The Covenant: A Novel

by James A. Michener

  When the performance ended, William hurried to the Voortrekkers, warning them for the second time: ‘Dingane means to kill you either tonight or tomorrow.’ But again Retief refused to heed the caution, pointing out: ‘A treaty is to be signed in the morning. We’ll leave immediately thereafter.’

  ‘Too late,’ the boy said, but Retief dismissed him, turning to Tjaart: ‘What we might do, Tjaart, is for you to speed back to the Blaauwkrantz. Tell our people that we’ve been granted the land. Get them packed and ready to take possession before Dingane changes his mind.’

  From a small leather pouch he brought forth the precious paper, showing it to Tjaart in a kind of triumph. ‘Tell them you saw this. Tell them the Kaffir will sign it tomorrow and then the land is peacefully ours.’

  So Tjaart and Paulus saddled their horses, and prepared to serve as bearers of sweet tidings. At last the Voortrekkers would have a home of their own, but before Paulus mounted his horse, William Wood slipped up to him, grasped his hand and whispered, ‘I’m glad you’re going. Because tomorrow the others will all be dead.’

  On Tuesday morning, 6 February 1838, Piet Retief, accompanied by seventy Boer horsemen, rode up to the gates of Dingane’s Kraal, where Zulu commanders ordered them to dismount, tether their horses and deposit their weapons in a pile, which would be guarded by one of the regiments: ‘Out of respect for the king. He was frightened by that sudden blast the other day.’ To these arrangements Retief, as a gentleman, agreed.

  The seventy-one white men, including Retief, entered the great arena, followed by their thirty-one Coloureds—one hundred and two in all. Since the day was extremely hot, the visitors were given those areas where the breeze was most likely to move the air, and they seated themselves and accepted the gourds of sorghum beer provided by Dambuza, the king’s chief councillor. The land deed was presented to Dingane, who with a flourishing gesture put his mark on it and returned it to Retief. Then the dancing began, two regiments unarmed and wonderfully muscular performing intricate steps and maneuvers.

  It was as peaceful a dance as the Zulu could have offered, and it pleased Retief and his men, but the boy William Wood, seeing that beyond the dancers three other regiments were silently moving into position, ran from the arena and told the people at the mission station, ‘They are all going to be killed.’

  ‘Hush,’ a woman said. ‘You’ve been reprimanded before for spreading rumors.’

  The king, watching carefully the progress of the dance, decided that it had reached the designated moment, so while the steps continued he rose and proposed a toast, putting it into Zulu verse, which he composed on the spot:

  ‘Let the white lips that thirst,

  Thirst no more!

  Let the eyes that want everything,

  See no more!

  Let the white hearts that beat …

  Be still!’

  Retief, understanding none of the words, nodded graciously to the king and raised his gourd. At that instant Dingane shouted, ‘Seize them, my warriors! Slay the wizards!’

  A thousand voices repeated the king’s command, and the dancing regiments stepped aside, allowing the real soldiers to leap forward, assegais in hand. With these daggers pointing at their throats, the bewildered Boers stumbled to their feet, whipped out what knives they had, and tried to defend themselves. It was useless. Four, six, ten Zulu grabbed at each Boer, wrestled him to the floor, then, holding him by the legs, dragged him out of the kraal and along a climbing footpath to the place of execution. There on a hill, as William Wood and the missionary women watched from their homes, the Boers were clubbed to death, one by one, knobkerries rising and falling.

  The Coloureds also were slain to a man. Piet Retief, pinioned, had to watch his own son being tortured to death before he, too, was clubbed mercilessly until his skull was shattered and he fell upon the heaped bodies of his comrades.

  The Zulu commander who had supervised the killings cried, ‘Cut out the liver and the heart of this man. Bury them in the middle of the road he traveled.’

  So ended Piet Retief, a man who had led his people into the wilderness to build a country of their own, a man who trusted those he met and placed his faith in God. His laager was destroyed; his son was slain; his far designs left un-attained. A failure in much that he attempted, he came to a terrible end, but it was also a noble beginning, for his legend would inspire a nation.

