by Wilbur Smith
‘Nearer my God to Thee,
Nearer to Thee—’
His voice was surprisingly clear and true, and Wilson was singing with him, holding the wadding to his stomach wound.
‘ – Darkness comes over me,
My rest a stone—’
The blind boy’s voice cracked and quavered. Dillon was beside him; though his ankle and elbow were shot through, he lay upon his back with a rifle propped on his crossed knees, ready to fire one-handed when they came. His voice was flat and tuneless, but he winked cheekily at Clinton and grinned:
‘ – Angels to beckon me—’
Eight of them, all that were left, every one of them wounded more than once, but all of them singing in the wilderness of the mopani forests – their voices tinny and thin, almost lost in the great crashing chords of the praise song of the Inyati regiment.
Then there was thunder in the air, the drumming of two thousand assegais on black and white dappled shields, and the thunder came rolling down upon their little circle.
Allan Wilson dragged himself to his feet to face them. Because of his stomach wound, he could not stand erect, and the one arm dangled at his side. His service revolver made a strangely unwarlike popping sound in the roar of the war chant and the drumming blades.
Dillon was still singing, snatching the loaded rifles and firing, and singing, and grabbing the next rifle. The blind boy fed the last cartridge into a rifle breech, and passed the hot rifle back to Dillon, and then he groped for another round, his fingers becoming frantic as he realized the bandolier was empty.
‘They’re finished,’ he cried. ‘They are all finished!’
Dillon pushed himself erect on his one good leg, and hopped forward, holding the empty rifle by the muzzle, and he swung the butt at the wave of shields and plumes that reared over him, but the blow lacked power and was deflected harmlessly aside by one of the tall oval shields; and then quite miraculously a long, broad blade sprang from between his shoulder blades, driven through from breast bone to spine, and the silver steel was misted pink.
‘I don’t want to die,’ screamed the blind boy. ‘Please hold me, Padre.’
And Clinton put his arm around his shoulders and squeezed with all his strength.
‘It’s all right, lad,’ he said. ‘It’s going to be all right.’
The bodies were stripped naked. Their skin, never touched by the sun, was snowy white and strangely delicate-looking, like the smooth petals of the arum lily. Upon this whiteness, the wounds were the shocking colour of crushed mulberries.
Around the killing ground was gathered a vast concourse of warriors, some of them already wearing items of the looted uniforms, all of them still panting with the exhilaration of that last wild charge and the stabbing with which it had ended.
From the dense ranks, an old grizzle-headed warrior stepped forward with his assegai held under-handed, like a butcher’s knife. He stooped over the naked corpse of Clinton Codrington. It was the time to let the spirits of the white men free, to let them escape from their bodies and fly, lest they remain on earth to trouble the living. It was time for the ritual disembowelment. The old warrior placed the point of his blade on the skin of Clinton’s stomach, just above the pathetic shrivelled cluster of his genitals, and gathered himself to make the deep upward stroke.
‘Hold!’ A clear voice stopped him, and the warrior stood back and saluted respectfully as Gandang came striding through the parting ranks of his warriors.
In the centre of that awful field, Gandang stopped, and looked down at the naked bodies of his enemies. His face was impassive, but his eyes were terrible, as though he mourned for all the earth.
‘Let them lie,’ he said quietly. ‘These were men of men, for their fathers were men before them.’
Then he turned and strode back the way he had come, and his men formed up behind him and trotted away into the north.
Lobengula had come to the end of his domains. Below him the earth opened into the steep escarpment of the Zambezi valley, a wild infernal place of broken rocky gorges and impenetrable thickets, of savage animals and a smouldering crushing heat.
At the limit of the eye the dark serpentine growth of riverine bush outlined the course of the father of all waters, and in the west a tall silver cloud of spray stood against the sky: it marked the place where the Zambezi river went crashing over a sheer ledge of rock in an awesome, creaming torrent, falling over three hundred feet into the narrow gorge below.
