‘We need to prepare ourselves. You must remember, Ballantyne, that we have technically only the right to dig for gold. As long as Lobengula does not molest us, we cannot declare war upon him.’
‘But if Lobengula were to interfere in any way with our people and their rights?’
‘That would be another matter.’ Rhodes stopped in front of Zouga’s chair. ‘Then I should certainly end his game for him.’
‘In the meantime the company’s shares are six shillings each,’ Zouga reminded him.
‘We need an incident,’ said Rhodes. ‘But in the meantime we have to prepare and I dare not put it on the wires. I want you to leave immediately for Fort Victoria to speak to Jameson.’ Rhodes swung his big head towards Jordan. ‘Do not make notes of this, Jordan,’ he ordered, and Jordan dutifully lifted his pencil from the pad. ‘Instruct Jameson to send me a series of telegrams on the new wires. Telegrams advising against war, that we can show the British Government and people when it is all over – but in the meantime tell him to prepare for war.’
Rhodes turned back to Jordan. ‘Take an instruction, Jordan. Sell fifty thousand B.S.A. Company shares for what they will fetch. Jameson must have what he needs to do the business. Tell him that, Ballantyne. I shall be behind him all the way – but we need an incident.’
Ralph Ballantyne sat his horse on the heights of the escarpment which fell away before him, in a tumbled splendour of rocky hills and forests. The spring foliage turned the groves of msasa trees into clouds of pink and swelling scarlets, and the air was so clear and bright that he could pick out the telegraph line all the way to the horizon.
The wires were a gossamer thread that glistened red gold in the sunlight, so fragile, so insubstantial, that it seemed impossible that they ran, arrow straight, six hundred miles and more to meet the railhead at Kimberley.
Ralph’s men had laid this line. The surveyors riding ahead to set up the beacons, the axemen following to clear the line, then the wagons bringing up the poles and finally the enormous spools of gleaming copper wire uncoiling endlessly.
Ralph had hired good men, paid them well, and visited them less than once a month. Yet he was proud as he saw the wires sparkle and thought of the importance and significance of this achievement.
Beside him his foreman cursed suddenly. ‘There it is! The thieving bastards!’ And he pointed to where the line of telegraph poles marched up the side of one forested hill. Ralph had thought that cloud shadow had dimmed the sparkle of the copper wire up this slope, but now when he focused his binoculars upon them he saw that the poles had been stripped bare.
‘Come on,’ he said grimly, and rode forward. When they reached the bottom of the slope they found that one of the telegraph poles had been chopped through at the base, and felled like timber. The wires had been hacked through, and the scuff marks in the earth where it had been rolled into bundles had not yet been erased by the wind.
Slowly they rode on up the slope, and Ralph did not have to dismount to read the sign of bare feet.
‘There were at least twenty of them,’ he said. ‘Women and children with them – a family outing, damn them to hell.’
‘It’s the women that put them up to it,’ the foreman agreed. ‘That wire makes beautiful bracelets and bangles. The black girls just love it.’
At the top of the slope another telegraph pole had been felled and the wire snipped through.
‘They have got away with five hundred yards of wire,’ Ralph scowled. ‘But next time it could be five thousand. Do you know who they are?’
The foreman shrugged. ‘The local Mashona chief is Matanka. His village is just the other side of the valley. You can see the smoke from here.’
Ralph slipped his rifle out of its boot under his knee. It was a magnificent new Winchester Repeater Model 1890 with his name engraved and chased with gold into the metal of the block. He levered a round into the breech.
‘Let’s go to see brother Matanka.’
He was an old man, with legs like a stork and a cap of pure white wool covering his head. He trembled with fear and fell on his knees before this furious young white man with a rifle in his hand.
‘Fifty head,’ Ralph told him. ‘And next time your people touch the wires it will be a hundred.’
Ralph and his foreman cut the fattest cattle out of Matanka’s herds and drove them ahead of them, up the escarpment and into the little white settlement of Fort Victoria which had grown up mid-way between the Shashi river and Fort Salisbury.
‘All right,’ Ralph told his foreman. ‘You can take them from here. Turn them over to the auctioneer, we should get ten pounds a head for them.’
