Authors: Wilbur Smith
‘It won’t take much to fix,’ Zouga told her.
‘I can’t believe how lucky we’ve
been.’
Louise went out into the kitchen and found four of her red
Rhode Island hens scratching in the dust. She called Jan Cheroot
from the stable and begged a few handfuls of grain from the
horses’ feed-bags. When she clucked at the hens, they came
in a flutter of wings to be fed.
The glass in the windows of the main bedroom was smashed, and
wild birds had come through to roost in the rafters. The
bedspread was stained with their excrement, but when Louise
stripped it off, the linen and mattress beneath it were clean and
dry.
Zouga put an arm around her waist, squeezed it and looked down
at her, in the way she knew so well.
‘You are a wicked man, Major Ballantyne,’ she
breathed huskily. ‘But there are no curtains on the
windows.’
‘Fortunately there are still shutters.’ He went to
close them, while Louise folded back the sheet and then
unfastened the top button of her blouse. Zouga returned in time
to assist her with the others.
An hour later when they came out again onto the front stoep,
they found Jan Cheroot had dusted off the chairs and table, and
unpacked the picnic basket they had brought from Bulawayo. They
drank fine Constantia wine and ate cold Cornish pasties, while
Jan Cheroot waited upon them and regaled them with anecdotes and
reminiscences of the exploits of Ballantyne’s Scouts.
‘There were none like us,’ he declared modestly.
‘Ballan-tyne’s Scouts! The Matabele learned to know
us well.’
‘Oh, don’t let’s talk about war,’
Louise pleaded.
But Zouga asked with good-natured sarcasm, ‘What
happened to all your heroes? The war still goes on, and we need
men like you.’
‘Master Ralph changed,’ said Jan Cheroot, darkly.
‘He changed just like that.’ He snapped his fingers.
‘From the day we caught Bazo at the Valley of the Goats, he
wasn’t interested any more. He never rode with the Scouts
again, and within a week he had gone back to the railhead to
finish building his railway. They say he will drive the first
train into Bulawayo before Christmas, that’s what they
say.’
‘Enough!’ Louise declared. ‘It’s our
first day at King’s Lynn in almost a year. I will not have
another word of war. Pour some wine, Jan Cheroot, and take a
little sip for yourself.’ Then she turned to Zouga.
‘Darling, can’t we leave Bulawayo and come back
here?’
Zouga shook his head regretfully. ‘I’m sorry, my
love. I could not risk your precious life. The Matabele are still
in rebellion, and this is so isolated—’
From the back of the house came the sudden shriek and cackle
of alarmed poultry. Zouga broke off and jumped to his feet. As he
reached for his rifle propped against the wall, he said softly
but urgently, ‘Jan Cheroot, go around the back of the
stables. I’ll come from the other side.’ Then to
Louise, ‘Wait here, but be ready to run for the horses if
you hear a shot.’ And the two men slipped silently away
down the veranda.
Zouga reached the corner of the wall below the main bedroom,
just as there was another storm of squawks and cackles, and the
beating of wings. He ducked around the corner, and sprinted down
the thick whitewashed walls that protected the kitchen yard, and
flattened himself beside the gate. Above the cacophony of
terrified chickens and the flapping of wings, he heard a voice
say, ‘Hold that one! Do not let it go!’
The voice was Matabele, and almost immediately a half-naked
figure ducked through the doorway beside Zouga, carrying a
chicken in each hand.
One thing only prevented Zouga firing. The pendulous bare
breasts that flapped against the Matabele’s ribs as she
ran. Zouga smashed the butt of his rifle between the
woman’s shoulders, knocking her to the earth, and he leaped
over her body into the kitchen yard.
Beside the kitchen door stood Jan Cheroot. He held his rifle
in one hand and in the other the skinny, naked, struggling body
of a small black boy.
‘Shall I knock his head in?’ Jan Cheroot
asked.
‘You are no longer a member of Ballantyne’s
Scouts,’ Zouga told him. ‘Just keep a hold on him,
but don’t hurt him.’ And he turned back to examine
his own prisoner.
She was an elderly Matabele woman, almost on the point of
starvation. She must once have been a big heavily fleshed woman,
for her skin hung loosely upon her in folds and wrinkles. Once
those breasts must have been the size of water melons, and almost
bursting with fat, but now they were empty pouches that dangled
almost to her navel. Zouga caught her wrist and hauled her to her
feet. He marched her back into the kitchen yard, and he could
clearly feel the bones of her arm through the wasted flesh.
