The two men sauntered off on a seemingly casual circuit of the darkening laager. They walked with their heads close together, while Ralph told Harry quietly, ‘The Siege Committee seem to be doing a good job. They have held a census of the laager already, and they reckon there are six hundred and thirty two women and children and nine hundred and fifteen men. The defence of the town seems to be on good footing, but nobody has yet thought of anything but defence. They were delighted to hear that their plight is known in Kimberley and Cape Town. I gave them the first news that they have had from outside the territory since the rising began – ‘ Ralph drew on his cheroot – ‘and they seemed to think it was as good as a couple of regiments of cavalry on their way already. We both know that isn’t so.’
‘It will take months to get troops up here.’
‘Jameson and his officers are on their way to England for trial, and Rhodes has been summoned to a court of inquiry.’ Ralph shook his head. ‘And there is worse news. The Mashona tribes have risen in concert with the Matabele.’
‘Good God.’ Harry stopped dead and seized Ralph’s arm. ‘The whole territory – all at the same time? This thing has been carefully planned.’
‘There has been heavy fighting in the Mazoe valley and in the Charter and Lomagundi districts around Fort Salisbury.’
‘Ralph, how many have these savages murdered?’
‘Nobody knows. There are hundreds of scattered farms and mines out there. We have to reckon on at least five hundred men, women and children dead.’
They walked on in silence for a while. Once a sentry challenged them, but recognized Ralph.
‘Heard you got through, Mr Ballantyne – are the soldiers coming?’
‘Are the soldiers coming?’ Ralph muttered, when they were past. ‘That’s what they all ask from the Siege Committee downwards.’ They reached the far end of the laager and Ralph spoke quietly to the guard there.
‘All right, Mr Ballantyne, but keep your eyes open. Those murdering heathen are all over.’
Ralph and Harry passed through the gateway into the town. It was utterly deserted. Everyone had been moved into the central laager. The thatch and daub shanties were dark and silent, and the two men walked down the centre of the broad dusty main street until the buildings petered out on either hand; they stopped and stood staring out into the scrubland.
‘Listen!’ said Ralph. A jackal yipped down near the Umguza stream, and was answered from the shadows of the acacia forest out in the south.
‘Jackal,’ said Harry, but Ralph shook his head.
‘Matabele!’
‘Will they attack the town?’
Ralph did not reply immediately. He was staring out into the veld, and he had something in his hands that he was teasing like a string of Greek worry beads. ‘There are probably twenty thousand fighting bucks out there. They have got us bottled up here, and sooner or later, when they have massed their impis and plucked up their courage, they will come. They will come long before the soldiers can get here.’
‘What are our chances?’
Ralph wrapped the thing he held in his hand around one finger, and Harry saw it was a strip of drab fur. ‘We have got four Maxim guns, but there are six hundred women and children, and out of the nine hundred men, half are not fit to hold a rifle. The best way to defend Bulawayo is not to sit in the laager and wait for them—’
Ralph turned away and they went back along the silent street. ‘They wanted me to join the Siege Committee, and I told them I did not like sieges.’
‘What are you going to do, Ralph?’
‘I am going to get together a small group of men. Those who know the tribe and the land, those who can shoot straight and talk Sindebele well enough to pass as natives – and we are going to go out there in the Matopos Hills, or wherever else they are hiding, and we are going to start killing Matabele.’
Isazi brought in fourteen men. They were all Zulus from the south, drivers and wagon-boys from the Zeederberg Company who had once worked for Rholands Transport, but had been stranded in Bulawayo by the rinderpest.
‘I know you can drive an eighteen-ox span,’ Ralph nodded at the circle of their faces as they squatted around the fire passing the red tin of ‘Wrights No. 1 Best Stuff ‘ that Ralph had provided, from hand to hand. ‘I also know that any one of you can eat his own weight in sadza maize porridge in one sitting, and wash it down with enough beer to stun a rhinoceros, but can you fight?’
And Isazi answered for them all, using the patient tone usually reserved for an obtuse child.
‘We are Zulu.’ It was the only reply necessary.
Jan Cheroot brought in six more, all of them Cape boys, with mixed Bushman and Hottentot blood, like Jan Cheroot himself.