‘That will cover the cost of replacing the wires fifty times over,’ the foreman grinned.
‘I don’t believe in taking a loss when I don’t have to,’ Ralph laughed. ‘Get on with you, I’ll have to go down and square it with the good doctor.’
Doctor Jameson’s office, as administrator of the Charterlands of the British South Africa Company, was a wood and iron building with an untidily thatched roof directly opposite the only canteen in Fort Victoria.
‘Ah, young Ballantyne,’ Jameson greeted Ralph, and secretly enjoyed Ralph’s frown of annoyance. He did not share the general high opinion of this youngster. He was too bumptious and too successful by a half, while physically he was all that Jameson was not; tall and broad-shouldered, with a striking appearance and forceful presence.
The wags were saying that one day Ralph Ballantyne would own the half of the Charterland that Rhodes did not already have his brand on. However, even Jameson had to grant that if you wanted something done, no matter how difficult, and if you wanted it done swiftly and thoroughly, and if you were prepared to pay top dollar, then Ralph Ballantyne was your man.
‘Ah, Jameson.’ Ralph retaliated by dropping the mousy little doctor’s title from the greeting, and by turning immediately to the other man in the room.
‘General St John.’ Ralph flashed that compelling smile. ‘How good to see you, sir! When did you get into Fort Victoria?’
Mungo St John limped across the room to take Ralph’s hand, and his single eye gleamed.
‘Got in this very morning.’
‘Congratulations on your appointment, sir. We need a good soldier up here, the way things are going.’ Ralph’s compliment was an oblique jibe at Dr Jameson’s own military aspirations. Rhodes had very recently appointed Mungo St John as the Company’s Chief of Staff. He would be under Jameson’s administration, naturally, but would be directly responsible for police and military affairs in the Charterlands of Rhodesia.
‘Did your men find the break in the wires?’ Jameson interrupted them.
‘Bangles and bracelets,’ Ralph nodded. ‘That’s what happened to the wires. I have given the local chief a lesson that I hope will teach him to behave himself. I fined him fifty head of cattle.’
Jameson frowned quickly.
‘Lobengula considers Matanka to be his vassal. He owns those cattle, the Mashona merely tend the herds on the king’s behalf.’
Ralph shrugged. ‘Then Matanka will have some explaining to do, and rather him than me, and that’s the truth.’
‘Lobengula won’t let this pass—’ Jameson broke off, and the frown cleared. He began to pace up and down behind his desk with excited, hopping, bird-like steps. ‘Perhaps,’ he twitched at his scraggly little moustache, ‘perhaps this is what we have been waiting for. Lobengula will not let it pass – nor, by God, will we.’ He paused and looked at Ralph. ‘How soon will you have the wires restored?’
‘By noon tomorrow,’ Ralph told him promptly.
‘Good! Good! We must get a message through to your father at GuBulawayo. If he protests to Lobengula that his vassals are stealing Company property, and informs him that we have fined him in cattle, what will Lobengula do?’
‘He will send an impi to punish Matanka.’
‘Punish him?’
‘Cut his head off, kill his men, rape his wom
en and burn his village.’
‘Exactly.’ Jameson punched his fist into his palm. ‘And Matanka is on Company ground and under protection of the British flag. It will be our duty, our bounden duty, to drive off Lobengula’s men.’
‘War!’ said Ralph.
‘War,’ agreed St John softly. ‘Well done, young fellow. This is what we have been waiting for.’
‘Ballantyne, can you give me a tender to provide wagons and supplies for an expeditionary force, say five hundred men; we’ll need twenty-five wagons, six hundred horses, when we drive for GuBulawayo.’
‘When do you expect to march?’
‘Before the rains.’ Jameson was decisive. ‘If we go, then we’ll have to finish it before the rains break.’
‘I will have a tender for you by the time the telegraph is reopened tomorrow.’
Ralph jumped down from the saddle and tossed his reins to the groom who came running.
Although it was only a temporary lodging which Ralph used on his infrequent visits to check the progress of his construction gangs, his transport stages and his trading posts – yet it was the grandest house in Fort Victoria, with glass in the windows and insect mesh screening the doors.
