by James Whyle
After his bath the Captain put on his uniform and rode over to the mess of the Cape Mounted Rifles. He sat at a table with the God-struck Lieutenant and Captain Norris of the Rifles and Norris poured champagne for them and other officers in generous measure. The men talked and laughed and devoured savoury dishes and the Captain remarked to Norris that the surprise of finding a comrade alive added a certain zest to the ambience of a dinner table. This zest he said, and an accompanying heartiness, was happy compensation for hard days in the field. Norris agreed and clapped the Captain upon the back and poured more wine. The God-struck Lieutenant put a hand over his glass to signify that he wanted no more and Norris asked him what it was that he read. The God-struck Lieutenant placed a finger on the page and spoke the words.
Blessed is he that readeth, and they that hear the words of this prophecy, and keep those things which are written therein.
He looked up at Norris and allowed his pause to lengthen.
For the time is at hand.
There was a stillness at the table and glances were exchanged and then Captain Norris spoke.
The time for pudding is at hand.
The men looked about to gauge each other’s responses.
And port.
Some of the officers smiled. The God-struck Lieutenant did not answer but stared into some revelatory future and after a time the men lifted their glasses and continued their conversations. The Captain leaned across to Norris and whispered in his ear and Norris did not regard or question the God-struck Lieutenant again.
Among the tents of the irregulars there were fires burning and some men went to the grog shops but most ate their stew of gristle and millet and laid themselves on the bare ground of the tents and slept. Waine sat in the darkness with the Captain’s port wine and drank and the kid saw it. When the dome of the darkness was firmly held in place by the arch of the Milky Way and the camp was sleeping Waine took up the bottle and walked. He moved through the camp and he came to the outbuilding where the horses were stabled and with them a few cows which provided milk for the officers. Waine entered there and drank what remained of the Captain’s port wine and laid the bottle down upon the stone floor. He pushed open a low door and entered a cubicle. There was straw under foot and a young cow lowed in the darkness.
The Provost Marshal was a man whose face was hedged with whisker and whose mind was likewise demarcated by the received wisdom of his day. He was plagued by the report of the stolen port wine and unable to sleep. It puzzled the Provost Marshal that a man could steal an officer’s port wine when he knew that the theft was the start of a rocky road whose end was transportation to an island ruled by maggots and labour and the lash, a hell hole where those who survived the work were taken in the end by starvation. It seemed to the Provost Marshal that only the irregulars among the forces assembled could contain men wild enough to risk such outcomes. The Provost Marshal lay uneasy in the darkness of his billet and he heard a beast calling. He rose from his bed and lit a lantern and put on his trousers and shirt and boots and walked quietly towards the sound of the disturbance.
The Provost Marshal entered the stables and looked about. His lantern cast a dim light along the rows of cubicles on either side. A horse shifted in its hay and snickered and from the further end of the building the Provost Marshal heard a groan that could perhaps have issued from a human. He stood and listened but the sound did not come again. The Provost Marshal walked quietly up the alley with lantern held aloft. The groaning came again and the Provost Marshal heard wood grind against stone and then the groaning was replaced by a rhythmic knocking. The Provost Marshal walked on carefully and came to the area where the cows were kept. He looked into one cubicle and calm brown eyes stared back at him above a munching jaw. He looked into another that was empty and then he looked into a third. The Provost Marshal saw a pair of thrusting buttocks. These nates pumped assiduously at a cow which stood against the stone wall. They belonged to a man whose trousers hung at his ankles and who balanced on an upturned wooden bucket that rattled on the stone. The Provost Marshal stared like one transmuted to granite. The despoiler was hunched above the placid beast in an ecstasy and he cried out and fell back from the toppling bucket with member erect and spurting jism indiscriminately.
The Provost Marshal stepped back with a cry and lifted his free arm as though to ward off an evil.
Dear God, he said. Dear God.
The ravager rolled in the hay and secured his trousers and leapt the low stable door with unexpected agility. The Provost Marshal stepped back with arms aloft. He tripped over a raised stone and dropped the lantern and the flame died and the glass shattered. The Provost Marshal sat there in the darkness with those strange and awful images, which he surmised to represent the procreation of the beast, branded upon his retinas. After a time he felt weakly on the stone for leverage in order to rise and his hand fell upon the Captain’s plundered port wine bottle.
On the day following the forces of the encampment assembled on the plain before the tents and marched up and down for three hours in good order but to no purpose that the kid could ascertain. After this the men shed their uniforms and bathed in the river. The kid’s ear was still much swollen and the joiner’s cheek likewise and Evans sat earless between them in the shallows. They were like three silent and misshapen trolls who pondered weighty matters in the waters. The river flowed onward to the sea and the men watched it. A dragonfly hovered above the slick dark water and its wings flashed in the sunlight. The joiner lifted his hand and hit the back of his neck where a horse fly had landed. He looked at his hand and then dropped it to his knee beneath the water.
What kind of man …
He shook his head.
Would do that to a cow.
Same kind of man that took the Captain’s port wine, said Evans.
Anyone would do it, said the kid.
The joiner was much astonished.