‘This one is named Grootboom, the big tree.’ Ralph thought he looked more like a Kalahari Desert thornbush, dark, dry and thorny. ‘He was a corporal in the Fifty-second Foot at Cape Town Fort. He is my nephew.’
‘Why did he leave Cape Town?’
Jan Cheroot looked pained. ‘There was a dispute over a lady. A man had his gizzard slit. They accused my dear nephew of the dastardly deed.’
‘Did he do it?’
‘Of course he did. He is the best man with a knife that I know – after me,’ Jan Cheroot declared modestly.
‘Why do you want to kill Matabele?’ Ralph asked him in Sindebele, and the Hottentot answered him fluently in the same language.
‘It is work I understand and enjoy.’
Ralph nodded and turned to the next man.
‘It is possible that this one is even more closely related to me,’ Jan Cheroot introduced him. ‘His name is Taas, and his mother was a great beauty. She owned a famous shebeen at the foot of Signal Hill above Cape Town docks. At one time she and I were dear and intimate friends, but then the lady had many friends.’
The prospective recruit had the flat nose and high cheekbones, the oriental eyes and the same waxen smooth skin as Jan Cheroot – if he was one of Jan Cheroot’s bastards and had spent his boyhood in Cape Town’s notorious dockland, then he should be a good man in a fight. Ralph nodded.
‘Five shillings a day,’ he said. ‘And a free box to bury you in if the Matabele catch you.’
Jameson had taken many hundreds of horses south with him, and the Matabele had swept the horses off the farms. Maurice Gifford had already taken 160 mounted men down towards Gwanda to bring in any survivors who might be cut off on the outlying farms and mines, and still be holding out. While Captain George Grey had formed a troop of mounted infantry, ‘Grey’s Scouts’, with most of the mounts that remained. The four mounts that Ralph had brought in with him were fine beasts, and he had managed to buy six more at exorbitant prices, £100 for an animal that would have fetched £15 on a good day at Kimberley market, but there were no others. He lay awake long after midnight under the wagon worrying about it while above him Robyn and Louise slept with the two girls and the children on the wagon truck under the canvas tent.
Ralph’s eyes were closed, and a few feet away Harry Mellow was breathing deeply and regularly drowning out any small sounds. Yet even in his preoccupation, Ralph became aware of another presence near him in the darkness. He smelled it first, the taint of woodsmoke and cured animal furs and the odour of the fat with which a Matabele warrior anoints his body.
Ralph slipped his right hand up under the saddle he was using for a pillow, and his fingers touched the chequered walnut butt of his Webley pistol.
‘Henshaw,’ whispered a voice he did not recognize, and Ralph whipped his left arm around a thick corded neck and at the same moment thrust the muzzle of the pistol into the man’s body.
‘Quickly,’ he grated. ‘Who are you, before I kill you?’
‘They told me you were quick and strong.’ The man was speaking Sindebele. ‘Now I believe it.’
‘Who are you?’
‘I have brought you good men and the promise of horses.’
Neither of them had spoken above a whisper.
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‘Why do you come like a thief?’
‘Because I am Matabele, the white men will kill me if they find me here. I have come to take you to these men.’
Ralph released him carefully, and reached for his boots.
They left the laager and slipped through the silent deserted town. Ralph had spoken only once more.
‘You know that I will kill you if this is treachery.’
‘I know it,’ replied the Matabele.
He was tall, as tall as Ralph but even heavier built, and once when he glanced back at Ralph the moonlight showed the silky sheen of scar tissue slashed across his cheek beneath his right eye.
In the yard of one of the last houses of the town, close to the open veld, yet screened from it by the wall that some houseproud citizen had erected to protect his garden, there were twelve more Matabele amadoda waiting. Some of them wore fur kilts while others were dressed in ragged Western cast-offs.
‘Who are these men?’ Ralph demanded. ‘Who are you?’
‘My name is Ezra, Sergeant Ezra. I was Sergeant to One-Bright-Eye who the impis killed at Khami Hills. These men are all Company police.’
‘The Company police have been disbanded and disarmed,’ Ralph said.
