by Wilbur Smith
The calf was dancing. Ralph had never seen anything like it. It was swaying, and turning in slow and elegant pirouettes, the neck twisting and untwisting, swinging first to one side then to the other. Every few paces the mother turned back anxiously to watch its offspring, and then torn between duty and maternal love, swung again to follow the old bull. At last, quite slowly, with a kind of weary grace, the calf slumped to the grassy earth, and lay in a tangle of long limbs. The mother hovered for a minute or two, and then in the way of the wilderness, deserted the weak and went on after her mate.
Ralph and Harry rode up, slowly, almost reluctantly, to where the calf lay. Only when they reached it were they aware of the fatal mucous discharge from jaws and nostrils, and the diarrhoea painting the dappled hind-quarters. They stared at the corpse in disbelief, until suddenly Harry wrinkled his nose and sniffed.
‘That smell, the same as the oxen—’ he started, and suddenly realization dawned upon him. ‘A murrain,’ he whispered. ‘By the sweet name of the Virgin, Harry, it’s some kind of plague. It is wiping out everything, game and oxen.’ Under his deep tan, Ralph had turned a muddy colour. ‘Two hundred wagons, Harry,’ he whispered, ‘almost four thousand bullocks. If this thing goes on spreading, I’m going to lose them all.’ He reeled in the saddle so that he had to clutch at the pommel for his balance. ‘I’ll be finished. Wiped out – all of it.’ His voice trembled with self-pity, and then a moment later he shook himself like a wet spaniel, sloughing off despair, and colour rushed back into his darkly handsome face.
‘No, I’m not,’ he said fiercely. ‘I’m not finished yet, not without a fight anyway.’ And he whirled to face Harry. ‘You’ll have to bring the women back to Bulawayo alone,’ he ordered. ‘I’m taking the four best horses.’
‘Where are you going?’ Harry asked.
‘Kimberley.’
‘What for?’
But Ralph had pivoted his horse like a polo pony, and was lying along its neck as he raced back towards the single wagon that had just come out of the forest behind them. Even as he reached it, one of the lead oxen collapsed and lay convulsed in the traces.
Isazi did not go to the kraal the following dawn. He was afraid of what he would find. Bazo went in his place.
They were all dead. Every single bullock. They were already stiff and cold as statues, locked in that dreadful final convulsion. Bazo shivered, and pulled his monkey-skin cloak more closely around his shoulders. It was not the dawn chill, but the icy finger of superstitious awe that had touched him.
‘When the cattle lie with their heads twisted to touch their flank, and cannot rise—’ he repeated aloud the exact words of the Umlimo, and his dread was carried away by the jubilant rush of his warlike spirits. ‘It is happening, just as it was prophesied.’
Never before had the Chosen One’s words been so unequivocal. He should have seen it immediately, but the whirlwind of events had confused him so that it was only now that the true significance of this fatal plague had come upon him. Now he wanted to leave the laager, and run southwards, day and night, without stopping, until he reached that secret cavern in the sacred hills.
He wanted to stand before the assembled indunas and tell them: ‘You who doubted, believe now the words of the Umlimo. You with milk and beer in your bellies, put a stone in their place.’
He wanted to go from mine to farm to the new villages the white men were building where his comrades now laboured with pick and shovel instead of the silver blade, wearing the ragged cast-offs of their masters rather than the plumes and kilts of the regiment.
He wanted to ask them, ‘Do you remember the war song of the Izimvukuzane Ezembintaba, the Moles-that-burrow-under-a-mountain? Come, you diggers of the other men’s dirt, come rehearse the war song of the Moles with me.’
But it was not yet full term, there was the third and final act of the Umlimo’s prophecy to unfold, and until then Bazo, like his old comrades, must play the white man’s servant. With an effort, he masked his savage joy, withdrawing behind the inscrutable face of Africa. Bazo left the kraal of dead bullocks and went to the remaining wagon. The white women and the child were asleep within the body of the vehicle, and Harry Mellow was lying wrapped in his blanket under the chassis where the dew could not wet him.
