Authors: Wilbur Smith
On his hands and knees, Ralph crawled down the narrow pathway,
keeping below the level of the slashing spears, silhouetting the
frantic figures of running men against the faint light of the
stars, and when he stabbed up at them, he aimed for the groin and
belly rather than the killing stroke, so that the men that he
maimed added their cries to the uproar.
From the head of the valley, Harry Mellow blew another blaring
blast on the brass foghorn, and it was echoed by the screams of
men blundering up the sides of the valley and escaping into the
open grassland beyond.
Ralph crept forward, listening for a single voice in the
thousands. In the first few minutes hundreds of fleeing warriors,
most of them unarmed, had escaped from the valley. In every
direction they were disappearing into the night, and each second
they were followed by others, men who would have unflinchingly
charged into the smoking muzzles of the Maxim machine-guns, but
who were reduced by fear of the supernatural to mindless
panic-stricken children. Their cries faded with distance, and now
at last Ralph heard the voice for which he had waited.
‘Stand fast, the Moles,’ it roared. ‘Stand
with Bazo. These are not demons.’ And Ralph crept towards
the sound.
In the clearing ahead of him, a camp-fire fed with fresh logs
flared up sullenly, and Ralph recognized the tall figure with
wide gaunt shoulders, and the slim woman at his side.
‘This is white men’s trickery,’ she cried,
beside her lord. ‘Wait, my children.’
Ralph sprang up and ran through the dense scrub to them.
‘Nkosi,’ he cried. He did not have to disguise his
voice, it was rough and hoarse with dust and tension and
battle-lust. ‘Lord Bazo, I am with you! Let us stand
together against this treachery.’
‘Brave comrade!’ Bazo greeted him with relief as
Ralph loomed out of the dark. ‘Stand back to back, form a
ring in which each of us will guard the other, and call out to
other brave men to join us.’
Bazo turned his back to Ralph, and drew the woman Tanase to
his side. It was she who glanced back and recognized Ralph as he
stooped.
‘It is Henshaw,’ she screamed, but her warning
came too late. Before Bazo could turn back to face him, Ralph had
changed his grip on the assegai, using it like a butcher’s
cleaver, and with a single stroke he hacked across the back of
Bazo’s legs, just above the ankles, and the Achilles’
tendons parted with a soft rubbery popping sound. Bazo collapsed
onto his knees, both legs crippled, pinned like a beetle to a
board.
Ralph seized Tanase’s wrist, jerked her out of the
circle of firelight, and hurled her headlong to earth. Holding
her easily, he tore off her short leather skirt and placed the
point of the assegai in her groin.
‘Bazo,’ he whispered. ‘Throw your spear upon
the fire, or I will open your woman’s secret parts as you
opened those of mine.’
T
he Scouts used
the first glimmerings of the new day to move slowly down the
valley in an extended line, finishing the wounded Matabele. While
they worked, Ralph sent Jan Cheroot back to where they had left
the horses to fetch the ropes. He was back within minutes with
the heavy coils of new yellow manila over the saddles of the
horses that he led.
‘The Matabele have scattered back into the hills,’
he reported grimly. ‘It will take a week for them to find
each other and regroup.’
‘We won’t wait that long.’
Ralph took the ropes and began making the knots. The Scouts
came in as he worked. They were scrubbing their assegai blades
with handfuls of dried grass, and Sergeant Ezra told Ralph,
‘We lost four men, but we found Kamuza, the induna of the
Swimmers, and we counted over two hundred bodies.’
‘Get ready to pull out,’ Ralph ordered.
‘What remains to be done will not take long.’
Bazo sat beside the remains of the fire. His arms were bound
behind him with thongs of rawhide, and his legs were thrust
straight out in front of him. He had no control over his feet,
they flopped nervelessly like dying fish stranded on a receding
tide, and the slow watery blood oozed from the deep gashes above
his heels.
Tanase sat beside him. She was stark naked, and bound like him
with her arms behind her back.
Sergeant Ezra stared at her body, and he murmured, ‘We
have worked hard all night. We have earned a little sport. Let me
and my
kanka
take this woman into the bushes for a short
while.’
