The spears were drumming on the rawhide shields now, and the deep humming chorus of the running warriors was almost deafening. They could only be yards from the barricade of wagons, but Zouga did not look up. He concentrated all his attention on the intricate task of loading the Maxim.
‘Load two!’ The gunner cranked again, and the feed block clattered. Zouga jerked the brass tag leader and the gunner let the handle fly back the second time. The first round shot smoothly into the breech.
‘Loaded and cocked!’ Zouga said, and tapped the gunner on the shoulder. Now they both looked up. The front rank of shields and war plumes seemed to curl over where they squatted beside the weapon, like a wave breaking on a beach.
It was the moment of the ‘closing in’ that the amadoda loved and lived for, already the shields were going up on high to free the spear arms and the steel rasped as the blades were cleared for the stabbing.
The joyous roar of the killing chant sundered the night; they were at the wagons, breaking into the laager, and the gunner sat stiffly upright with the gun between his knees and both hands on the traversing handles. He hooked his fingers through the rings of the safety guard, and as it lifted, he pressed his thumbs down on the chequered firing button.
The muzzle was almost touching the belly of a tall plumed warrior coming in between the wagons when the thick barrel shuddered, and a bright bar of flickering light sprang from the muzzle and the hammering clatter dinned upon Zouga’s eardrums. It sounded as though a giant was drawing a steel bar horizontally across a sheet of corrugated iron, and miraculously the warrior was blown away.
The gunner traversed the Maxim back and forth, like a meticulous housewife sweeping a dusty floor, and the continuous muzzle flashes lit the open clay pan with a dancing unearthly light.
The black tide of Matabele was no longer advancing; it stood static in front of the wagons; and though its crest foamed with dancing plumes and the shields that formed the body of the wave heaved and clattered and tumbled, they came no closer. They were dammed by the stroking, flickering bar of light that sprang from the Maxim gun. The solid stream of bullets played like a jet of water from a firehose upon them, and as each of the chanting warriors came racing up, he died on the same spot as the man in front of him had died, and he fell upon his corpse, while another warrior appeared in the space he had left, and the gun swung back, hammering and jerking, and that man went down, his shield clattering on the baked clay of the pan and the flash of the gun reflected from the burnished steel of his assegai as it went spinning from his nerveless hand.
All around the square the Maxims ripped and roared, and six hundred repeating rifles underscored that hellish chorus. The air was blue with gunsmoke, and the reek of cordite burned the throats of the troopers and made their eyes run, so that they seemed to be weeping for the terrible butchery in which they were engaged.
Still the Matabele came on, though now they had to clamber over a shapeless barricade of their own dead, and the gunner beside Zouga lifted his thumbs from the button trigger and twirled the elevation wheel of the Maxim, lifting the muzzle an inch so as to keep the fire on the belly line of the warriors as they climbed over the mounds of corpses.
Then once again the gun fluttered and roared, the glossy black bodies jerked and twitched and bucked as the stream of bullets tore into them.
Still the Matabele came on.
‘By God, will they never stop!’ yelled the gunner. The muzzle of the gun glowed cherry red, like a horseshoe fresh from the forge, and the steam from the water jacket whistled shrilly as the coolant boiled. The bright brass cases spewed from the extractor; they pinged and pattered against the iron-shod wheel of the wagon and formed a glittering mound beneath it.
‘Empty gun!’ Zouga yelled, as the end of the belt whipped into the clattering breech. They had been firing for less than sixty seconds, and the case of five hundred belted cartridges was empty.
Zouga kicked it aside and dragged up a fresh case, and the Matabele surged towards the silent gun.
‘Ready, load one!’ Zouga yelled.
‘Load two!’ They were swarming into the gap between the wagons.
‘Loaded and cocked!’ And once again that fluttering beat like the wings of a dark angel dulled their senses, and the barrel swung back and forth, back and forth, washing them away into the darkness.
‘They’re running,’ shouted the gunner. ‘Look at them run!’
