by Wilbur Smith
Ralph nodded, and opened the pouch on his hip. From it he took the strip of brown mole-skin and bound it carefully about his right arm above the elbow. Then they settled down to wait.
They waited in the sunlight, and it beat down upon their greasy naked backs, until their sweat oozed from clogged pores and the flies came swarming gleefully to it. They waited while the sun made its noon, and then began to slip down the farther side of the sky.
Abruptly, Ralph raised his head, and at the movement a little stirring rippled down the row of marksmen lining the lip of the donga. There was a sound of many voices at a distance, and they woke echoes from the lichen-stained cliffs that guarded the entrance to the gorge. Then there was singing, sweet children’s voices, the sound of it rose and filled with each fluke of the wind and each turn in the rocky passage.
From the entrance to the gorge a diminutive figure came dancing. The weird pattern of red and black and white paints disguised Jan Cheroot’s flat pug-like features, and the buttery yellow of his skin, but there was no mistaking his sprightly step, and the way he carried his head at a birdlike angle. The sack of pretties that he had used as bait was long ago empty and had been discarded.
He scampered down the path towards the stone cairn which Ralph had built, and behind him came the Matabele. So eager were they that they crowded three or four abreast, and jostled each other to keep pace with the Pied Piper that led them.
‘More then I had hoped,’ Ralph whispered, but Harry Mellow did not look at him. The coating of black fat covered the pallor of his face, but his eyes were stricken as he stared fixedly over the sights of the Maxim.
The long column of Matabele was still emerging from the gorge, but Jan Cheroot was almost level with the cairn.
‘Ready,’ Ralph grated.
Jan Cheroot reached the cairn, and then with a miraculous twinkling movement, he disappeared as though a pitfall had sucked him in.
‘Now!’ said Ralph.
Not a man in the long line of riflemen moved. They were all staring down into the valley.
‘Now!’ Ralph repeated.
The head of the column had stopped in bewilderment at Jan Cheroot’s abrupt disappearance, and those behind pushed forward.
‘Open fire!’ Ralph ordered.
‘I can’t do it,’ whispered Harry, sitting behind the gun with both hands on the grips.
‘Damn you!’ Ralph’s voice shook. ‘They slit Cathy’s belly open, and tore my daughter out of her womb. Kill them, damn you!’
‘I can’t,’ Harry choked, and Ralph seized his shoulder and dragged him backwards.
He dropped down behind the gun in his place, and grabbed the double pistol grips. With his forefingers he hooked the safety-locks open, and then pressed his thumbs down on the chequered firing-button. The Maxim gun began its hellish fluttering roar, and the empty brass cartridge-cases spewed in a bright stream from the breech.
Peering through the drifts of blue gunsmoke, Ralph slowly traversed the gun from left to right, sweeping the pathway from the mouth of the gorge to the stone cairn, and from the donga on each side of him the repeating Winchesters added their thunder to the din. The gunfire almost, but not quite, drowned out the sounds from the valley below.
Juba could not keep pace with the younger women, nor with the racing children. She lagged further and further behind, with Tungata urging her on anxiously.
‘We will be too late, Grandmother. We must hurry.’
Before they reached the gorge at the end of the valley, Juba was wheezing and staggering, all her rolls of shining fat wobbling at each heavy pace, and she was seeing patches of darkness before her eyes.
‘I must rest,’ she panted, and sank down beside the path. The stragglers streamed past her, laughing and joshing her as they entered the gorge.
‘Ah, little Mother, do you want to climb up on my back?’
Tungata waited beside her, hopping from one foot to the other, wringing his hands with impatience.
‘Oh Grandmother, just a little farther—’
When at last the patches of darkness cleared from her vision, she nodded at him, and he seized her hands and threw all the weight of his tiny body into levering her upright.
Now, as Juba hobbled along the path, they were the very last in the file, but they could hear the laughter and chanting far ahead, magnified by the funnel of the gorge. Tungata ran forward, and then drawn by his duty, skipped back to Juba’s hand again.
‘Please, Grandmother – oh please!’