Lobengula sat upon the box of the leading wagon and looked upon all this savage grandeur with listless eyes. The wagon was drawn by two hundred of his warriors. The oxen were all dead, the ground had been too rugged and rocky for most of them and they had broken down and died in the traces.
Then the migration had run into the first belt of the tsetse fly, and the dreaded little insects had come to swarm on the dappled hides of the remaining bullocks and plague the men and women in Lobengula’s sprawling caravan. Within weeks, the last of the fly-struck beasts was dead, and men, more resistant to the sting of the tsetse, had taken their places in the span and drawn their king onwards in his hopeless, aimless flight.
Now even they were daunted by what lay ahead, and they rested on the yokes and looked back at Lobengula.
‘We will sleep here this night,’ said the king, and immediately the weary, starving host that followed the wagons spread out to begin the chores of making camp, the young girls to carry water in the clay pots, the men to build the temporary lean-to shelters and cut the wood for the fires, and the women to eke out the contents of the almost empty grain bags and the few shreds of dried meat that remained. The fly had killed the last of the slaughter beasts with the draught bullocks, and game was scarce and shy.
Gandang went forward to the lead wagon and saluted his half-brother.
‘Your bed will be ready soon, Nkosi Nkulu.’
But Lobengula was staring dreamily up at the steep rocky kopje that towered above their bivouac. The great bloated trunks of the cream-of-tartar trees had forced the black boulders apart. The little twisted branches, loaded with smooth furry pods, reached towards the uncaring sky like the maimed arms of a cripple.
‘Is that a cave up there, my brother?’ Lobengula asked softly. A dark cleft was riven into the rock face that girdled the crest of the hill. ‘I wish to go up to that cave.’
Twenty men carried Lobengula on a litter of poles and furs, and he winced at each jolt, his great swollen body riddled with gout and arthritis, but his eyes were fastened on the crest high above him.
Just below the rock face Gandang made a sign to the bearers and they lay the litter gently upon the rocky slope while Gandang shifted his shield onto his shoulder and freed his broad blade from its thong as he went ahead.
The cave was narrow but deep and dark. The small ledge at its mouth was littered with the furry remains and chewed bones of small animals, the hydrax and baboon, gazelle and klipspringer. The cave itself gave out the fetid odour of the cage of a carnivorous animal, and when Gandang squatted at the entrance and peered into the sombre depths, there was the sudden vicious spitting snarl of a leopard, and dimly he saw the beast move in the shadows and caught the glint of its fierce golden eyes.
Gandang moved slowly out of the sunlight, and paused to let his eyes adjust to the gloom. The leopard warned him again with a terrifying crackle of anger in the confined spaces of the cavern. It had crept closer and was lying flat upon a narrow ledge above the level of Gandang’s head. He could just make out the shape of its broad adder-like brow; the ears were laid back flat and the eyes slitted with rage.
Carefully, Gandang moved into position below the ledge, for he did not want to trigger the charge until he was ready to receive it. Balanced lightly in a half crouch, with the assegai’s point lifted and lined up on the enraged animal’s throat, Gandang flirted his shield and called to it.
‘Come, evil one! Come, devil spawn.’ And with another stunning burst of rage, the leopard launched itself, a bl
The blade was still buried in the leopard’s chest. It coughed once, choking on its own blood, and then it wrenched itself free of the steel and bounded out through the mouth of the cavern. When Gandang followed it cautiously into the sunlight, the beautiful beast was stretched out on the rocky ledge in a spreading puddle of its own blood. It was a magnificent old male, the pelt unscarred. The sable rosettes upon its back were not much darker than the dark amber ground, that shaded down to a pure buttery cream on the underbelly. A noble animal, and only a king might wear its fur.
‘The way is safe, oh King,’ Gandang called down the slope, and the litter-bearers carried Lobengula up and set him gently upon the ledge.
The king dismissed the bearers, and he and his half-brother were alone on the hillside, high above this harsh and barbaric land. Lobengula looked at the dead leopard and then at the dark mouth of the cavern.