In front of the wagons lay nothing but the piles of bodies. Here and there a dying man made feeble little movements, groping for a lost assegai or trying to staunch one of the awful holes in his flesh with fumbling fingers.
Beyond the massed corpses, the wounded and maimed were dragging themselves back towards the treeline, leaving dark wet smears on the clay. One of them was on his feet, staggering in aimless circles, using both hands to hold his bulging entrails from falling out of the open pouch of his belly. The Maxim had gutted him like a fish.
Beyond the trees the sky was a marvellous shade of ashes of roses, and the clouds were picked out in smoking scarlets and pipings of pale gold as the dawn came up in silent fury over the reeking field.
‘Them black bastards have had enough.’ The Maxim gunner giggled with mirthless, nervous reaction to that glimpse that he had just had into hell itself.
‘They’ll be back,’ said Zouga quietly, as he dragged up another case of belted ammunition and knocked off the lid.
‘You did all right, mate,’ the gunner giggled again, staring with wide horrified eyes at the piles of dead.
‘Refill the water in your condenser, soldier,’ Zouga ordered him. ‘The gun’s over-heating, you’ll have a jam when the next wave hits.’
‘Sir!’ The gunner realized suddenly who Zouga was. ‘Sorry, sir.’
‘Here is your loader.’ The number two came up breathlessly. He was a fresh-faced lad, curly-headed and pink-cheeked. He looked more like a choirboy than a machine-gunner.
‘Where were you, trooper?’ Zouga demanded.
‘Checking the horses, sir. It was all over so quickly.’
‘Listen!’ Zouga ordered, as the boy took his place at the gun.
From the treeline, across the bloodied clay pan, came the sound of singing – deep and sonorous in the dawn. It was the praise song of the ‘Moles-who-burrow-under-a-mountain’.
‘Stand to your gun, trooper,’ Zouga ordered. ‘It’s not over yet.’ And he turned on his heel and went striding down the line of wagons, reloading the revolver from his belt as he went.
Singing, Bazo strode down the squatting lines of his impi, and they sang with him.
He had held their shattered ranks just beyond the edge of the treeline as they came streaming back from the square of wagons. They were re-grouped now, singing as they screwed their courage for the next assault. What remained of Manonda’s impi was mingled with his. They had been in the first wave of the attack, and very few of them were left.
Suddenly there was a great rushing sound in the air above the tree tops, like the onrush of the first wild storm of summer. Then in the midst of the squatting ranks a tall column of smoke and dust and flame sprang into the air, and the bodies of men were flung high with it.
‘Kill the smoke devil,’ somebody screamed, and another shell burst amongst them, and another, leaping fountains of smoke and flame; and the maddened warriors fired their ancient Martini-Henry rifles at these smoke devils, killing and wounding their comrades on the far side.
‘They are not devils,’ shouted Bazo, but his voice was lost in the barrage of artillery fire, and the pandemonium of warriors trying to defend themselves against something they did not understand.
‘Come!’ Bazo bellowed. There was only one way to bring them under control again.
‘To the wagons. Forward to the wagons.’ And those close enough to hear him followed, and the others, seeing them go, went bounding after them. They came out of the treeline in a swarm, and the other shattered impis heard the war chant go up, and turned agai
n back onto the open pan of pale grey clay – and immediately that terrible clattering din, like the laughter of maniacs, began again and the air was filled with the flute and crack of a thousand whiplashes.
‘They are coming again,’ Zouga said quietly, almost to himself. ‘This is the fifth time.’
‘It’s madness.’ Mungo St John murmured, as the racing ranks came out of the trees and over the lip of the river bank, their plumes seething like the surface of boiling milk as they came onto the guns.
The field guns were depressed to the limit of their travel, the fuses screwed down to their shortest range, and the shrapnel bursts were strangely beautiful in the morning sky, popping open like pods of new cotton, shot through with pretty red fire.
The storm of small-arms fire was like the monsoon rains beating on an iron roof, and as the impis came into the drifting banks of gunsmoke, the dense ranks thinned out, and lost momentum, like a wave sliding up a steep beach.
