, as the steel scraped the ground and then returned to the air to strike the dirt again. Singing wafted up to them, the melodious sound of African voices joined in an age-old tune.

  Kirk stopped and bent over to catch his breath. A stitch in his side pulled the muscles taut. He gulped air as he straightened and stretched his cramping stomach.

  ‘My father’s rifle!’ he panted. ‘I have to go back.’

  ‘No mukomana, you can never go to that place again. We have angered the spirits of the ancestors. Only bad things will happen if we go back.’

  ‘Maybe tomorrow she’ll have gone away?’ Kirk asked. He straightened and began to walk towards the mission at a slower pace, still holding his side.

  ‘No, she’s everywhere. She’s a sangoma! A spirit medium for Nehanda. A Karoi —what you would call a “little witch”. You know the Chirorodziva Pool at the caves? The deep one with the blue waters? The sangoma is the person who calms the spirits that catch your stone if you toss one into the waters. If you throw a stone, you stir up and insult the Shona heroes who were killed by the Nguni raiders, you cause unrest in the ancestors’ bones at the bottom of the pool, where they are watching, still protecting their homelands. They come to get you while you sleep. They take you away and no one ever sees you again.’

  ‘No one believes in that stuff.’

  ‘Aiwa, do not say that, mukomana. It is true. The sangomas, they are the only ones that can take away the curse the ancestors put on the man who throws the stone. Only the Karoi.’

  Kirk looked behind them then continued to walk towards the mission.

  ‘What else do your people say about the caves and the blue water?’ he asked.

  ‘That there are many bones in the pools, not just those of the Shona people. But also some maybe from the great Mzilikazi’s amawarrior, and some from the white people who came here long ago. They wait forever in the cave, trying to get out and go home to their own hunting grounds and ikhaya.’

  ‘But that was years ago. The Matabele wars—’

  ‘The ancestors, they never forget. The Karoi can choose to save you or she can choose to help the spirits if that’s what she wants. If you want a person to die and they have not cast a stone, then you go see her and she can call those spirits.’

  ‘My father says that’s all native superstitions. None of it is real,’ Kirk said confidently. ‘We visited those caves on the way to Salisbury last month. My father stopped and we ate lunch there beside the blue water. The white people call it the Sinoia Caves. The only ghosts we heard were our echoes as we called out hello.’

  ‘The Reverend can say anything because he only believes in his one god that he says is more powerful, and is gentle, but that is not our way, mukomana. That is not the way in Africa.’

  ‘Kirk! Impendla!’ Sister Mary called out loudly and waved to them from the mission.

  Impendla turned to Kirk. ‘Come on, better get back and tell them that the dogs found nothing.’

  ‘But Sixpence will want to know where Mylani is. He’ll go looking for her,’ Kirk said.

  ‘Don’t tell him about Mylani. If he asks, tell him she never came back to us when we called while hunting and we’ll go look for her tomorrow. Even though we know she’s dead, we can never tell him. We cannot return to bring her body home. The Karoi, she will find out and call the spirits!’

  ‘But what about my father’s rifle?’

  Impendla shook his head. ‘It is lost to you.’

  Kirk was dressed in his hunting clothes as he entered the mission church. He had his large knife in its sheath and carried a
n assegai that he’d made with Impendla. The thick thatch of the building’s roof cooled the interior and the wooden framework of the tall structure created a cathedral-shaped ceiling. Its low exterior whitewashed walls defined where the church was, and kept out the larger animals, but its open style ensured that the wind freely circulated through the building. His father stood tall talking with a group of black women, their coloured clothes bright against the red polished concrete floor as they sat, their legs stretched outwards. As always, some nursed babies on their laps or had them attached to their back with blankets, and small children sat quietly close to their mothers. Out of habit he looked up to check there were no bats hanging from the rough wooden rafters as he approached the circle. ‘Father, have you seen Impendla? I’ve looked everywhere.’

  ‘No. You spend too much time with him anyway. Remember that we’re here to spread the word of God, not be converted to the native ways.’

  Kirk pulled a face as his father ruffled his hair.

  ‘Cook says that guineafowl is better without the lead fragments, Father,’ he said, but he grimaced as he spoke. The dread of having to tell his father about the loss of his rifle sat heavy in his stomach. He knew that when he did tell him there would be trouble and he’d probably receive a belting. Perhaps he could sneak back later and get it, when Impendla had calmed down.

  His father smiled at him. ‘I agree with Cook. No, I don’t know where he is, so off you go, keep looking,’ he said. ‘Make sure you don’t go into the bush without him, though. Understand?’

  Kirk half turned to go.

  ‘Kirchman Bernard Potgieter, do you understand?’ his father asked.

  He knew his father meant business when he used his whole name, and there would be no going into the bush today without Impendla. He had to find him.

  Kirk nodded, then ran over the polished cement floor, jumped nimbly over the low wall that was the outer structure of the church, and headed towards the compound, the only place he hadn’t looked for Impendla. He’d already searched all the mission buildings, the orchard, the field of maize they had planted, where he had run his hands over the tops of the green plants that now grew almost to his waist, but he hadn’t located him.