by Wilbur Smith
Robyn St John woke to the soft scratching on the shutter of her bedroom, and she raised herself on one elbow.
‘Who is it?’ she called.
‘It is me, Nomusa.’
‘Juba, my little Dove, I did not expect you!’
Robyn slipped out of bed and crossed to the window. When she opened the shutter, the night was opalescent with moonlight, and Juba was huddled below the sill.
‘You are so cold.’ Robyn took her arm. ‘You’ll catch your death. Come inside immediately. I’ll fetch a blanket.’
‘Nomusa, wait.’ Juba caught her wrist. ‘I must go.’
‘But you have only just arrived.’
‘Nobody must know that I was here, please tell nobody, Nomusa.’
‘What is it? You are shaking—’
‘Listen, Nomusa. I could not leave you – you are my mother and sister and friend, I could not leave you.’
‘Juba—’
‘Do not speak. Listen for a minute,’ Juba pleaded. ‘I have so little time.’
It was only then that Robyn realized that it was not the chill of night that shook Juba’s vast frame. She was racked with sobs of fear and of dread.
‘You must go, Nomusa. You and Elizabeth and the baby. Take nothing with you, leave this very minute. Go into Bulawayo, perhaps you will be safe there. It is your best chance.’
‘I don’t understand you, Juba. What nonsense is this?’
‘They are coming Nomusa. They are coming. Please hurry.’
Then she was gone. She moved swiftly and silently for such a big woman, and she seemed to melt into the moon shadows under the spathodea trees. By the time Robyn had found her shawl and run down the veranda, there was no sign of her.
Robyn hurried down towards the hospital bungalows, stumbling once on the verge of the path, calling with increasing exasperation.
‘Juba, come back here! Do you hear me? I won’t stand any more of this nonsense!’
She stopped at the church, uncertain which path to take.
‘Juba! Where are you?’
The silence was broken only by the yipping of a jackal up on the hillside above the Mission. It was answered by another on the peak of the pass where the road to Bulawayo crossed the hills.
‘Juba!’
The watch-fire by the hospital bungalow had burned out. She crossed to it, and threw on to it a log from the woodpile. The silence was unnatural. The log caught and flared. In its light she climbed the steps of the nearest bungalow.
The sleeping-mats of the patients were in two rows, facing each other down each wall, but they were deserted. Even the most desperately ill had gone. They must have been carried away, for some of them had been past walking.
Robyn hugged the shawl around her shoulders. ‘Poor ignorant heathen,’ she said aloud. ‘Another witchcraft scare, they will run from their own shadows.’
She turned sorrowfully away, and walked through the darkness back towards the house. There was a light burning in Elizabeth’s room, and as Robyn climbed the steps of the veranda, the door opened.
‘Mama! Is that you?’
‘What are you doing, Elizabeth?’
‘I thought I heard voices.’
Robyn hesitated, she did not want to alarm Elizabeth, but then she was a sensible child, and unlikely to go into hysteria over a bit of Matabele superstition.
‘Juba was here. There must be another witchcraft scare. She ran off again.’
‘What did she say?’
‘Oh, just that we should go in to Bulawayo to escape some sort of danger.’
Elizabeth came out onto the veranda in her nightdress, carrying the candle.
‘Juba is a Christian, she doesn’t dabble in witchcraft.’ Elizabeth’s tone was concerned. ‘What else did she say?’
‘Just that,’ Robyn yawned. ‘I’m going back to bed.’ She started along the veranda, and then stopped. ‘Oh, the others have all run off. The hospital is empty. It’s most annoying.’
‘Mama, I think we should do as Juba says.’
‘What do you mean by that?’
‘I think we should go in to Bulawayo immediately.’
‘Elizabeth, I thought better of you.’
‘I have an awful feeling. I think we should go. Perhaps there is real danger.’
‘This is my home. Your father and I built it with our own hands. There is no power on earth that will force me to leave it,’ Robyn said firmly. ‘Now go back to bed. With no help, we are going to have a busy day tomorrow.’