‘Yes, they have taken away our guns. They say they do not trust us. That we may go over to the rebels.’
‘Why do you not?’ Ralph said. ‘Some of your brothers have. They say a hundred of the Company police have gone over, and taken their rifles with them.’
‘We cannot – even if we had wished to.’ Ezra shook his head. ‘Have you heard of the killing of two Matabele women near the Inyati river? A woman called Ruth and another called Little Flower, Imbali?’
Ralph frowned. ‘Yes, I remember.’
‘It was these men, and I was their sergeant. The induna named Gandang has asked that we be taken to him alive. He wishes personally to supervise the manner of our deaths.’
‘I want men who can kill the women of the Matabele as easily as they killed ours,’ said Ralph. ‘Now what of these horses?’
‘The horses captured by the Matabele at Essexvale and Belingwe are being held in the hills at a place I know of.’
Long before the curfew bell, they had all slipped out of the central laager singly and in pairs, Jan Cheroot and his Cape boys taking the horses with them, and by the time Ralph and Harry Mellow strolled down the main street as though they were taking the evening air before returning to the laager for dinner, the others were all gathered in the walled garden at the end of the street.
Sergeant Ezra had brought the kilts and spears and knobkerries, and Jan Cheroot had the big black three-legged pot of beef fat and lampblack boiled to a paste. Ralph and Harry and the Hottentots stripped naked and smeared each other with the rancid mixture, taking care to work it in around the back of the ears, the knees and elbows, and below the eyes where pale skin might show.
By the time the curfew bell in the Anglican church began to toll, they were all dressed in the kilts of Matabele amadoda. Ralph and Harry covered their hair, which would have betrayed them, with headdresses of black widow-bird feathers. Isazi and Jan Cheroot strapped the rawhide bootees over the hooves of the horses, while Ralph gave his final orders, speaking in Sindebele, the only language they would use during the entire raid.
They left the town in the sudden darkness between sunset and moonrise, the hoofbeats of the horses deadened by the rawhides, and Ezra’s Matabele running at the stirrups on silent bare feet. After the first hour, Ralph muttered a curt order to the Matabele and they took a stirrup-leather and hung from it, a man on each side of the horses. The pace of the march never slackened below a canter. They swept south and eastwards, until the crenellated crests of the Matopos Hills were outlined against the moon-pale sky.
A little after midnight Ezra grunted.
‘This is the place!’
Ralph rose in the stirrups and raised his right arm. The column bunched up and dismounted. Jan Cheroot’s reputed bastard, Taas, came to take the horses, while Jan Cheroot himself checked his men’s weapons.
‘I will put them against the firelight for you,’ Ralph whispered to him. ‘Watch for my signal.’
Then Ralph smiled at Isazi, his teeth glinting in the shiny black mask of his daubed face. ‘There will be no prisoners. Lie close, but beware of Jan Cheroot’s bullets.’
‘Henshaw, I want to go in with you.’
Harry Mellow spoke in Sindebele, and Ralph answered him in the same language.
‘You shoot better than you talk. Go with Jan Cheroot.’
At another order from Ralph, every one of them reached into the leather pouch on his hip and brought out a white cow-tail tassel necklace. They were the recognition insignia, that might prevent them killing each other in the press of the fighting. Only Ralph added another ornament to his dress. From his hip pouch he brought the strip of mole-skin and bound it around his upper arm; then he hefted the heavy assegai and leadwood knobkerrie and nodded at Ezra.
‘Lead!’
The line of Matabele, with Ralph running in second place, trotted at a traverse across the slope of the hill. As they turned the southern buttress, they saw the red glow of a watch-fire in the valley below. Ralph sprinted past Ezra to the front of the line. He filled his lungs and began to sing.
‘Lift the rock under which sleeps the serpent.
Lift the rock and let the Mamba loose.
The Mamba of Mashobane has silver fangs of steel.’
It was one of the fighting songs of the Insukamini impi, and behind him the line of Matabele picked up the refrain in their deep melodious voices. It resounded from the hills and woke the camp in the valley. Naked figures, risen from the sleeping-mats, threw wood on the fires, and the red glow lit the underside of the acacia trees so they formed a canopy like a circus tent overhead.
