by James Whyle
They moved upwards and the heathen retreated before them and when they debouched onto open grassland the sun had just passed its zenith and they cast little shadow. The irregulars were joined by the General and the rest of the forces and while the General was deliberating with his officers a group were ordered back into the forest to fetch a body.
They stepped as silently as they could and the joiner moved on the kid’s right and Evans on his left. They found the body which lay naked on its back, its flesh pink in the dark undergrowth and the chest hacked open as though someone had thought to remove the heart. The organs lay wetly in their lobes and coils of grey and plum and fat flies buzzed and settled and drank and the joiner formed a stretcher from the stems of two young trees tied together with wild vines and they picked up the body and carried it back through the forest.
As they stepped into the open there were shots to their left and they dived and the stretcher fell and the kid saw heathens springing from the undergrowth along the edge of the trees. The kid embraced the earth which owned a clean good smell of crushed grass and damp soil which stood in contrast to the smell of faeces which came from the body. There was groaning nearby and he could hear the sound of bullets smacking into the trees as the troops fired back and then a detachment charged forward from the main force and drove the heathen back into the forest.
They buried the body with five others in a shallow grave dug with hands and billhooks and bayonets and they covered the loose earth with leaves and grass and when the scouts passed the spot three days later the bodies had been dragged out once more and left to the sun and the vultures.
It was near dusk when they descended from the heights and the kid, just fifteen years on this earth, had killed a man and he could see the lines of the camp fires blazing on the dark plain in the brigade’s bivouac below. He marched with long easy strides and the dust gave off a sweet fragrance under the dew, and when they approached the camp there was a rich stench from the latrines and then the smell of coffee and roasting meat.
They dumped their packs in the lines and the Captain chose the kid as part of a detachment to fetch water. They moved through the Fingo levies and informed the sentry and proceeded with great caution, navigating by the sound of water over rock for it was very dark. They cut the river upstream of the camp and the water was cold and clear and smelt of stone and the men drank deeply before they began to fill the canteens. They stumbled back through the dark and as they approached the lines the Captain shouted, friend.
There was no answer so they stopped and the Captain shouted again and there was a flash of powder in the lines and a ball of lead hummed through among them. The kid knelt and there were cries of alarm from the camp and oaths from the irregulars. The Captain charged forward yelling, friend, you savage, friend, and they were fortunate in that he gained the bivouac before the sentry had time to reload.
The Captain berated the sentry and wrote his name down as near as he could understand it in his book and then they proceeded to their own lines. There was a stew waiting for them and the men sat around a fire and chewed.
What is this, asked the kid.
Beef, said the joiner.
You sure?
Heathen beef captured this very morning.
The kid chewed and then he spat a great gob of gristle into the flames.
Don’t let it feel you to weaken, said the joiner.
They sat and chewed and stared at the flames and sucked on their coffee. The wounded groaned about them and they heard the screams of a man whose knee had been shot on the mountain as a barber held a candle and the surgeon sawed through the cartilage that connected what remained of his femur to his shin.
They put more wood on the fire and the kid rolled himself in his blanket and put his head on his pack. He hugged his rifle to him and stared at the flames which leapt and danced into the dark and he smelt the wild unspeakable hindoo odour which lurks in the vicinity of funeral pyres.
He sat on a pitching deck in a circle of savages. They grasped muskets topped with huge arrow heads and they stared at the flames which forked forth and they rode a burning ship commissioned to some woeful deed. Pagans stirred up the fires beneath and the snakey flames darted curling to catch them by the feet. The kid stared with his companions at the blaze and the wind howled and the ship groaned and dived and the kid saw clear in the furnace the figure of a writhing child. They rode a rushing mount freighted with barbarians and laden with fire and a burning corpse. A ruffian rose up with a musket and aimed it at the kid and the kid stood and took him by the throat and as they fell the form changed strangely beneath the kid’s hands and it is a woman and she is dark and frowning at him on the mountain top. Her flesh is soft and hot beneath his hands and he feels as they lie there on the sweet grass a charge in his calves which travels up through his thighs and groin like a light that consumes him and then he wakes and the flames have died and there are only a few dim coals that still glow in the ashes.