Henshaw had deserted them late the previous afternoon, before they had even reached the bank of the Lupani river. He had chosen four horses, the swiftest and strongest. He had charged Bazo most strictly with the task of leading the little party back to Bulawayo on foot, then he had kissed his wife and son, shaken hands briefly with Harry Mellow, and galloped away southwards towards the drift on the Lupani, leading the three spare horses on a long rein and riding like a man chased by wild dogs.
Now Bazo stooped beside the wagon and spoke slowly and clearly to the blanket-wrapped figure beneath it. Though Harry Mellow’s grasp of Sindebele improved each day, it was still equivalent to that of a five-year-old and Bazo had to be sure he understood.
‘The last of the oxen is dead. One horse was killed by the buffalo, and Henshaw has taken four.’
Harry Mellow sat up quickly and made the decision. ‘That leaves one mount each for the women, and Jon-Jon can ride up behind one of them. The rest of us will walk. How long back to Bulawayo, Bazo?’
Bazo shrugged eloquently. ‘If we were an impi, fast and fit, five days. But at the pace of a white man in boots—’
They looked like refugees, each servant carrying bundles of only the most essential stores upon his head, and strung out in a long straggling line behind the two horses. The women were hampered by their long skirts whenever they walked to rest the horses, and Bazo could not contain himself to this pace. He ranged far ahead of the others and once he was out of sight and well beyond earshot, he pranced and stamped, stabbing with an imaginary assegai at a non-existent adversary, and accompanying the giya, the challenge dance, with the fighting chant of his old impi.
‘Like a mole in the earth’s gut
Bazo found the secret way—’
The first verse of the song commemorated the impi’s assault on the mountain stronghold of Pemba, the wizard, when so long ago Bazo had climbed the subterranean passage to the top of the cliff. It was as a reward for this feat that Lobengula had promoted Bazo to induna, had given him the headring, and allowed him to ‘go in to the women’ and choose Tanase as his wife.
Dancing alone in the forest, Bazo sang the other verses. Each of them had been composed after a famous victory, all except the last. That verse was the only one that had never been sung by the full regiment in battle array. It was the verse for the last charge of the Moles, when with Bazo at their head, they had run onto the laager on the banks of the Shangani river. Bazo had composed it himself, as he lay in the cave of the Matopos, near unto death with the mortification of the bullet wounds in his body.
‘Why do you weep, widows of Shangani,
When the three-legged guns laugh so loudly?
Why do you weep, little sons of the Moles,
When your fathers did the king’s bidding?’
Now suddenly there was another verse. It came into Bazo’s head complete and perfect, as though it had been sung ten thousand times before.
‘The Moles are beneath the earth,
“Are they dead?” asked the daughters of Mashobane.
Listen, pretty maids, do you not hear
Something stirring, in the darkness?’
And Bazo, the Axe, shouted it to the msasa trees in their soft mantles of red leaves, and the trees bowed slightly to the east wind, as though they, too, were listening.
Ralph Ballantyne stopped at King’s Lynn. He threw the reins to Jan Cheroot, the old Hottentot hunter. ‘Water them, old man, and fill the grain bags for me. I will be away again in an hour.’
Then he ran up onto the veranda of the sprawling thatched homestead, and his stepmother came out to meet him, her consternation turning to delight, when she recognized him.
‘Oh Ralph, you startled me�
�’
‘Where is my father?’ Ralph demanded, as he kissed her cheek, and Louise’s expression changed to match the gravity of his.
‘In the north section, they are branding the calves – but what is it, Ralph? I haven’t seen you like this.’
He ignored the question. ‘The north section, that’s six hours’ ride. I cannot spare the time to go to him.’
‘It’s serious,’ she decided. ‘Don’t torture me, Ralph.’
‘I’m sorry.’ He laid his hand on her arm. ‘There is some dreadful murrain sweeping down out of the north. It hit my cattle on the Gwaai river, and we lost them all, over one hundred head in twelve hours.’
Louise stared at him. ‘Perhaps—’ she whispered, but he cut across her brusquely.
‘It’s killing everything, giraffe and buffalo and oxen, only the horses have not been touched yet. But, by God, Louise, I saw buffalo lying dead and stinking on each side of the track as I rode southwards yesterday. Animals that had been strong and healthy the day before.’
