My Dear Captain Codrington,
My trust in an all-merciful Providence and my belief in the true and one God, and in his gentle son and our Saviour Jesus convinces me that this will come into your hands while there is still time for you to act.
Through a series of incredible adventures and misfortunes I now find myself devoid of friends or protectors, in the power of the notorious American Slave Master and trader Mungo St John. Against both my will and my conscience I am being forced to act as the physician for this infamous vessel which is at this moment preparing for the voyage around the Cape of Good Hope, across the Atlantic Ocean for a port in the Southern States of America.
As I write, I can hear the doleful sounds from the deck above me, and from the hold below where the poor creatures, eight hundred forsaken souls in all, wearing only their chains are being brought aboard and incarcerated for the voyage which many of them will not survive.
We are lying at anchor in a hidden creek, concealed from the open sea by a sweep of the channel and the mangrove swamps, a perfect hide-away for the nefarious business in hand.
However, I have been able to study the ship’s chart and from the navigator’s markings learn the name of the estuary and its exact position. The river is the Rio Save, and it lies 20° 58' south latitude and 35° 03' east longitude.
I will do all in my power to delay the sailing of this vessel, though at this moment I cannot think what that will be. If this letter reaches you in time, there will be no difficulty for an officer of your courage and experience to blockade the river mouth and seize this slave ship when she attempts to leave the river.
If we have sailed before your arrival, then I implore you to follow in the same course as the Captain of the Huron must set to round Good Hope, and I will pray for adverse winds and weather that will enable you to come up with us.
Robyn went on pouring out the tale of her capture, of the plague that had swept through the barracoons, of her fear and hatred of the slavers, the detailed accounts of their barbaric practices and cruelties, and suddenly she realized that she had filled many pages with her account, and she began her last paragraph.
You were gracious enough to express your belief that our destinies were linked in some mysterious way. I know that you share with me the same hatred of this abominable trade, and for these reasons I have made bold enough to appeal to you, confident that you will hearken to my anguished cry.
Robyn paused again, and then searched swiftly in her pen case and found the pair of the earring which she had given to Clinton Codrington so many months ago.
I enclose with this letter a token of my friendship and trust which I hope you will recognize, and I will search every day to see the topsails of your fine ship hurrying to give succour to myself and to the other unfortunates who are my ship-mates on this cursed and iniquitous voyage.
She signed it with her bold, rounded signature and stitched the folded pages and the single item of cheap jewellery into a square of duck canvas.
There was only one address that she had for it. Clinton had told her that he was under orders to call at Zanzibar Island, and she knew that Her Majesty’s Consul on the island was a man of substance and integrity, a staunch adversary of the slave trade, one of the few men that her father, Fuller Ballantyne, had ever written about with respect and affection.
When she had finished, she tucked the small canvas package up under her skirts, and went up on deck. Mungo St John was on his quarterdeck, gaunt and lean and pale, and he took a step towards her, but she turned from him immediately.
‘Nathaniel,’ she called to the bosun. ‘I wish to visit the buggaloo.’ She indicated the Arab dhow which was still anchored downstream from Huron.
‘She’s making ready to sail, ma’am.’ Nathaniel knuckled his forehead. ‘She’ll be gone before we can get across—’
‘She will if you continue talking,’ Robyn told him briskly. ‘I must see if there is aught they need, the poor devils, before they sail.’
Nathaniel glanced at his Captain, and after a moment’s hesitation, Mungo nodded his assent and turned back to watch the stream of slaves coming aboard through the entry port.
The Arab Captain of the dhow, just strong enough to take his place at the tiller, greeted her respectfully and listened attentively while she spoke.
Nathaniel was waiting in the gig, out of sight below the level of the dhow’s deck, and Robyn made sure that they were shielded from a casual watcher on Huron’s deck before she passed the canvas package to the Arab, and followed it with a gold English sovereign.
