by James Whyle
The kid heard a sound behind and he turned to look. The Lieutenant Colonel was dismounting from his horse next to a burnt hut in the middle of the clearing. The kid turned back and fired into the forest and ducked down and felt for a cartridge and bit it open and poured powder down his bore. He seated a bullet and placed a cap on the nipple. He looked behind and he saw that the Lieutenant Colonel was standing exposed and shouting and waving his hat.
The Lieutenant Colonel looked out across the plain to the north and pointed towards the heathen position and waved his hat at the distant artillery. The kid watched and the Lieutenant Colonel took a step forward and released his hat which hung for a moment in the air and then a ball took it. The Lieutenant Colonel watched his hat move through the air and then he looked down at his chest where it spewed out of him in a tangle of blasted cloth and flesh and bone and he said God damn you God damn you and then he fell.
The kid began to rise but Providence put a hand on his shoulder and kept him down. Men came out of the forest behind the homestead and ran to the Lieutenant Colonel. Lieutenant Gordon of the Highlanders stood and looked down at his leader and called for a stretcher. Another officer squatted at the Lieutenant Colonel’s head and lifted it and spoke to him but the Lieutenant Colonel’s eyes were vacant.
A ball passed through the squatting officer’s head and entered Lieutenant Gordon’s right thigh. The lead travelled on and its shape changed and it left Gordon’s right thigh and entered his left and destroyed the femur just below the point where its ball sat in the socket of the pelvis. The head-shot officer leant slowly forward and Gordon cried out and fell. The head-shot officer came down in a pious articulation of joint and limb and bending vertebrae that was the termination of a destiny born with time itself when it sprang forth from the singularity. He knelt over the Lieutenant Colonel with his broken skull resting on the Lieutenant Colonel’s chest. Gordon lay groaning and clasping his thigh and he formed with the two dead men in their bright uniforms a strange still tableau in the carnage.
The irregulars huddled behind their stoneworks and the heathen yelled in exultation and began to advance from rock to rock. They pointed at the Lieutenant Colonel as they came and they laughed.
Johnny bring stretcher, they shouted. Johnny bring stretcher.
It seemed for a time that the irregulars would be overcome and then shells and round shot came over from the artillery on the plain and the heathen and their defector allies began a careful retreat into the forest. The warriors were greased and naked and they carried nothing but their weapons and they slipped away through the undergrowth with the fluid agility of great silent cats and by the time the kid could bring his sights to bear they were always gone.
Men came from the rear to bear away the dead and the irregulars proceeded after the heathen and they came eventually to a place where the forest dropped away into the Great Ravine. They lay among branches severed from the trees above by passing shells. There were boulders all about and many had been split by some previous cataclysm and the kid took refuge in a crevice. He found there beneath an overhang axes and bullet moulds and lead and cast balls and an assortment of leather ornaments and an armband of fine pale bone. The kid took up the armband and examined it and felt its smoothness. He put down his rifle and put the armband over his left hand and pushed it up onto his wrist and looked at it on his scratched grimy arm.
The irregulars took cover there and a scout arrived with orders for the Captain to remain in occupation of the position. The sun shone down and at midday they were baking in the heat. The kid lay low on the ground in good cover and he watched how a column of ants dragged the body of an insect across the earth.
At three o’clock in the afternoon clouds came down and settled on the ridge and within half an hour the kid could barely see the joiner in his place ten yards away and he shivered in the cold. At four o’clock the irregulars received orders to withdraw and they joined the rest of the brigade on a bare bleak ridge. Fires were made in the fog and the men did not speak. They went about their work and the cloud hung upon them like a pall and the glow of the flames was barely visible from a distance of more than a few yards.
The kid stood close to such a blaze and held out his hands to warm them and he looked up to see Evans loom out of nothingness as though called that instant from the void.
Where’s the coffee, he said.
There isn’t any, said the kid.
And food?
Herrid’s gone to see.
Herrid’s gone to get something for himself.
They stood around the fire and they waited.
They got the Lieutenant Colonel, said the kid.
Evans nodded and then he spat into the flames.
Were you there?
I was up in the forest to the side, said Evans. They damn near got me too.
And me, said the joiner.
So who’s in command now?
I don’t know who he is, said Evans, but he reasons like an oyster.
Off in the mist a lone sentinel paced before a solitary tent. Their previous commander lay within among the dead. A lantern cast a dim light on his red beard and his English cheeks and he stared up at the canvas roof with features frozen in a mask of grim satisfaction. The head-shot officer lay next to the Lieutenant Colonel and his face had been distorted by the ball that passed behind it. One of his eyes was missing and a strand of nerve hung out from the vacant hole. Men filed past to pay their respects and the dead lay there like statues formed from wax and their wounds were so variously grotesque that they could for all the world have been designed to horrify children at a carnival.
The Captain left the tent and went to see Lieutenant Gordon and found him laid on the ground beneath a rough shelter of green boughs. The Captain questioned the doctor and the doctor shook his head doubtfully and Gordon lay in a pool of seeping blood and watched them with frightened eyes.
