by Peter Rimmer
The light of the sun was turning from white to yellow and throwing long tree shadows over the elephant grass as they took a path up into the hills. As the sun was setting, they found a stream and let the horses loose to graze and drink. Together they gathered the firewood before the light had gone; their vast world had shrunk to the surrounding trees picked out by the firelight.
They drank coffee sitting around the fire with their backs to a tree trunk they had hauled into position, Seb encouraging Tinus to tell him the stories of Africa. The once frightening sounds around them were now familiar and Sebastian Brigandshaw had become one with the bush.
They woke to the sound of gunfire and for a moment Seb thought Tinus had gone off on his own. The night was paling behind their range of mountains from where the sun was rising. Their own camp was in darkness, the fire still burning.
“Hunters,” said Seb.
“Lobengula,” said Tinus. “Those are muzzleloaders, probably mine. This is Lobengula’s hunting ground. We hunt game whereas the Matabele hunt people, the Shona in particular. What’s left of the original tribe live in the mountains, hiding from the king’s regiments.”
“Can’t we help?”
“You had better see this so you understand Africa better. Saddle up, young Seb.”
The mountain range was covered in trees, the slopes gentle and easy to climb with streams running down to the plain. While waiting for the light to come over the hill, they had drunk the first coffee and eaten cold venison. The gunfire behind them had stopped.
“There’s a small valley in the hills,” said Tinus. “I found it many years ago.”
“Won’t the Matabele attack us?”
“Only if we sided with the Shona.”
As the sun came up into the valley, the two horsemen reached the rim of the escarpment. Down in the valley, the Matabele impi was loading grain onto a wagon directed by an induna, the man’s headgear different to the soldiers. Most of the soldiers were carrying assegais. A small group of young women and children were huddled together under guard. The bodies of dead men and old women were strewn over the ground between the huts. Away from the huts broken stems of maize spread in the open spaces between the trees, reaching far into the valley. It was the recently harvested cobs that were now being loaded onto the wagons. Soldiers were going among the dead, cutting open the stomachs to let out the spirits. There was no animosity in their actions. Behind the loading wagons, the cattle were being brought together. With military efficiency the soldiers fired the huts and empty grain silos and left with the valuables; the grain, cattle, young women and children. Even as Seb and Tinus watched, the valley began to empty of living people. Soon all that was left of the Shona village was the dead bodies and the burning huts. Then the morning doves began to call again.
“Mzilikazi, Lobengula’s father, ran away from Shaka with his regiment,” explained Tinus. “Over sixty years ago. Shaka was going to kill Mzilikazi. The man cut a swathe through the Transvaal until Hendrik Potgieter chased him over the Limpopo. By then the original Zulus were outnumbered by the remnants of the slaughtered tribes. What you just saw down there. Young women who will do what they are told and young children who will grow up speaking Zulu, the future wives, the future soldiers of the impis. The short stabbing spear of the Zulu is Africa’s equivalent of gunpowder. That and Shaka’s training made them invincible. It is easier to rape and pillage than working the land. Every year Lobengula throws the spear in a different direction where the industrious Shona will have grown the crops and fattened the cattle. A whole year’s work is stolen in a morning. Someday the Matabele, the Zulu, will grow fat and complacent. Then they will be raped and pillaged.
“Military power determines wealth, not hard work. Maybe all through history until one great power maintains law and order like the Romans. The beaten tribes of Africa have looked to the Boers for protection and now they are looking to the British. Rhodes has a charter from your Queen Victoria to protect these people and bring them the word of God. He wants to subdue Lobengula by buying from him the concessions to look for gold. Lobengula fears the white man. Why he gave his permission to hunt. Every dog has his day and the days of Lobengula are short. The British use massacres like that to further their own conquest; the righteous rush to do good. The power of the stabbing spear will give way to the power of the chattering machine gun. Maybe there will be peace for a while. But peace like wealth never seems to last. Someone is always stealing it.”
