The Angels Weep

by Wilbur Smith

  Robyn reached forward and picked up the reins. The Matabele watched her and still not one of them moved. Robyn flicked the reins, and the mules started forward at a walk.

  Gandang, son of Mzilikazi, senior induna of the Matabele, stepped off the track, and behind him the ranks of his amadoda opened. The mules passed slowly down the lane between them, stepping daintily over the mutilated corpses of the troopers. Robyn stared straight ahead, holding the reins stiffly. Just once as she drew level with where Mungo St John lay, she glanced down at him, and then looked ahead again.

  Slowly, the coach rolled on down the hill, and when Elizabeth looked back again, the road was deserted.

  ‘They have gone, Mama,’ she whispered, and only then did she realize that Robyn was shaking with silent sobs.

  Elizabeth put her arm around her shoulders, and for a moment Robyn leaned against her.

  ‘He was a terrible man, but, oh God forgive me, I loved him so,’ she whispered, and then she straightened up and urged the mules into a trot towards Bulawayo.

  Ralph Ballantyne rode through the night, taking the difficult and direct path through the hills rather than the broad wagon road. The spare horses were loaded with food and blankets that he had salvaged from the railhead camp. He led them at a walk over the rocky terrain, husbanding them for whatever efforts lay ahead of them.

  He rode with his rifle across his lap, loaded and cocked. Every half hour or so, he halted his horse and fired three spaced rifle shots into the starry sky. Three shots, the universal recall signal. When the echoes had muttered and rumbled away down the hills, he listened carefully, twisting slowly in the saddle to cover every direction, and then he called, yelling his despair into the silences of the wilderness.

  ‘Jonathan! Jonathan!’

  Again he rode on slowly through the darkness, and when the dawn came he watered the horses at a stream and let them graze for a few hours, sitting on an antheap to guard them, munching biscuit and bully, and listening.

  It was strange how many of the sounds of the bush could seem like the cries of a human child to someone who listened wishfully. The mournful ‘quay’ of a grey lourie brought Ralph to his feet with his heart hammering, the screech of a meercat, even the wail of the wind in the tree-tops disturbed him.

  In mid-morning he up-saddled and rode again. He knew that in daylight there was greater danger of running into a Matabele patrol, but the prospect had no terrors. He found himself welcoming it. Deep inside him was a cold dark area, a place that he had never visited before, and now as he rode on, he explored it and found there such hatred and anger as he had never believed was possible. Riding slowly through the lovely forests in the clean white sunshine, he discovered that he was a stranger to himself; until this day he had never known what he was, but now he was beginning to find out.

  He reined in his horse on the crest of a high bare ridge, where watching Matabele eyes could have seen him from afar silhouetted against the blue, and deliberately he fired another three single shots. When no file of running warriors came to the summons, his hatred and anger were stronger still.

  An hour after noon, he climbed the ridge of the ancients where Zouga had killed the great elephant and looked down onto the Harkness Mine.

  The buildings had been burned. On the far ridge the walls that Harry Mellow had built for Vicky were still standing, but the empty windows were like the eyes of a skull. The roof beams were stark and blackened, some of them collapsed beneath the weight of charred thatch. The gardens were trampled, and the lawns were strewn with the debris of two young lives – the brass bedstead with stuffing bursting out of the torn mattress, the chests of Vicky’s dowry broken open and the contents scorched and scattered.

  Further down the valley the mine store and office had been burned also. The stacks of blackened goods still smouldered, and there was the stink of burning rubber and leather on the air. There was another smell mingled with it, a smell like greasy pork cooking, the first time Ralph had smelled human flesh roasting, but instinctively he knew what it was, and he felt his stomach heave.

  In the trees about the burned-out buildings roosted the hunch-backed vultures. There were hundreds of these disgusting birds, from the big black vultures with their bald red heads to the dirty brown birds with obscene woollen caps covering their long necks. Amongst the vultures were the carrion storks, the raucous crows and the little wheeling black kites. It must be a rich banquet to attract such a gathering.

