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.’
‘Who 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?’
They 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.
Gandang led them, and a pace behind him on either hand came his half-brothers Babiaan and Somabula, and behind them again the other sons of Mashobane, wearing the headrings of honour and carrying every one of them the broad silver killing blades and the tall rawhide shields that gave them their name Matabele, ‘the People of the Long Shields’.
Ten paces in front of Zouga, Gandang stopped and grounded his shield, and the two men stared deeply into each other’s eyes, and both of them were thinking of the day they had first met thirty years and more before.
‘I see you, Gandang, son of Mzilikazi,’ Zouga said at last.
‘I see you, Bakela, the one who strikes with the fist.’
And behind Zouga Mr Rhodes ordered calmly, ‘Ask him if it is to be war or peace.’
Zouga did not take his eyes from those of the tall emaciated induna.
‘Are the eyes still red for war?’ he asked.
Gandang’s reply was a deep rumble, but it carried clearly to every induna who followed him, and it rose up to the massed ranks of warriors upon the heights.
‘Tell Lodzi that the eyes are white,’ he said, and he stooped and laid his shield and his assegai upon the ground at his feet.
Two Matabele, dressed only in loincloths, pushed the steel cocopan along the narrow-gauge railway tracks. When they reached the tip, one of them knocked out the retaining pin and the steel pan swivelled and spilled its five-ton load of sugary blue quartz in the funnel-shaped chute. The rock tumbled and rolled into the sizing box, and piled on the steel grating where another dozen Matabele fell upon it with ten-pound sledgehammers, and broke it up so that it could fall through the grating into the stamp boxes below.
The stamps were of massive cast iron; hissing steam drove them in a monotonous see-saw rhythm, pounding the ore to the consistency of talcum powder. The roar of the stamps was ear-numbing. A continuous stream of water, piped up from the stream in the valley below, sluiced the powdered ore out of the stamp boxes and carried it down the wooden gutters to the James tables.
In the low open-sided hut, Harry Mellow stood over the No. 1 table, and watched the flow of thick mud-laden water washing across the heavy copper sheet that was the tabletop. The top was inclined to allow the worthless mud to run to waste, and eccentric cams agitated the table gently to spread the flow and ensure that every particle of ore touched the coated surface of the table. Harry closed the screw valve, and diverted the flow of mud to the No. 2 table. Then he threw the lever and the agitation of the table ceased.
Harry glanced up at Ralph Ballantyne and Vicky who were watching him avidly, and he cocked a thumb to reassure them – the thunderous roar of the stamps drowned all conversation here – and then Harry stooped over the table once more. The tabletop was coated with a thick layer of quicksilver, and, using a wide spatula, Harry began scraping it off the copper and squeezing it into a heavy dark ball. One of the unique properties of mercury is its ability to mop up particles of gold the way that blotting paper sucks up ink.
When Harry had finished, he had a ball of amalgamated mercury twice the size of a baseball, that weighed almost forty pounds. He needed both hands to lift it. He carried it across to the thatched rondavel that served as laboratory and refinery for the Harkness Mine, and Ralph and Vicky hurried after him, and crowded into the tiny room behind him.
The three of them watched with utter fascination as the ball of amalgam began to dissolve and bubble in the retort over the intense blue flame of the primus stove.
‘We cook off the mercury,’ Harry explained, ‘and condense it again, but what we have left behind is this.’
The boiling silver liquid reduced in quantity, and began to change in colour. They caught the first reddish-yellow promise, the gleam that has enchanted men for more than six thousand years.
‘Just look at it!’ Vicky clapped her hands with excitement, shaking out her thick coppery tresses, and her eyes shone as though with a reflection of the lustre of the precious liquid that she was watching. The last of the mercury boiled away, and left behind a deep glowing puddle of pure gold.
‘Gold,’ said Ralph Ballantyne. ‘The first gold of the Harkness Mine.’ And then he threw back his head and laughed. The sound startled them. They had not heard Ralph laugh since he had left Bulawayo, and while they stared at him, he seized both of them, Vicky in one arm and Harry in the other, and danced them out into the sunlight.
They danced in a circle, and the two men whooped and howled, Ralph like a highlander, and Harry like a Plains Indian, while the Matabele hammer-boys broke off their labours and watched them, first with astonishment, and then chuckling in sympathy.
Vicky broke out of the circle first, panting and holding the first bulge of her pregnant tummy in both hands.
‘You are mad!’ she laughed breathlessly. ‘Mad! Both of you! And I love you for it.’
The mix was fifty-fifty, half river-clay dug from the banks of the Khami and half yellow anthill clay, the adhesive qualities of which had been enhanced by the saliva of the termites which had carried it up through their subterranean tunnels to the surface. The clays were puddled in a pit beside the bottom well, the same well that Clinton Codrington, Robyn’s first husband, and Jordan Ballantyne had dug together so long ago, even before the Charter Company’s pioneers had first ridden into Matabeleland.
Two of the Mission converts cranked up each bucketful from the well, and spilled it into the mixing pit, another two shovelled in the clay and a dozen naked black children, led by Robert St John, made a game out of trampling the clay to the correct consistency. Robyn St John was helping pack the clay into the oblong wooden moulds, each eighteen inches by nine. A line of Mission boys and girls carried the filled moulds away to the drying ground, where they carefully turned out the wet bricks onto the beds of dry grass, and then hurried back with the empty moulds to
have them refilled.
There were thousands of yellow bricks lying in long lines in the sun, but Robyn had calculated that they needed at least twenty thousand for the new church alone. Then of course they would have to cut all the timber and cure it, and in a month’s time the thatch grass in the vleis would be tall enough to begin cutting.
Robyn straightened and placed her muddied yellow hand in the small of her back to ease the cramping muscles. A lock of grey-flecked hair had escaped from under the scarf she had knotted over her head, and there was a smear of mud down her cheek and neck, but the little runnels of her own sweat were eroding this away and staining the high collar of her blouse with it.
She looked up at the burned-out ruins of the Mission; the charred roof beams had fallen in and the heavy rains of the last wet season had dissolved the unbaked brick walls into a shapeless hillock. They would have to re-lay every brick, and lift every rafter into place again, and the prospect of all that grinding, unremitting labour gave Robyn St John a deep and exciting sense of anticipation. She felt as strong and alive as the young medical missionary who had first stepped onto this unforgiving African soil almost forty years before.
‘Thy will be done, dear Lord,’ she said aloud, and the Matabele girl beside her cried happily, ‘Amen, Nomusa!’
Robyn smiled at her, and was about to bend once more to the brick moulds, when she started, shaded her eyes, and then picked up her skirts and rushed down the track towards the river, running like a young girl.
‘Juba,’ she cried. ‘Where have you been? I have waited so long for you to come home.’
Juba set down the heavy load she carried balanced on her head, and came lumbering to meet her.
‘Nomusa!’ She was weeping as she hugged Robyn to her. Great fat oily tears slid down her cheeks and mingled with the sweat and mud on Robyn’s face.