To a cow?
Take the wine, said the kid.
True.
The joiner nodded and so did Evans and their eyes followed the dragon fly.
It was Waine.
Evans and the joiner looked at the kid.
Took the skipper’s wine.
Best not mention that, said Evans.
Why not?
Because he’ll kill you, said Evans.
Maybe I’ll kill him.
Stop scratching your ear, said the joiner.
The kid stared down at the warm muddy water and after a time they rose and lay to dry themselves in the sand and then they returned to the tents. As they approached, Providence the Fingo stepped out into their path and smiled.
Come.
Where to, said Evans.
Winkel.
What for?
Count.
Count what?
Money.
Money?
Evans frowned astutely, but he seemed hopeful.
What money?
Count, said Providence.
He hasn’t found treasure, said the joiner. He can’t count. He spoke to Providence in his own language and Providence smiled and answered with dignified gesticulation.
He bought some things. Wants to make sure they don’t cheat him.
Evans was scathing of this suggestion and only the kid followed Providence into the town. The day was hot and still and the kid’s ear throbbed and he felt the weight of the sun upon him. Providence strode purposefully and though he answered many greetings and enquiries on the way he did not slow his pace. They came to a shop and entered into a throng of Fingos beneath a ceiling hung with saddles and blankets and three-legged iron pots. These men and women conversed loudly with the two settlers behind the counter and among themselves. Providence pushed through them and the Fingos greeted him and questioned him about his young companion and offered remarks and advice about the swelling of his ear. Bantering thus in good nature they came to the counter and the man behind it saw Providence and lifted up from below a suit of clothing. Providence took it a
nd examined it and displayed in turn a bright blue coat with brass buttons and a yellow schoolboy’s cap with blue and red velvet tassels and a pair of black military trousers with broad red stripes down their sides. He nodded his head slowly and the kid turned to the shopkeeper.
How much?
Three shillings and sixpence.
Providence reached into his daghasack and brought out a smaller bag formed from the scrotum of a bullock and placed it on the counter. He stood there naked apart from a ragged tartan shirt and towering above the company and his member hung like a fat python. He had an ashy smell on him like a forest glade that a company of infantry has camped in for three weeks. He opened the purse and counted out the coins exact and placed them on the table and looked at the kid. The kid counted the coins again and nodded and the man behind the counter took the money. Providence put on the trousers and the coat and the cap and began to sweat. He looked like an ill-conceived character in a pantomime performed by a preparatory school for giants. There were exclamations from the customers standing about and some stepped back in alarm as though Providence had become hazardous through his transformation.
In the days following Providence wore his new uniform about the camp, and many of his comrades sported their own ensembles. Some were armed with swords and spurs and some wore the uniforms of defunct regiments and some combined military wear with articles of fashion recently sold by settlers fallen on hard times.
The Captain observed this behaviour and smiled and then he became grave like one who remembers a duty and he returned to his quarters and set his writing table up in the shade of the veranda.
The Fingo levies, he wrote, are universally fine, athletic and well-made men and more perfect models it is impossible to imagine. This superiority arises from their simple diet and from their free and hardy life in the open air. It is said also that the Fingo, like the heathen, always destroy deaf, blind or deformed children. This is done at birth or as soon as their imperfection becomes manifest. True or not, it is certain that no cripples are seen among them.
The Captain paused, aware perhaps of the dangers of generalisation but eager nonetheless to consider the Fingo people as a whole, and then he wrote on. While he was thus engaged the Provost Marshal sat staring at the port wine bottle. There was a bottle of brandy beside it and from this the Provost Marshal drank. As the sun moved across the sky the Provost Marshal drank and it did not help for he saw manifest before him the terrible coupling in the stables. And then the Provost Marshal began to see the future. He saw how the cow travailed in birth and pained to be delivered. The Provost Marshal saw that the cow had issue. He saw something come forth in blood and fall upon the ground. The cow turned to lick it and the little monster stood nimbly in its gore. It was an ape with two small human heads and a member like a hose which it lifted and slung about its shoulders between its two twisting necks. It turned one head and then the next towards the Provost Marshal. And then these two heads looked at each other and gibbered.
The Provost Marshal’s hair stood vertical and he cried out and he rose and his chair clattered on the boards behind him. He took the Captain’s port wine bottle and he stumbled through the camp and across the parade ground and past the sentries and down to the river. He bathed himself in the waters and then he put on his trousers and took up his other clothes and went to a glen formed by bushes and the shade of an enormous Cape willow tree. The Provost Marshal knelt there in that arboreal cathedral and he commenced to pray.
Dear God, said the Provost Marshal, I am losing my faith. He looked about. In this place, I am losing my faith. I have dreams when I am awake. I see Satan’s imp clear as daylight before my eyes and he says his name is Tokolos. Dear God, please help me. Please give me a sign that there is a force for good that moves in the world.
