Bazo bridled instantly. ‘Hark!’ He cocked his head. ‘Do I hear a small baboon barking his boasts from the top of the kopjes?’
The little Zulu grinned at him mirthlessly, and took the stock whip from Ralph’s sweaty hands. Then he walked to the tangled span with a jaunty step.
He touched the big black ox on the neck. ‘Hau, Sathan!’ he greeted him, and at the same time baptized him ‘Devil’.
The great ox rolled one eye at him, seemed to recognize his assurance and immediately quietened. The little Zulu loosed him and took him forward, talking to him easily in a bizarre mixture of Zulu, English and the Cape Dutch taal, and chained him into the lead position.
He went back quickly and pulled the red ox out of the tangle by the rein about his horns.
‘Dutchman—’ he named him, for no good reason. ‘Come, you red thunder!’
And he put him into the lead file beside Sathan and called to them quietly.
‘Donsa, Sathan, pull. Pakamisa, Dutchman, pick up the chain!’ Obediently the pair of bullocks straightened their forelegs and leaned forward against the yoke – and a miracle happened. The long heavy silver chain from the disselboom came up straight and hard as an iron bar, and those animals on the ground were forced to lunge up onto their feet, those that had backed out were pulled into the span, horns and heads pointing forward. In that moment Ralph learned the single most important rule of the open road, keep the chain straight and true, and all else is possible.
Now the little Zulu moved with a deceptively casual air along the double rank of bullocks, touching and talking and wheedling.
‘Hey! Fransman, I can see by your wise and beautiful eyes that you were bom to the wheel!’ And the sturdy black and white beast was led back to his position at the off-wheel.
It took ten minutes, and then the Zulu put the long lash into the air. It hissed like a black mamba and then snaked forward over the ears of the team, not touching a single hair as it fired explosively. The heavy wagon jolted, the white canvas tent that covered the rear half of the long body shook like the imfurling mainsail of a tall ship and then it was rolling away smoothly.
The Zulu crinkled his eyes at Ralph and called a question. ‘Yapi? Where? Which way?’
‘Yakato!’ North!’ Ralph shouted back joyously, and despite himself Bazo snatched up his war shield and assegai and whirled into a frenzied challenge dance, leaping and stabbing at a host of imaginary enemies, shouting defiance and ecstasy to all the world.
The road to the Vaal river was the first leg of the journey, and the ruts were axle deep, and red soil raw as a fresh wound, the dust a fog in the windless air through which it was just possible to make out the horns of the two wheeler bullocks. The dust hid from Ralph his parting view of the sprawling town, and its high stagings above the gaping hole which had been his home and his prison for so many years, and by the time that the other traffic on the road had thinned sufficiently for the dust cloud to settle, they had made five miles and the stagings might have been merely a distant line of dead thorn trees silhouetted against the sunset.
The little Zulu called to his boy who led the front oxen, and the child swung them off the road, and the high rear wheels bumped out of the ruts and then crunched through crisp winter grass as the wagon rolled towards a spreading umbrella-shaped acacia which would give them shelter and firewood for the night.
Walking at the front wheel Ralph pondered the two unexpected additions to his company.
The child had come out of the curtain of red dust, naked except for the little flap of his mutsha in front, and with the roll of sleeping-mat and the cooking-pot balanced upon his head.
He had placed these meagre possessions on the tailboard of the wagon and then, at a nod and a word from the Zulu, had taken the lead rein and plodded solemnly ahead of the span, his bare feet sinking ankle-deep in the powder dust.
Ralph wondered how old he was, and decided he could not be more than ten years of age.
‘What is his name?’ he asked the Zulu.
‘A name?’ The little man shrugged. ‘It is not important. Call him Umfaan – the Boy.’
‘And what is your name?’ Ralph went on, but the little driver suddenly had urgent business at the head of the span and perhaps the dust had clogged his ears for he did not seem to hear the question.
Ralph had to ask the question again, after the outspan, when the Zulu was squatting beside the cooking fire watching Umfaan stir the maize-meal in the black pot.