His spurs clattered on the steps as he stormed up onto the verandah, and Cathy heard him and came running with the baby on her hip.
‘You are home so soon,’ she cried delightedly, rebuttoning her bodice from the feeding.
‘Couldn’t stay away from you two.’ He laughed and smacked a kiss on her mouth, then snatched the baby from her and tossed him high.
‘Do be careful.’ Cathy hopped anxiously to try and take him back, but Jonathan gurgled joyously and kicked with excitement, and a trickle of milk reappeared and ran down his chin.
‘Mucky little devil.’ Ralph held him high and sniffed at his son. ‘Both ends at once, by God. Here, Katie.’ He handed the infant to her and held her around the waist.
‘We are going to GuBulawayo,’ he said.
‘Who?’ She looked up at him in confusion.
‘St John and the good doctor and I, and when we get there B.S.A. shares will go to five pounds. Last price I heard before the wires were cut was five shillings. The first message that goes out tomorrow is my buying order to Aaron Fagan – for fifty thousand British South Africans!’
Bazo’s impi came sweeping down out of the western forests, silent as shadows and murderous as wild hunting dogs.
‘Kill that dog Matanka,’ the king had ordered. ‘Kill him and all his men.’ And Bazo caught them in the dawn, as the first of them came out of their huts yawning and rubbing the sleep from their eyes, and then they chased the young girls cackling and shrieking like hens amongst the huts, and roped them in bunches.
‘And all his men,’ had been the king’s order, and some of Matanka’s men were working for the white men, at the Prince Mine, one of the very few paying gold reefs in Mashonaland. They were breaking and carrying the rock.
‘Do not interfere,’ Bazo told the mine overseer. ‘This is the king’s business. No white man will be hurt, that is the king’s order.’ And they chased the Mashona labourers into the crushing plant and stabbed them as they hid under the sorting-tables.
They came racing down the telegraph line, five hundred red shields. The Mashona wiremen were unwinding the huge drums and stringing the shining strands.
‘No white men will be hurt,’ Bazo shouted as he let his young men run. ‘Stand aside, white men.’ But now Bazo was mad with blood and boastful with the killing fever. ‘This is not for you, white men. Not yet, white men, but your day will come.’
They dragged the Mashona down from the telegraph poles, and bayed about them like hounds tearing a fox to pieces, while the Mashona screamed to their white masters for protection.
‘Bring in the cattle, all Matanka’s cattle,’ the king had ordered, and Bazo’s men swept the Mashona pastures, and drove the sprawling multi-coloured herds back into the west in the clouds of their own dust; and with the herds were mingled some of the white men’s cattle – for one beast looks like another, and the marks burned by hot iron into the hide meant nothing to the Matabele warriors.
It was all done so swiftly that Jameson had to ride hard with his band of hastily assembled volunteers to catch them before they reached the frontier of the Charterland.
He had thirty-eight men with him, and when he saw the horsemen, Bazo turned back and with the massed warriors at his back he greeted Jameson.
‘Sakubona, Daketela! I see you, Doctor! Fear not, by the king’s orders no white man will be molested.’
But the volunteers bunched their horses, and there was the snick of breech blocks and the rattle of bolts as they loaded. Thirty-eight against five hundred, and they were jumpy and white-faced.
The little doctor spurred forward, and Ralph murmured to St John: ‘By God, the man is a bantam cock, and he’ll get us all into it yet.’
But Jameson showed no agitation as he stood in the stirrups and called: ‘Men of Matabele, why have you crossed the border?’
‘Hau, Daketela!’ Bazo answered him with mock astonishment. ‘What border is this you speak of? Surely this land, all of it, belongs to Lobengula. There are no borders.’
‘The men you have slaughtered are under my protection.’
‘The men we killed were Mashona,’ Bazo replied scornfully. ‘And the Mashona are Lobengula’s dogs – to kill or keep as he wishes.’
‘The cattle you have stolen belong to my people.’
‘All the Mashona cattle belong to the king.’
Then St John shouted over him, ‘Careful, Jameson, there is treachery here, watch those men on your left.’
Some of Bazo’s men had pressed forward, the better to see and to hear. A few of them were armed with ancient Martini-Henry rifles, probably those with which Rhodes had paid the king for his concession.