Jan Cheroot was still holding the boy, and now Zouga studied
him briefly. He also was skeletally thin, each rib and each knob
of his spine poked through the skin, and his head seemed too big
for his body, and his eyes too big for his head.
‘Little bugger is starving,’ said Zouga.
‘That’s one way of getting rid of them,’ Jan
Cheroot agreed, and at that moment Louise stepped into the
kitchen doorway with the rifle still in her hand, and her
expression changed the instant she saw the black woman.
‘Juba,’ she said. ‘Is that you,
Juba?’
‘Oh Balela,’ the Matabele woman whimpered.
‘I had thought never to see the sunshine of your face
again.’
‘What now!’ said Zouga grimly. ‘We have
caught ourselves a pretty prize, Jan Cheroot. The senior wife of
the great and noble induna Gandang, and this puppy must be his
grandson! I didn’t recognize either of them, they are on
their last legs.’
Tungata Zebiwe sat in his grandmother’s bony lap and ate
with a quiet frenzy, the total dedication of a starving animal.
He ate the extra Cornish pasties from the picnic basket, then he
ate the crusts that Zouga had left. Louise searched the
saddlebags and found a battered tin of bully, and the child ate
that also, stuffing the rich fatty meat into his mouth with both
hands.
‘That’s right,’ said Jan Cheroot sourly.
‘Fatten him up now, so we have to shoot him later.’
And he went off sulkily to saddle the horses for the return to
Bulawayo.
‘Juba, little Dove,’ Louise asked, ‘are all
the children like this?’
‘The food is finished,’ Juba nodded. ‘All
the children are like this, though some of the little ones are
dead already.’
‘Juba – is it not time that we women put an end to
the foolishness of our men, before all the children are
dead?’
‘It is time, Balela,’ Juba agreed. ‘Time and
past time.’
‘W
ho is
this woman?’ Mr Rhodes asked, in that exasperated
high-pitched voice that betrayed his agitation, and he peered at
Zouga. His eyes seemed to have taken a new prominence as though
they were being squeezed out of his skull.
‘She is the senior wife of Gandang.’
‘Gandang – he commanded the impi that massacred
Wilson’s patrol on the Shangani?’
‘He was a half-brother to Lobengula. With Babiaan and
Somabula he is the senior of all the indunas.’
‘I don’t suppose there is anything to lose by
talking to them,’ Mr Rhodes shrugged. ‘This business
will destroy us all if it goes on much longer. Tell this woman to
take a message back that the indunas must lay down their arms and
come in to Bulawayo.’
‘I’m sorry, Mr Rhodes,’ Zouga told him.
‘They won’t do that. They have had an
indaba
in the hills, all the indunas have spoken, and there is only one
way.’
‘What is that, Ballantyne?’
‘They want you to go to them.’
‘Me – personally?’ Mr Rhodes asked
softly.
‘We will speak only to Lodzi, and he must come to us
unarmed. He must come into the Matopos without the soldiers. He
may bring three other men with him, but none of them must carry a
weapon. If they do, we kill them immediately.’ Zouga
repeated the message that Juba had brought out of the hills for
him, and Mr Rhodes closed his eyes and covered them with the palm
of his hand. His voice wheezed painfully in his chest, so that
Zouga had to lean forward to catch his words.
‘In their power,’ he said. ‘Alone and
unarmed, completely in their power.’
Mr Rhodes dropped his hand and stood up. He moved heavily to
the opening of the tent. He clasped his hands behind his back,
and rocked back on his heels. Outside in the hot dusty noon, a
bugle sang the advance, and there was the distant sound of a
cavalry troop leaving the laager, hooves and the rattle of lance
butts in their hard leather boots.
Mr Rhodes turned back to Zouga. ‘Can we afford to trust
them?’ he asked.
‘Can we afford not to, Mr Rhodes?’
T
hey left the
horses at the place that had been agreed, in one of the myriad
valleys in the granite hills that reared into broken crests and
dropped into deep troughs like the frozen surf whipped up by a
wild Atlantic gale. Zouga Ballantyne led from there, taking the
twisted narrow footpath through dense brush, moving slowly and
looking back every few paces at the shambling, bearlike figure
that followed him.
