The Book of War

by James Whyle

  XXXI

  An ambiguous peace – Event horizon – The Captain rewarded.

  GENERAL CATHCART RETURNED from his Basotholand expedition claiming a victory which those who were present knew had never occurred and early in 1853 Jinqi and the chieftain of the Gaika made peace with the British authorities. The terms upon which the peace is made, wrote the Captain, neither the Gaika nor the colonists can exactly make out.

  In March General Cathcart issued a general order:

  HEADQUARTERS, GATESTOWN

  The Commander-in-chief, in disbanding this corps – The Kromme Rangers – wishes to convey to its gallant commander, officers and men, the high estimation in which he holds their services &c.

  (Signed.)

  J. A. Cloete

  Quartermaster General.

  The Captain copied the general order down in his book and on the day following the irregulars assembled for the last time on the parade ground in Gatestown. Most of the men took offers of transport to The Bay and thence by ship to the Cape but some remained behind to claim their farms. The last time the kid saw Evans and the joiner they were following Higgs and Basson into the black hole of a bar in a side street of Gatestown.

  The Captain sailed for London with a skull for Doctor Anderson and another for himself and he was refused a commission by the Horse Guards who told him that if he wanted such a thing he would have to pay. Six months after his return, however, the Captain found himself talking with a young man who was both the Duke of Brabant and King of the Belgians. The Captain was explaining to the Duke something of the nature of the Dutch colonists on the southern tip of Africa in whom the Duke had a great interest. A solemn gentleman approached and asked the Captain to follow him.

  The Captain shook hands with the Duke and excused himself and the solemn one led him to a small side door. The solemn one stopped and hesitated and then he opened the door like an unctuous country beadle entering a rich man’s chapel. He stood back and ushered the Captain forward. The Captain stepped into an oak-panelled room where he saw a dark robust woman and a number of sedate and immaculately dressed men. The Captain wondered for a moment if a mistake had been made. He was about to bow himself out when the woman looked at him and offered him a brisk grim smile and looked away again.

  One of the men stepped forward and placed a cushion at the Captain’s feet. A voice whispered behind.

  Kneel.

  The Captain obeyed and bowed his head and he saw a pair of brown leather shoes of sturdy manufacture peek from beneath the woman’s skirts as she approached. The Captain waited and a long silence ensued. A whispering commenced above him and then it stopped. The Captain looked up. The woman grimaced and struggled to hold a great gleaming blade in the air with both hands. She looked over the Captain’s head at the men behind.

  What is his name, she said.

  His name, Your Majesty?

  Yes. His Christian name. What is the man’s name?

  No word came from the men and the woman grunted and shifted her hands on the weapon which wobbled perilously above the Captain’s head like a guillotine over a Jacobin.

  No one knows his name?

  She looked down at the Captain.

  Stephen, said the Captain.

  The woman let the sword fall in her hands and it came down past the Captain’s dodging shoulder and clanged upon the wooden floor and one of the men stepped forward quickly to take it.

  Arise, said the woman, Sir Stephen. And she held out her hand.

  The Captain bit his lip. His eyes were wet. He took her hand in his and he pressed his ardent lips to the cool alabaster flesh.

  XXXII

  Solvitur ambulando – Kinship – The full moon.

  THE MAN TRAVELS WITH his companion Providence and there is a yellow dog that trots with them and who can tell who is the savage, who the sage. They move across the hills. They walk by rocky paths up towards the great escarpment. They rise by narrow tracks and sometimes they dislodge white stones which roll away from their feet and clatter to a stop and grin at them.

  They come up to the great plains and they see a beetle which rolls a ball of dung across a dusty track. The beetle stands upon its arms and manoeuvres the ball with its hind legs. The man watches. He wears hide trousers and a leather jerkin of his own manufacture and he has simple plains shoes on his feet such as the Dutchman and Hottentot wear. He looks like one indigenous to that landscape. He can kill or not kill. He is a pilgrim and an exile and a returnee.