VI
Woman and child – Mountain bivouac – Captured cattle – Fingo spoils – The dance – Cannabis sativa.
THE KID ROSE COLD and stiff in the dawn with a dampness in his groin and the dream lingering. He lay on the hard ground and smelt dew on dust and cold ashes. The morning was dull and misty and the tops of the mountains were hidden in cloud. The joiner found a coal and blew a flame from it and brewed coffee and the men sat drinking. They watched as a heathen woman came with a baby tied to her back and approached the camp. A Fingo guard looked at her and made a comment and another laughed and the woman stepped across the line and walked about searching among the tents and fires. She came to their flames and the men stared at her and she looked at the kid. The kid held her gaze for a long time and then he frowned and looked at the fire.
The woman bent and searched among their ashes finding the gristle the kid spat out the night previous and she blew the ash from it and the child stared with dark quiet eyes from the bed of her back. The woman, bent as she was, started speaking like one who works in a field and speaks to another and she rose and turned away and the kid listened to the rise and fall of her utterance and knew only that her opinion was emphatic.
The heathen were heard shouting on the heights and the Captain approached Johnny Fingo for translation. Johnny Fingo told him they questioned why they were kept on the mountain in the cold. A wagon train carrying the wounded rode out under cavalry escort and then the irregulars received their rations and strapped up their blankets and greatcoats and their sixty rounds of ball cartridge. As the cloud burned off they marched out into the mountains by a steep route which left them parched and dazed on the highlands at midday. They rested and drank and marched on and went down into a valley, a green grassy basin in a wooded amphitheatre. They came upon a heathen village and the Fingos discovered large quantities of grain hidden in cunning granaries beneath the floors of the huts and they plundered it and then they torched the dwellings.
There was a stream nearby and they bivouacked there and the General rode out with a cavalry company and detachments of Fingo and Hottentot levies and the party encountered no enemy and returned at dusk. There were fires lit and Evans was sleeping in the dust with his head on his pack when the kid heard the sound of a distant report and a piece of wood exploded in the fire and a pot of coffee fell slopping over Evans’ shin. Evans leapt to his feet bemused and cursing. The joiner and the kid had not finished laughing when there came another report and a man at a nearby fire roared and clutched his thigh and on examination found in it a lump of metal cut from the leg of a cooking pot. There were flashes on the dark slopes and the reports echoed and the Captain consulted with the General and a party was sent off to drive the heathen out of range. The light had faded in the west and the kid stepped away from the fires and watched. The two flashing straggling lines of intermittent fire climbed towards the sky and each flash was followed by the clap of a musket that rolled and bounced and echoed among the crags like a bastard cousin of thunder.
&
nbsp; On the day following they ascended again and stood looking out over the basin of forest and glen and green grassy slopes and a foaming river and they saw the heathen swarming on the site of their night’s bivouac.
They always where you used to be, said Evans. The joiner spat.
The tracks of heathen oxen had been discovered and the irregulars followed them back down into the valley and they were opposed by Hottentot defectors and descended skirmishing through the forest. The defectors retreated before them and they came upon their huts and burned them and then they came upon the cattle, three hundred head, and returned with them up the mountain. They climbed a ridge and crossed a small pass in the foothills and looked down at the plain where the bulk of the force was already bivouacked. They descended, stumbling like zombies, and the Fingos cried out and conversed with the cattle that went before.
They came into the camp and they ate what was given them and they slept and on the day following they marched west along the mountains and climbed the face of an intervening ridge and crossed its summit and saw arrayed on the plain below the white tents of the standing camp which was a day’s march north-east of Fort Adams.