‘What is your name?’ And the Zulu smiled as though at a secret thought, and then he said:
‘A name can be dangerous, it can hover over a man like a vulture and mark him for death. Before the soldiers came to the royal kraal at Ulundi, I was called one thing—’
Ralph stirred uncomfortably at the reference to the battle that had ended the Zulu War. The tattered tunic that the Zulu wore had once been the same dark blue as that of the Natal police uniform and one of those rents in the faded cloth might have been made by the stabbing blade. Lord Chelmsford had sent the Zulu king and most of his indunas in chains to the island of St Helena, where another emperor had died in captivity. However, some of his fighting chiefs had escaped from Zululand and now wandered homeless exiles across the vast continent. The driver wore the headring of an induna.
‘ – It was a name which men once spoke carefully, but I have not heard it for so long now that I have forgotten it,’ the Zulu went on, and again Ralph wondered if there was a legend still alive amongst the defeated Zulu of a little induna, smaller than the tall warriors he commanded and wizened far beyond his years, who had led them in that terrible charge into the English camp below the Hill of the Little Hand.
In the firelight Ralph studied the Zulu’s tunic again, and he told himself that it was unlikely that it had been taken from the corpse of an Englishman on that grisly field; yet he shivered briefly although the night was warm.
‘Now you have forgotten that name?’ he encouraged, and the Zulu crinkled his eyes again.
‘Now I am called Isazi, the Wise One, for reasons that should be clear even to a Matabele.’
Across the fire Bazo snorted disdainfully, then stood and walked out of the firelight, into the darkness where the jackals piped plaintively.
‘My name is Henshaw,’ Ralph told him. ‘Will you stay with me and drive my wagon all the way?’
‘Why not, Little Hawk?’
‘You do not ask where I am going.’
‘I need a road.’ Isazi shrugged. ‘The one to the north is no longer or harder than the road to the south.’
The jackal yipped again, but much closer this time, and Bazo paused, changed the assegai to his right hand, and answered the cry, cupping his palm over his mouth to give resonance to the sound; and then he moved on to where a small stone kopje shone in the moonlight like a pile of silver bullion.
‘Bazo.’ The greeting was a whisper, soft as the night wind in the pale grass, and a shadow stepped from amongst the moon shadows at the base of the kopje.
‘Kamuza, my brother.’ Bazo went to him and embraced him, open hands upon his shoulders.
‘I have a stone in my belly, heavy with sorrow at this parting.’
‘We will share the road again – one day, we will drink from the beer pot and fight with our shoulders touching—’ Kamuza answered him quietly. ‘But now we are both upon the king’s business.’
Kamuza slipped the thongs that held his kilt in place, and it sagged heavily to his knees, leaving him naked.
‘Hurry,’ he said. ‘I must return before the curfew bell.’ Since the Diamond Trade Act, blacks were not allowed on the streets of Kimberley once the curfew bell had rung.
‘You were not marked by the police?’ Bazo asked, as he removed his own kilt and changed it with Kamuza.
‘They are everywhere, like pepper ticks in the new spring grass,’ Kamuza grunted. ‘But I was not followed.’
Bazo weighed the fur kilt in both hands while Kamuza swiftly belted the replacement
about his own waist.
‘Show me,’ Bazo said, and Kamuza took the kilt back from his hands and spread it on one of the flat moon-washed boulders.
He picked at the knotted thong that doubled the waistband, and as it came undone he opened the secret pouch of soft tanned leather, crusted with ceramic trade beads. The pouch ran the full length of the wide waistband, the opening concealed by the decorative beadwork, and the interior of the long pouch was divided into cells, like a wasp’s nest.
In each stitched leather cell nestled a large pebble that glistened with a slick soapy sheen in the moonlight.
‘Count them,’ Kamuza instructed. ‘Let us agree on the number – and let Lobengula, the great Black Elephant, count the same number into his mighty hands when you lay the belt before him at the kraal of GuBulawayo, the place of killing.’
Bazo touched each diamond with his fingertip, his lips moving silently. ‘Amashumi amatatu!’
‘Thirty,’ Kamuza repeated. ‘It is agreed.’
