by Wilbur Smith
As always, the two tents were set close together, almost touching. The gallant Englishman guarding the woman, Camacho smiled again, and felt his drowsiness lifting miraculously as his groin charged once more. He wished the night away, for he had already waited so long.
Night came with the dramatic suddenness of Africa, within minutes the valley was filled with shadows, the sunset made its last theatrical flare of apricot and old gold light and then it was dark.
For an hour more Camacho could see the occasional dark figure silhouetted by the flames of the camp fires. Once the sound of singing carried softly and sweetly to the ridge, and the other camp sounds, the clank of a bucket, the thud of a log thrown on the fire, the drowsy murmur of voices, showed that the routine was unaltered, and the camp completely unaware.
The noises faded and the fires died. The silence and the darkness was disturbed only by the piping lament of a jackal across the valley.
The star patterns turned slowly across the sky marking the passage of the hours, and then gradually paled out before the greater brilliance of the rising moon.
‘Fetch the others,’ Camacho told the man nearest him, and rose stiffly to his feet, stretching like a cat to relieve numbed muscles. They came silently, and gathered close about Camacho, to listen to his final whispered instructions.
When he finished whispering, he looked from one to the other in turn. Their faces in the bright moonlight had the pale greenish hues of freshly exhumed corpses, but they nodded their agreement to his words, and then followed him down the slope, dark silent shapes like a troop of wolves; they reached the dry watercourse in the gut of the valley, and split into their prearranged groups.
Camacho moved up the newly beaten path towards the camp. He carried his knife in his right hand and his musket in the other, and his feet made a barely audible brushing sound through the short dry grass. Ahead of him, beneath the outspread branches of a mukusi tree, he could make out the shape of the sentry, where he had been placed six hours before. The man was asleep, curled like a dog on the hard earth. Camacho nodded with satisfaction and crept closer. He saw the man had pulled a dark blanket over his head. The mosquitoes had bothered him also, Camacho grinned and knelt beside him.
With his free hand he felt softly for the man’s head through the blanket, then the hand stilled. He gave a little grunt of surprise, and jerked the blanket aside. It had been arranged over the exposed roots of the mukusi tree to look like the shape of a sleeping man, and Camacho swore quietly but with great vehemence.
The sentry had chosen the wrong time to sneak away from his post. He was probably back in the lean-to shelter snoring happily on a mattress of dry grass. They would get him with the others, when they cleaned out the shelter. Camacho went on up the slope into the camp. In the moonlight the canvas of the tents shone ghostly silver, a beacon on which his lust could concentrate. Camacho slipped the sling of the musket over his shoulder as he hurried forward, towards the left-hand tent, and then checked as another dark figure emerged from the shadows, the knife in his right hand instinctively came up and then he recognized his own man, one of those whom he had sent to cut the Englishman’s throat.
The man nodded jerkily, all was well so far and they went forward together, separating only as they approached the two tents. Camacho would not use the fly opening of the woman’s tent – for he knew it would be laced closed, and if there were any surprises they would be at the entrance. He slipped around the side of the tent, and stooped to one of the hooded ventilator openings. He ran the point of the blade into it and then drew it upwards in a single stroke. Although it was heavy canvas, the blade had been whetted expertly, and the side wall split with only a whisper of sound.
Camacho stepped through the opening, and while he waited for his eyesight to adjust to the deeper darkness of the interior, he fumbled with the fastening of his breeches, grinning happily to himself as he made out the narrow collapsible cot and the little white tent of the muslin mosquito net. He shuffled towards it slowly, careful not to trip over the cases of medical stores that were piled between him and the cot.
Standing over the cot, he ripped the muslin netting aside violently, and lunged full length on to the cot, groping for the woman’s head to smother her cries, the loose ends of his belt flapping at his waist, and his breeches sagging around his hips.
For a moment he was paralysed with shock at the fact that the cot was empty. Then he groped frantically over every inch of it, before coming to his feet again and hoisting his breeches with his free hand. He was confused, disconnected, and wild ideas flashed through his mind. Perhaps the woman had left the cot to answer a call of nature, but then why was the fly carefully laced closed. She had heard him and was hiding behind the cases, armed with a scalpel, and he swung round panicking to lash out with the knife, but the tent was empty.
Then the coincidence of the missing sentry and the empty cot struck him with force, and he felt deep and urgent concern. Something was happening that he did not understand. He charged for the rent in the canvas, tripped and sprawled over one of the cases and rolled on to his feet again, nimble as a cat. He ran out, clinching his belt and looking about him wildly, unslinging his musket and only just preventing himself from calling aloud to his men.
He ran to the Englishman’s tent, just as his man came running out of the long dark tear in the canvas side, brandishing his knife, his face pale and fearful in the moonlight. He saw Camacho, screamed and struck out at him wildly with the long silver blade.
‘Silence, you fool,’ Camacho snarled at him.
‘He’s gone,’ the man panted, craning to stare about into the deep shadows that the moon cast under the trees. ‘They’ve gone. They’ve all gone.’
‘Come!’ snapped Camacho, and led him at a run down towards the lean-to that the Hottentot musketeers had built.
