The Angels Weep (47 page)

Ralph turned away and they went back along the silent street.
‘They wanted me to join the Siege Committee, and I told
them I did not like sieges.’

‘What are you going to do, Ralph?’

‘I am going to get together a small group of men. Those
who know the tribe and the land, those who can shoot straight and
talk Sindebele well enough to pass as natives – and we are
going to go out there in the Matopos Hills, or wherever else they
are hiding, and we are going to start killing
Matabele.’

I
sazi brought
in fourteen men. They were all Zulus from the south, drivers and
wagon-boys from the Zeederberg Company who had once worked for
Rholands Transport, but had been stranded in Bulawayo by the
rinderpest.

‘I know you can drive an eighteen-ox span,’ Ralph
nodded at the circle of their faces as they squatted around the
fire passing the red tin of ‘Wrights No. 1 Best Stuff
‘ that Ralph had provided, from hand to hand. ‘I also
know that any one of you can eat his own weight in
sadza
maize porridge in one sitting, and wash it down with enough beer
to stun a rhinoceros, but can you fight?’

And Isazi answered for them all, using the patient tone
usually reserved for an obtuse child.

‘We are Zulu.’ It was the only reply
necessary.

J
an Cheroot
brought in six more, all of them Cape boys, with mixed Bushman
and Hottentot blood, like Jan Cheroot himself.

‘This one is named Grootboom, the big tree.’ Ralph
thought he looked more like a Kalahari Desert thornbush, dark,
dry and thorny. ‘He was a corporal in the Fifty-second Foot
at Cape Town Fort. He is my nephew.’

‘Why did he leave Cape Town?’

Jan Cheroot looked pained. ‘There was a dispute over a
lady. A man had his gizzard slit. They accused my dear nephew of
the dastardly deed.’

‘Did he do it?’

‘Of course he did. He is the best man with a knife that
I know – after me,’ Jan Cheroot declared
modestly.

‘Why do you want to kill Matabele?’ Ralph asked
him in Sindebele, and the Hottentot answered him fluently in the
same language.

‘It is work I understand and enjoy.’

Ralph nodded and turned to the next man.

‘It is possible that this one is even more closely
related to me,’ Jan Cheroot introduced him. ‘His name
is Taas, and his mother was a great beauty. She owned a famous
shebeen at the foot of Signal Hill above Cape Town docks. At one
time she and I were dear and intimate friends, but then the lady
had many friends.’

The prospective recruit had the flat nose and high cheekbones,
the oriental eyes and the same waxen smooth skin as Jan Cheroot
– if he was one of Jan Cheroot’s bastards and had
spent his boyhood in Cape Town’s notorious dockland, then
he should be a good man in a fight. Ralph nodded.

‘Five shillings a day,’ he said. ‘And a free
box to bury you in if the Matabele catch you.’

J
ameson had
taken many hundreds of horses south with him, and the Matabele
had swept the horses off the farms. Maurice Gifford had already
taken 160 mounted men down towards Gwanda to bring in any
survivors who might be cut off on the outlying farms and mines,
and still be holding out. While Captain George Grey had formed a
troop of mounted infantry, ‘Grey’s Scouts’,
with most of the mounts that remained. The four mounts that Ralph
had brought in with him were fine beasts, and he had managed to
buy six more at exorbitant prices, £100 for an animal that
would have fetched £15 on a good day at Kimberley market,
but there were no others. He lay awake long after midnight under
the wagon worrying about it while above him Robyn and Louise
slept with the two girls and the children on the wagon truck
under the canvas tent.

Ralph’s eyes were closed, and a few feet away Harry
Mellow was breathing deeply and regularly drowning out any small
sounds. Yet even in his preoccupation, Ralph became aware of
another presence near him in the darkness. He smelled it first,
the taint of woodsmoke and cured animal furs and the odour of the
fat with which a Matabele warrior anoints his body.

Ralph slipped his right hand up under the saddle he was using
for a pillow, and his fingers touched the chequered walnut butt
of his Webley pistol.

‘Henshaw,’ whispered a voice he did not recognize,
and Ralph whipped his left arm around a thick corded neck and at
the same moment thrust the muzzle of the pistol into the
man’s body.