Twice more Juba was forced to stop. They were all alone now, and the sunlight did not penetrate the depths of the narrow gorge. It was shadowy and the cold coming up from the dashing white waters chilled even Tungata’s high spirits.
The two of them came around the bend, and looked out between the high granite portals into the open sunlit grassy bowl beyond.
‘There they are!’ Tungata cried with relief.
The pathway through the yellow grassland was thick with people, but, like a column of safari ants on the march that had come against an impossible obstacle, the head of the line was bunching and milling.
‘Hurry, Grandmother, we can catch up!’
Juba heaved her bulk upright and hobbled towards the welcoming warm sunlight.
At that moment the air around her head began to flutter as though a bird had been trapped within her skull. For a moment she thought that it was a symptom of her exhaustion, but then she saw the masses of human figures ahead of her begin to swirl and tumble and boil like dust-motes in a whirlwind.
Although she had never heard it before, she had listened when the warriors who had fought at Shangani and the Bembesi crossing described the little three-legged guns that chattered like old women. Armed suddenly by reserves of strength that she never believed she possessed, Juba seized Tungata and blundered back up the gorge like a great cow elephant in flight.
Ralph Ballantyne sat on the edge of his camp cot. There was a lighted candle set in its own wax on the upturned tea-chest that served as a table, and a half-filled whisky bottle and enamel mug beside it.
Ralph frowned at the open page of his journal, trying to focus in the flickering yellow candlelight. He was drunk. The bottle had been full half an hour before. He picked up the mug and drained it, set it down and poured from the bottle again. A few drops spilled onto the empty page of his journal. He wiped them away with his thumb and studied the wet mark it left with a drunkard’s ponderous concentration. He shook his head, to try and clear it, then he picked up his pen, dipped it and carefully wiped off the excess ink from the nib.
He wrote laboriously and where the ink touched the wetness left by the spilled whisky, it spread in a soft blue fan shape on the paper. That annoyed him inordinately, and he flung the pen down and deliberately filled the enamel mug to the brim. He drank it, pausing twice for breath, and when the mug was empty, he held it between his knees, with his head bowed over it.
After a long time, and with an obvious effort, he lifted his head again, and re-read what he had written, his lips forming the words, like a schoolboy with his first reader.
‘War makes monsters of us all.’
He reached for the bottle again, but knocked it on its side and the golden brown spirit glugged into a puddle on the lid of the tea-chest. He fell back on the cot and closed his eyes, his legs dangling to the floor and one arm thrown over his face protectively.
Elizabeth had put the boys to bed in the wagon, and crawled into the cot below theirs, careful not to disturb her own mother. Ralph had not eaten dinner with the family, and he had sent Jonathan back with a rough word when he had gone across to the tent to fetch his father to the meal.
Elizabeth lay on her side under the woollen blanket, and her eye was level with the laced-up opening in the canvas hood, so she could see out. The candle was still burning in Ralph’s tent, but, in the corner of the laager, the tent that Harry and Vicky shared had been in darkness for an hour. She closed her eyes and tried to force herself to sleep, bu
t she was so restless that beside her Robyn St John sighed petulantly and rolled over. Elizabeth opened her eyes again and peered surreptitiously through the canvas slit. The candle was still burning in Ralph’s tent.
Gently she eased herself out from under the blanket, watching her mother the while. She picked up her shawl from the lid of the chest, and clambered silently down to the ground.
With the shawl about her shoulders, she sat on the disselboom of the wagon. There was still only a sheet of canvas between her and where her mother lay. She could clearly hear the rhythm of Robyn’s breathing. She judged when she sank deeply below the level of consciousness, for her breathing made a soft glottal rattle in the back of her throat.
The night was warm, and the laager almost silent; a puppy yapped unhappily from the far end, and closer at hand a baby’s hungry wail was swiftly gagged by a mother’s teat. Two of the sentries met at the nearest corner of the laager, and their voices murmured for a while. Then they parted and she saw the silhouette of a slouch hat against the night sky as one of them passed close to where she sat.