Before they reached it they met their companions running towards them in a disorderly bunch.
‘Machito?’ somebody called nervously.
‘Shut your mouth,’ Camacho growled at them, but the man blurted on.
‘The scherm is empty, they have gone.’
‘The Devil has taken them.’
‘There is nobody.’
There was an almost superstitious frenzy of awe on them all, the darkness and the silent empty camp turned them all into cowards. Camacho found himself, for once, without an order to give, uncertain of what to do. His men crowded around him helplessly, seeming to take comfort from each other’s physical presence, cocking and fiddling with their muskets and peering nervously into the shadows.
‘What do we do now?’ A voice asked the question that Camacho had feared, and somebody else threw a log from the pile on to the smouldering watch fire in the centre of the camp.
‘Don’t do that,’ Camacho ordered uncertainly, but instinctively they were all drawn to the warmth and comfort of the orange tongue of flame that soared up brightly, blowing like a dragon’s breath.
They turned their backs towards it, forming a half circle and faced outwards into the dark which in contrast to the flames was suddenly impenetrably black.
It was out of this darkness that it came. There was no warning, just the sudden thunderous burst of sound and flame, the long line of spurting muzzle flashes, blooming briefly and murderously, and then the sound of the striking balls in their midst, like a handful of children’s marbles hurled into a mud puddle, as the musket balls slogged into human flesh.
Immediately men were hurled lightly about by the heavy lead slugs, and the little band about the watch fire was thrown into struggling, shouting confusion.
One of them flew backwards, at a run, doubled in the middle where a ball had taken him low in the belly. He tripped over the burning log and fell full length into the blazing watch fire. His hair and beard flared like a torch of pine needles and his scream rang wildly through the tree tops.
Camacho himself threw up his musket, aiming blindly into the night from whence the Englishman’s voice was chan
ting the ritual infantry orders for mass volley fire.
‘Section One. Reload. Section Two. Three paces forward. One round volley fire.’
Camacho realized that the devastating blast of close range musketry that had just swept them would be repeated within seconds. With mild derision Camacho had watched on many a hot afternoon as the Englishman drilled his double line of red-jacketed puppets, the front rank levelling and firing on command, then the second rank taking three paces forward in unison, stepping through the gaps in the first rank and in their turn levelling and firing. The same evolutions which, when magnified ten thousand times, had broken the charge of French cavalry up the slope at Quatre Bras, now filled Camacho with unutterable terror, and he flung up his musket and fired it unsighted into the darkness, in the direction of the cool, precise English voice. He fired at the same instant as one of his own men who had been knocked down by the first volley scrambled to his feet only lightly wounded, directly in front of Camacho’s musket muzzle. Camacho shot him cleanly between the shoulder blades at a range of two feet, so close that the powder burn scorched the man’s shirt. It smouldered in little red sparks as he sprawled at full length on his face once more, until the glowing sparks were quenched by the quick flow of the man’s heart blood.
‘Fool!’ Camacho howled at the corpse, and turned to run. Behind him the English voice called, ‘Fire!’
Camacho threw himself down on to hard earth, howling again as his hands and knees sank into the hot ash of the watch fire and he felt his breeches char and his skin blister.
The second volley swept over his head, and around him more men were falling and screaming, and Camacho rebounded to his feet at a dead run. He had lost both his knife and musket.
‘Section One, three paces forward, one round volley fire.’
The night was suddenly filled with running, shouting figures, as the porters burst out of their encampment. There was no direction or purpose in their flight. They ran like Camacho, driven by gunfire and their own terrible panic, scattering away into the surrounding bush, singly and in small groups.
Before the command ordering the next volley of musket fire, Camacho ducked behind the hillock of porters’ packs, which had been piled close to the Englishman’s tent and covered with waterproof tarpaulin.
Camacho was sobbing with the agony of his scorched hands and knees, and with the humiliation of having walked so guilelessly into the Englishman’s trap.
He found his terror giving way to bitter and spiteful hatred. As little groups of terrified porters stumbled towards him out of the darkness, he drew one of the pistols from his belt and shot the leader in the head and then leapt up howling like a demented ghost – they ran and he knew they would not stop until, miles away in the trackless wilderness, they dropped with exhaustion, easy prey for lion or hyena. It gave him a moment’s sour satisfaction, and he looked around for some other damage he could wreak.
The pile of stores behind which he crouched and the dying fire in front of the Englishman’s deserted tent caught his attention. He snatched a brand from the fire, blew it into flame and tossed it flaring brightly on to the high canvas-covered pile of stores and equipment, then flinched as another volley crashed out of the darkness, and he heard the Englishman’s voice.
‘As a line of skirmishers, take the bayonet to them now, men.’
Camacho jumped down into the dry river-bed, and blundered through the crunching sugary sand to the far bank, where he scrambled thankfully into the dense riverine bush.
At the re-assembly point on the ridge there were three of his men already waiting, two of them had lost their muskets and all three were as shaken and sweaty and breathless as Camacho himself.
