by Wilbur Smith
The man screamed. It was a cry of ringing mortal agony that bounded from the rocky sides of the valley, cutting through the silences of the night watch, and Ralph bellowed with him.
‘Devils! Devils are killing me!’ He rolled over and stabbed another warrior, wounding him so he yelled in surprise and pain.
‘There are devils here!’
At fifty other watch-fires down the valley, the men of Ballantyne’s Scouts were stabbing and screaming with Ralph.
‘Defend yourselves, there are ghosts at work!’
‘Tagati! Witchcraft! Beware the witches!’
‘Kill the witches!’
‘Witchcraft! Defend yourselves!’
‘Run! Run! The devils are amongst us.’
Three thousand warriors, every one of them steeped from childhood in superstition and witchlore, awakened to the screams and wild cries of dying men, and the panic-stricken warnings yelled by men come face to face with the devil’s legions. They awakened in blinding suffocating darkness, and seized their weapons and struck out in terror, yelling with fright and the comrades they wounded shrieked and struck back at them.
‘I am wounded. Defend yourselves from the devils. Hah! Hah! The devils are killing me!’
The night was filled with running figures that collided and stabbed and cried.
‘The valley is haunted!’
‘The devils will kill us all!’
‘Run! Run!’
Then from the head of the valley rose such a monstrous iron-lunged braying, such a cacophony that it could only be the voice of the great demon himself. Tokoloshe, the eater of men. It was a sound that drove terrified men over the last frontier of reason, into the realms of witless insensate pandemonium.
On his hands and knees, Ralph crawled down the narrow pathway, keeping below the level of the slashing spears, silhouetting the frantic figures of running men against the faint light of the stars, and when he stabbed up at them, he aimed for the groin and belly rather than the killing stroke, so that the men that he maimed added their cries to the uproar.
From the head of the valley, Harry Mellow blew another blaring blast on the brass foghorn, and it was echoed by the screams of men blundering up the sides of the valley and escaping into the open grassland beyond.
Ralph crept forward, listening for a single voice in the thousands. In the first few minutes hundreds of fleeing warriors, most of them unarmed, had escaped from the valley. In every direction they were disappearing into the night, and each second they were followed by others, men who would have unflinchingly charged into the smoking muzzles of the Maxim machine-guns, but who were reduced by fear of the supernatural to mindless panic-stricken children. Their cries faded with distance, and now at last Ralph heard the voice for which he had waited.
‘Stand fast, the Moles,’ it roared. ‘Stand with Bazo. These are not demons.’ And Ralph crept towards the sound.
In the clearing ahead of him, a camp-fire fed with fresh logs flared up sullenly, and Ralph recognized the tall figure with wide gaunt shoulders, and the slim woman at his side.
‘This is white men’s trickery,’ she cried, beside her lord. ‘Wait, my children.’
Ralph sprang up and ran through the dense scrub to them. ‘Nkosi,’ he cried. He did not have to disguise his voice, it was rough and hoarse with dust and tension and battle-lust. ‘Lord Bazo, I am with you! Let us stand together against this treachery.’
‘Brave comrade!’ Bazo greeted him with relief as Ralph loomed out of the dark. ‘Stand back to back, form a ring in which each of us will guard the other, and call out to other brave men to join us.’
Bazo turned his back to Ralph, and drew the woman Tanase to his side. It was she who glanced back and recognized Ralph as he stooped.
‘It is Henshaw,’ she screamed, but her warning came too late. Before Bazo could turn back to face him, Ralph had changed his grip on the assegai, using it like a butcher’s cleaver, and with a single stroke he hacked across the back of Bazo’s legs, just above the ankles, and the Achilles’ tendons parted with a soft rubbery popping sound. Bazo collapsed onto his knees, both legs crippled, pinned like a beetle to a board.
Ralph seized Tanase’s wrist, jerked her out of the circle of firelight, and hurled her headlong to earth. Holding her easily, he tore off her short leather skirt and placed the point of the assegai in her groin.
‘Bazo,’ he whispered. ‘Throw your spear upon the fire, or I will open your woman’s secret parts as you opened those of mine.’