They remained there for three days and the Captain told them that the charge up the mountainside to take the rock fortress had been mentioned in the General’s despatches. On the second day a party arrived from Gatestown with the mail. The officer’s horse and two men had died on the rocky pass and of the six that remained three were wounded.
On the day following they remained in camp and tended their gear and groups of Fingos went out to discover heathen homesteads and burn them. The air was cold and bright and all across the foothills columns of smoke rose up straight and stately like the icons of a forgotten ritual from the time when apes first came to worship fire. Throughout the day the Fingos returned in laughing groups. They came laden with heathen corn and ornaments and apparel finely wrought and arcane toggery. The kid saw the man called Providence dance into the camp in a rich crown of otter skin and cowry shell and bright feathers.
The Fingos were much satisfied with their spoils and that evening they arrayed themselves in the ornaments and insignia of despoiled chieftains and commenced to sing in deep guttural voices. They beat with knobbed sticks on ox-hide shields and sixty men threw off their cloaks and blankets and stepped into the arena with spears aloft and began to dance. They stamped the ground as though the earth itself was a drum and a hundred chests resonated with it. The dancers jerked and bent and leapt and kicked and hung for a moment in the air with one foot high above their heads and then they dropped to drum upon the earth once more. They hissed like serpents and crept with low heads as though stalking an enemy and then they cried out and leapt again and plunged their spears, on which the living blood had only recently dried, into imaginary victims.
A party of elder warriors sat cross-legged in their tent smoking a hookah made from a bullock’s horn. Its downward point was filled with water and a reed stem was let into the side and this was surmounted by a rough stone bowl filled with a species of Indian hemp. The kid sat in the shadows and watched how each man opened his jaws and placed his lips to the mouth of the horn and sucked so that the herb glowed and spat in its bowl and the old men’s eyes glowed in turn and they lifted their heads and blew the peppery aromatic smoke up towards the mountains.
VII
West to Fort Cox – Assessment of women – A captive – Death at a crossing – Below the Kromme – Desecration – Jinqi – Escort to Fort Cox – Music of their vowels – Westward once more – Pies – Measurement of skulls – Sand storm – Black ghosts.
ON THE DAY FOLLOWING the irregulars marched to Fort Adams and encamped on the plain some distance outside the walls. The sun died and rose again and they struck their tents and tramped through the village to the sound of the church bell calling the settlers to service. They halted at noon to rest the oxen near a deserted village. The white wattle-and-daub houses stood charred and derelict and axes and bayonets and spades and kettles lay where the settlers had dropped them. They marched on and encamped within a mile of Fort Cox and on the day following they rumbled past its stone barracks and the Captain admired the staff quarters with their cool verandas and high hedges of prickly pear enclosing green compounds shaded by trees and American aloes.
The sun hung close like a yellow stove and the dust floated up towards it and as they left the town they were followed by shouting groups of Hottentot and Fingo and others stood and watched in silence from their huts.
The kid saw an old grizzled man who leant forward on a carved stick and with him three crones whose wizened breasts hung to their waists. There were two men who wore nothing but a short cloak hung on one shoulder and there were children with stomachs as round as a pregnant woman’s. There were matrons also and young women bare-breasted and the kid looked at them and they stared back at him with dark eyes.
The Captain rode with the God-struck Lieutenant.
They have an incredible posterior development, he said.
The Lieutenant stared at him.
The women. Very developed in the rear.
The Lieutenant held the Captain’s gaze for a long time before he looked away.
They marched on, crossing the upper reaches of the Little Fat River by a stone bridge, and when the sun sat low and red in the west they pitched camp in a grove of mimosa.