Jameson swung his horse to face them.
‘Back!’ he shouted. ‘Back, I say.’ He lifted his rifle to enforce his order, and one of the Matabele instinctively copied the gesture, half threatening the little group of mounted white men with his rifle.
Mungo St John flung up his rifle, and as it touched his shoulder he fired. The shot was a thunderous burst of sound in the heated dusty air, and the heavy bullet smashed into the Matabele’s naked chest. His rifle clattered on the ground, and a little feather of bright crimson sprayed from his chest. The warrior pirouetted slowly, almost gracefully, until they looked into the shocking gape of the exit wound between his shoulder blades. Then the warrior collapsed, and his legs kicked convulsively.
‘Do not touch a white man!’ Bazo bellowed into the terrible silence, but not more than half a dozen of the horsemen understood the language. To the others it sounded like a killing order. The crash of volleyed rifle fire mingled with the trample of hooves and whinny of panicky horses. The banks of blue gunsmoke blended with the billowing pale dust and the rippling plumes of running warriors.
Bazo’s impi was streaming away into the forest, carrying their wounded with them, and slowly the rifle fire stuttered and faded, and the horses quietened. The little group sat, silent and appalled, and stared at the Matabele dead strewn across the open ground ahead of them. They looked like the abandoned toys of a petulant child.
Ralph Ballantyne had not drawn the gold-engraved Winchester from its boot, and there was a long unlit cheroot between his white teeth. He spoke around it, smiling ironically, but his eyes were cold and green and hard.
‘I count thirty-three of ‘em down, Doctor Jim,’ he said loudly. ‘Not a bad bag really, even though they were sitting birds.’ And he struck a Vesta against the thigh of his riding breeches and lit the cheroot; then he gathered the reins and turned his horses’s head back towards the fort.
Lobengula turned the small canvas bag of sovereigns in his narrow graceful hands. He stood in the centre of the goat kraal, and there were only three Matabele with him, Gandang and Somabula and Babiaan. The others he had sent away.
/> Before him stood a little white group. Zouga had brought Louise with him to the meeting. He had not dared leave her alone in the cottage beyond the stockade of the royal kraal, not with the mood of the Matabele as it had been ever since Jameson’s massacre at Fort Victoria.
Facing the king also, but a little separated from the other couple, stood Robyn and Clinton Codrington.
Still fingering the bag of gold, Lobengula turned his face to Robyn.
‘See, Nomusa, these are the gold queens that you advised me to accept from Lodzi.’
‘I am deeply ashamed, oh King,’ Robyn whispered.
‘Tell me faithfully, did I give away my land when I signed the paper?’
‘No, King, you gave away only the gold beneath it.’
‘But how can men dig for gold without the land over it?’ Lobengula asked, and Robyn was silent and miserable.
‘Nomusa, you said that Lodzi was a man of honour. So why does he do these things to me? His young men swagger across my land and call it their own. They shoot down my warriors, and now they gather a great army against me, with wagons and guns and thousands of soldiers. How can Lodzi do this to me, Nomusa?’
‘I cannot answer you, oh King. I deceived you as I was myself deceived.’
Lobengula sighed. ‘I believe you, Nomusa. There is still no quarrel between us. Bring your family, all your people here to my kraal that I may protect you through the dark times that lie ahead.’
‘I do not deserve the king’s consideration.’ She choked on the words.
‘No harm will come to you, Nomusa. You have Lobengula’s word upon it.’ He turned slowly back to Zouga.
‘This gold, Bakela. Does it pay me for the blood of my young men?’ And he threw the bag at Zouga’s feet. ‘Pick up your gold, Bakela, and take it back to Lodzi.’
‘Lobengula, I am your friend – and I tell you this as a friend. If you refuse the monthly payment, then Lodzi will look upon it as a breaking of faith.’
‘Was not the killing of my young men a breaking of faith, Bakela?’ Lobengula asked sadly. ‘If it was not, then my people believe it to be so. The regiments are gathered, so that they darken the Hills of the Indunas; they wear their plumes and carry their assegais and their guns, and their eyes are red. The blood of Matabele has been spilled, Bakela, and the enemies of the king gather against him.’