The Scouts used the first glimmerings of the new day to move slowly down the valley in an extended line, finishing the wounded Matabele. While they worked, Ralph sent Jan Cheroot back to where they had left the horses to fetch the ropes. He was back within minutes with the heavy coils of new yellow manila over the saddles of the horses that he led.
‘The Matabele have scattered back into the hills,’ he reported grimly. ‘It will take a week for them to find each other and regroup.’
‘We won’t wait that long.’
Ralph took the ropes and began making the knots. The Scouts came in as he worked. They were scrubbing their assegai blades with handfuls of dried grass, and Sergeant Ezra told Ralph, ‘We lost four men, but we found Kamuza, the induna of the Swimmers, and we counted over two hundred bodies.’
‘Get ready to pull out,’ Ralph ordered. ‘What remains to be done will not take long.’
Bazo sat beside the remains of the fire. His arms were bound behind him with thongs of rawhide, and his legs were thrust straight out in front of him. He had no control over his feet, they flopped nervelessly like dying fish stranded on a receding tide, and the slow watery blood oozed from the deep gashes above his heels.
Tanase sat beside him. She was stark naked, and bound like him with her arms behind her back.
Sergeant Ezra stared at her body, and he murmured, ‘We have worked hard all night. We have earned a little sport. Let me and my kanka take this woman into the bushes for a short while.’
Ralph did not bother to reply, but turned to Jan Cheroot instead. ‘Bring the horses,’ he ordered.
Tanase spoke to Bazo without moving her lips, in the way of the initiates.
‘What is the business of the ropes, Lord? Why do they not shoot us, and have done?’
‘It is the white man’s way, the way that conveys the deepest disrespect. They shoot honoured enemies, and use the ropes on criminals.’
‘Lord, on the day I first met this one you call Henshaw, I dreamed that you were high upon a tree and he looked up at you and smiled,’ she whispered. ‘It is strange that in that dream I did not see myself beside you upon that tree.’
‘They are ready now,’ said Bazo, and turned his head to her. ‘With my heart I embrace you. You have been the fountainhead of my life.’
‘I embrace you, my husband. I embrace you, Bazo, who will be the father of kings.’
She went on staring into his ravaged, ugly-beautiful face and she did not turn her head when Henshaw stood tall over them and said in a harsh tortured voice, ‘I give you a better death than you gave to the ones I loved.’
The ropes were of different lengths, so that Tanase hung slightly lower than her lord. The soles of her bare feet, suspended at the height of a man’s head, were very white and her toes pointed straight at the earth like those of a little girl standing on tiptoe. Her long heron neck was twisted sharply to one side, so that she still seemed to listen for Bazo’s voice.
Bazo’s swollen face was lifted towards the yellow dawn sky, for the knot had ridden around under his chin. Ralph Ballantyne’s face was lifted also as he stood at the base of the tall acacia tree in the bottom of the Valley of the Goats looking up at them.
In one other respect, Tanase’s vision was unfulfilled – Ralph Ballantyne did not smile.
So Lodzi came and with him came Major-General Carrington and Major Robert Stephenson Smyth Baden-Powell who would one day coin the motto ‘Be Prepared’, and behind them came the guns and the soli
ders. The women and children danced out from the laager at Bulawayo with bouquets of wild flowers for them, and they sang ‘For they are jolly good fellows’ and wept with joy.
The senior indunas of Kumalo, betrayed by the Umlimo’s promises of divine intervention, uncertain and with the fire in their bellies swiftly cooling, squabbling amongst themselves and awed by the massive show of military force that they had provoked, withdrew slowly with their impis from the vicinity of Bulawayo.
The imperial troops sortied in great lumbering columns and swept the valleys and the open land. They burned the deserted villages and the standing crops and they drove away the few cattle that the rinderpest had spared. They shelled the hills where they suspected the Matabele might be hiding, and they rode their horses to exhaustion, chasing the elusive black shadows that flittered through the forest ahead of them. The Maxims fired until the water in the cooling-jackets boiled, but the range was nine hundred yards or more and the targets were as fleet as rabbits.