  Ralph rode down off the crest and almost immediately found the first bodies. Matabele warriors, he saw with grim satisfaction, they had crawled away to die of their wounds. Harry Mellow had held out better than the construction gang at the railhead.

  ‘That he should have taken a thousand of the black butchers with him,’ Ralph hoped aloud, and rode on cautiously with his rifle at the ready.

  He dismounted behind the ruins of the mine store and tethered the horses with a slippery hitch, ready for a quick run. Here there were more dead Matabele, lying amid their own broken and discarded weapons. The ash was still hot, and three or four corpses lay within the shell of the store. They had been burned to unrecognizable black mounds, and the smell of pork was overpowering.

  Holding his rifle at high port, Ralph stepped carefully through the ash and debris towards the corner of the building. The squawk and flap of the vultures and the scavengers covered any small sounds he might make, and he was ready to meet the sudden charge of warriors that might be lying in ambush for him. He steeled himself also to the discovery of the corpses of Harry and pretty blonde little Vicky. Burying his own mutilated loved ones had not hardened him to the horror of what he knew he would find here.

  He reached the corner of the building, removed his hat and carefully peeked around the wall.

  There were two hundred yards of open ground between the burned-out store and the open mouth of the No. 1 adit shaft that Harry had driven into the side of the hill. The open ground was heaped with dead warriors. There were piles and skeins of them, drifts and windrows of them. Some were twisted into agonized sculptures of black limbs and some of them lay singly, as though resting, curled into the foetal position. Most of them had been ripped and gnawed by the birds and the jackals, but others were untouched.

  This killing ground gave Ralph a bitter feeling of pleasure.

  ‘Good for you, Harry my boy,’ he whispered.

  Ralph was about to step into the open, when his eardrums cracked with the brutal disruption of passing shot, so close that he felt his own hair flap against his forehead. He reeled back behind the shelter of the wall, shaking his head to clear the insect humming in his ears. That bullet must have missed by an inch or less, good shooting for a Matabele sniper. They were notoriously poor marksmen.

  He had been careless. The piles of dead warriors had distracted him, he had presumed that the impi had finished its bloody business and gone on, a stupid presumption.

  He crouched low and ran back down the length of the burned building, sweeping his open flank with an eye sharpened by the hot rush of adrenalin through his veins. The Matabele loved the encircling movement: if they were out front, then they would soon be in his rear, up there amongst the trees.

  He reached the horses, slipped the tether and led them over the hot ash into the shelter of the walls. From the saddlebag he took a fresh bandolier of ammunition and slung it over his other shoulder, criss-crossing his chest like a Mexican bandit, and muttering to himself.

  ‘All right, you black bastards, let’s burn some powder.’

  One corner of the stone wall had collapsed where the unbaked Kimberley brick had not been able to withstand the heat. The opening was jagged, it would break the silhouette of his head and the rear wall would prevent back lighting. Carefully he peered out over the bloody ground. They were well concealed, probably in the bush above the mine shaft.

  Then with a start of surprise he realized that the mouth of the adit shaft had been barricaded, it was blocked with baulks of timber and what look
ed like sacks of maize.

  They were in the mineshaft – but that didn’t make sense, he puzzled. Yet it was confirmed immediately. There was a vague shadowy movement beyond the barricade in the throat of the shaft, and another bullet sang off the lip of the wall under Ralph’s nose, blinding him with brick dust.

  He ducked down, and wiped his swimming eyes. Then he filled his lungs and bellowed.

  ‘Harry! Harry Mellow!’

  There was silence, even the vultures and the jackals quieted by the shocking burst of gunfire.

  ‘Harry – it’s me, Ralph.’

  There was a faint answering shout, and Ralph jumped up, vaulted over the broken wall and ran towards the shaft. Harry Mellow was racing towards him, jumping over the piles of dead Matabele, a wide grin on his face. They met halfway, and embraced with the violence of relief, wordlessly pounding each other’s backs, and then before he could speak, Ralph looked over the big American’s shoulder.

