The Covenant: A Novel

by James A. Michener

  ‘What happens if the spit dries?’ Tjaart asked the interpreter.

  ‘The messenger who received the order is strangled.’

  The warriors were ready. From numerous openings more than two thousand Zulu fighting men rushed into the cattle kraal bearing tall white shields, which they flashed this way and that in a dazzling display. Then with three mighty stompings of their right feet, they shouted ‘Bayete!’ and the earth reverberated. They then began a warriors’ dance, swaying gently at times, leaping into the air at others; it was an awesome performance, kept in such perfect synchronization that Retief whispered, ‘I doubt if any European army could do the same.’

  The first day was spent in this manner, and when it ended Retief said, through the interpreter, ‘Tomorrow we shall talk.’

  That was not Dingane’s plan, for on the morrow he sat with his guests in the royal cattle kraal, where, like an Oriental ruler showing his jewels to impress a visitor, or a European his collection of paintings, he prepared to display his conspicuous wealth. Again he spit on his wrist, whereupon servants led enormous herds of cattle past in silent defile. One herd of more than two thousand consisted of alternate rows of black and red; another of somewhat smaller size was all brown.

  When the handsome beasts departed and a scurry of men cleaned up the droppings, Dingane signaled once more, and now came an incredible performance. Filing through the entrance to the kraal came two hundred snow-white oxen garbed majestically in garlands and caparisons and all without horns. Each was attended by an ebony warrior who stayed at the beast’s head but never touched it.

  Tjaart assumed that this was another march-past, and he was sufficiently impressed by the beauty of these matched animals to nod approvingly to the king, who held up one hand to indicate that the real performance would now begin.

  Slowly, to the Boers’ amazement, the two hundred oxen began to dance with the warriors, following a set of rather intricate steps, forming large patterns and then regrouping, without ever a command that Tjaart could hear. Gradually, as Dingane had intended, the effect became hypnotic and wonderfully African: these huge beasts delicately stepping off their patterns, turning majestically and coming back, hesitating, twisting, and then moving forward at their slow purposeful pace. Each animal looked as if he alone were performing the dance, as if the eyes of all spectators were following him, and each displayed obvious satisfaction in dancing so well.

  That night Retief told Tjaart, ‘Tomorrow we talk.’

  This time he was right. They talked, but not about the grant of land. Dingane, listening attentively to every word the interpreter said, asked, ‘What happened when your people met with Mzilikazi?’

  Delighted at this opportunity to instruct a pagan king, Retief expounded enthusiastically on the Boer triumphs: ‘A handful of us … Van Doorn here was one of them. He’ll tell you—’

  ‘Tell me what?’ the king interrupted.

  Tjaart knew instinctively that he must not boast of his victories over the Great Bull Elephant, even though Mzilikazi was Dingane’s enemy, for to do so would raise questions in the king’s mind, so he replied modestly, ‘We fought him twice, and he was powerful.’

  ‘That’s not the story!’ Retief protested, and while Dingane kept his pudgy fingers pressed against his lips, the Boer leader cried, ‘Forty of our men held off five thousand of his. Wave after wave of his soldiers came at our men, and we shot them down till they lay like ripe pumpkins in the veld.’

  ‘So few of you, so many of them?’

  ‘Yes, Mighty King, because when a ruler disobeys the commands of our God, he is struck down. Remember that.’

  Dingane did not change his expression, but Tjaart noticed that he kept his fingertips pressed hard against his lips, as if he were controlling himself lest he say too much, and when the two Voortrekkers took their seats for this day’s entertainment, Tjaart said, ‘I wish you had not been so bold,’ but Retief, in some exhilaration, replied, ‘From time to time you must teach these pagan kings a lesson.’ When Tjaart tried to remonstrate, Retief said, ‘Look!’

  More than two thousand Zulu warriors in full battle dress, with distinctive ox tails tied about their upper arms and knees, had run onto the parade ground, taken position and stamped their feet, shouting ‘Bayete!’ Then came a stylized battle show replete with cries, stabbing exercises and mock attacks. Tjaart, who had experienced the real thing, was repelled by the display, but Retief was riveted by the performance, and told the king, ‘Your men are mighty warriors.’ Dingane nodded, then replied, ‘They live at my command. They kill at my command.’