  On the day ten months later when other Boers came upon his body, they would find in the leather pouch near his bones a document carefully marked by Dingane, King of the Zulu, granting him:

  the Place called Port Natal together with all the Land annexed, that is to say from Dogeela to the River westward and from the Sea to the North as far as the Land may be Useful and in my possession for their Everlasting property.

  De merk + + van de Koning Dingane

  Tjaart and Paulus, riding quietly along the banks of the Tugela River, could not know that their fellow Voortrekkers were being massacred, but the boy suffered powerful premonitions and said, ‘Father, I do think the king is going to kill all our men. Should we turn back to warn them?’

  ‘No one would dare do a thing like that.’

  ‘But William knows the king. Twice he heard him say that we were wizards.’

  ‘He meant wise men. Because we defeated Mzilikazi.’

  ‘But William has seen wizards put to death. Men hammer stakes into them.’

  The boy was so insistent that Tjaart had to pay attention; he became more alert, and it was fortunate that he did, because toward noon he detected to the rear a rise of dust along the trail they had just traveled, and from a hiding place, saw with horror the better part of two regiments, assegais glistening, flash past, headed in the general direction of the Blaauwkrantz River.

  Instantly Tjaart realized that they must somehow move ahead of the running column to alert the encampments and the hundreds of Voortrekkers who would not be in laager, but no matter how cleverly they tried to speed along unused trails, invariably they were forestalled by detachments of Zulu who were fanning out across the countryside, murdering any Boers they found.

  At four different isolated camps, Tjaart and Paulus found only smoldering ruins and gutted Boers. In an agony of fear, they fought to circumvent the Zulu lines and sound an alarm, but always they failed; once when it seemed that they could slip down a canyon, they watched in dismay as a third regiment of Dingane’s men crept in, attacking a lonely wagon and killing everyone.

  Belatedly, Tjaart had to acknowledge aloud that Retief and all his men were probably dead. He looked blankly at Paulus, and the boy nodded. He had known all along how great would be the disaster, for William Wood had told him, and now, distraught, he said, ‘And before we left, William told me that every Boer in Zululand would be killed. We must hurry to the river.’

  ‘I’ve been trying!’ Tjaart cried, and once again he sought to outflank the Zulu lines, and failed.

  At sunset on Friday, 16 February 1838, they were still far short of the Blaauwkrantz, their warning signal undelivered. That night, along an unprotected stretch eleven miles in length, the scattered wagons of the Voortrekkers stood in formless array, and near them the women and children of the men already slaughtered went carelessly to sleep. Additional families, only recently arrived from Thaba Nchu, were spending their first nights in their promised land and staring at the stars which had brought them safely home. It was a quiet night, with only a few dogs barking sporadically.

  At one o’clock in the morning three full regiments of Zulu warriors stormed forth in a surprise attack and reached the sleeping wagons and tents before anyone could sound an alarm. In the first wave they slaughtered everyone at the eastern end of the line, except two members of the Bezuidenhout family. The younger Bezuidenhout, barely able to grasp the fact that all but one of his kin were slain, enabled others farther westward to survive the assault by heroically riding through the night, breaking miraculously through one concentration of Zulu warriors after another. />
  Among the groups he wakened was the Van Doorn encampment: Jakoba, Minna and Theunis, their three-year-old daughter Sybilla and their five servants. These nine had just enough time to take frenzied precautions before the screaming Zulu fell upon them, and in these moments of terror Theunis Nel did a remarkable thing: he took Sybilla and hid her behind a tree, well away from the wagons, and as he left her, trembling with a fear he could not control, he whispered, ‘Sybilla, remember when we played the game? You must not make a sound.’

  Running back to the wagons, he supervised the distribution of guns and knives and boards, and with these futile weapons and a heroism unmatched, his people defended themselves, the women firing their rifles until there was no more gunpowder, then standing side by side with their Coloureds, chopping at the deadly enemy. Minna went down first, cut to pieces. One by one the fearless, faithful Coloureds died. Then Jakoba and Theunis stood with their hands touching in love and farewell, fighting with whatever they could grab, and finally there was Theunis alone, a pathetic little man swinging a club.