They awoke at dawn with heavy rain beating on the patrol tents from low dark clouds and marched on without coffee as all fires had been extinguished by the downpour. They were met by a party of the Cape Corps who brought with them captured cattle and sheep and they drove the stock across the plain between a wall of fog to the south and the grim heights of the Kromme to the north. The Captain called on the scouts for extra vigilance but no attack came. They halted for breakfast at a dry riverbed with scattered pools of stagnant water in which trapped fish gasped and skittered. The kid caught in his nostrils a strange rich smell like roasted pork and burnt horn and found beneath a weeping willow tree a heathen with a large hole in his naked chest. The man leaned back as though sleeping against the tree trunk and his feet roasted quietly on the coals along with his intended meal.
The scouts brought in a prisoner who bled from a wound in his stomach and sat him under the tree with the dead man. This warrior wore a string of tiger teeth around his neck and the Captain coveted it. He spoke with Evans and Evans approached the prisoner with reaping hook in hand. The prisoner looked up at Evans and clasped his palms together and groaned and Evans seemed affronted by these gestures.
Like a dying cow in a hailstorm, he said.
The prisoner closed his eyes and waited. Evans frowned and reached for the string and sliced through it. The prisoner felt the teeth go and waited for some time and then opened astonished and grateful eyes and watched as his necklace was given to the Captain. Three Fingos stepped forward to kill the man but the God-struck Lieutenant berated them and they desisted. The Lieutenant set water and bread within the prisoner’s reach and moved the dead man’s feet from the coals. When the column moved on the two were seated there in silence under the tree before a thin strand of smoke which rose vertically into the blue.
The irregulars marched on across the steaming plain through clumps of mimosa and towards midday they passed the blackened ruins of a settler house where a mangy dog gnawed at the bones of an ass. In the afternoon they came upon a deep narrow river and crossed it in separate bodies at different points by slippery ledges of rock. A man slipped so that his feet went up before and his head caught an edge of granite. He was unconscious as he went over the waterfall.
They retrieved the body and buried it and encamped near the river and woke on the day following to find the ground white with frost and a bitter wind blowing from the Kromme. Within three hours the sun was scorching overhead and the irregulars were snoring in the shade of the mimosas. The Captain explored the banks of the river and shot two monkeys and three green and crimson parrots and a muscular lizard which he
measured against a Hottentot voorloper and found the lizard to be longer and noted the observation in his book.
They remained in that place three days and were joined by other forces and patrols went out and returned with captured sheep and cattle and then they marched on in search of better pasture. They proceeded upriver and halted at a deserted government station. There was a burnt chapel and three roofless houses from which the irregulars pulled tables and benches and armchairs to place around their fires. In the evening Evans sat on a wooden throne like a dusty Viking looter and the men chewed on their ration of beef. A man called Jones offered Evans a juicy marrow bone.
A little more cow, your worship?
I don’t mind if I do, said Evans.
The kid laughed and Evans took the bone.
Tell you this, he said. I’ve sailed some stinking ships in my time. With cannibals for shipmates.
Cannibals, said the joiner.
Cannibals. And this is a whole lot better.
Providence the Fingo formed the pulpit of the chapel into a snug sleeping place and his companions used a large stone to grind their coffee in the font. The God-struck Lieutenant watched through narrowed eyes but he said nothing.
On the third evening of their stay a company of cavalry rode in with word from the General that Jinqi, the chieftain on the white horse, was in the area with a large force armed with muskets. The next morning the irregulars watched as an officer rode out with the levies and three companies of Highlanders and a six-pound howitzer. The party returned in the night and before dawn came the irregulars were on the march escorting a train of wagons and slaughter oxen to Fort Cox. They were joined on the way by a Dutchman with his wife and family, three silent women and a giant of a son and three thousand sheep for company. After a day’s march they came by a more direct route to the place of roasting feet and as they approached three vultures lumbered away like well-fed bishops disturbed in fiscal negotiation. The two bodies lay in the shade of the tree and stared at the heavens from dusty eyeless holes. They had been eviscerated and their spines were visible in the blackened rotting cavities of their chests and their organs of generation had been eaten so that they appeared like appalling travesties of the very idea of gender.