Two more came in while they regained their breath and power of speech. One was badly hit, his shoulders shattered by a musket ball.
‘There won’t be any others,’ he gasped, ‘those little yellow bastards caught them with bayonets as they were crossing the river.’
‘They’ll be here any minute.’ Camacho dragged himself to his feet again, looking back down into the valley. He saw with grim satisfaction that the pile of stores was blazing brightly, despite the efforts of half a dozen tiny dark figures to beat out the flames. He had only moments to enjoy the spectacle, for lower down the slope came the thin, but warlike cries of the Hottentot musketeers and the thud and flash of their musket fire.
‘Help me,’ cried the man with the shattered shoulder. ‘Don’t leave me here, my friends, my comrades, give me an arm,’ he pleaded, trying to struggle back on to his feet, but he was speaking to the empty night, and as the rush of footsteps down the far slope of the hill dwindled, his knees buckled under him and he sank back on to the rock earth sweating with pain and the terror which lasted only until one of the Hottentots drove the point of a bayonet into his chest and out between his shoulder blades.
Zouga strode angrily through the camp in the rising heat and bright sunlight of morning. His face and arms were blackened with soot, his eyes still red and smarting from the smoke of the fires, his beard was scorched and his eyelashes burned half away from fighting the flames. They had lost most of their stores and equipment for the fire had run away through the tents and thatched shelters. Zouga paused to glance at the charred and trodden scraps of canvas that were all that were left of the tents; they would miss them when the rains broke, but that was the very least of their losses.
He tried to make a mental list of the most grievous damage they had suffered. There were firstly only forty-six porters left out of more than one hundred. Of course, he could expect Jan Cheroot and his Hottentots to bring in a few more. They were at this moment scouring the valleys and hills around the camp for scattered survivors. He could still hear the kudu-horn trumpets calling in the stragglers. However, many would have risked the long and dangerous journey back to Tete rather than a recurrence of the night’s attack, and they would have seized the opportunity to desert. Others would be lost after their midnight flight and panic. They would fall prey to wild animals or succumb to thirst. Half a dozen had been killed by random musketry fire and by the retreating brigands who had deliberately fired into the masses of unarmed porters. Four others were so badly wounded that they would die before nightfall.
That was the most serious loss, for without porters they were helpless. Without porters to carry them, what remained of the carefully selected equipment and trade goods were as useless to them as if they had left them in London or dumped them overboard from Huron’s deck.
Of the equipment itself, it would take them hours to count their losses, to find what had burned and what they could salvage from the stinking, smouldering mass of cloth and canvas, what they could pick out of the trodden and dusty mess scattered down the rock hillside. The scene reminded Zouga forcefully of so many other battlefields, the terrible destruction and waste affronted him, as it had done before.
The few remaining porters were already at work, picking over the field like a line of harvesters, retrieving anything of value from the ash and the dust. Little Juba was with them concentrating on the search for Robyn’s medical stores, and books and instruments.
Robyn herself had set up an emergency clinic under the wide green branches of the mukusi tree in the centre of the camp, and when Zouga paused to look at the wounded men who still awaited her attention, and at the dead bodies laid out in a neat row and covered with a blanket or a scrap of charred and dirty canvas, he was angry with himself all over again.
Though what alternative had there been for him, he wondered.
If he had turned the camp into an armed fortress, it would have meant enduring a long-drawn-out siege with Camacho’s wolves skulking around the perimeter, sniping and harrying them until their opportunity came.
No, he had been right to set the trap and end it at a single stroke. At least now he could be certain that the Portuguese were still in full flight for the coast, but the price had been too high, and Zouga was still angry.
The expedition, so well co
nceived and lavishly equipped, had ended in disaster before it had achieved a single one of its objectives. The loss of equipment and life had been heavy, but that was not what burned so acidly in Zouga’s stomach as he paused at the perimeter of the devastated camp and lifted his eyes longingly towards the high broken ground of the southern escarpment. It was the idea of having to give up, before he had begun, and when he was so close, so very close. Twenty, fifty, not more than a hundred miles ahead of him lay the frontier of the empire of Monomatapa. Behind him, one hundred miles to the north was the dirty little village of Tete, and the wide river which was the beginning of the long ignoble road back to England, back to obscurity, back to a commission in a third-rate regiment, back to conformity and the wearying discipline of the cantonments of the Indian army. Only now that he was doomed to return to that life did he realize how deeply he had hated and resented it, just how much the desire to escape it had brought him here to this wild untouched land. Like a long-term prisoner who has tasted one day of sweet freedom, so the prospect of return to his cage was that much more painful, now. The pain of it cramped his chest, and he had to breathe deeply to control it.
He turned away from the southern vista of ragged peaks and savage black rock cliffs, and he walked slowly to where his sister worked quietly in the shade of the mukusi. She was pale, with dark smudges of fatigue and strain under her green eyes. Her blouse was speckled with spots of her patients’ blood, and her forehead appeared blistered with tiny beads of perspiration.
She had started work in the darkness, by the light of a bull’s eye lantern and now it was mid-morning.
She looked up wearily as Zouga stood over her.