  When he saw fresh hordes descending upon him and realized that they might stumble upon his hidden daughter, he ran before them, leading away from her tree, and the warriors overtook him, each stabbed at him with an assegai. But still he ran, to lead them as far away as possible, and shouting to warn the other wagons. When he felt his knees failing and blood choking his lungs, he turned to face his assailants, grabbed at their assegais, and died of many wounds.

  Balthazar Bronk, who had so relentlessly denied him his ordination, had managed, as such men often do, to be at the far end of the encampment, where the Zulu did not reach.

  Tjaart arrived at Blaauwkrantz before dawn, and searching in the ghostly light, he and Paulus saw the awful desolation: men hacked to pieces, women and children chopped down, brown and black servants who had surrendered their lives defending the people for whom they worked.

  ‘Father!’ Paulus cried. ‘Our wagons!’

  Recognizing the burned-out frames, Tjaart rushed over—and found his family massacred: Jakoba lay with six dead Zulu at her feet, Minna with three, all the servants, their bodies slashed by assegais. But no Sybilla. And no Theunis.

  ‘Child!’ Tjaart roared, hoping that she might somehow have escaped. There was no response, so he started shouting for Theunis, cursing him for having run away and deserted his women.

  ‘Goddamn you, Nel!’ he bellowed, and then suddenly he was surrounded by women, jabbering that Theunis had saved their lives: ‘He was dying, but he ran nearly half a mile, shouting to us, warning us …’ ‘He was stabbed so many times …’

  ‘Was Sybilla with him?’

  ‘He was alone with the spears.’ They led him to where the crookbackt sick-comforter lay, uncovered, and Tjaart fell beside him and cried, ‘Theunis, where is your daughter?’

  Paulus de Groot, now six, looked at the dead body of his second mother, then at Aunt Minna, and he was about to move on to see where Uncle Theunis lay when he sensed a movement among the trees, and although he was terrified by the dreadful things of this night, he walked toward the sound, and there beneath a tree sat Sybilla. She had witnessed everything that happened, but she knew from what her father had told her in those last moments that she must not make a sound.

  She made none now, and even when Paulus reached down to take her hands, she followed him mutely, and with Paulus walking backward and guiding her, they left the tree and started to where Tjaart was grieving over the body of her father. But when Paulus had her well on the way, she suddenly halted, pulling her hands free, and when she was thus released she walked purposefully to where her mother and Ouma Jakoba lay. When she stood over them she did not weep, nor did she kneel to kiss them. She simply stood there, and after a while she turned to her friend Paulus and placed her hands again in his. Vaguely she had always known that his father and mother had been killed, and now she knew that hers had died, too. He was the person she could trust. He was the one who understood.

  They were standing thus when someone informed Tjaart that his granddaughter was alive. ‘Sybilla!’ he shouted, but when he dashed back to lift her in his arms, crying, ‘Thank God, thank God!’ she merely looked at him. Her father had warned her not to speak, and it would be some days before she did.

  As soon as Jakoba and the Nels were buried, Tjaart headed for the far end of the wagon line to ascertain what had happened to the Ryk Naudés, and as he walked, dozens of Voortrekkers halted him to ask, ‘What news of Retief?’ and he was afraid to tell them of Paulus’ conviction that the entire party had been slain.

  When he found the Naudé wagon, the people of that group were engaged in burying thirteen of their dead. Among them was Ryk; that feckless youth had refused to put his wagons into laager, had been out sporting with some new girl, and had rushed back in time to face a circle of Zulu, who hacked him to pieces.

  At the end of the common grave Tjaart found Aletta, her arm in a sling, her face scarred by a long gash; as always, she stood there betraying no emotion, and even when Tjaart signaled to her across the fallen bodies, she merely nodded. Since the Voortrekkers were still without a clergyman, a layman was needed to read from the Bible, and Balthazar Bronk volunteered: he offered a fine prayer and the mass grave was closed.

  Then, as if a mighty hand were pushing him from the back, Tjaart stepped around the grave, walked solemnly to where Aletta stood, and addressed her before some other womanless man might lay claim: ‘You can’t live alone, Aletta.’

  ‘It would be impossible,’ she said.

  Her husband was dead. Her wagon was burned. She had no place to sleep, no clothes other than those she wore. She had no money, no food, no relatives. She was alone on unprotected land which the Zulu might overrun at any moment, so with a last tearless look at the grave, she held out her good hand, encouraging Tjaart to take it and guide her down the long line of wagons till they reached his.