‘This would be a fitting tomb for a king,’ said Lobengula reflectively, and Gandang could not answer him. They were silent for a long while.
‘I am a dead man,’ said Lobengula at last, and raised a graceful hand to still Gandang’s protest. ‘I walk, I speak still, but my heart is dead within me.’
Gandang was silent, and he could not look upon the king’s face.
‘Gandang, my brother. I want only peace. Will you grant me that? When I order it, will you bring your spear to me and by piercing my dead heart let my spirit free to find that peace?’
‘My King, my brother, never once have I disobeyed your order. Ever your word was the centre of my existence. Ask anything of me, my brother, anything but this. Never can I lift my hand towards you, son of Mzilikazi, my father, grandson of Mashobane, my grandfather.’
Lobengula sighed. ‘Oh Gandang, I am so weary and sick with grief. If you will not give me surcease, then will you send for my senior witchdoctor?’
The witchdoctor came and listened gravely to the king’s command; then he rose and went to the carcass of the leopard.
He clipped off the long, stiff, white whiskers and burned them to powder in a tiny clay pot over a small fire. To make the potion stronger still, he pounded a dozen seeds of the poison rope shrub to a paste and mixed it with the lethal ashes. Then from a stoppered buck-horn on his belt, he poured and stirred an acrid green liquid.
On his knees, with face to the ground, he wriggled towards the king like an obsequious cur-dog and placed the pot on the rocky ledge before him. As his withered claw-like fingers released the deadly vessel, Gandang rose silently behind him and drove his assegai between the witchdoctor’s bony shoulder blades and out of his pigeon chest.
Then he picked up the wizened skeletal body and carried it into the recesses of the cavern. When he came back he knelt again before Lobengula.
‘You are right,’ Lobengula nodded. ‘No man but you should know the manner of the king’s going.’
He picked up the pot and held it between his cupped pink palms.
‘Now you will be the father of my poor people. Stay in peace, my brother,’ said Lobengula, and lifted the pot to his lips and drained it at a single draught.
Then he lay back on the litter and pulled a fur kaross over his head.
‘Go sweetly, my beloved brother,’ said Gandang. His noble features were set like weathered granite, but as he sat beside the king’s bier the tears coursed down his cheeks and wet the great battle-scarred muscles of his chest.
They buried Lobengula in the cavern, sitting upright on the stone floor and wrapped in the wet green skin of the leopard. They dismantled his wagons and carried them up the hill and stacked the parts at the back of the cave.
They piled Lobengula’s tusks of yellow ivory at each hand, and at his feet Gandang placed his toy spear of kingship and his beer pots and eating plates, his knives and mirrors and snuff-horn, his beads and ornaments, a bag of salt and another of grain for the journey – and finally the little sealed clay pots of uncut diamonds to pay his way into the spirit world of his forefathers.
Under Gandang’s supervision, they sealed the mouth of the cavern with heavy slabs of black ironstone, then, dolefully singing the king’s praises, they went back down the hill.
There were no cattle to slaughter for the funeral feast, nor grain for the beer pots. Gandang called the leaders of the mourning people to him.
‘A mountain has fallen,’ he said simply. ‘And an age is past. I have left behind me my wife and my son and the land that I loved. Without those things a man is nothing. I am going back. No man need follow me. Each must choose his own path, but mine is south again to GuBulawayo and the magical hills of the Matopos – to meet and talk with this man Lodzi.’
In the morning, when Gandang started southwards again, he looked back and saw what was left of the Matabele nation straggling along behind him, no longer a great and warlike people, but a bewildered and broken rabble.
Robyn Codrington stood on the cool shaded verandah of Khami Mission. It had rained that morning, and the air was washed sparkling clean and the wet earth smelled like newly baked bread as the bright sunshine warmed it.
Robyn wore the black ribbons of mourning sewn on her sleeves.
‘Why do you come here?’ she demanded quietly, but unsmilingly, of the man who mounted the front steps of the verandah.