‘Quickly,’ he grated. ‘Who are you, before I
kill you?’

‘They told me you were quick and strong.’ The man
was speaking Sindebele. ‘Now I believe it.’

‘Who are you?’

‘I have brought you good men and the promise of
horses.’

Neither of them had spoken above a whisper.

‘Why do you come like a thief?’

‘Because I am Matabele, the white men will kill me if
they find me here. I have come to take you to these
men.’

Ralph released him carefully, and reached for his boots.

They left the laager and slipped through the silent deserted
town. Ralph had spoken only once more.

‘You know that I will kill you if this is
treachery.’

‘I know it,’ replied the Matabele.

He was tall, as tall as Ralph but even heavier built, and once
when he glanced back at Ralph the moonlight showed the silky
sheen of scar tissue slashed across his cheek beneath his right
eye.

In the yard of one of the last houses of the town, close to
the open veld, yet screened from it by the wall that some
houseproud citizen had erected to protect his garden, there were
twelve more Matabele
amadoda
waiting. Some of them wore
fur kilts while others were dressed in ragged Western
cast-offs.

‘Who are these men?’ Ralph demanded. ‘Who
are you?’

‘My name is Ezra, Sergeant Ezra. I was Sergeant to
One-Bright-Eye who the impis killed at Khami Hills. These men are
all Company police.’

‘The Company police have been disbanded and
disarmed,’ Ralph said.

‘Yes, they have taken away our guns. They say they do
not trust us. That we may go over to the rebels.’

‘Why do you not?’ Ralph said. ‘Some of your
brothers have. They say a hundred of the Company police have gone
over, and taken their rifles with them.’

‘We cannot – even if we had wished to.’ Ezra
shook his head. ‘Have you heard of the killing of two
Matabele women near the Inyati river? A woman called Ruth and
another called Little Flower, Imbali?’

Ralph frowned. ‘Yes, I remember.’

‘It was these men, and I was their sergeant. The induna
named Gandang has asked that we be taken to him alive. He wishes
personally to supervise the manner of our deaths.’

‘I want men who can kill the women of the Matabele as
easily as they killed ours,’ said Ralph. ‘Now what of
these horses?’

‘The horses captured by the Matabele at Essexvale and
Belingwe are being held in the hills at a place I know
of.’

L
ong before the
curfew bell, they had all slipped out of the central laager
singly and in pairs, Jan Cheroot and his Cape boys taking the
horses with them, and by the time Ralph and Harry Mellow strolled
down the main street as though they were taking the evening air
before returning to the laager for dinner, the others were all
gathered in the walled garden at the end of the street.

Sergeant Ezra had brought the kilts and spears and
knobkerries, and Jan Cheroot had the big black three-legged pot
of beef fat and lampblack boiled to a paste. Ralph and Harry and
the Hottentots stripped naked and smeared each other with the
rancid mixture, taking care to work it in around the back of the
ears, the knees and elbows, and below the eyes where pale skin
might show.

By the time the curfew bell in the Anglican church began to
toll, they were all dressed in the kilts of Matabele
amadoda
. Ralph and Harry covered their hair, which would
have betrayed them, with headdresses of black widow-bird
feathers. Isazi and Jan Cheroot strapped the rawhide bootees over
the hooves of the horses, while Ralph gave his final orders,
speaking in Sindebele, the only language they would use during
the entire raid.

They left the town in the sudden darkness between sunset and
moonrise, the hoofbeats of the horses deadened by the rawhides,
and Ezra’s Matabele running at the stirrups on silent bare
feet. After the first hour, Ralph muttered a curt order to the
Matabele and they took a stirrup-leather and hung from it, a man
on each side of the horses. The pace of the march never slackened
below a canter. They swept south and eastwards, until the
crenellated crests of the Matopos Hills were outlined against the
moon-pale sky.

A little after midnight Ezra grunted.

‘This is the place!’

Ralph rose in the stirrups and raised his right arm. The
column bunched up and dismounted. Jan Cheroot’s reputed
bastard, Taas, came to take the horses, while Jan Cheroot himself
checked his men’s weapons.

‘I will put them against the firelight for you,’
Ralph whispered to him. ‘Watch for my signal.’