Ralph did not bother to reply, but turned to Jan Cheroot
instead. ‘Bring the horses,’ he ordered.
Tanase spoke to Bazo without moving her lips, in the way of
the initiates.
‘What is the business of the ropes, Lord? Why do they
not shoot us, and have done?’
‘It is the white man’s way, the way that conveys
the deepest disrespect. They shoot honoured enemies, and use the
ropes on criminals.’
‘Lord, on the day I first met this one you call Henshaw,
I dreamed that you were high upon a tree and he looked up at you
and smiled,’ she whispered. ‘It is strange that in
that dream I did not see myself beside you upon that
tree.’
‘They are ready now,’ said Bazo, and turned his
head to her. ‘With my heart I embrace you. You have been
the fountainhead of my life.’
‘I embrace you, my husband. I embrace you, Bazo, who
will be the father of kings.’
She went on staring into his ravaged, ugly-beautiful face and
she did not turn her head when Henshaw stood tall over them and
said in a harsh tortured voice, ‘I give you a better death
than you gave to the ones I loved.’
T
he ropes were
of different lengths, so that Tanase hung slightly lower than her
lord. The soles of her bare feet, suspended at the height of a
man’s head, were very white and her toes pointed straight
at the earth like those of a little girl standing on tiptoe. Her
long heron neck was twisted sharply to one side, so that she
still seemed to listen for Bazo’s voice.
Bazo’s swollen face was lifted towards the yellow dawn
sky, for the knot had ridden around under his chin. Ralph
Ballantyne’s face was lifted also as he stood at the base
of the tall acacia tree in the bottom of the Valley of the Goats
looking up at them.
In one other respect, Tanase’s vision was unfulfilled
– Ralph Ballantyne did not smile.
S
o Lodzi came
and with him came Major-General Carrington and Major Robert
Stephenson Smyth Baden-Powell who would one day coin the motto
‘Be Prepared’, and behind them came the guns and the
soliders. The women and children danced out from the laager at
Bulawayo with bouquets of wild flowers for them, and they sang
‘For they are jolly good fellows’ and wept with
joy.
The senior indunas of Kumalo, betrayed by the Umlimo’s
promises of divine intervention, uncertain and with the fire in
their bellies swiftly cooling, squabbling amongst themselves and
awed by the massive show of military force that they had
provoked, withdrew slowly with their impis from the vicinity of
Bulawayo.
The imperial troops sortied in great lumbering columns and
swept the valleys and the open land. They burned the deserted
villages and the standing crops and they drove away the few
cattle that the rinderpest had spared. They shelled the hills
where they suspected the Matabele might be hiding, and they rode
their horses to exhaustion, chasing the elusive black shadows
that flittered through the forest ahead of them. The Maxims fired
until the water in the cooling-jackets boiled, but the range was
nine hundred yards or more and the targets were as fleet as
rabbits.
So the weeks dragged on and became months, and the soldiers
tried to starve the Matabele and force them into a set-piece
battle, but the indunas sulked in the broken ground and took
refuge in the Matopos Hills where the guns and the soldiers dared
not follow them.
Occasionally the Matabele caught an isolated patrol or a man
on his own, once even the legendary Frederick Selous,
elephant-hunter and adventurer extraordinary. Selous had
dismounted to ‘pot’ one of the rebels that were
disappearing over the ridge ahead, when a stray bullet grazed his
pony, and his usually impeccably behaved animal bolted and left
him stranded. Only then he realized that he had outridden the
main body of his Scouts, and that the Matabele were instantly
aware of his predicament. They turned back and coursed him like
dogs on a hare.
It was a race the likes of which Selous had not run since his
elephant-hunting days. The bare-footed and lightly equipped
amadoda
gained swiftly, so close at last that they freed
their blades from the thongs and began that terrible humming war
chant. Only then Lieutenant Windley, Selous’
second-in-command, spurred in and pulling his foot from the left
stirrup, gave Selous the leather and galloped with him into the
ranks of the oncoming Scouts.
At other times the swing of fortune was towards the soldiers,
and they would surprise a foraging patrol of Matabele at a drift
or in thick bush, and hang them from the nearest trees that would
bear the weight.