And they were all large clean stones, the smallest the size of the first joint of a man’s little finger.
Bazo tied the kilt about his waist, the fleecy tails of the bat-eared fox dangling to his knees.
‘It looks well upon you,’ Kamuza nodded, and then went on. ‘Tell Lobengula, the Great Elephant, that I am his dog and I grovel in the dirt at his feet. Tell him that there will be more of the yellow coins and the bright stones. Tell him that his children labour each day in the pit – and there will be more, many more. Every man who takes the road north will bring him riches.’ Kamuza stepped forward and laid his right hand on Bazo’s shoulder.
‘Go in peace, Bazo the Axe.’
‘Stay in peace, my brother, and may the days disappear like raindrops into the desert sand until we smile upon each other once more.’
I sazi put the span to its first real test in the drift of the Vaal river.
The grey waters were barely flowing, but they covered the hubs of the tall iron-shod rear wheels, and the bottom was broken waterwom rock that clanked and rolled under pressure, threatening to jam the wheels and denying purchase to the driving hooves of the span.
Yet they ran the wagon through under load, leaning into the yokes, noses down almost touching the surface of the river, and the wagon tent jolting and rocking behind them.
Until, under the steep cut up the far bank, the rear wheels stuck and the wagon bed tilted alarmingly. Then Isazi showed his expertise. He swung the team wide, giving them a run at it, and when he called to his leaders and burst the air asunder with the thirty-foot lash that tapered to the thickness of twine they went in stiff-legged, jerked her clear, and took the load out of the river bed at a canter, while Isazi pranced and sang their praises and even Umfaan smiled.
Ralph ordered an early outspan under the tall trees on the far bank, for there was good grass and unlimited water, and the next leg of the road to his grandfather Moffat’s mission station was a hundred and twenty miles, hard and dry going all the way.
‘See, Little Hawk,’ Isazi was still rapturous over the performance of his span. ‘See how clever they are. They pick a good patch of grass and eat it up; they do not wander from patch to patch, wasting their time and strength, as lesser beasts might do. Soon they will settle with the cud, and in the morning they will be strong and rested. Each of them is a prince among cattle!’
‘From tomorrow we begin night marches,’ Ralph ordered, and Isazi’s smile faded and he looked severe.
‘I had already made that decision,’ he said sternly, ‘but where did you ever hear of night marching. Little Hawk? It is a trick of the wise ones.’
‘Count me amongst them then, Isazi,’ Ralph told him solemnly, and walked out of camp to find a place upon the riverbank from which to enjoy the sunset.
Here the banks of the Vaal were churned into mounds and irregular hollows, the old river workings, picked over by the first diggers and now abandoned and overgrown. It was a mass burial ground of men’s dreams, and looking upon it Ralph’s high spirits that had buoyed this first day’s trek upon the open road began to evaporate.
It was the first day in his life that Ralph had been free and completely his own man. Walking at the wheel of his own wagon, he had woven dreams of fortune. He had imagined his wagons – fifty, a hundred – carrying his cargoes across the continent. He had seen them coming south again, loaded with ivory and bars of yellow gold. He had seen in his mind’s eye the wide lands, the herds of elephant, the masses of native cattle, the riches that lay out there in the north beckoning to him, warbling the siren call in his ears.
He had been carried so high that now as his spirits turned they fell as low. He looked at the deserted diggings on the banks across the river, the vain scratchings where other men had attempted to turn this great brown slumbering giant of a continent to their own account.
Then suddenly he felt very small and lonely, and afraid. His thoughts turned to his father, and his spirits plunged lower still as he recalled the last words he had spoken.
‘Go then! Go and be damned to you.’
That was not the way he had wanted it. Zouga Ballantyne had been the central figure in his life until that day. A colossus who overshadowed each of his actions, each of his thoughts.
Much as he had chafed under the shackles that his duty to his father had placed upon him, much as he had resented every one of his decisions being made for him, each of his actions ordered, yet now he felt as though the greater part of himself had been removed by some drastic surgery of the soul.