‘I had no choice,’ Mungo St John answered her. He stopped on the top step, and studied her for a moment without any trace of mockery on his face.
Her skin was scrubbed and fresh, devoid of either rouge or powder. It was smooth and fine-textured. There was no pouching below her clear green eyes, no blurring of her jawline, and her hair drawn back from her temples and forehead was innocent of silver lacing. Her body was small-breasted and narrow-hipped, tall and supple, but when she saw the direction of his gaze, the line of Robyn’s lips hardened and set.
‘I should be grateful, sir, if you would state your business and leave.’
‘Robyn, I am sorry, but perhaps it is best that the uncertainty is over.’
In the four months since the return of the flying column from the Shangani, a dozen rumours had come out of the bush.
That fateful morning, Mungo St John’s column, cut off by the flooded river, had heard heavy firing on the opposite bank. Then almost immediately they had themselves come under fierce attack by elements of the Matabele army. They had been forced to retire, a long weary fighting retreat in the rain that had taken weeks of starvation and privation, until at last the harrying impis had let them go, but not before the gun carriages had been abandoned and half the horses lost.
Nobody had known what had happened to Allan Wilson’s patrol on the north bank of the Shangani, but then the word had reached GuBulawayo that the little band had cut their way through the impis, gained the Zambezi, and rafted down it to the Portuguese settlement of Tete, three hundred miles downstream. Later that was denied by the Portuguese and hopes plunged, to be revived again when a Matabele induna coming in to surrender suggested that the white men had been taken prisoner by the Inyati regiment – rumour, denial and counter-rumour for four harrowing months, and now Mungo St John was standing before Robyn.
‘It’s certain,’ he said. ‘I did not want a stranger to bring the news to you.’
‘They are dead,’ she said flatly.
‘All of them. Dawson reached the battlefield and found them.’
‘He would not have been able to recognize them or be certain of how many bodies. Not after all these months, not after the hyena and vultures—’
‘Robyn, please.’ Mungo held out a hand to her, but she recoiled from him.
‘I won’t believe it, Clinton could have escaped.’
‘In the bush Dawson met the senior induna of the Matabele. He was coming in with all his people to surrender. He described to Dawson the patrol’s last stand, and how in the end they all died.’
‘Clinton could have—’ She was very pale, shaking her head firmly.
‘Robyn, it was Gandang. He knew your husband well. “Hlopi” he called him, the man with white hair. He saw him lying with the other dead. It is certain. There can be no more hope.’
‘You can go now,’ she said, and then quite suddenly she was weeping. Standing very erect and chewing her lower lip to try and stop herself, but her face had crumpled and the rims of her eyelids turned rosy-pink with grief.
‘I cannot leave you like this,’ he said and limped down the stoep towards her.
‘Don’t come near me,’ she husked through her tears, and she retreated before him. ‘Please don’t touch me.’
He came on, lean and rangy as an old tom-leopard; but the cruel and swarthy planes of his face had softened with an expression she had never seen upon them before, and his one good eye held her swimming green ones with a deep and tender concern.
‘Don’t, oh please don’t—’ Now she held up both hands as if to ward him off, and she turned her face away. She had reached the end of the verandah; her back was pressed to the door of the bedroom which Cathy and Salina had once shared, and she began to pray, her voice muffled by her own tears.
‘Oh Gentle Jesus, help me to be strong—’ His hands fell upon her shoulders; they were hard as bone and cool through the thin cotton of her blouse. She shuddered, and gasped.
‘ – Have pity. I beg you. Let me be.’
He took her chin in the cup of his hand and forced her face up to his.
‘Will you give me no peace, ever?’ she mumbled brokenly, and then his mouth covered hers and she could not speak again. Slowly the rigidity went out of her body, and she swayed against him. She sobbed once, and began to slump into the embrace of his hard muscled arms. He caught her behind the knees, and around the shoulders, and lifted her like a sleeping child against his chest.
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