‘There will be another sovereign for you, from the man you deliver it to,’ she told him, and the Arab bit the coin, and smiled wanly as he tucked it into a fold of his turban.
‘And I am Matabele. Induna of two thousand. My name is Gandang, son of Mzilikazi, son of Zulu, and I come with a bright spear and a red heart.’
Zouga understood the words with difficulty, for they were spoken rapidly, in accents that were strange to his ears, but there was no misunderstanding the Induna’s intention. His tone was clear, the murderous determination in his voice evident, and around him the circle of long black shields was unbroken and steadfast.
Unconsciously Zouga had straightened, forcing his aching muscles erect, and he held the Induna’s gaze without flinching. They stared at each other, and Zouga found himself exerting all his will, all the force of his personality, trying to stay the Induna’s spear arm. He knew it needed only for the bright broad blade to drop and two hundred amadoda would sweep into the rudimentary camp. It would be over so swiftly, the resistance that Zouga and his tiny band could offer would be so puny that they would not even earn the compliment of disembowelment from the victors.
He knew that only his steady gaze and the completely fearless mien that he offered to the Matabele had so far stayed the spear arm, but the silence was drawing out. At any second the spell would snap. He must choose his next action and words as though his life depended upon them, as indeed they did.
Gandang watched the strange pale man before him with his features impassive, yet for possibly the first time in his life while on his father’s service, he was uncertain.
The man who called himself Bakela had spoken familiar names. Tshedi and Manali, they were names that his own father revered, yet that in itself would not have been enough to stay his hand, for the King’s orders were clear: all who entered the Burnt Land must die. It was more than that. He knew who this man was. The maiden who he would soon take as wife had spoken of him. This was the brother of the white woman who had delivered Juba to his care, and whom he had called amekazi,mother.
Juba had spoken of the man Bakela as she lay beside him on her sleeping-mat. She had spoken of him with admiration and awe, as a mighty hunter of elephant, as a warrior honoured by an all-powerful Queen who lived far beyond great waters. Juba had spoken of this man Bakela as a friend and a protector.
So Gandang paused before giving the order ‘Bulala! Kill them!’
A Matabele Induna is never influenced by the words or whims of a woman, if he has fifty wives their voices are still as the chattering of the waters over the rocks in the shallow rapids of the Nyati river, and a man does not heed them, or rather it must never be apparent that he heeds them.
Juba had travelled to strange places and spoken of wonders and witchery, and Gandang while seeming not to listen had indeed listened and been impressed. The girl was not only comely and high bred, but sensible far beyond that mere simpering giggling sexuality to which he was accustomed in other girls of her age.
Gandang was learning that a Matabele Induna is never influenced by the whims and words of a woman, unless those words are spoken and the whims expressed on the privacy of the sleeping-mat, by a senior wife whose good sense has been proven.
Then it is folly not to hearken, for a senior wife can make a man’s life unbearable, even if that man is an Induna of two thousand, and the favoured son of the most powerful monarch in Africa.
 
; Behind the dark impassive mask of his handsome face, Gandang was thinking furiously. Instinct and Juba’s words had warned him that it would be folly to slay this man, yet the warriors at his back knew his orders, and if he failed to carry them out, that failure would immediately be construed as weakness, and his treason reported to the King.
Before him the tattered figure took a pace forward, his whole being ludicrously arrogant. Gandang could see no trace of fear in the steady gaze of his strangely coloured eyes.
‘I come as an emissary to the great King Mzilikazi, ruler of the Matabele people – and I bring greeting from the White Queen from across the waters.’
At the words Gandang felt a small warm flame of relief. The fact that the white man spoke the language of the people, albeit with a strange accent, made it more plausible that he was indeed an emissary. It was plausible, also, that this Queen of his would want to seek the protection and favour of a king as powerful as his father, and that she should be so ignorant as to send her emissary through the Burnt Land instead of along the open road from the south. Zouga saw the shift of mood in the Induna’s eyes, that tiny crack in his determination.