“There is someone coming out of the trees,” said Seb.
“Yes. I saw him half an hour ago. He was making sure the soldiers had gone. The remarkable thing about mankind is the survivor. There is always a survivor or otherwise, you and I would not be here. Somewhere back in ancient history, one of our own ancestors came out of the forest to look at the destruction.”
“It’s a child.”
“Probably a young herd boy, sent into the forest to look for a stray animal.”
“Won’t he starve with the food gone?”
“Maybe. If he’s strong, he’ll survive.”
“Can’t we help that one?” asked Seb.
“Maybe.”
The boy was crying. A man with his stomach split open lay at his feet. Overhead the vultures were circling while the village smouldered in ruins.
Seb dismounted and walked towards the boy, across the packed, dry earth between the ruins. Even the chickens and dogs had been killed. Seb stopped twenty yards short and waited, the sun burning his back. The child kept staring at his dead father while the tears cut a clean path through the red dust on his face. Three vultures came to earth in a spread and attacked the intestines spilling from one of the bodies. The sound of flies was as loud as swarming bees. A dust devil swirled through the dead village sending new sparks from the smouldering piles that had been huts where people had slept that night. The dust devil moved away from the boy and Seb, running off into the trees, raising old leaves and grass high into the sky.
The boy looked up and saw the apparition with long straight hair the colour of sun-bleached maize, a wide-brimmed hat shielding eyes the colour of the morning sky, carrying a stick that spat death and he waited to die. The apparition took off the hat and swatted at the flies and then put it back on top of the long straight hair. The boy looked further, and another strange man was looking at him from the top of a horse, the man’s eyes almost shut against the sun. More of the birds clattered to the ground to feed, and the boy waited. There was nowhere to run and no one to help.
“Leave him alone,” called Tinus. “Come, young Seb. We came to hunt. There’s nothing you can do. The boy’s terrified. Let’s get out of here.”
Seb looked the boy in the eye and made a gesture to follow before turning around. Walking slowly, he returned to his horse, and when he remounted the boy had left the corpse and was walking towards them.
Tatenda was eleven years old and his grandfather had been chief of the Makori tribe, a branch of the Kalanga people, before it was wiped out by Mzilikazi. He was the sixth child of his father’s first wife and the first boy. It was why his mother had called him Tatenda, the Shona word for thank you. His mother had been taken with his two surviving older sisters and the three youngest children. Tatenda’s ten-year-old brother was slaughtered with the other men, a boy too old to forget. At the same time as Seb and Tinus, Tatenda had heard the dreadful sound of the muzzleloaders. The remnants of the Makori hidden in their small, mountain valley had been found by an impi of Lobengula, son of Mzilikazi. From his perch halfway up the escarpment on the other side of the valley from where the two horsemen had appeared, Tatenda had watched the slaughter of his father and brother. He had watched with hatred the remnants of the tribe being taken away to Matabeleland.
When he looked up at the first white man he had ever seen, the prospect of revenge was embedded in his young mind. There had been many stories of these white men on horses with sticks that spat death, and the ones that had most interested his father were the wild stori
es that these men had defeated Mzilikazi far to the south.
He would have lived in the forest without starving to death. Three of the cows had strayed and two were in milk. There were game and fruit and many small rivers coming down the mountain. Alone he would have survived to find the remnants of another Shona tribe as the Makori were not the only ones hiding in the hills. Wiping the tears from his face for the last time, he followed the white man, the cold, bitter taste of revenge deep in his body. When the younger of the two white men, the one who had called with his hand, held it out again to pull him up onto the horse, he allowed himself to be jerked up behind the rider. He made a prayer to God through his ancestors that these men would show him the way. For a brief moment, he smiled at the rest of his life.