  Other figures had emerged from behind the rude barricade. Vicky dressed in men’s breeches and shirt, with a rifle in her hand and coppery hair tangled around her shoulders. At her side Isazi, the diminutive Zulu driver, and another even smaller figure ran ahead of them both. The child ran with both arms pumping, and face screwed up.

  Ralph caught him up and hugged him to his chest, pressing his haggard unshaven cheek against the boy’s velvet skin.

  ‘Jonathan,’ he croaked, and then his voice failed. The feel of the child’s warm little body, and the milky puppy smell of his sweat was almost too painful to be borne.

  ‘Daddy.’ Jon-Jon pulled back his head, and his face was pale and stricken.

  ‘I couldn’t look after Mummy. She wouldn’t let me.’

  ‘That’s all right, Jon-Jon,’ Ralph whispered. ‘You did your best—’

  And then he was crying. The terrible dry hacking sobs of a man driven to the far frontiers of his love.

  Though he hated to let the child out of his arms for a moment, Ralph sent Jonathan to help Isazi feed the horses at the entrance to the shaft. Then he drew Vicky and Harry Mellow aside and in the gloom of the tunnel where they could not see his face, he told them simply:

  ‘Cathy is dead.’

  ‘How?’ Harry broke the stunned silence. ‘How did she die?’

  ‘Badly,’ Ralph told them. ‘Very badly. I don’t want to say any more.’

  Harry held Vicky while she wept and when her first sharp grief was over, Ralph went on, ‘We can’t stay here. We have a choice, the railhead or Bulawayo.’

  ‘Bulawayo may be burned and sacked by now,’ Harry pointed out.

  ‘And there may be an impi between here and the railhead,’ said Ralph. ‘But if Vicky wants to try and reach the railhead, we can send her and Jon-Jon south on the first train that gets through.’

  ‘Then?’ Harry asked. ‘What then?’

  ‘Then I am riding to Bulawayo. If they are still alive, then they’ll want fighting men to stay that way.’

  ‘Vicky?’ Harry hugged his wife.

  ‘My mother and my family are at Bulawayo. This is the land of my birth – I’m not running away.’ She wiped the wetness off her cheeks with her thumbs. ‘I’m coming with you to Bulawayo.’

  Ralph nodded. He would have been surprised if she had agreed to go south.

  ‘We will ride as soon as we have eaten.’

  They took the wagon road northwards and it was a dismal route. The derelict wagons abandoned during the rinderpest were as regular as milestones. The wagon canvas was already rotted to tatters, the cargoes looted, and scattered on the grass, shattered cases and broken boxes and rusting tins. In the traces of some of the wagons the mummified remains of the oxen lay where they had fallen, heads twisted back in the convulsions that had killed them.

  Then at intervals they came upon death and destruction that was fresher and more poignant. One of the Zeederbergs’ express coaches in the middle of the track, with the mules speared to death and, festooned from the branches of a thorn-tree, the disembowelled bodies of the driver and his passengers.

  At the drift of the Inyati river the blackened walls of the trading-post was all that were left standing. Here there was a macabre twist to the usual mutilation of the dead. The naked bodies of the Greek shopkeeper’s wife and her three daughters had been laid in a neat row in the front yard with the shafts of the knobkerries thrust up into their private parts. The shopkeeper himself had been beheaded, and his trunk thrown onto the fire. His head, fixed on an assegai, leered at them in the centre of the road. Ralph covered Jon-Jon’s face with his coat, and held him close as they rode past.

  Ralph sent Isazi ahead to scout the drift and he found it defended. Ralph closed up the little party and they took it at a gallop, catching the dozen or so Matebele amadoda by surprise, shooting four of them down as they ran to their weapons, and thundering up the far bank together in the dust and gunsmoke. They were not followed, though Ralph, hoping they might be, turned back and lay in ambush beside the road.

  Ralph held Jonathan in his lap during the night, starting awake every few minutes from nightmares in which Cathy screamed and pleaded for mercy. In the dawn he found that without realizing it, he had taken the mole-skin headband from his jacket and held it balled in his fist. He put it back in his pocket and buttoned the flap, as though it was something rare and precious.