  On the fourth day the king finally consented to talk seriously with the Boers, and assured them that he was viewing favorably their application for a large grant of land south of his own domains. He asked Retief to prove his responsibility as a possible settler by recovering some cattle stolen from him by a distant chief, and more or less assured him that once this mission was accomplished, the land grant would be quickly arranged during Retief’s next visit. After a long speech of farewell, with foot-stomping and a graceful exit of his sixteen favorite wives, the king nodded and departed, leaving Retief and Van Doorn free to return to their company of waiting Voortrekkers. But before the men left the area, an English missionary, who had been living near Dingane’s kraal for some months, hurried up to them and said, ‘Friends, your lives are my concern.’

  ‘Ours too,’ Retief said lightly, for he was pleased by the promising results of his first official visit with the king.

  ‘Did he invite you back for another visit?’

  ‘Yes, in January, if we could complete a small matter for him. If not, in February.’

  ‘Friends, in the name of God, do not come back.’

  ‘Foolishness. He’s going to give us the grant we seek.’

  ‘Friends, believe me. I live with these people. Every sign I saw proved to me that he intends killing you.’

  ‘We Boers do not hold much with missionaries,’ Retief said, and Tjaart nodded. Neither of the men could tolerate the philanthropists, and they saw in this meddling man one more troublemaker.

  ‘Friends, regardless of what you think of me as a missionary, I warn you as a guide. Dingane means to kill you. If you return to his kraal, you will never leave.’

  Retief had grown impatient with the intrusion. Brushing the missionary aside, he said as he strode past, ‘Say no prayers on our account. We’re not Englishmen. We’re Dutchmen. We know how to deal with Kaffirs.’

  When Tjaart returned to the Kerkenberg he found the place deserted except for one boy shepherding a flock left there for utilization by chance travelers. He said that Mijnheer Bronk had prevailed upon the group to complete the descent into the valley of the Blaauwkrantz River.

  Tjaart was at first angry that Bronk should have made such a bold decision alone, but when he saw the new site he had to admit that it was an improvement on the aerie in the hills. Kerkenberg had been for resting; the Blaauwkrantz was for living. It had ample water, good drainage, and a promise of the fine pastures which the Voortrekkers would occupy for the remainder of their lives. Tjaart went to Bronk and said, ‘You have chosen well.’

  In December 1837 new arrivals struggling down the Drakensberg brought the Voortrekkers an unexpected Christmas present: ‘We have defeated Mzilikazi. He’s fled north of the Limpopo, gone forever.’ And three men who had participated in the final running battle elaborated: ‘We caught him in retreat and kept at his heels. Overpowered him. Four thousand of his men dead. Two of ours.’

  Brave beyond the demands of normal warfare, these black troops without guns or horses had tried to combat a white army that had both, and the day had come when the Great Bull Elephant had to face the fact that his regiments could no longer dominate the vast area they had delineated for themselves, and his kraals could not hold out against the Boer and Coloured horsemen who came thundering through the huts at dawn. As one of the arriving Boers said, ‘Like an enraged elephant, he thrashed about the veld, th
en slowly withdrew.’ He crossed the Limpopo, passing that grand and gloomy collection of ruins at Zimbabwe and establishing his permanent kingdom of the Matabele in the western reaches of that olden empire. For Mzilikazi, the great odyssey of his people, which had left such a trail of blood, was ended.

  But even as Jakoba heard of this victory, she shared with Tjaart her apprehensions over the way things had been going ever since Balthazar Bronk had led the Voortrekkers to lower ground: ‘I don’t feel safe here. We’ve worked so hard to come this far, and I think it’s all wrong.’

  ‘What do you propose?’

  ‘We should go back to higher ground.’

  ‘We can’t move all these people back to the Kerkenberg.’

  ‘I mean all the way back. To the plateau where we belong.’

  Tjaart was astounded. ‘You’d go back up that mountain?’

  ‘I would. Right now.’

  ‘We’d never get our wagon up.’