The candle still burned in the tent, and it must be past midnight by now. The flame drew her as though she were a moth. She rose and crossed to the tent. Silently, almost furtively. She lifted the flap and slipped in, letting it drop closed behind her.
Ralph lay on his back on the steel cot, his booted feet dangled to the ground, and one arm covered his face. He was making an unhappy little whimpering sound in his sleep. The candle was guttering, burned down into a puddle of its own molten wax, and the smell of spilled whisky was sharp and pungent. Elizabeth crossed to the tea-chest, and set the fallen bottle upright. Then the open page of the journal caught her attention, and she read the big uneven scrawl: ‘War makes monsters of us all.’
It gave her a pang of pity so sharp that she closed the leatherbound journal quickly, and looked at the man who had written that agonized heart-cry. She wanted to reach across and touch his unshaven cheek, but instead she hitched her nightdress in a businesslike fashion and squatted beside the cot. She undid the straps of his riding-boots, and then, taking them one at a time between her knees, she pulled them off his feet. Ralph muttered and flung the arm off his face, rolling away from the candlelight. Gently Elizabeth lifted his legs and swung them up onto the cot. He groaned and curled into a foetal position.
‘Big baby,’ she whispered, and smiled to herself. Then she could resist no longer and she stroked the thick dark lock of hair off his forehead. His skin was fever-hot, moist with sweat, and she laid her palm against his cheek. His dark new beard was stiff and harsh, the feel of it sent electric prickles shooting up her arm. She pulled her hand away, and, once more businesslike, unfolded the blanket from the foot of the cot and drew it up over his body.
She leaned over him to settle it under his chin, but he rolled over again and before she could jump back, one hard muscular arm wrapped over her shoulder. She lost her balance and fell against his chest, and the arm pinned her helplessly.
She lay very still, her heart pounding wildly. After a minute the grip of his arm relaxed, and gently she tried to free herself. At her first movement, the arm locked about her, with such savage strength that her breath was driven from her lungs with a gasp.
Ralph mumbled, and brought his other hand over, and she convulsed with shock as it settled high up on the back of her thigh. She dared not move. She knew she could not break the grip of his restraining arm. She had never expected him to be so powerful, she felt as helpless as an unweaned infant, totally in his power. She felt the hand behind her begin to fumble and grope upwards – and then she sensed the moment when he became conscious.
The hand slid up to the nape of her neck, and her head was pulled forward with a gentle but irresistible force until she felt the heat and the wetness of his mouth spread over hers. He tasted of whisky and something else, a yeasty musky man taste, and without her volition, her own lips melted and spread to meet his.
Her senses spun like wheels of flame behind her closed eyelids, the sensations were so tumultuous, that for long moments she did not realize that he had swept her nightdress up to the level of her shoulder-blades, and now his fingers, hard as bone, and hot as fire, ran in a long slow caress down the cleft of her naked buttocks and then settled into the soft curve where they joined her thighs. It galvanized her.
Her breath sobbed in her throat, and she struggled to be free, to escape from the torture of her own wild wanting, of her cruel need for him, and from his skilful insistent fingers. He held her easily, his mouth against the soft of her throat, and his voice was hoarse and rough.
‘Cathy!’ he said. ‘My Katie! I missed you so!’
Elizabeth stopped struggling. She lay against him like a dead woman. No longer fighting, no longer even breathing.
‘Katie!’ His hands were desperate to find her, but she was dead, dead.
He was fully awake now. His hands left Elizabeth’s body and came up to her face. He cupped her head in his hands, and lifted it. He looked at her uncomprehendingly for a long moment, and then she saw the green change in his eyes.
‘Not Cathy!’ he whispered.
She opened his fingers gently and stood up beside the cot.
‘Not Cathy,’ she said softly. ‘Cathy has gone, Ralph.’
She stooped over the guttering candle, cupped one hand behind it, and blew it out. Then she stood upright again in the sudden total darkness. She unfastened the bodice of her nightdress, shrugged it over her shoulders and let it fall around her ankles. She stepped out of it and lay down on the cot beside Ralph. She took his unresisting hand and replaced it where it had been before.