They squatted in long silent ranks in the long grass below the crest of the hills. Gandang moved quietly down the ranks, stopping occasionally to exchange a word with an old comrade in arms. To revive a memory of another waiting before a battle of long ago.
It was strange to sit upon the bare earth during the waiting time. In the old days they would have sat on their shields, the long dappled shields of iron-hard oxhide, squatting upon them not for comfort but to hide their distinctive shape from a watchful enemy until the moment came to strike terror into his belly and steel into his heart; squatting upon them also to prevent some young buck in the throes of the divine madness from prematurely drumming upon the rawhide with his assegai and giving warning of the waiting impi.
It was strange also not to be decked out in the full regimentals of the Inyati impi, the plumes and furs and tassels of cow-tails, the war rattles at ankle and wrist, the tall headdress that turned a man into a giant. They were dressed like neophytes, like unblooded boys, with only their kilts about their waists, but the scars upon their dark bodies and the fire in their eyes gave the lie to that impression.
Gandang felt himself choking with a pride that he once thought he would never experience again. He loved them, he loved their fierceness and their valour, and though his face was quiet and expressionless, the love shone through in his eyes.
They picked it up and gave it back to him a hundred times. ‘Baba!’ they called him in their soft deep voices. ‘Father, we thought we would never fight at your shoulder again,’ they said. ‘Father, those of your sons who die today will be forever young.’
Across the neck of the hills a jackal wailed mournfully and was answered from close at hand. The impi was in position, lying across the Khami hills like a coiled mamba, waiting and watchful and ready.
There was a glow in the sky now. The false dawn, that would be followed by the deeper darkness before the true dawn. The deep darkness that the amadoda loved and used so well.
They stirred quietly, and grounded the shaft of assegai between their heels, ready for the order: ‘Up my children. It is the time of the spears.’
This time the order did not come, and the true dawn flushed the sky with blood. In its light the amadoda looked at each other.
One of the senior warriors, who had won Gandang’s respect on fifty battlefields, spoke for all of them. He went to where Gandang sat alone to one side of the impi.
‘Baba, your children are confused. Tell us why we wait.’
‘Old friend, are your spears so thirsty for the blood of women and babes, that they cannot wait for richer fare?’
‘We can wait as long as you command it, Baba. But it is hard.’
‘Old friend, I am baiting for a leopard with a tender goat,’ Gandang told him, and let his chin sink back on the great muscles of his chest.
The sun pushed up and gilded the tree-tops along the hills, and still Gandang did not move, and the silent ranks waited behind him in the grass.
A young warrior whispered to another. ‘Already the storm has begun. Everywhere else our brethren are busy. They will mock us when they hear how we sat on the hilltop—’
One of the older men hissed a rebuke at him, and the young warrior fell silent, but further down the ranks another youngster shifted on his haunches and his assegai tapped against that of his neighbour. Gandang did not raise his head.
Then from the hilltop a wild francolin called. ‘Qwaali! Qwaali!’ The sharp penetrating cry was a characteristi
c sound of the veld, only a sharp ear would have detected anything strange about this one.
Gandang rose to his feet. ‘The leopard comes,’ he said quietly, and stalked up to the vantage point from which he could look down the full length of road that led to the town of Bulawayo. The sentry who had sounded the call of the wild pheasant pointed wordlessly with the hilt of his assegai.
There was an open coach and a troop of horsemen upon the road. Gandang counted them, eleven riding hard, coming directly out towards the Khami hills. The figure that led them was unmistakable, even at this distance. The height in the saddle, the alert set of head, the long stirrups.
‘Hau! One-Bright-Eye!’ Gandang greeted him softly. ‘I have waited many long moons for you.’
General Mungo St John had been awakened in the middle of the night. In his nightshirt he had listened to the hysterical outpourings of a coloured servant who had escaped from the trading-store on the Ten-Mile Drift. It was a wild tale of slaughter and burning, and the man’s breath smelled of good Cape brandy.
‘He’s drunk,’ said Mungo St John flatly. ‘Take him away, and give him a good thrashing.’