‘Wait,’ he said. ‘There is something that I have for you.’
In Zouga’s writing-case still reposed the impressive handwritten letters, with seals of wax and scarlet ribbon that had been provided him by the Under-secretary at the Foreign Office, in the usual form.
In the name of Her Britannic Majesty, Ruler of Great Britain and Ireland, Defender of the Faith – To the representatives of all foreign governments or to who-soever it may concern,
We do, by these presents, request and require that our beloved Morris Zouga Ballantyne be allowed to pass freely without let or hindrance and that he be afforded that assistance of which he may stand in need.
Zouga turned his back on the silent menacing ranks of spearsmen, and walked back slowly through the gap in the scherm of cut thorn branches.
Jan Cheroot was waiting for him, his face the colour of the watch-fire ash. He and the gunbearers were crouched below the thorn barrier, staring through the chinks with expressions of such utter terror that Zouga felt emboldened in comparison.
‘Lay down those guns,’ he snapped, for all the weapons were cocked and primed and a nervous finger on a hair-trigger could let fly the shot that brought a solid black wave of Matabele sweeping through the camp.
Gandang suddenly found himself in a position of uncertainty. From being the merciless bearer of the King’s justice, he found himself waiting like a timid suitor outside the gate in the thorn barrier, and every second detracted from his dignity.
Behind him he heard the stir of one of his men, the soft tap of assegai spear on hide shield. His men were growing restless already, sensing the passing of advantage to the little group of ragged starvelings they had surrounded. Gandang turned slowly, and his stony gaze passed over the ranks. They froze once more into utter stillness.
‘Gandang, son of Mzilikazi, Induna of two thousand. Come forward.’
The hail from beyond the thorn barrier was unexpected and startlingly loud, but it came the moment before Gandang reached the limit of his patience and loosed his eager warriors. Gandang moved forward to the gateway. His plumes nodding about his head, his tread dignified, his carriage proud, so that no men might guess at his uncertainty. At the gateway he paused, and though his expression did not alter nor his gaze waver, he experienced a profound relief that his own wisdom and the words of his little dove had stayed his blade.
Before him stood a figure of almost incredible beauty. It took him many seconds to recognize the ragged individual of a few minutes previously. The figure wore cloth of that same peculiarly rich shade of red of the bushshrike’s chest, brighter than the colour of freshly spilled blood. Though this was enough to stop a man’s breath, it was not all. Bright metal ornaments on breast and shoulders sparkled in the morning sunlight, the belt buckle was of the same metal. The belt and cross-straps were of the same blinding whiteness as an egret’s wing. The tall shako swept down to an elegant point between the eyes, and the helmet badge blazed like a sunrise upon the man’s forehead.
There was no doubt now in Gandang’s mind that here was indeed an important man, and a soldier of repute, as Juba had warned him, and he made a silent resolution to listen to her words in future with even greater attention. He felt a little shiver of dismay at the thought that he might have followed his first instincts and had this man cut down as though he was a worthless Mashona, a mere eater of dirt.
The magnificent figure took one pace towards him and lifted a hand to the peak of that beautiful helmet in a formal gesture that Gandang answered instinctively with a sweeping salute of his stabbing spear.
‘I, Bakela, request that my token be conveyed to your father, the honoured and victorious Mzilikazi, and that he be informed that I request from him the right of the road,’ said the man in his atrocious Sindebele and Gandang accepted the token from his hand, the small package with strange signs and marks upon it, bound up with strips of coloured cloth so beautiful that they would have delighted the heart of even the most vain and spoiled woman.
‘It shall be done,’ he agreed.
In the moments of his confrontation with Gandang, Zouga had been thinking as furiously as the Matabele and making his own calculations of survival. Now that he had fallen in with a border impi he knew he must put aside any thought of escaping southwards. Apart from the fact that they were completely surrounded and heavily outnumbered, he knew that no unmounted man could run ahead of these warriors. They were like machines built for the pursuit and the annihilation of an enemy.