When the path began to climb, Zouga stopped and waited for him
to regain his breath. Mr Rhodes’ face had taken on a bluish
mottled appearance, and he was sweating heavily. However, after
only a few minutes, he waved Zouga onwards impatiently.
Close behind Mr Rhodes followed the two others that the
indunas had stipulated. One was a journalist – Mr Rhodes
was too much of a showman to miss an opportunity such as this
– and the other was a doctor, for he realized that the
assegais of the Matabele were not the only threat he faced, on
this gruelling journey.
The shimmering heat of the Matopos Hills made the air above
the granite surfaces dance and waver as though they were the
plates of a wood-fired iron stove. The silence had a cloying
suffocating texture that seemed almost tangible, and the sudden
sharp bird calls that cut through it every few minutes served
only to emphasize its intensity.
The scrub pressed in closely on each side of the track, and
once Zouga saw a branch tremble and stir when there was no
breeze. He strode on upwards with a measured pace, as though he
were leading the guard of honour at a military funeral. The path
turned sharply into a vertical crack in the highest point of the
granite wall, and here Zouga waited again.
Mr Rhodes reached him and leaned against the heated granite
with his shoulder while he wiped his face and neck with a white
handkerchief. He could not speak for many minutes and then he
gasped, ‘Do you think they will come,
Ballantyne?’
Farther down the valley, from the thickest bush, a robin
called and Zouga inclined his head to listen. It was almost
convincing mimicry.
‘They are here before us, Mr Rhodes. The hills are alive
with Matabele,’ and he looked for fear in the pale blue
eyes. When he found none, he murmured quietly, almost shyly,
‘You are a brave man, sir.’
‘A pragmatic one, Ballantyne.’ And a smile twisted
the swollen disease-ravaged face. ‘It’s always better
to talk than to fight.’
‘I hope the Matabele agree.’ Zouga returned his
smile and they went on into the vertical crack in the granite,
passing swiftly through shadow into the sunlight once more, and
below them was a basin in the granite. It was ringed by high
ramparts of broken granite, and bare of any cover.
Zouga looked down into the little circular valley and all his
soldier’s instincts were offended.
‘It’s a trap,’ he said. ‘A natural
killing-ground from which there is no escape.’
‘Let us go down,’ said Mr Rhodes.
In the middle of the basin was a low anthill, a raised
platform of hard yellow clay, and instinctively the little group
of white men made their way towards it.
‘We might as well make ourselves comfortable,’ Mr
Rhodes panted, and sank down upon it. The other members of the
party sat on each side of him – only Zouga remained upon
his feet.
Though he kept his face impassive, his skin itched as the
insects of dread crawled over it. This was the heart of the
Matopos Hills, the sacred hills of the Matabele, their stronghold
in which they would be at their bravest and most reckless. It was
folly to come unarmed into this place, to throw themselves upon
the mercy of the most savage and bloodthirsty tribe of a cruel
wild continent. Zouga stood with his empty hands clasped behind
his back, and turned slowly upon his heel, surveying the wall of
rock that hemmed them in. He had not completed his circle before
he said quietly:
‘Well, gentlemen. Here they are!’
Without a sound, with no spoken command, the impis rose from
their concealment, and formed a living barricade along the
skyline. They stood in rank upon rank and shoulder to shoulder,
completely encompassing the rocky valley. It was impossible to
count their multitude, impossible even to guess at their
thousands, but still the silence persisted as though their
eardrums were filled with wax.
‘Do not move, gentlemen,’ Zouga cautioned them,
and they waited in the sunlight. They waited while the silent
impassive impis stood guard about them. Now no bird called and
not the lightest breeze stirred the forest of feather headdresses
and the kilts of fur.
At last the ranks opened and a group of men came through. The
ranks closed behind them, and the little group came on down the
path. These were the great princes of Kumalo, the Zanzi of royal
blood – but how they were reduced.
They were all of them old men, with the hoarfrost of the years
sparkling in their woolly caps of hair and in their beards. They
were starved to the thinness of pariah dogs, with their
warrior’s muscles stringy and wasted, and their old bones
showing through. Some of them had dirty blood-soaked bandages
bound over their wounds, while the limbs and faces of others were
scabbed with the sores that starvation and deprivation breed.