The first white man got into town three hours before dawn. He had been stabbed through the thigh and his left arm was broken in two places by blows from a knobkerrie. He was clinging to his horse’s neck with his good arm.
‘The Matabele are out!’ he screamed. ‘They are burning the farms—’ and he slid out of the saddle in a dead faint.
By first light there were fifty wagons formed into a laager in the market square; without oxen to draw them, they had been manhandled into position. All the town’s women and children had been brought into the laager and put to work making bandages, reloading ammunition, and baking hard bread against a siege. The few able-bodied men that Doctor Jameson had not taken with him into captivity in the Transvaal were swiftly formed into troops, and horses and rifles were found for those who lacked them.
In the midst of the bustle and confusion, Mungo St John had commandeered a fast open coach with a coloured driver, picked out the most likely and best mounted troop of horsemen, and using his authority as acting Administrator given them the order.
‘Follow me!’
Now he reined in on the crest of the hills above Khami Mission, at the point where the track was narrowest and the tall yellow grass and the forest hemmed it in like a wall on each side, and he shaded his single eye.
‘Thank God!’ he whispered. The thatched roofs of the Mission that he expected to see billowing with smoke and flame stood serenely in the quiet green valley beyond.
The horses were sweating and blowing from the pull up the hills, and the coach had lagged two hundred paces behind Mungo. As soon as it came up, without giving a moment’s rest to the mules, Mungo shouted, ‘Troop, forward!’ and spurred away down the track, with his troopers clattering behind him.
Robyn St John came out of the thatched rondavel that was her laboratory, and as soon as she recognized the man that led the column, she placed her hands upon her boyish hips and lifted her chin angrily.
‘What is the meaning of this intrusion, sir?’ she demanded.
‘Madam, the Matabele tribe is in full rebellion. They are murdering women and children, burning the homesteads.’
Robyn took a step backwards protectively, for Robert had come pale-faced from the clinic to hang onto her skirts.
‘I have come to take you and your children to safety.’
‘The Matabele are my friends,’ said Robyn. ‘I have nothing to fear from them. This is my home. I do not intend leaving it.’
‘I do not have time to indulge your predilection for obstructive disputation, madam,’ he said grimly, and stood in the stirrups.
‘Elizabeth!’ he bellowed, and she came onto the veranda of the homestead. ‘The Matabele are in revolt. We are all in mortal danger. You have two minutes to gather what personal items your family may need—’
‘Take no heed of him, Elizabeth,’ Robyn shouted angrily. ‘We are staying here.’
Before she realized his intention, Mungo had pricked his horse with a spur, backing it up towards the laboratory doorway; then he stooped from the saddle and caught Robyn about the waist. He swung her up over the pommel of the saddle, with her backside in the air and her skirts around her hips. She kicked and yelled with outrage, but he walked his horse alongside the open coach and with a heave of his shoulder dumped her in another flurry of petticoats onto the back seat.
‘If you do not stay there, madam, I will not hesitate to have you bound. It will be most undignified.’
‘I will never forgive you for this!’ she panted through white lips, but she could see he meant the threat seriously.
‘Robert,’ Mungo St John ordered his son, ‘go to your mother. Immediately!’
The child scampered to the coach and climbed into it.
‘Elizabeth!’ Mungo St John bellowed again. ‘Hurry, girl. All our lives depend on haste now.’
Elizabeth ran out onto the veranda with a bundle over her shoulder.
‘Good girl!’ Mungo St John smiled at her. So pretty and brave and level-headed, she had always been one of his favourites. He jumped down to boost her into the coach, and then vaulted back into the saddle.
‘Troop, Walk. March! Trot!’ he ordered, and they wheeled out of the yard.
The coach was in the rear of the column. The ten troopers in double ranks ahead of it, and five lengths out in front of them again rode Mungo St John. Despite herself, Elizabeth was thrilled and deliciously fearful. It was all so different from the quiet monotonous round of life at Khami Mission, the armed men, the urgency and tension in each of them, the dark threat of the unknown surrounding them, the romance of the faithful husband riding through the valley of the shadow of death to save his beloved woman. How noble and dashing he looked at the head of the column, how easily he sat his horse, and when he turned to look back at the coach, how reckless was his smile – there was only one other man in all the world to match him. If only it had been Ralph Ballantyne come to save her alone! The thought was sinful, and she put it away quickly, and to distract herself looked back down the hill.