‘What must we do, Ralph?’
‘Sell,’ he answered. ‘Sell all the cattle at any price, before it reaches us.’ He turned and shouted to Jan Cheroot. ‘Bring the notebook from my saddlebag.’
While he scribbled a note for his father, Louise asked, ‘When did you last eat?’
‘I cannot remember.’
He ate the slabs of cold venison and raw onion and strong cheese on slices of stone-ground bread, and washed it down with a jug of beer, while he gave Jan Cheroot his instructions. ‘Speak to nobody else but my father. Tell nobody else of this thing. Go swiftly, Jan Cheroot.’ But Ralph was up in the saddle and away before the little Hottentot was ready to ride.
Ralph circled wide of the town of Bulawayo, to avoid meeting an acquaintance and to reach the telegraph line at a lonely place, well away from the main road. Ralph’s own construction gangs had laid the telegraph line, so he knew every mile of it, every vulnerable point and how most effectively to cut off Bulawayo and Matabeleland from Kimberley and the rest of the world.
He tethered his horses at the foot of one of the telegraph poles and shinned up it to the cluster of porcelain insulators and the gleaming copper wires. He used a magnus hitch on a leather thong to hold the ends of the wire from falling to earth, and then cut between the knots. The wire parted with a singing twang, but the thong held, and when he climbed down to the horses and looked up, he knew it would need a skilled linesman to detect the break.
He flung himself back into the saddle, and booted the horse into a gallop. At noon he intersected the road and turned southwards along it. He changed horses every hour, and rode until it was too dark to see the tracks. Then he knee-haltered the horses, and slept like a dead man on the hard ground. Before dawn, he ate a hunk of cheese and a slice of the rough bread Louise had put into his saddlebag, and was away again with the first softening of the eastern sky.
At mid-morning, he turned out of the track, and found the telegraph line where it ran behind a flat-topped kopje. He knew the Company linesmen hunting for the first break in the line would be getting close to it by now, and there may be somebody in the telegraph office in Bulawayo anxious to send a report to Mr Rhodes about the terrible plague that was ravaging the herds.
Ralph cut the line in two places and went on. In the late afternoon, one of his horses broke down. It had been ridden too hard, and he turned it loose beside the road. If a lion did not get it, then perhaps one of his drivers would recognize the brand.
The next day, fifty miles from the Shashi river, he met one of his own convoys coming up from the south. There were twenty-six wagons in the charge of a white overseer. Ralph stopped only long enough to commandeer the man’s horses, leave his own exhausted animals with him, and then he rode on. He cut the telegraph lines twice more, once on each side of the Shashi river, before he reached the railhead.
He came upon his surveyor first, a red-haired Scot. With a gang of blacks, they were working five miles ahead of the main crews, and cutting the lines for the rails. Ralph did not even dismount.
‘Did you get the telegraph I sent you from Bulawayo, Mac?’ he demanded without wasting time on greetings.
‘Nowt, Mr Ballantyne.’ The Scot shook his dusty curls. ‘Not a word from the north in five days – they say the lines are down, longest break I’ve heard of.’
‘Damn it to hell,’ Ralph swore furiously, to cover his relief. ‘I wanted you to hold a truck for me.’
‘If you hurry, Mr Ballantyne, sir, there is an empty string of trucks going back today.’
Five miles further on Ralph reached the railhead. It was crossing a wide flat plain dotted with thorn scrub. The boil of activity seemed incongruous in this bleak, desolate land on the edge of the Kalahari Desert. A green locomotive huffed columns of silver steam high into the empty sky, shunting the string of flat-topped bogies to the end of the glistening silver rails. Teams of singing black men, dressed only in loincloths, but armed with crowbars, levered the steel rails over the side of the trucks and as they fell in a cloud of pale dust, another team ran forward to lift and set the tracks onto the teak sleepers.
The foremen levelled them with cast-iron wedges and the hammer boy followed them, driving in the steel spikes with ringing blows. Half a mile back was the construction headquarters. A square sweat box of wood and corrugated iron that could be moved up each day. The chief engineer was in his shirtsleeves, sweating over a desk made of condensed-milk cases nailed together.