3
December 1889
Arthur Brigandshaw was having the time of his life. He had once again avoided a tedious weekend at Hastings Court, and the girl he had had in mind had agreed to the theatre and supper at the Café Royal. She was coarse and sexy which was how Arthur liked his women. By the time he had finished flattering the lady, telling her how refined and well bred and beautiful she was, the lady would be back in his Baker Street house, and right in his bed. Flattery and champagne were his chief weapons of conquest.
Six months before, the Indian Queen had returned to London from a profitable voyage and without his youngest brother. Captain Doyle had told some story of Seb going off to hunt elephant in darkest Africa. Arthur was quite sure the good captain had taken his words ‘keep the brat out of England for at least eighteen months’ most literally. He had, of course, emphasised the words ‘at least’ and as the months had stretched his brother’s absence, he was convinced Sebastian was dead.
The boy would be two years old in April, and even though he and Emily knew perfectly well the boy belonged to Seb, The Captain was none the wiser. Ensconced at Hastings Court as Lord of the Manor, he was in his element and it was just a pity the man’s accent had not changed with his wealth and new position. Arthur, in fact, had never touched Emily, which amused him. The girl had been bought and paid for along with the house. There was an heir to the great future dynasty of the Brigandshaws. Arthur himself received an excessive salary from Colonial Shipping for very little work, and the poor girl was largely chaperoned by his father who now made the captains of his ships attend him at Hastings Court. The king, thought Arthur, was very much in his counting chamber.
To cap it all, he was going to make his personal fortune. The East India Club was largely for rich merchants and underwriters at Lloyd’s, and as titular manager of Colonial Shipping, Arthur had been offered membership on his thirtieth birthday, which at first had seemed a crashing bore, but afterwards the source of fun listening to the old codgers pontificating on their fortune and the fortune of the great British Empire. On three occasions he picked up tips for the Stock Exchange and made a quick profit. His habits as a new, young member were to be demure and eavesdrop. Two of the men he had overheard were Alfred Beit and Cecil John Rhodes, respectively the wealthiest man in Africa and the likely next Prime Minister of the Cape. And if these two did not know what they were talking about, Arthur asked himself, then whoever did? Beit, the financier, was reputed to be as rich as Rhodes. Arthur had overheard the whole thing in his high-backed armchair, away from the fire, in a small alcove that had made him anonymous. He was quite sure neither man knew he was there. Lazy as usual, he had spent the afternoon in the club reading a detective novel rather than going back to the office after his lunch.
What he overheard was going to be bigger than the East India Company that had made Clive a rich man and the Queen Empress of all India. The new royal charter would at first cover southern Africa but Arthur had overheard Rhodes talking about a rail link from the Cape to Cairo that was to be built by his Charter Company. Rhodes had told Beit about the German surveyor, Karl Mauch, who predicted more gold in southern Africa than anywhere else in the world. And Rhodes, Arthur had learnt as he eavesdropped avidly, had bought Lobengula’s mining concession from Charles Rudd and was launching a pioneer column the next spring to travel into the interior. The new British South Africa Company, which had some time ago been floated on the London Stock Exchange, was going to make a fortune. New shares were being offered to the public.
Arthur had gone to his bank and mortgaged his existing shares, his house in Baker Street and two years’ salary. To Arthur’s surprise, buying BSAC shares was the easiest part of the exercise, which made him chuckle. Only Beit, Rhodes and Arthur Brigandshaw knew what was going on. His fifty thousand pound investment was not only going to make him rich but it was also going to make him independent. There would no longer be any need to pretend to his father. At last, he would be his own man. Rhodes and Africa were going to make him his fortune. He was having the time of his life.
The fact that Rhodes had been quite well aware of young Brigandshaw sitting with his back to them in the alcove was the one piece of information of which Arthur was unaware. Beit and Rhodes needed investors, it being better to use other people’s money than their own. And young Brigandshaw’s father was rich. Rhodes had gone from mining magnate to empire builder. He wanted his name in history and to do it he was going to conquer southern Africa with his private army for his Queen. Beit and Rhodes had no intention of paying a dividend anytime soon.