  ‘Leave it. Let’s go back to Thaba Nchu and join some other group moving north.’

  The idea was appealing. Tjaart had not liked what he saw at Dingane’s Kraal, for if the Zulu king controlled that number of well-trained men, what would keep him from acting like Mzilikazi if he became angry? And why had he been so nervously concerned about the defeat of his arch-rival in the early skirmishes if he were not applying that experience to himself? Surely, if the Voortrekkers had heard of the Bull Elephant’s final expulsion, Dingane must have heard too, and must be wondering whether a handful of Boers could do the same to him.

  ‘I fear the English missionary may have been correct,’ he confided to Jakoba. ‘I think Retief might do well to avoid that kraal.’

  ‘Warn him.’

  ‘He listens to no man. Never has.’

  ‘Tjaart, I think we should leave here. Let Bronk command. Did you know that during your absence he expelled Theunis from the Kerkenberg?’

  ‘He what?’ Such graceless behavior in the name of religion nauseated Tjaart, and he sought the sick-comforter to assure him that many of the men in the company, those who had faced death repeatedly and had not run away, appreciated his spiritual assistance: ‘Theunis, when a man faces odds of a thousand to one, and when the cattle have been stolen and the horses stampeded, he needs God’s assurance. On this trek you have been more important than four guns. Stay close to us, for I fear that harsh days lie ahead.’

  ‘As bad as on the Vaal River?’

  ‘Worse. Mzilikazi was wily and brilliant. Dingane is terrible and undisciplined. If I’m ever absent, keep the wagons in laager.’

  ‘We haven’t been in laager for months.’

  ‘I’ve seen Dingane,’ Tjaart said. ‘I’ve seen his kraal. This man is a king, and kings invade.’

  Three times in the next days he contemplated following his wife’s advice and leaving this encampment, and he even went so far as to consult with his son-in-law: ‘Theunis, how would you respond to Jakoba’s belief that we should leave here, climb the mountain and go north, as we proposed?’

  ‘I would go tomorrow.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Balthazar Bronk, he’s a tyrant. He’s not a man to lead other men.’

  Tjaart laughed. ‘You’re angry with him for demoting you.’

  ‘That’s one reason,’ Theunis confessed. ‘But we’re in a new land, new problems. Desperately this people needs a predikant. Our church has refused to countenance us, so we should establish our own rules.’

  ‘I tried. You saw me try, and we were defeated.’

  ‘I would like to go north with you, Tjaart, and find our own land. Believe me, this Natal is contaminated.’

  It was contaminated in ways that the sick-comforter either did not know or refused to recognize, for Minna, always fearful that the trek might split and take Ryk Naudé from her permanently, was stealing out to see him at every opportunity, and he seemed as eager as she for these assignations. This left Aletta free, and for reasons that no one could have explained, and certainly not the participants, she threw herself in Tjaart’s way, knowing that he was hungry for her. It was a strange and ugly situation, the more so in that the aggrieved parties, Jakoba and Theunis, were among the strongest of the Voortrekkers, and the best. They never spoke to each other of their private griefs, but in their family prayers little Theunis, twisted to one side, sometimes became eloquent when he invoked God on behalf of the Voortrekkers, seeking for them a strength unusual, a devotion unworldly. Often at the end of his protracted prayers tears would spring from both his eyes, not only from the blemished one.

  The Van Doorns were not able to leave Blaauwkrantz, because Piet Retief came riding into camp with an urgent request: ‘I need a hundred men to accompany me to Dingane’s Kraal. And they must be good horsemen.’

  ‘Why?’ a murmur of voices asked.

  ‘Tjaart knows why,’ and he asked Van Doorn to describe the exhibitions Dingane had provided for his visitors during the last meeting: the military drills, the dancing of the oxen. ‘I want our horsemen to show that king something he’s never even imagined. Boer strength. Our horsemen in their speediest drill.’

  He was not able to enlist the full hundred, but he did get seventy-one skilled horsemen, including himself and his son. Of course, some thirty-one Coloureds rode along, for the Voortrekkers engaged in not a single operation, warlike or peaceful, without their usual complement of assistants. Besides, some of the Coloured were exciting horsemen, and Retief was counting on them to adorn the display he had in mind.