  They rode on northwards all that day, past the little one-man gold mines and the homesteads where men and their families had begun to carve a life out of the wilderness. Some of them had been taken completely by surprise. They were still clad in the remnants of their night-clothes. One little boy even clutched his teddy bear while his dead mother reached out to him with fingers that did not quite touch his sodden curls.

  Others had sold their lives dearly, and the dead Matabele were flung like woodchips from a sawmill in a wide circle around the burned-out homesteads. Once they found dead amadoda but no white bodies. There were tracks of horses and a vehicle heading out northwards.

  ‘The Andersons. They got away,’ Ralph said. ‘Please God, they are in Bulawayo by now.’

  Vicky wanted to take the old wagon road, past Khami Mission, but Ralph would not do so.

  ‘If they are there, it’s too late. You’ve seen enough. If they got away, we’ll find them in Bulawayo.’

  So they rode into the town of Bulawayo in the early morning of the third day. The barricades opened to let them pass into the huge central laager in the town square, and the townspeople thronged around the horses, shouting questions.

  ‘Are the soldiers coming?’

  ‘When are the soldiers coming?’

  ‘Did you see my brother? He was at the Antelope Mine—’

  ‘Have you any news?’

  When she saw Robyn waving to her from the top of one of the wagons in the market square, Vicky wept again for the first time since leaving the Harkness Mine. Elizabeth jumped down from the wagon and pushed her way through the crowd to Ralph’s horse.

  ‘Cathy?’ she asked.

  Ralph shook his head and saw his own sorrow reflected in her clear dark honey-coloured eyes. Elizabeth reached up and lifted Jon-Jon down from the front of the saddle.

  ‘I’ll look after him, Ralph,’ she said softly.

  The family was installed in a corner of the central laager. Under Robyn’s and Louise’s direction, the single wagon had been turned into a crowded but adequate home.

  On the first day of the rising, Louise and Jan Cheroot, the little Hottentot, had brought the wagon in from King’s Lynn. One of the survivors from the Matabele attack at Victoria Mine had galloped past the homestead, shouting a barely coherent warning as he went by.

  Louise and Jan Cheroot, already alerted by the desertion of the Matabele labourers and servants, had taken time to pack the wagon with a load of essentials, tinned food and blankets and ammunition, and they had driven into Bulawayo, Jan Cheroot handling the traces, and Louise sitting on top of the load with a rifle in her hands. Twice they had seen small
war parties of Matabele at a distance, but a few warning shots had kept them there, and they reached the town amongst the very first refugees.

  Thus the family did not have to rely on the charity of the townsfolk, like so many others who had arrived in Bulawayo with only a lathered horse and an empty rifle.

  Robyn had set up a clinic under a canvas awning beside the wagon and had been asked by the Siege Committee to supervise the health and sanitation of the laager. While Louise had quite naturally taken charge of the other women in the laager, setting up a system by which all food stocks and other essential supplies were pooled and rationed, delegating the care of the half-dozen orphans to foster mothers, and organizing the other activities, from an entertainment committee, to lessons in loading ammunition and handling firearms for those gentlewomen who did not already have those skills.

  Ralph left Vicky to break the news of Cathy’s death to her mother, gave Jon-Jon into Elizabeth’s care and set off across the laager to find a member of the Siege Committee.

  It was after dark when Ralph got back to the wagon. Surprisingly, there was a brittle air of festivity upon the town. Despite the terrible bereavements that most families had suffered, despite the threat of dark impis gathering just beyond the walls of the laager, yet the cries of the children playing hide-and-go-seek amongst the wagons, the merry notes of a concertina, the laughter of women and the cheerful blaze of the watch-fires might have been those of a picnic in happier times.

  Elizabeth had bathed both Jonathan and Robert, so they glowed pinkly and smelled of carbolic soap, and now as they ate their dinner at the camp table, she was telling them a story that made their eyes big as marbles in the lamplight.

  Ralph smiled his thanks at her, and summoned Harry Mellow with an inclination of his head.