‘Not Cathy,’ she whispered. ‘Tonight it’s Elizabeth. Tonight and for ever more.’ And she placed her mouth over his.
When at last she felt him fill all the sad and lonely places within her, her joy was so intense that it seemed to crush and bruise her soul and she said: ‘I love you. I have always loved you – I will always love you.’
Jordan Ballantyne stood beside his father on the platform of the Cape Town railway station. They were both stiff and awkward in the moment of parting.
‘Please don’t forget to give my,’ Jordan hesitated over the choice of words, ‘my very warmest regards to Louise.’
‘I am sure she will be pleased,’ said Zouga. ‘I have not seen her for so long—’ Zouga broke off.
The separation from his wife had drawn out over the long months of his trial in the Queen’s Bench Division of the High Court before the Lord Chief Justice, Baron Pollock, Mr Justice Hawkins, and a special jury. The Lord Chief Justice had shepherded a reluctant jury towards the inevitable verdict.
‘I direct you that, in accordance with the evidence and your answers to the specific questions I have put to you, you ought to find a verdict of guilty against all the defendants.’ And he had his way.
‘The sentence of the Court, therefore, is that as to you Leander Starr Jameson, and as to you John Willoughby, that you be confined for a period of fifteen months’ imprisonment without hard labour. That you, Major Zouga Ballantyne, have three months’ imprisonment without hard labour.’
Zouga had served four weeks of his sentence in Holloway, and with the balance remitted, had been released to the dreadful news that in Rhodesia the Matabele had risen and that Bulawayo was under siege.
The voyage southwards down the Atlantic had been agonizing, he had had no word of Louise, nor of King’s Lynn, and his imagination conjured up horrors that were nourished by tales of slaughter and mutilation. Only when the Union Castle mailboat had docked that morning in Cape Town Harbour were his terrible anxieties relieved.
‘She is safe in Bulawayo,’ Jordan had answered his first question. Overcome with emotion, Zouga had embraced his youngest son, repeating, ‘Thank God, oh thank God!’ over and over again.
They had lunched together in the dining-room of the Mount Nelson Hotel and Jordan had given his father the latest intelligence from the north.
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��Napier and the Siege Committee seem to have stabilized the situation. They have got the survivors into Bulawayo, and Grey and Selous and Ralph with their irregulars have given the rebels a few bloody knocks to keep them at a wary distance.
‘Of course the Matabele have an absolutely free run of the territory outside the laagers at Bulawayo and Gwelo and Belingwe. They do as they please, though strangely enough they do not seem to have closed the road to the southern drifts. If you can reach Kimberley in time to join the relief column that Spreckley is taking through, you should be in Bulawayo by the end of the month – and Mr Rhodes and I will not be long in joining you.
‘Spreckley will be taking through only essential supplies, and a few hundred men to stiffen the defence of Bulawayo until the imperial troops can get there. As you probably know, Major-General Sir Frederick Carrington has been chosen to command, and Mr Rhodes and I will be going up with his staff. I have no doubt we will bring the rebels to book very swiftly.’
Jordan kept up a monologue during the entire meal, to cover the embarrassment caused by the stares and the whispers of the other diners, who were deliciously scandalized by the presence of one of Jameson’s freebooters in their midst. Zouga ignored the stir he was creating, and addressed himself to the meal and the conversation with Jordan until a young journalist from the Cape Times, clutching his shorthand pad, approached the table.
‘I wonder if you would care to comment on the leniency of the sentences passed by the Lord Chief Justice.’
Only then did Zouga raise his head, and his expression was bleak.
‘In the years ahead they will give medals and knighthoods to men who achieve exactly the same task that we attempted,’ he said quietly. ‘Now will you be kind enough to let us finish our lunch in peace.’
At the railway station Jordan fussed over making certain that Zouga’s trunk was in the goods van and that he had a forward-facing seat in the last carriage. Then they faced each other awkwardly, as the guard blew his warning whistle.
‘Mr Rhodes asked me to enquire whether you would still be good enough to act as his agent at Bulawayo?’