‘Oh, Mama!’ she cried, jumping up in the swaying coach, pointing wildly. ‘Look!’
The Mission was burning. The thatch of the church stood in a tall beacon of leaping flame. Smoke was curling out of the homestead, and as they stared in horror, they saw tiny dark human figures running down the pathway under the spathodea trees, carrying torches of dry grass. One of them stopped to hurl his torch onto the roof of the clinic.
‘My books,’ whispered Robyn. ‘All my papers. My life’s work.’
‘Don’t look, Mama.’ Elizabeth sank down beside her on the seat, and they clung to each other like lost children.
The little column reached the crest of the pass; without a pause the weary horses plunged down the far side – and the Matabele came simultaneously from both sides of the track. They rose out of the grass in two black waves, and the humming roar of their war chant swelled like the sound of an avalanche gathering momentum down a steep mountainside.
The troopers had been riding with their carbines cocked, the butts resting on their right thighs, but so swift was the rush of Matabele that only a single volley rippled down the column. It made no impression upon the black wave of humanity, and then as the horses reared and whinnied with terror, the troopers were dragged from their saddles, and stabbed through and through, ten and twenty times. The warriors were mad with blood lust. They swarmed over the bodies, snarling and howling, like the hounds tearing the carcass of the fox.
A huge sweat-shining warrior seized the coloured driver by the leg, and plucked him off the driver’s seat of the coach, and while he was still in the air another warrior transfixed him on the broad silver blade of an assegai.
Only Mungo St John, five lengths ahead of the column, broke clear. He had taken a single assegai-thrust through the side, and the blood streamed down one leg of his breeches, dow
n his riding-boot and dripped from the heel.
He still sat high in the saddle, and he looked back over his shoulder. He looked over the heads of the Matabele straight into Robyn’s eyes. It was only for an instant, and then he had wheeled his horse, and he drove back into the mass of black warriors, riding for the coach. He fired his service pistol into the face of a warrior who leaped to catch his horse’s head, but from the other side another Matabele stabbed upwards overhanded, deeply into his armpit. Mungo St John grunted and spurred onwards.
‘I’m here!’ he shouted to Robyn. ‘Don’t worry, my darling—’ and a warrior stabbed him through the belly. He doubled over. His horse went down, sharp steel driven through its heart, and it seemed that it was all over, but miraculously Mungo St John rose to his feet and stood foursquare with the pistol in his hand. His eye-patch had been torn from his head, and the empty eye-socket glared so demoniacally, that for a moment the warriors fell back and he stood in their midst with the terrible spear wounds in his chest and belly running red.
Gandang stepped out of the press, and a silence fell upon them all. The two men stood face to face for a long second, Mungo tried to lift the pistol, but his strength failed him, and then Gandang drove the silver blade through the centre of Mungo St John’s chest and it shot a hand’s span out of his back.
Gandang stood over the body and placed one foot upon Mungo St John’s chest and pulled the blade free. It made a sucking sound like a boot in thick mud. It was the only sound, and after it was silence. The silence was even more terrible than the war chant and the screams of dying men.
The dense press of black bodies hemmed in the coach, and hid the corpses of the dead troopers. The amadoda formed a ring around where Mungo St John lay upon his back, his features still twisted into a grimace of rage and agony. His one eye glaring at the enemy he could no longer see.
One at a time the warriors lifted their heads and stared at the huddle of women and a child in the open body of the coach. The very air was charged with menace, their eyes were glazed with the killing madness, and blood still splattered their arms and chests and speckled their faces like a macabre war paint. The ranks swayed like prairie grass touched by a little breeze. In the rear a single voice began to hum, but before it could spread, Robyn St John rose to her feet and from the height of the coach looked down upon them. The hum died out into silence.