Until this moment he had not really thought of losing his father, he had not let the memory of their brutal parting cut him too deeply. Now suddenly this dirty slow river was the barrier between him and the life he had known. There was no going back – now or ever. He had lost his father and his brother and Jan Cheroot and he was alone and lonely. He felt the acid tears scald his eyelids.
His vision wavered, played him tricks, for across the wide river course, on the far bank was the figure of a horseman.
The horseman slouched easily in the saddle, one hand on his hip, the elbow cocked; and the set of the head upon the broad shoulders was unmistakable.
Slowly Ralph came to his feet, staring in disbelief, and then suddenly he was running and sliding down the sheer bank and splashing waist deep through the grey waters of the ford. Zouga swung down from Tom’s back and ran forward to meet Ralph as he came up the bank.
Then both of them stopped and stared at each other. They had not embraced since the night of Aletta’s funeral, and they could not bring themselves to do so now, though longing was naked in the eyes of both of them.
‘I could not let you go, not like that,’ said Zouga, but Ralph had no reply, for his throat had closed.
‘It is time for you to go out on your own,’ Zouga nodded his golden beard. ‘Past time. You are like an eaglet that has outgrown the nest. I realized that before you did, Ralph, but I did not want it to be. That is why I spoke so cruelly.’
Zouga picked up Tom’s reins and the pony nudged him affectionately. Zouga stroked his velvety muzzle.
‘There are two parting gifts that I have for you.’ He placed the reins in Ralph’s hand. ‘That is one,’ he said evenly, but the green shadows in his eyes betrayed how dearly that gesture had cost him. ‘The other is in Tom’s saddle-bag. It’s a book of notes. Read them at your leisure. You may find them of interest – even of value.’
Still Ralph could not speak. He held the reins awkwardly, and blinked back the stinging under his eyelids.
‘There is one other small gift, but it has no real value. It is only my blessing.’
‘That is all that I really wanted,’ whispered Ralph.
It was six hundred miles to the Shashi river, to the border of Matabeleland.
Isazi inspanned at dusk each evening and they trekked through the cool of the night. When the moon went down and it was utterly dark, then Umfaan threw the lead rein over Dutchman’s head, and the big black ox put his nose
down and stayed on the track, like a hunting dog on the spoor, until the first glimmering of dawn signalled the outspan.
During a good night’s trek they made fifteen miles – but when the going was heavy with sand they might make only five miles.
During the days, while the cattle grazed or chewed the cud in the shade, Ralph saddled up Tom and, with Bazo running beside his stirrup, they hunted.
They found herds of buffalo along the banks of the Zouga river, the river on whose bank Ralph’s father had been born, big herds, two hundred beasts together.
The herd bulls were huge, bovine and bald with age, their backs crusted with the mud from the wallow, the spread of their armoured heads wider than the stretch of a man’s arms, the tips of the polished black horns rising into symmetrical crescents like the points of the sickle moon, while the bosses above their broad foreheads were massively crenellated.
They ran them down, and Tom loved those wild flying chases every bit as much as his rider.
They chased the ghostly grey gemsbuck over the smoking red dunes, and in the thorn country they hunted the stilt-legged giraffe and sent their grotesque but stately bodies plunging and sliding to earth with the crack of rifle fire, the long graceful necks twisting in the agony of death like that of a swan.
They baited with the carcasses of zebra, and the coppery red Kalahari lions came to the taint of blood, and Tom stood down their charge. Though he trembled and snorted and rolled his eyes at the shockingly offensive cat smell, he stood for the shot which Ralph took from the saddle, aiming between the fierce yellow eyes or into the gape of rose-pink jaws starred with white fangs.
Thus, fifty days out from Kimberley they came at last to the Shashi river, and when they had made the crossing Bazo was on his native soil. He put on his war plumes and carrying his shield on his shoulder he walked with a new spring and joy in his stride as he led Ralph to a hilltop from which to survey the way ahead.
‘See how the hills shine,’ Bazo whispered with an almost religious fervour. And it was true. In the early sunlight the granite tops gleamed like precious jewels. Soft, dreaming, ruby, delicate sapphires and glossy pearl shaded like a peacock tail into a fanfare of colour.