A drizzling rain came down and the wind swept cold over the lofty bivouac and the hastily gathered fuel ran out and the fires died. The irregulars threw up little walls of loose stone and rock and sheltered behind them. Some dug holes in softer ground and piled the earth around and placed large flat slabs of stone above and crawled beneath like reclusive arthropods. So they made their beds and lay in them and soon enough all but the shivering sentinels were slumbering upon that windswept plain.
They were roused at dawn by the bugle’s reveille and found the highlands white with frost and they crowded around a few fires of logs which the sentries had scrounged in the night. The bodies of the dead were placed on a mule wagon and the wounded were placed on another and the party left for the fort at Post Retief. The irregulars went as escort and they had gone only a few hundred yards when Lieutenant Gordon began to howl with pain at the motion of the wagon and so he was placed on a stretcher and the Captain rode back to fetch men of his company to carry him.
They travelled on at the stretcher’s pace and the slow cortège passed over the grasslands. The sun came out and the frost melted and they moved over a plain all aglow with blossoming gladiolus and amaranth and aphelexis. The ground rose slightly to the west and this gentle ridge was so thickly covered with scarlet flowers that there might have been a swathe of bright cloth laid out there in preparation for some courtly celebration.
There were belts of bush that ran up from the wooded ravines below and Hottentot snipers were spotted and the little column steered out of range of those treacherous forests. They marched on and came upon fields of mushrooms and gathered them as they went. They could hear artillery fire behind them in the south and they skirted the edges of a luxuriant valley with green uplands and belts of forest. A little river ran through it and along its banks were burnt farmhouses. They passed a hill covered with tall bushes bearing great flowered grails all fluted with petals of pink and white and as they went one of the poles of Gordon’s stretcher broke and he fell to the earth with his leg bent out at an uncanny angle below the hip.
A spare stretcher was
taken from a wagon and Gordon’s leg was laid straight. He screamed as the broken bone ends ground against each other and he was placed upon the stretcher and they proceeded as before. There were columns of cloud in the north and as these thunderheads descended their lower surfaces took on a hue of dark indigo. A gust of wind came up and eddied about and picked up sand and dry grass and leaves and strew them across the track. The wind stopped and a profound silence fell.
There came a click. And then light. It was all about them and the plain and the wagons were gone and there was only light. The world returned with a rumble so prodigious that it might have come from enormous cannons rolled across a wooden deck directly above the irregulars’ heads. Hail began to fall and rain with it and within minutes the invaders and their mounted officers and the wounded and the dead were all impartially soaked and all but the dead were shivering.
The storm passed and the column moved into a narrow glen by the side of an exuberant stream. The road was rocky and the mules slipped on the wet rocks and the wagons lurched and clattered. The wounded yelled out in agony as they bounced upon their wooden beds and the dead rolled stiffly on theirs.
They negotiated a bend in the track and emerged and saw the fort that stood alone on rising ground with its walls dwarfed by the ramparts of a dark amphitheatre of mountains beyond. These peaks rose up all around and their long slopes merged with the murky cloud. A stray beam of light came down and lit the little citadel and it appeared like a tiny daub of brightness painted upon a vast and gloomy canvas.
The cortège approached across the plain and a detachment came out to meet them and helped to carry the wounded through the gates. The dead were taken into the commissariat forage store and placed in hastily made coffins and a sergeant major nailed them home.
In the afternoon the thunder mingled with the report of distant guns and together these sounds rolled out in solemn signal across the highlands. The mourners arranged themselves by their regiments and waited. The coffins were borne out and a muddy firing party presented arms. Pipers piped a skirling tune and the mourners marched in slow time and they stopped at the newly dug graves and a captain of the Highlanders read the funeral service. The kid stood there with his chin resting on the butt of his rifle and he thought about the yellow dog. The coffins were lowered and Herrid shouted an order and the roar of a hundred guns reverberated three times across the plateau.
In the evening the Captain visited Lieutenant Gordon and found him frightened and hurting and plagued by flies upon a thin straw mattress. Next to him lay a sergeant whose leg had been amputated at the knee. This man complained of a great pain which emanated from the limb he no longer possessed. Beside him was Ricketts who had been wounded on the pass below Mount Misery on the 14th of October. Ricketts was glad of the new company and spoke happily of what he would do when he was well. He struggled up on an elbow and spat redly onto the mud floor and then he lay back again and smiled and blood bubbled from the wound in his chest.
That night the Captain sat with the other officers at a long deal table on a floor of stamped ant heap in a bare white room. They ate a stew of mushroom and beef from shared bowls as the hospital detachment had found it easier to provide a dinner than it had to find the plates to serve it on. The men talked in low voices and one took out a scrap of paper which he said bore the last words that the Lieutenant Colonel had written. It was a request for wine and porter and sago and milk to be provided for the wounded at the Lieutenant Colonel’s expense. Some bottles of the ordered wine were brought out in evidence and although they were of indifferent quality the officers drank them and their voices caught in their throats as they reminisced about their late commander.