So the weeks dragged on and became months, and the soldiers tried to starve the Matabele and force them into a set-piece battle, but the indunas sulked in the broken ground and took refuge in the Matopos Hills where the guns and the soldiers dared not follow them.
Occasionally the Matabele caught an isolated patrol or a man on his own, once even the legendary Frederick Selous, elephant-hunter and adventurer extraordinary. Selous had dismounted to ‘pot’ one of the rebels that were disappearing over the ridge ahead, when a stray bullet grazed his pony, and his usually impeccably behaved animal bolted and left him stranded. Only then he realized that he had outridden the main body of his Scouts, and that the Matabele were instantly aware of his predicament. They turned back and coursed him like dogs on a hare.
It was a race the likes of which Selous had not run since his elephant-hunting days. The bare-footed and lightly equipped amadoda gained swiftly, so close at last that they freed their blades from the thongs and began that terrible humming war chant. Only then Lieutenant Windley, Selous’ second-in-command, spurred in and pulling his foot from the left stirrup, gave Selous the leather and galloped with him into the ranks of the oncoming Scouts.
At other times the swing of fortune was towards the soldiers, and they would surprise a foraging patrol of Matabele at a drift or in thick bush, and hang them from the nearest trees that would bear the weight.
It was an inconclusive cruel little war, that drew on and on. The military officers who were conducting the campaign were not businessmen, they did not think in terms of cost-efficiency, and the bill for the first three months was a million pounds of sterling, a cost of £5,000 per head of Matabele killed. The bill was for the account of Mr Cecil John Rhodes and his British South Africa Company.
In the Matopos Hills, the indunas were forced towards starvation, and in Bulawayo Mr Rhodes was forced just as inexorably towards bankruptcy.
The three riders moved in a cautious, mutually protective spread. They kept to the centre of the track, their rifles were loaded and cocked and carried at high port.
Jan Cheroot rode point, fifty yards ahead. His little woolly head turned tirelessly from side to side as he searched the bush on each side. Behind him came Louise Ballantyne, delighting in her escape from the confinements of the Bulawayo laager after these weary months. She rode astride, with all the élan of a natural horsewoman, and there was a feather in her little green cap, and when she turned to look back every few minutes, her lips parted in a loving smile. She was not yet accustomed to having Zouga with her once again, and she had constantly to reassure herself.
Zouga was fifty yards behind her, and he answered her smile in a way that wrenched something deep inside her. He sat easy and straight in the saddle, the wide-brimmed slouch hat slanted over one eye. The sun had gilded away the pallor of Holloway gaol, and the silver and gold of his beard gave him the air of a Viking chieftain.
In that extended order they rode up from the grassy plains, under the high arched branches of the msasa trees, up the first slope of the hills and, as he reached the false crest, Jan Cheroot stood in his stirrups and shouted with relief and delight. Unable to contain themselves, Louise and Zouga cantered forward and reined in beside him.
‘Oh, thank you, Lord,’ Louise whispered huskily, and reached across for Zouga’s hand.
‘It’s a miracle,’ he said softly, and squeezed her fingers.
Ahead of them the mellow thatch of King’s Lynn basked comfortably in the sunlight. It seemed to be the most beautiful sight either of them had ever looked upon.
‘Untouched.’ Louise shook her head in wonder.
‘Must be the only homestead in Matabeleland that wasn’t burned.’
‘Oh come on, my darling,’ she cried, with sudden ecstasy. ‘Let’s go back to our home.’
Zouga restrained her at the steps of the wide front porch, and made her stay in the saddle, her rifle at the ready, holding the reins of their horses while he and Jan Cheroot searched the homestead for any sign of Matabele treachery.
When Zouga came out onto the stoep again, he carried his rifle at the trail and smiled at her.
‘It’s safe!’
He helped her down from the saddle, and while Jan Cheroot led the horses away to stall feed them in the stables from the grainbags he had brought, Zouga and Louise went up the front steps hand in hand.
The thick ivory curves of the old bull elephant’s tusks still framed the doorway to the dining-room, and Zouga stroked one of them as he passed.
‘Your good luck charms,’ Louise chuckled indulgently.
‘The household gods,’ he corrected her, and they passed between them into the house.