Then Ralph smiled at Isazi, his teeth glinting in the shiny
black mask of his daubed face. ‘There will be no prisoners.
Lie close, but beware of Jan Cheroot’s bullets.’

‘Henshaw, I want to go in with you.’

Harry Mellow spoke in Sindebele, and Ralph answered him in the
same language.

‘You shoot better than you talk. Go with Jan
Cheroot.’

At another order from Ralph, every one of them reached into
the leather pouch on his hip and brought out a white cow-tail
tassel necklace. They were the recognition insignia, that might
prevent them killing each other in the press of the fighting.
Only Ralph added another ornament to his dress. From his hip
pouch he brought the strip of mole-skin and bound it around his
upper arm; then he hefted the heavy assegai and leadwood
knobkerrie and nodded at Ezra.

‘Lead!’

The line of Matabele, with Ralph running in second place,
trotted at a traverse across the slope of the hill. As they
turned the southern buttress, they saw the red glow of a
watch-fire in the valley below. Ralph sprinted past Ezra to the
front of the line. He filled his lungs and began to sing.

It was one of the fighting songs of the Insukamini impi, and
behind him the line of Matabele picked up the refrain in their
deep melodious voices. It resounded from the hills and woke the
camp in the valley. Naked figures, risen from the sleeping-mats,
threw wood on the fires, and the red glow lit the underside of
the acacia trees so they formed a canopy like a circus tent
overhead.

Ezra had estimated there were forty
amadoda
guarding
the horses, but there were more than that already gathered around
the fires and every second more flocked into the bivouac, the
outposts coming in to see what was causing the commotion. Ralph
had planned for that. He wanted no stragglers. They must be
concentrated, so that his riflemen could fire into the bunch,
making one bullet do the work of three or four. Ralph trotted
into the Matabele encampment.

‘Who commands here?’ Ralph broke off the
battle-song, and demanded in a bellow. ‘Let the commander
stand forth to hear the word I bring from Gandang.’ He knew
from the account that Robyn had given him of the massacre on the
Khami Hills that the old induna was one of the leaders of the
uprising. His choice of name had the effect he had hoped for.

‘I am Mazui.’ A warrior stepped forward
respectfully. ‘I wait for the word of Gandang, son of
Mzilikazi.’

‘The horses are no longer safe in this place. The white
men have learned where they are. At the rise of the sun we will
take them deeper into the hills,’ Ralph told him. ‘To
a place that I shall show you.’

‘It shall be done.’

‘Where are the horses?’

‘They are in the kraal, guarded by my
amadoda
,
safe from the lions.’

‘Bring in all your pickets,’ Ralph ordered, and
the commander shouted an order and then turned back to Ralph
eagerly.

‘What news is there of the fighting?’

‘There has been a great battle,’ Ralph launched
into a fanciful account, miming the fighting in the traditional
way, leaping and shouting and stabbing in the air with his
assegai.

‘Thus we came upon the rear of the horsemen, and thus
and thus we stabbed them—’ His own Matabele gave him
a chorus of long drawn-out ‘Jee’ and leaped and
postured with him.

The audience was enraptured, beginning to stamp and sway in
sympathy with Ralph and his Matabele. The sentries and pickets
had come in from the periphery of the camp. No more hurrying
black figures emerged from the shadows. They were all here
– a hundred, perhaps a hundred and twenty, not more, Ralph
estimated, against his forty men. Not unfair odds, Jan
Cheroot’s Cape boys were all first-rate marksmen, and Harry
Mellow with a rifle was worth five ordinary men.

From close at hand, on the first slope of the hill, a nightjar
called. It was a musical quavering cry, that sounded like
‘Good Lord, deliver us’; this pious sentiment gave
the bird its popular name, the Litany bird. It was the signal
which Ralph had been listening for. He felt a bleak satisfaction
that Jan Cheroot had followed his orders so strictly. From the
position on the slope, Jan Cheroot would have the crowd of
amadoda
silhouetted against the firelight.

Making it all part of the dance, Ralph whirled away, still
prancing and stamping, opening a distance of twenty paces between
himself and the nearest Matabele. Here Ralph ended his dance
abruptly with his arms spread like a crucifix. He stood deathly
still staring at his audience with wild eyes, and a silence fell
upon them all.