Ezra had estimated there were forty amadoda guarding the horses, but there were more than that already gathered around the fires and every second more flocked into the bivouac, the outposts coming in to see what was causing the commotion. Ralph had planned for that. He wanted no stragglers. They must be concentrated, so that his riflemen could fire into the bunch, making one bullet do the work of three or four. Ralph trotted into the Matabele encampment.
‘Who commands here?’ Ralph broke off the battle-song, and demanded in a bellow. ‘Let the commander stand forth to hear the word I bring from Gandang.’ He knew from the account that Robyn had given him of the massacre on the Khami Hills that the old induna was one of the leaders of the uprising. His choice of name had the effect he had hoped for.
‘I am Mazui.’ A warrior stepped forward respectfully. ‘I wait for the word of Gandang, son of Mzilikazi.’
‘The horses are no longer safe in this place. The white men have learned where they are. At the rise of the sun we will take them deeper into the hills,’ Ralph told him. ‘To a place that I shall show you.’
‘It shall be done.’
‘Where are the horses?’
‘They are in the kraal, guarded by my amadoda, safe from the lions.’
‘Bring in all your pickets,’ Ralph ordered, and the commander shouted an order and then turned back to Ralph eagerly.
‘What news is there of the fighting?’
‘There has been a great battle,’ Ralph launched into a fanciful account, miming the fighting in the traditional way, leaping and shouting and stabbing in the air with his assegai.
‘Thus we came upon the rear of the horsemen, and thus and thus we stabbed them—’ His own Matabele gave him a chorus of long drawn-out ‘Jee’ and leaped and postured with him.
The audience was enraptured, beginning to stamp and sway in sympathy with Ralph and his Matabele. The sentries and pickets had come in from the periphery of the camp. No more hurrying black figures emerged from the shadows. They were all here – a hundred, perhaps a hundred and twenty, not more, Ralph estimated, against his forty men. Not unfair odds, Jan Cheroot’s Cape boys were all first-rate marksm
en, and Harry Mellow with a rifle was worth five ordinary men.
From close at hand, on the first slope of the hill, a nightjar called. It was a musical quavering cry, that sounded like ‘Good Lord, deliver us’; this pious sentiment gave the bird its popular name, the Litany bird. It was the signal which Ralph had been listening for. He felt a bleak satisfaction that Jan Cheroot had followed his orders so strictly. From the position on the slope, Jan Cheroot would have the crowd of amadoda silhouetted against the firelight.
Making it all part of the dance, Ralph whirled away, still prancing and stamping, opening a distance of twenty paces between himself and the nearest Matabele. Here Ralph ended his dance abruptly with his arms spread like a crucifix. He stood deathly still staring at his audience with wild eyes, and a silence fell upon them all.
Slowly Ralph raised his arms above his head. He stood like that for a moment, a heroic figure glistening with fat, every muscle in his arms and chest standing proud, the kilt of civet-tails hanging to his knees, the collar of white cow-tails around his neck, his charm against the death that lurked in the darkness beyond the firelight. His blackened features were twisted into a ferocious grimace that held the watchers spellbound. The dancing and singing had served its purpose well. It had distracted the amadoda, and masked any noise that the Zulus and Hottentots might have made while moving into position around the bivouac.
Now suddenly Ralph let out a demoniacal howl that made the amadoda shudder, and he dropped his arms – the signal for which Harry and Jan Cheroot were waiting.
The curtains of darkness were torn aside by the blast of massed rifle fire. The range was point-blank, the muzzles almost touching the press of dark naked bodies. It smashed into them, a single bullet churning through belly and chest and spine, bringing down four men, stopping only when the slug broke up against one of the heavy bones of pelvis or femur.
So unexpected was the assault, that the mass of warriors milled aimlessly, receiving three volleys from the repeating Winchesters, before they broke and ran. More than half of them were down already, and many of those still on their feet were wounded. They ran on top of Isazi’s Zulus, and piled up against them like water on a dam wall. Ralph heard the great shouts of ‘Ngidla! I have eaten!’ as the Zulus put in the steel, and heard the screams of the dying men.