  He carries a great Dutch flintlock over his shoulder in the manner of a bandit and he walks the high grasslands beyond the mountains. He stakes his claim. He strides across a tableland that might not end.

  The man marks the Southern Cross each night where it hangs askew above the void and he chooses a sign on the horizon opposite and each morning he walks towards it. His shadow stretches over the plains. It matches him step for step. It marks the passing of the days and it marks his latitude and it signals the solstice and from it it is possible to infer the course of the massive turning earth about the star which dwarfs it.

  See the man. He feeds upon the sun. He is god particular. He springs from singularity into infinite burning. He is bound upon a wheel of fire and he must needs burn. And he is kin to you. He is your kin.

  When he can he sleeps in caves, your kinsman. He learns how to find them by their relation to water and by the way in which they survey the landscape. He learns to find them by the way in which they are hidden.

  He makes his fire beneath an overhang. He coaxes the spark in the way the Fingo taught him. He lays the skinned body of a hyrax upon the coals. He stands and he touches the dark emblems about his neck. They might be burnt and blackened sea shells or figs dried and wrinkled and turned to stone.

  He looks about. There are paintings in red and black and brown on the wall of the cave. There are antelope cunningly drawn. They seem at peace upon the rock. There are dancers about them and there is one who hangs above as though flying, a man ecstatic and pierced with arrows. The tall strange figure grows from contours that are intrinsic to the rock. It is of the stone and not of it. It is a warrior. He holds a weapon aloft and he is all beset.

  The man squats with the dog at the fire beneath the sign of his precursor. He shares the food with the dog and they sit close to the warmth and eat. They look into the coals and the flames lick up from the place where the three logs join. The man puts his hand on the dog’s neck.

  Jack, he says.

  The dog’s tongue lolls and it pants and it stares out vigilant across the plain. The wind whispers and an antelope grunts in the reeds of the stream below and the yellow dog pricks up its ears.

  What is it, Jack?

  There are clouds that drift away to the south and as they move the moon is unveiled like a new minted coin that shows clear upon its face the stamp of the coldforger. It is a shaft in the fabric of the known. It is like the bore of a rifle whose charge still burns. It is a core of brightness and its inverse is the dark ball already launched upon the watcher and travelling faster than its sound.

  Disclosure

  THE UGLY FACT, SAID Cormac McCarthy in a rare interview in the New York Times, is that books are made out of books.

  The Book of War was sparked by McCarthy’s Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the West and is scattered, fertilised, with phrases and sentences and images and echoes and ideas and jokes from that book. The indebtedness is not only to McCarthy. The prophecy/warning scene where the irregulars first meet the disordered missionary contains lines and dialogue from the equivalent scenes in Blood Meridian and Moby Dick. The scene has an element of collage to it.

  But even beyond the debt to Melville and McCarthy The Book of War is built on the skeletons of, and pillages assiduously from, firsthand accounts of the War of the Prophet by Stephen Bartlett Lakeman (What I Saw in Kaffirland) and William Ross King (Campaigning in Kaffirland: or Scenes and Adventures in the Kaffir War of 1851–2). Most of the events described were reported b
y these men and many are attested by other sources. Most of what the Captain writes in his book comes, occasionally word for word, from Lakeman or King.

  If readers wish to unravel the exact extent to which the various works overlap on levels of text and story I recommend the authors above, but the wild unspeakable hindoo odour belongs to Herman Melville alone.

  Acknowledgements

  THANKS ARE OWED TO Heidi Anne Kruger, Harry Kalmer, Melissa de Villiers, Marlene van Niekerk, Willem Anker, Bibi Slippers, SJ Naude, Wynand Coetzer, Richard de Nooy, Loyiso Maqoma, Ian Roberts and Pete van der Woude, who variously encouraged, mentored, suggested, queried, translated and edited.