  Added to the roster were Tjaart and Paulus de Groot, two weeks short of six years old and already a practiced horseman; as Tjaart said farewell to Jakoba and the Nels, he promised them that he would protect the boy and be home soon with an agreement giving the Voortrekkers rights in Natal. Plans for seeking a safer home in the north were abandoned.

  It was a beautiful summer’s journey down to the Tugela and across it into the heart of Zululand, but it was dangerously seductive, for the Voortrekkers had convinced themselves that no harm could befall them. Even Tjaart, who had been warned by the missionary and cautioned by his wife, forgot his apprehensions.

  ‘What could happen to us?’ he asked his friends. ‘Dingane wanted us to recover his stolen cattle, and there they are, trailing along behind us. He’ll welcome us and sign the papers we want.’

  They arrived at the great kraal on Saturday morning, 3 February 1838, and the festivities began at once. Paulus encountered a pleasure of which no one had told him, for in the royal town there had been for some time an English lad named William Wood, twelve years old, whom King Dingane treated as a kind of pet, a precious curiosity who lived with the nearby missionaries but who had the run of the capital. This lad took Paulus under his protection, showing him the intricacies of the royal huts and even the forbidden quarters, vast in extent, in which the king’s wives were sequestered.

  At the end of the first day Paulus was exhausted but delighted: ‘Father Tjaart, this is the best.’ And memories of his parents’ mutilation by the regiments of another king like Dingane were dulled.

  On the second day Retief offered the king a surprise, calling upon his horsemen to go through their maneuvers. Into the vast arena, populated by at least four thousand Zulu warriors, came the Boer horsemen, two by two, rifles across their saddles, blank loadings in position. Slowly the horses circled the arena, came down the middle, performing convolutions and raising a stirring clatter. The warriors were entranced, for although they had danced with the oxen, their beautiful beasts had been slow and ponderous; these horses flowed with magic, leaping and twisting at command.

  And then, again from a signal by Retief, which Dingane carefully noted, the horsemen broke into a gallop, formed one phalanx, dashed straight at the ebony armchair-throne and discharged their rifles. The effect was overwhelming, and so startled Dingane that he whispered to an attendant, ‘These men are indeed wizards.’

  William Wood overheard this remark, and as soon as the affair ended he sought out Tj
aart and told him of the awful thing the king had said: ‘He whispered that you were indeed wizards.’

  ‘In a way we are,’ Tjaart agreed.

  ‘Ssssh! It means he’s going to kill you.’

  Tjaart frowned. ‘What’s your name again?’

  ‘William Wood. I know Dingane. Mr. van Doorn, he’s going to kill all of you.’

  The boy’s face was so woebegone that Tjaart felt he must inform Retief of the incident, but the commander laughed it off: ‘One of the English missionaries said the same thing. But you must remember they’re English. They’re afraid of Kaffirs.’

  But Tjaart was so impressed by William’s warning that he suggested leaving the area that night, and he argued so persuasively that Retief might have ordered his people home had not King Dingane himself suddenly appeared: ‘I want to ask two questions. First, is it true that your people have finally defeated Mzilikazi?’

  ‘Yes,’ Retief replied expansively. ‘We killed five thousand of his men. Drove him right across the Limpopo.’ He looked threateningly at Dingane, and added, ‘A similar defeat awaits any king who opposes the will of God.’

  ‘Who decides that the will of your God has been opposed?’ the interpreter asked.

  ‘We will know,’ Retief said.

  ‘My second question. Is it true that your Coloured people can ride horses the way you do?’ Retief answered, ‘Tomorrow you’ll see. And as you watch them, remember that you might be given horses, too, once we move into our land.’ Dingane nodded.

  On Monday, February 5, the show was held, and although the Coloured riders lacked the military precision of the Boers, they rode with such joyous abandon that they more than compensated for the deficiency. William Wood, sitting near the king, heard him grumble to his advisors, ‘If the Coloured can ride horses, so can the Zulu. We must keep careful watch on these wizards.’