Once again the wave faltered, and just short of the wagons it stopped, hesitated and then was going back, and the storm of gunfire continued long after the last of them had disappeared amongst the trees. In a kind of insensate fury the Maxim bullets tore wet white slabs of bark off the tree trunks, and then one after the other fell silent.
Standing beside Zouga, Dr Jameson scrubbed his hands together gleefully. ‘It’s all over. Their impis are destroyed, shattered, blown away. It’s better than we could ever have hoped for. Tell me, St John, as a military man, what do you estimate their losses to be so far?’
Mungo St John considered the question seriously, climbing up onto one of the wagons the better to survey the field, ignoring the spattering of Martini-Henry rifle fire from the edge of the treeline where a few Matabele snipers were making very poor practice; convinced that raising their sights to the maximum made the bullets more powerful, most of their fire crackled high over the heads of the men manning the wagons.
Standing on the wagon Mungo St John lit a cheroot without transferring his attention from the carnage which surrounded them. At last he said gravely, ‘Not less than two thousand casualties – perhaps as many as three.’
‘Why don’t you send a party out to count the bag, Doctor?’ Zouga suggested, and Jameson did not recognize the sarcasm.
‘We cannot spare the delay – more is the pity. We can still get in a full day’s trek. That will look good in the Company report.’ He pulled the gold chain from his fob pocket and sprang the lid of his watch with his thumbnail ‘Eight o’clock,’ he marvelled. ‘It’s only eight o’clock in the morning. Do you realize that we have won a decisive battle before breakfast, gentlemen, and that by ten o’clock we can be on our way to Lobengula’s royal kraal? I think we have done our shareholders rather proud.’
‘I think,’ Zouga cut in gently. ‘That we still have a little more work to do. They are coming again.’
‘I don’t believe this,’ Mungo St John marvelled.
Bazo paced slowly down the sparse ranks. This was no longer an impi. It was a pathetic little band of desperate survivors. Most of them had bound up their wounds with bloody bunches of green leaves, and their eyes had that strange fixed stare of men who had just looked into eternity. They were no longer singing, they squatted in silence – but they were still facing towards the white men’s laager.
Bazo passed beyond the shortened line and paused under the spreading branches of a wild teak tree. He looked up.
Manonda, the commander of what had once been the glorious Insukamini impi, hung by his neck from one of the main branches. There was a thong of rawhide around his throat, and his eyes were still open, bulging in a defiant glare towards his enemies. His right leg, shattered above the knee by machine-gun fire, was twisted at an ugly angle and hung lower than his other leg.
Bazo lifted his assegai in a salute to the dead induna.
‘I greet you, Manonda, who chose death rather than to drink the bitter draught of defeat,’ he shouted.
The Insukamini impi was no more. Its warriors lay in deep windrows in front of the wagons.
‘I praise you, Manonda, who chose death rather than to live a cripple and a slave. Go in peace, Manonda – and speak sweetly to the spirits on our behalf.’
Bazo turned back and stood before the waiting, silent ranks. The early morning sun, just clearing the tree tops, threw long black shadows in front of them.
‘Are the eyes still red, my children?’ Bazo sang out in a high clear voice.
‘They are still red, Baba!’ they answered him in a bass chorus.
‘Then let us go to do the work which still waits to be done.’
Where ten amadoda had raced in that first wave, now two made the last charge across the blood-soaked clay. Only one of that pitiful band went more than halfway between the tree lines and the wagons. The rest of them turned back and left Bazo to run on alone. He was sobbing with each stride, his mouth open, the sweat running in oily snakes down his naked chest. He did not feel the first bullet that struck him. It was just a sudden numbness as though part of his body was missing, and he ran on, jumping over a pile of twisted corpses, and now the sound of the guns seemed muted and far-off, and there was another greater dinning in his ears that boomed and echoed strangely like the thunder of a mighty waterfall.
He felt another sharp tug, like the curved red-tipped thorn of the ‘wait-a-bit’ tree hooking into his flesh, but there was no pain. The roaring in his head was louder, and his vision narrowed so that he seemed to be looking down a long tunnel in the darkness.