He looked about and he listened and he noticed that the tree was humming as though it harboured a swarm of bees. He looked up into the branches and he saw how the light shimmered in the green leaves. The Provost Marshal felt himself lifted up in the humming into that living light. And then Waine came upon him from behind and struck him upon the head with a rock. The Provost Marshal lay groaning and bleeding on the mud and the leaves and Waine turned him on his stomach and sodomised him and then he cut his throat with a heathen stabbing spear.
The camp was much disturbed by the murder of the Provost Marshal and after official inquiry it was written that the heathen had done the deed in an attempt to inspire terror and the guards were doubled. The Captain had his doubts and he expressed them to the God-struck Lieutenant and there was much rumour among the men as to the facts of the death and as to the detail of what had occurred. As to why the Provost Marshal’s trousers were about his knees and why the Captain’s port wine bottle was found next to his corpse. The irregulars gathered in a group outside their tents and conferred.
Weren’t no heathen, said the joiner.
How do you know, said Smith.
Heathen don’t do that. Your heathen will cut you open, take your guts out. If they take your gear off it’s because they want your parts. Use them for medicine.
He spat.
But I never seen them do that.
The joiner looked at the kid, and the kid frowned and looked at Waine. Waine felt the look and turned his dark small head towards the kid and raised his hand to his throat and drew his fingers softly across it in an ambiguous gesture and the kid looked away.
XII
Second attack on the Kromme – The Northern Highlands – Norris – To the aid of the Rifles – Mundell’s farm – A skull – Steaming mourners – Hymn on a darkling plain – The Great Western Ravine – Beauty and decay – A homestead – Roots of Pelargonium – Buried again – Providence, the healer.
THERE HAD BEEN rumour and report for some time that the main forces of the heathen were leaving the mountains to the east and consolidating in the Kromme under Jinqi and Branders the Hottentot defector. It was said also that Jinqi and Branders controlled their forces from a cave hidden on the heights of Mount Misery and the Captain was pleased when he received the orders for a general move against their strongholds.
On the 12th of October the General left Fort Cox with the artillery and the Cape Corps and he was joined on his route by a regiment of infantry which had departed Fort Adams on the same morning. At ten o’clock that night the irregulars marched out with the reserve battalion of the 12th Regiment and the 74th Highlanders and a squadron of the Cape Mounted Rifles and two companies of Fingos. They embarked on their journey under the command of the same Lieutenant Colonel Gaunt as before and this time they numbered one thousand one hundred and fifty men.
They marched through the empty moonlit streets of Fort Cox in a dark column and the sound of their footfall upon the earth was like massed and distant drums. Only one man remained awake to witness their passing and that was the disordered missionary who stood sentinel in the shadows of an alley.
They tramped for fourteen miles and rested for an hour on the banks of a stream and then they marched on. The sun hung yellow above them and the heat was such that at the time when they cast the least shadow the barrels of their weapons blistered any hand placed upon them. In the late afternoon they reached the foot of the mountains and lay down to rest beneath thorny bushes. The Lieutenant Colonel called for the guide to be brought to him. The guide proposed a path up the Kromme and various officers disputed his suggestion. They said that the route was impractical for horses at any time and almost impassable for infantry at night. As the discussion continued a thick mist came down and a cold rain began to fall and the irregulars huddled in their steaming blankets and cursed.
At midnight they rose from their pallets of stone and emerged from their wrappings and marched on in chill fog and drizzle. They moved west in search of a route and sometimes the clouds flickered with a strange green and yellow light and the lower slopes of the Kromme appeared as though called up out of the void and only when they were gone and it was dark again did the thunder rumble.<
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Out on the edges of the world the blackness bent and fractured in its plates and the furnace beyond showed itself in jagged fissures. The column stumbled up a gorge on a path so steep that the mounted men had to alight and led their horses and the Captain worried that they would lose the pack animals and his entire subsistence with them. The kid’s thighs burned and they struggled on and after some hours they gained the first ridge and moved along it on a grassy plain.
They staggered like drunk men. The kid had barely closed his eyes for forty hours and his ear throbbed. He walked sleeping through the wet grass and saw before his feet in the mist the scrubbed boards of a shifting deck and he heard the surge of the sea and he stepped aside to avoid a coil of faded hempen rope and he stumbled and woke regretfully. At other times the dim crushed grass of the path assumed the form of a worn carpet and the kid could trace the pattern of it and see about it a bed and chairs and a child’s ragged clothes and a chest of drawers and then he stumbled once more and those objects resolved themselves into rocks and bushes.
The 14th day of October came with a grey dim dawn as they reached the higher ranges. The slope by which they had ascended was bare and dark and around them the peaks appeared and disappeared in rolling cloud. They reached the plateau and came out on a burnt tableland and the troops were ordered to halt there for breakfast. Evans enquired as to the nature of the breakfast and Herrid told him that what breakfast there was was in their packs and so they sat on the black grass and gnawed with blackened teeth on black biscuit.
A thick heavy fog came down and hung about them and saturated their clothing. The kid could see only Evans and the joiner and Waine but the clink of bridles and the murmur of voices and the sound of distant shouted orders and cattle lowing gave notice of a thousand other beings all invisible in the mist. For two hours they waited shivering for the General’s column and it did not come and then they rose and felt their way forward.