‘What is your mileage?’ Ralph demanded from the door of the shack.
‘Mr Ballantyne, sir,’ the engineer jumped up. He was an inch taller than Ralph, bull-necked and with thick hairy forearms, but he was afraid of Ralph. You could see it in his eyes. It gave Ralph a flicker of satisfaction, he was not trying to be the most popular man in Africa. There was no prize for that. ‘We didn’t expect you, not until the end of the month.’
‘I know. What’s your mileage?’
‘We have had a few snags, sir.’
‘By God, man, do I have to kick it out of you?’
‘Since the first of the month,’ the engineer hesitated. He had proved to himself that there was no profit in lying to Ralph Ballantyne. ‘Sixteen miles.’
Ralph crossed to the survey map, and checked the figures. He had noted the beacon numbers of the railhead as he passed.
‘Fifteen miles and six hundred yards, isn’t sixteen,’ he said.
‘No, sir. Almost sixteen.’
‘Are you satisfied with that?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Nor am I.’ That was enough, Ralph told himself, any more would decrease the man’s usefulness, and there wasn’t a better man to replace him, not between here and the Orange river.
‘Did you get my telegraph from Bulawayo?’
‘No, Mr Ballantyne. The lines have been down for days.’
‘The line to Kimberley?’
‘That is open.’
‘Good. Get your operator to send this.’
Ralph stooped over the message pad and scribbled quickly.
‘For Aaron Fagan, attorney at law, De Beers Street, Kimberley. Arriving early tomorrow 6th. Arrange urgent noon meeting with Rough Rider from Rholand.’
Rough Rider was the private code for Roelof Zeederberg, Ralph’s chief rival in the transport business. Zeederberg’s express coaches plied from Delagoa to Algoa Bay, from the goldfields of Pilgrims Rest to Witwatersrand, to the railhead at Kimberley.
While his telegraph operator tapped it out on the brass and teak instrument, Ralph turned back to his engineer.
‘All right, what were the snags that held you up, and how can we beat them?’
‘The worst is the bottle-neck at Kimberley shunting-yards.’
For an hour they worked, and at the end of it the locomotive whistled outside the shack. They went out, still arguing and planning. Ralph tossed his saddlebag and blanket-roll onto the first flat car, and held the train for ten minutes longer while he arranged
the final details with his engineer.
‘From now on you will get your hardware faster than you can nail it down,’ he promised grimly, as he vaulted up onto the bogie and waved at the driver.
The whistle sent a jet of steam spurting into the dry desert air, and the locomotive wheels spun and then gripped with a jolt, and the long string of empty cars began to trundle southwards, building up speed rapidly. Ralph found a corner of the truck out of the wind, and rolled into his blanket. Eight days’ ride from the Lupani river to the railhead. It had to be some sort of record.
‘But there is no prize for that either,’ he grinned wearily, pulled his hat over his eyes and settled down to listen to the song of the wheels over the ties. ‘We have got to hurry. We have got to hurry.’ And then just before he fell asleep, the song changed: ‘The cattle are dying. The cattle are dead,’ sang the wheels over and over again, but even that could not keep him awake one second longer.
They pulled into the shunting-yards at Kimberley, sixteen hours later. It was just past four in the morning.
Ralph jumped down off the bogie as the locomotive slowed for the points, and with his saddlebags slung over his shoulder, trudged up De Beers Street. There was a light on in the telegraph office and Ralph beat on the wooden hatch until the night operator peered out at him like a barn owl from its nest.
‘I want to send an urgent telegraph to Bulawayo.’
‘Sorry, mate, the line is down.’
‘When will it be open again?’
‘God knows, it’s been out for six days already.’
Ralph was still grinning as he swaggered into the lobby of Diamond Lil’s Hotel.
The night clerk was new. He did not recognize Ralph. He saw a tall lean sunburned man, whose stained and dusty clothing hung loosely on him. That wild ride had burned off all Ralph’s excess flesh. He had not shaved since leaving the Lupani, and his boots were scuffed almost through the uppers by the brushing of the thorn scrub as he had ridden through it. Locomotive soot had darkened his face and reddened his eyes, and the clerk recognized a drifter when he saw one.