  With dismay she saw that he, too, had nothing: no bed, no box of Jakoba’s clothes, no wagon ready for the road—nothing but a brown-gold pot and a Bible. There was no Dutch minister to marry them, but this widow and this widower were wed of their own determination; and as they started retrieving the possessions scattered about, messengers came crying: ‘Retief and all his men are slain.’

  It was obvious that God had struck His chosen people with a series of punishing blows. For their arrogance and their sins he had chastised them, and as they huddled in their depleted laagers, awaiting the next assault of the Zulu, they tried to unravel the mystery of their wrongdoing.

  Every man who died at Dingane’s Kraal had loved God and had endeavored to live according to His laws, yet all had perished. Every woman and child murdered at Blaauwkrantz had been faithful to the Bible, but they had been slaughtered. If ever an assembly of people had just cause to rebel against their deity, it was the Voortrekkers that summer of 1838, but they reacted quite differently.

  Spiritually they sought within themselves the reasons for their reverses, and decided that they had been lax in their attention to worship and in the keeping of the commandments. For example, Tjaart van Doorn knew in his heart that the adulteries in his family had been the cause of the savage retribution he had suffered, and yet—why had he been saved and faultless Jakoba punished?

  Aletta continued to perplex him. In the days following the massacre, her principal concern had been with the cut across her cheek: ‘Will it leave a scar?’ Wives showed her how to sterilize the wound in cow’s urine and salve it with butter, and when she was assured that it would heal without a major blemish, she was satisfied. In her relations with Tjaart she continued as she had always been—completely passive, interested in nothing, absorbed only in herself. Once when he returned to their tent exhausted from digging trenches, he wanted to discuss the problem of finding someone who might lead them against the Zulu, but she had no opinions on any of the men. In some exasperation he asked, ‘How about Balthazar Bronk?’ and she put her hand to her chin, studied the matter, an
d said, ‘He might be the one,’ even though she knew he had run away at Veg Kop.

  In the hard task of erecting some sort of defense he noticed this peculiarity: that the boy Paulus toiled like a man while the woman Aletta behaved like a child. He could not help comparing her with Jakoba, who would have been at his side as the new barricades were being built, and he began to understand why Ryk Naudé, married to this extremely beautiful girl, had nevertheless preferred Minna.

  When, thanks to Tjaart’s stubborn work, these Voortrekkers felt moderately safe from Zulu attack, they returned to the Book of Joshua to review the steps by which he had triumphed at Jericho over his Canaanite enemies, and now the loss of Theunis Nel was felt, for he would have been eager to explicate such matters. In his absence, Tjaart had to serve as principal guide, bending over the charred cover of his Bible to read the relevant verses:

  ‘And it came to pass … that the people went up into the city, every man straight before him, and they took the city. And they utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old, and ox, and sheep, and ass, with the edge of the sword.’

  Then he swore grimly: ‘That’s what we’ll do to Dingane’s Kraal. Total destruction.’ By what specific steps this would be accomplished he did not know, for he considered himself inadequate to lead. What he could do was reflect the stubborn Boer determination to see this job finished, and if any man wavered, he laid forth the damning statistics: ‘At the kraal, one hundred and two of our men killed. Here at Blaauwkrantz, two hundred and eighty-two. Out in the countryside, at least seventy more slain in their sleep. We demand retribution.’

  ‘How can we attain it,’ Balthazar Bronk asked, ‘when we are so few and they so many?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Tjaart said, ‘but I’m sure God will show us a way.’

  And then into camp rode the man who would achieve miracles. He was Andries Pretorius, clean-shaven, younger than the other leaders, a person of substance in Graaff-Reinet. He was extremely tall and bulky, slow to reach decisions but resolute when he had done so. Like most of the leaders, he had been married more than once, with eight children by his first wife, three by his second. A grave, thoughtful man, he had hurried north in response to a summons from the beleaguered Voortrekkers. With his gun, his pistols and a thick-bladed cutlass, he strode into camp on 22 November 1838 and said simply, ‘I have come to help you. Within the week we shall ride forth to destroy Dingane.’