On the day following the Captain rose early and went to visit Lieutenant Gordon and found that his wound had mortified during the night and that he had expired with the dawn and Ricketts not long after him. The irregulars left the fort some hours later in escort of a small herd of commissariat cattle. They retraced their steps across the uplands and towards midday they saw the combined division with its retinue of wagons stretched across the plain two miles ahead.
The Captain rode across and learned that the heathen had once more baffled attempts to dislodge them from the forests on the day previous and that a captain of the Highlanders was mortally wounded and seven other men dead. He received orders to proceed down the Shining Water Pass and he rode back and the irregulars and their cattle turned east for the head of the pass and they came to it in the early afternoon.
The first mile of the track was much ravaged by the recent storms and the wagons teetered down through gullies four feet deep in places and the beaten sun was sinking behind the Kromme in great swathes of crimson and pink and azure by the time the irregulars reached their tents in the Shining Water Valley.
XVII
Colonel Ire – Conflicting land claims – Provenance of the Kuffār – Ire on otherness – Dining with Providence – A pipe shared – The godfire.
ON THE DAY FOLLOWING the kid sat in the sun at the edge of the river and the yellow dog gnawed and growled at a thigh bone some way longer than itself.
I hope that’s not human, said the kid.
The dog looked at him and it cocked its head to one side and it seemed puzzled and then it gnawed at the bone once more. The kid lay back on the warm earth and doves murmured in the trees and other smaller birds chittered and flew about in dense bright flocks.
The Captain rode into Fort Cox and entered the church and sat there among the settlers in their fine Sunday outfits. The congregation listened to words which had been inscribed by desert tribesmen who had learnt the art from Babylon and which had been much translated over the millennia and then the service ended and the Captain rode back to the camp.
The irregulars remained there for two weeks and during this time there came to join them a Colonel Ire who liked to drink. Colonel Ire was a small man with pale blue eyes and a drooping moustache which hid his mouth so that the food he ate seemed to disappear into his face by magic. He sat at the table in the officers’ mess tent and drank and when he was asked a question he was happy to reply.
They are their own worst enemy, said Colonel Ire. They are unable to unite. The land ran out and they were killing for it before we came. Fifty years past Gaika was begging the Batavians to do battle with him against his own brother Lambie for control of this very country. Now the Lambies and the Gaika will tell you that it is theirs by right of purchase from the Hottentots. The Gunukwebees will tell you the same, but say they bought it from the Dutchmen. And they’ll form allegiance with whoever they think will help them secure it.
Where do they come from, asked the Captain. Originally.
The heathen are the descendants of Ishmaelite tribes. They came via the Red Sea and down the eastern coast of the continent. You can deduce this quite simply from their habits. Their abhorrence of pork is as ardent as the Musselman’s or the Jew’s. Look at their practice of polygamy. And they are circumcised around their fourteenth year to mark their passage into manhood. Just as Abraham and Ishmael were.
They take more than one wife, said the God-struck Lieutenant. He shook his head.
A rich heathen, said Colonel Ire, will take as many wives as he has cattle to buy them with. A poor Fingo might struggle to afford one. Their society is as much divided into rich and poor as ours is.
Do they have a god?
Primarily they worship their ancestors, but they have learnt something of the existence of an invisible God from the missionaries. But note this. There is no word in their language for such an entity. They have no word for God. They appropriate a Hottentot word, Tixo. It means my arm or safeguard. You will hear the Fingos using it when they have sneezed. It is doubtful what idea they connect with it.
And this Jinqi, asked the Captain.
He is one of Gaika’s sons. Luckily for us, by a junior wife. If he were the hereditary leader of the Gaika and therefore of all the Gagabee they would have taken Gatestown at the start of the
war. If they listened to him. Their system seems to be something in the nature of a constitutional monarchy. The paramount’s writ does not always apply.
I have been told, said the God-struck Lieutenant, that there is a heathen in Edinburgh as we speak. That he is the son of a chieftain and was sent there by the missionaries. That he is a Christian and he reads and writes as well as you or I.
When they are all like him, said Colonel Ire, they will no longer be a problem.
And until then?
I will continue to kill them.
Then we are beasts, said the Lieutenant.
Beasts?
Yes.
How does civilisation begin?
With writing. With Christ.
No. Natural men, barbarians, in possession of an unbroken will for power, throw themselves on weaker, more peaceful races. Cattle-rearing or trading communities. The superior caste is the barbarian caste and their superiority resides in their technology and in their psychical power.
Colonel Ire pressed two fingers against his temple.
We will prevail because we are more complete men. We are more complete men because we are more complete beasts.
The conversation went on and the God-struck Lieutenant listened in silence and after a time he excused himself from the table and left the tent. He walked back towards his lines and he stopped for a moment to watch the Fingos around their fires.