The rumour reached Sir Henry Manderville, Emily’s father, and Arthur’s father-in-law, during his sojourn in Florence where he had spent two of the most boring years of his life for somewhere better to go. England, now that he’d sold his house and daughter for a lifelong annuity, was too painful. Emily wrote but never once asked him back to England. News of the birth of Harry reached him three months after the event. Having looked at every conceivable piece of Italian art and with his life in the pit of boredom, he had made friends with a reprobate Englishman who was also disinclined to return to the island of his birth. Sir Henry had just turned thirty-seven and should have been in the prime of life. Rich Italian food, too much wine, very little exercise and a permanent balding head, made him look fifty. He had nothing to live for so it didn’t matter and the wine bottle was likely to get him into less trouble than Italian women. He had loved a woman once; that had been enough for him.
Gregory Shaw had been in the army, the Indian Army, and Henry suspected something had gone wrong with his career but had never asked the question. Basically, they were both in the same boat so it didn’t matter. They were exiles. Exiles from home, country, family and friends. Neither delved into the other’s past, glad enough to drink together and talk English. Drinking alone was the bottom of the pit in Henry’s opinion of life, and the two almost middle-aged exiles had made friends, each day meeting in the same hotel bar to get drunk. The local ladies had long given them up for lost and left them alone. The Italian barman kept the drinks coming and also left them alone, and when the rumour reached them, they were sitting at the bar drinking the second glass of wine, the bottle between them in a silver ice bucket next to a large bowl of olives. It usually took them a bottle of wine to become talkative so they drank and ate olives in silence, staring separately into the past of their lives where everything they were existed. The knack at the end of the first bottle of wine was to talk trivia and keep to trivia through the third. After that, it didn’t matter.
In mutual silence, both of them listened to two Englishmen talking at the table next to the bar, oblivious to anyone else understanding English. Henry had gone quite dark from strolling in the Italian sun, his only exercise. They looked like locals in clothes they had bought in Italy. When the two men left the table, Henry looked at Gregory. “We’d better go,” he said.
“I agree, old boy.”
Abandoning half-filled glasses, they left the bar with a rare purpose. The barman picked the bottle out of the ice bucket. It was more than half full. For a moment he wondered what he had done wrong. Then he shrugged his shoulders. He had seen a lot of foreigners come and go to Florence.
“Whe
re are we going so fast, old boy?” asked Gregory out on the pavement.
“The shipping company. We can take a boat through the new canal, and down the east coast of Africa to Cape Town. Cape Town isn’t England.”
“Or India,” said Gregory, quickening his pace. “The right to peg fifteen gold claims and a three thousand acre farm.”
“No, it was two farms and ten gold claims.”
“Major Johnson.”
“Major Frank Johnson.”
“You’re a baronet and I was a captain.”
“What if they don’t take us on the column?”
“Then we’ve wasted a passage to Cape Town but relieved our boredom. I’ll stake you a passage for one of your farms. Five thousand acre farms.”
“I’m sure it was six, old boy. We better get ourselves fit between here and Cape Town.”
“We will.”
“Oh, and I’ll buy my own ticket.”
“You will?”
“Yes I will, old boy.”
The one problem worrying Gregory Shaw, as they walked briskly towards the offices of Lloyd-Triestino, was communication. Was it possible that the major recruiting for Rhodes would know that Captain Gregory Shaw had been drummed out of his regiment? Would the nightmare continue? The colonel’s words rang as clearly in his ears as they had the first time.
“We British, Captain Shaw, rule the Indians, we do not live with them. Do I make myself clear? There are twenty thousand Englishmen ruling two hundred million Indians because they respect us. We are aloof. We are their superiors. We do not allow them into the mess any more than we allow them into our bedrooms. May I remind you, Captain Shaw, that your family are one of the most respected in Dorset and I will not have a scandal, sir. No, I most definitely will not have a scandal. I want your word that you will never see the woman in question again. Do I have your word, Captain Shaw?”