The meeting had not taken him completely unprepared. There had been many a night in the preceding weeks when he had woken in the darkest hours, and he had lain on the hard earth and dreaded a moment such as this.
He had mentally rehearsed his actions – from the concealment of any fear while he won time to don his dress uniform, to the demand to be taken to the King’s kraal. When it had gone as he planned it, when the tall Induna had agreed, ‘It shall be done,’ it had taken another enormous extension of Zouga’s will not to show relief. He had stood aloof, disinterested, while Gandang had picked and called out five of his swiftest runners and had recited a long message that they must memorize, and take to Mzilikazi.
It began with a long recitation of the King’s praises which began,
‘Great black elephant who shakes the earth with his tread – ’ went on to list the deeds that Gandang had performed since leaving the great kraal at Thabas Indunas, the march eastward, the battle at the pass and the slaying of Bopa, the slave master, right up to this day’s encounter with the white man. After a flowery description of the man’s magnificent finery (which Gandang knew would intrigue his father), it ended with a repetition of Bakela’s request to be ‘given the road’ to Thabas Indunas.
The chosen messengers, each in turn repeated the long message, and though he showed no change of expression Zouga was amazed that each of them had it word-perfect. It was an impressive demonstration of the developed memory of people who do not have the art of writing and reading.
Gandang handed them the sealed parchment envelope that contained Zouga’s letter of credentials, and the messengers sprang to their feet from where they had squatted, saluted their Induna, formed file and trotted away towards the west.
Gandang turned back to Zouga. ‘You will stay encamped here until the King sends word.’
‘When will that be?’ Zouga asked, and Gandang answered him sternly.
‘Whenever the King is pleased to do so.’
Zouga’s little party was left unmolested. Although there were a dozen Matabele amadoda positioned about the camp, guarding it day and night, not one of them attempted to enter the gateway in the thorn scherm. Until the moment when they might slaughter them, the persons and property of their prisoners were inviolate.
The main body of the impi camped a quarter of a mile downstream. Each evening the tall
Induna visited Zouga and they sat for an hour or so across the fire from each other, speaking gravely and seriously.
As the days of waiting became weeks so the two men developed each for the other a deep respect, if not actual friendship. They were both warriors, and they had common ground when they spoke of old campaigns and of skirmishes and battles fought. They recognized in each other the strengths, the essential decencies of men who live by and respect the laws of their society, though those laws might diverge widely.
‘I account him a gentleman,’ Zouga wrote in his journal. ‘One of nature’s own.’
While Gandang, speaking to Juba on the sleeping-mat said merely, ‘Bakela is a man.’
Gandang allowed Zouga’s bearers to leave the enclosure, to cut and bring in thatch and timber to strengthen and improve the buildings, so that at last Zouga could sleep dry and warm. This, together with the rest and respite from endless marching brought an immediate improvement in Zouga’s health. The deep wound in his cheek healed cleanly, leaving a pink shiny scar. The shoulder mended, the bruising abated, and he no longer needed a staff or a sling for his arm. Within a week he knew he was well enough to shoot the heavy four-to-the-pound.
One evening he proposed to Gandang that they hunt together, and the Induna who by this time was finding the waiting as tedious as Zouga was, agreed with alacrity. Gandang’s amadoda surrounded a herd of Cape buffalo, and drove them down in a bellowing, stampeding black wave to where they waited. Zouga saw the tall Induna rise from cover and race in, bare-footed, shieldless, and kill a mature bull buffalo with a single thrust of the broad-bladed assegai through the ribs behind the heaving shoulder. Zouga knew that he lacked both the skill and courage to emulate that feat.
Gandang watched when Zouga stood to meet the squealing, thunderous charge of an enraged bull elephant, and when the beast went down to the crash of the shot, dropping on to its knees in a storm of dust, Gandang stepped past Zouga and touched the little black hole that punctured the elephant’s thick grey hide an inch above the first crease at the top of the trunk.