It was an inconclusive cruel little war, that drew on and on.
The military officers who were conducting the campaign were not
businessmen, they did not think in terms of cost-efficiency, and
the bill for the first three months was a million pounds of
sterling, a cost of £5,000 per head of Matabele killed. The
bill was for the account of Mr Cecil John Rhodes and his British
South Africa Company.
In the Matopos Hills, the indunas were forced towards
starvation, and in Bulawayo Mr Rhodes was forced just as
inexorably towards bankruptcy.
T
he three
riders moved in a cautious, mutually protective spread. They kept
to the centre of the track, their rifles were loaded and cocked
and carried at high port.
Jan Cheroot rode point, fifty yards ahead. His little woolly
head turned tirelessly from side to side as he searched the bush
on each side. Behind him came Louise Ballantyne, delighting in
her escape from the confinements of the Bulawayo laager after
these weary months. She rode astride, with all the
élan
of a natural horsewoman, and there was a
feather in her little green cap, and when she turned to look back
every few minutes, her lips parted in a loving smile. She was not
yet accustomed to having Zouga with her once again, and she had
constantly to reassure herself.
Zouga was fifty yards behind her, and he answered her smile in
a way that wrenched something deep inside her. He sat easy and
straight in the saddle, the wide-brimmed slouch hat slanted over
one eye. The sun had gilded away the pallor of Holloway gaol, and
the silver and gold of his beard gave him the air of a Viking
chieftain.
In that extended order they rode up from the grassy plains,
under the high arched branches of the msasa trees, up the first
slope of the hills and, as he reached the false crest, Jan
Cheroot stood in his stirrups and shouted with relief and
delight. Unable to contain themselves, Louise and Zouga cantered
forward and reined in beside him.
‘Oh, thank you, Lord,’ Louise whispered huskily,
and reached across for Zouga’s hand.
‘It’s a miracle,’ he said softly, and
squeezed her fingers.
Ahead of them the mellow thatch of King’s Lynn basked
comfortably in the sunlight. It seemed to be the most beautiful
sight either of them had ever looked upon.
‘Untouched.’ Louise shook her head in wonder.
‘Must be the only homestead in Matabeleland that
wasn’t burned.’
‘Oh come on, my darling,’ she cried, with sudden
ecstasy. ‘Let’s go back to our home.’
Zouga restrained her at the steps of the wide front porch, and
made her stay in the saddle, her rifle at the ready, holding the
reins of their horses while he and Jan Cheroot searched the
homestead for any sign of Matabele treachery.
When Zouga came out onto the stoep again, he carried his rifle
at the trail and smiled at her.
‘It’s safe!’
He helped her down from the saddle, and while Jan Cheroot led
the horses away to stall feed them in the stables from the
grainbags he had brought, Zouga and Louise went up the front
steps hand in hand.
The thick ivory curves of the old bull elephant’s tusks
still framed the doorway to the dining-room, and Zouga stroked
one of them as he passed.
‘Your good luck charms,’ Louise chuckled
indulgently.
‘The household gods,’ he corrected her, and they
passed between them into the house.
The house had been looted. They could not have expected less,
but the books were still there, thrown from the shelves, some
with their spines broken or with the leather boards damaged or
gnawed by rats, but they were all there.
Zouga retrieved his journals and dusted them superficially
with his silk scarf. There were dozens of them, the record of his
life, meticulously handwritten and illustrated with ink drawings
and coloured maps.
‘It would have truly broken my heart to have lost
these,’ he murmured, piling them carefully on the library
table and stroking one of the red morocco covers. The silver was
lying on the dining-room floor, some of it battered, but most of
it intact. It has no value to a Matabele.
They wandered through the rambling homestead, through the
rooms that Zouga had added haphazardly to the original structure,
and they found small treasures amongst the litter: a silver comb
he had given her on their first Christmas together, the diamond
and enamel dress studs which had been her birthday present to
him. She handed them back to him and went up on tiptoe to offer
her face to his kiss.
There was still crockery and glassware on the kitchen shelves,
though all the pots and knives had been stolen and the doors to
the pantry and storerooms had been broken off their hinges.