Again he felt that irritating but painless jerk and tug in his flesh, and he was suddenly weary. He just wanted to lie down and rest, but he kept on towards the flashing white canvas of the wagon tents. Yet again that sharp insistent pull as though he was held on a leash, and his legs buckled under him. Quite gently he toppled forward and lay with his face against the hard sun-baked clay.
The sound of the guns had ceased, but in its place was another sound, it was the sound of cheering; behind the wall of wagons the white men were cheering themselves.
Bazo was tired, so utterly deathly tired. He closed his eyes and let the darkness come.
The wind had swung suddenly and unseasonably into the east, and there was a cold dank mist lying on the hills, the fine guti which made the trees drip dismally and chilled every bone in Tanase’s body as she trudged up a narrow path that led to a saddle between two pearly grey granite peaks. Over her shoulders was a leather cloak and on her head she balanced a bundle of possessions which she had salvaged from the cave of the Umlimo.
She reached the saddle and looked down into yet another valley choked with dense, dark green undergrowth. She searched it eagerly, but then her spirits slowly fell again. Like all the others, it was devoid of any human presence.
Since she had left the secret valley, the moon had reached its full, and waned to nothingness, and was once again a curved yellow sliver in the night sky. All that time she had searched for the women and children of the Matabele nation. She knew they were here, hiding somewhere in the Matopos, for it was always the way. When a powerful enemy threatened the nation, the women and children were sent into the hills – but it was such a vast area, so many valleys and deep labyrinthine caves that she might search a lifetime without finding them.
Tanase started slowly down into the deserted valley. Her legs felt leaden, and another spasm of nausea brought saliva flooding from under her tongue. She swallowed it down, but when she reached the floor of the valley, she sank down onto a moss-covered rock beside the little stream.
She knew what was the cause of her malady; though she had missed her courses by only a few days, she knew that the loathsome seed that her pale, hairy, balloon-bellied ravisher had pumped into her had struck and taken hold, and she knew what she must do.
She laid aside her load and searched for dry kindling under the trees where the guti had not yet dampened it. She piled it in the protected lee of a sheltering rock, and crouched over it.
For many long m
inutes she concentrated all her will upon it. Then at last she sighed, and her shoulders slumped. Even this minor power, this small magic of fire making, had gone from her. As the white man with the golden beard had warned her, she was Umlimo no longer. She was just a young woman, without strange gifts or terrible duties, and she was free. The spirits could make no demands upon her, she was free at last to seek out the man she loved.
As she prepared to make fire in the conventional manner, with the tiny bow for twirling the dry twig, two passions gave her strength to face the ordeal ahead of her – her love and her equally fierce hatred.
When the contents of the little clay pot boiled, she added the shreds of dried bark of the tambooti to it, and immediately the sweet odour of the poisonous steam cloyed upon the back of her throat.
The straight sharp black horn of the gemsbuck had been clipped off at the tip so that it could be used for cupping blood, or as a funnel for introducing fluids into the body.
Tanase spread the leather cloak below the rock shelter and lay on it, flat upon her back, with her feet braced high against rough granite. She had lubricated the horn with fat, and she took a deep breath, clenched her jaw upon it, and then slid the horn into herself. When it met resistance, she manipulated it carefully, but firmly, and then her breath burst from her in a gasp of agony as the point found the opening and forced its way still farther into her secret depths.
The pain gave her a strange unholy joy, as though she were inflicting it upon the hated thing that had taken root within her. She lifted herself on one elbow, and tested the contents of the little clay pot. It was just cool enough for her to be able to bear the heat when she plunged her forefinger into it.
She took up the pot and poured it into the mouth of the long black funnel, and this time she moaned, and her back arched involuntarily, but she poured until the pot was empty. There was the coppery salt taste of blood in her mouth, and she realized that she had bitten through her own lip. She seized the horn and plucked it out of herself, and then she curled up on the leather cloak and hugged her knees to her bosom, shuddering and moaning at the fire in her womb.