The house had been looted. They could not have expected less, but the books were still there, thrown from the shelves, some with their spines broken or with the leather boards damaged or gnawed by rats, but they were all there.
Zouga retrieved his journals and dusted them superficially with his silk scarf. There were dozens of them, the record of his life, meticulously handwritten and illustrated with ink drawings and coloured maps.
‘It would have truly broken my heart to have lost these,’ he murmured, piling them carefully on the library table and stroking one of the red morocco covers. The silver was lying on the dining-room floor, some of it battered, but most of it intact. It has no value to a Matabele.
They wandered through the rambling homestead, through the rooms that Zouga had added haphazardly to the original structure, and they found small treasures amongst the litter: a silver comb he had given her on their first Christmas together, the diamond and enamel dress studs which had been her birthday present to him. She handed them back to him and went up on tiptoe to offer her face to his kiss.
There was still crockery and glassware on the kitchen shelves, though all the pots and knives had been stolen and the doors to the pantry and storerooms had been broken off their hinges.
‘It won’t take much to fix,’ Zouga told her. ‘I can’t believe how lucky we’ve been.’
Louise went out into the kitchen and found four of her red Rhode Island hens scratching in the dust. She called Jan Cheroot from the stable and begged a few handfuls of grain from the horses’ feed-bags. When she clucked at the hens, they came in a flutter of wings to be fed.
The glass in the windows of the main bedroom was smashed, and wild birds had come through to roost in the rafters. The bedspread was stained with their excrement, but when Louise stripped it off, the linen and mattress beneath it were clean and dry.
Zouga put an arm around her waist, squeezed it and looked down at her, in the way she knew so well.
‘You are a wicked man, Major Ballantyne,’ she breathed huskily. ‘But there are no curtains on the windows.’
‘Fortunately there are still shutters.’ He went to close them, while Louise folded back the sheet and then unfastened the top button of her blouse. Zouga returned in time to assist her with the others.
An hour later when they came out again onto the front
stoep, they found Jan Cheroot had dusted off the chairs and table, and unpacked the picnic basket they had brought from Bulawayo. They drank fine Constantia wine and ate cold Cornish pasties, while Jan Cheroot waited upon them and regaled them with anecdotes and reminiscences of the exploits of Ballantyne’s Scouts.
‘There were none like us,’ he declared modestly. ‘Ballan-tyne’s Scouts! The Matabele learned to know us well.’
‘Oh, don’t let’s talk about war,’ Louise pleaded.
But Zouga asked with good-natured sarcasm, ‘What happened to all your heroes? The war still goes on, and we need men like you.’
‘Master Ralph changed,’ said Jan Cheroot, darkly. ‘He changed just like that.’ He snapped his fingers. ‘From the day we caught Bazo at the Valley of the Goats, he wasn’t interested any more. He never rode with the Scouts again, and within a week he had gone back to the railhead to finish building his railway. They say he will drive the first train into Bulawayo before Christmas, that’s what they say.’
‘Enough!’ Louise declared. ‘It’s our first day at King’s Lynn in almost a year. I will not have another word of war. Pour some wine, Jan Cheroot, and take a little sip for yourself.’ Then she turned to Zouga. ‘Darling, can’t we leave Bulawayo and come back here?’
Zouga shook his head regretfully. ‘I’m sorry, my love. I could not risk your precious life. The Matabele are still in rebellion, and this is so isolated—’
From the back of the house came the sudden shriek and cackle of alarmed poultry. Zouga broke off and jumped to his feet. As he reached for his rifle propped against the wall, he said softly but urgently, ‘Jan Cheroot, go around the back of the stables. I’ll come from the other side.’ Then to Louise, ‘Wait here, but be ready to run for the horses if you hear a shot.’ And the two men slipped silently away down the veranda.
Zouga reached the corner of the wall below the main bedroom, just as there was another storm of squawks and cackles, and the beating of wings. He ducked around the corner, and sprinted down the thick whitewashed walls that protected the kitchen yard, and flattened himself beside the gate. Above the cacophony of terrified chickens and the flapping of wings, he heard a voice say, ‘Hold that one! Do not let it go!’