The Covenant: A Novel

by James A. Michener

  The more Balthazar talked, the more sense he made, and by the time Aletta got out of bed, the two men had convinced themselves that they must start quickly toward the mountains; Natal was not for them. But when Aletta heard the decision she began to pout and said that she did not intend to help carry this wagon back up those hills. ‘No necessity,’ Bronk assured her. ‘There’s a good trail now. General Pretorius crossed the peaks in three days.’

  ‘Why didn’t we use it?’ she said.

  ‘It wasn’t known then.’

  For a three-day period it looked as if Aletta might leave Tjaart; she was not legally married to him yet, and there were other men in the new settlements who needed wives. It was her strong desire to remain here with the other women and not climb back to the highveld where her life would be lonely and short. But then an American missionary—a gawky young Baptist from Indiana—wandered into the settlements, and the hunger of the Voortrekkers for a predikant manifested itself. Tjaart joined a committee of five which interrogated the young man to see if he might be willing to perfect his Dutch and transfer his allegiance to the Dutch Reformed Church.

  ‘I am not too good at languages,’ he said in English.

  ‘Did you attend a seminary?’ Tjaart asked in Dutch.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And were you approved?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then you can learn.’

  ‘But you ought to have a Dutch minister.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Tjaart said, ‘but the Dutch ministers have outlawed us,’ and he showed the young man the latest copy of the Cape Town newspaper, The South African Commercial Advertiser, in which spokesmen for the church reiterated the charge that the Voortrekkers were fugitives acting in disobedience to organized society, that they were no doubt spiritual degenerates and should be shunned by all good people.

  ‘Of course it would be better if we had Dutch predikants,’ Tjaart summarized, ‘but what we want to know is can you accept our doctrines?’

  ‘Well,’ the young fellow said brightly, ‘seems to me that the Dutch Reformed Church is pretty much what we in America call Lutherans.’

  ‘Nothing of the kind!’ Tjaart roared. ‘That’s Martin Luther. We’re John Calvin.’

  ‘Aren’t they the same?’

  ‘Good God!’ Tjaart grumbled, and he took no further part in the interrogation, but when the other four had completed their questioning, it became apparent that here was a true man of God, called to the frontier from a vast distance, one who would grace any community. Without consulting Tjaart, they made him a definite offer, and he finally accepted.

  But it was Tjaart who gave him his first two commissions: ‘Will you perform a marriage?’

  ‘I would be proud to do so, Mr. van Doorn.’

  ‘I’m never a mister,’ Tjaart growled, whereupon the young minister said, ‘But you are a man of strong calling, and that I like.’

  The two men walked to Tjaart’s wagon, where Aletta was summoned, and when she heard that this strange fellow was a minister she turned pale, for during the past several nights she had been secretly meeting a young man whose love-making she fancied, and she had been about to inform Tjaart of her new preference. He, seeing her paleness, surmised what the situation might be, for he had met with her when she was married to another and he knew her irresponsibility; but he also knew that moving to the north without a wife would be impossible, and he was still captivated by her beauty. So he reached out, grasped her harshly by the wrist, and pulled her before the new predikant.

  ‘Marry us,’ he said, and there in the Natal sunlight the new clergyman performed his first ritual, knowing well that it was somehow faulty and that this was not a good union.

  His second rite was a strange one. Tjaart, with the approval of some of his neighbors, asked the missionary, ‘Sir, can you honor us by ordaining a dead man?’

  ‘Quite unheard of.’ But when Van Doorn led the party to a narrow grave marked by a few stones and explained to the new predikant who Theunis Nel had been, and how he had died, and why he had always wanted to be an ordained clergyman, the young fellow said, ‘He won his ordination of God. It would ill behoove me to deprive him of it.’

  So at the graveside he prayed for the soul of … ‘What’s the name again?’ ‘Theunis Nel,’ Tjaart whispered. ‘… The soul of Thy servant Theunis Nel. I became a minister by studying at seminary in Pennsylvania. Theunis became one by sacrificing his life for others.’

  ‘Can you pray in Dutch?’ Tjaart asked.

  ‘I’m learning.’

  ‘Well, say a few words. Theunis spoke Dutch.’

  In halting phrases the young predikant asked for the blessing of all upon this man who served so faithfully, the true minister of the faith, after which Tjaart said defiantly, ‘Now he’s a predikant,’ but Balthazar Bronk, following this nonsense from a distance, whispered to his cronies, ‘He was Tjaart’s son-in-law. That explains it.’

  Nevertheless, when Tjaart and his legal wife inspanned their oxen and set their rebuilt wagon on the journey west, Bronk was with them, and six other families. With the English once more breathing down their necks, this time in Natal, they knew they had yet to find the promised land they sought.

  On 26 March 1841 they reached the foothills of the Drakensberg, where they rested for three weeks prior to the assault. Bronk had been correct in stating that a new pass had been found over the peaks, but even so, it required almost a month for the wagons slowly to retrace their way to Thaba Nchu, where hundreds of Voortrekkers had assembled. Here, too, they rested through the cold months of June and July, acquiring goods, listening to tales about the land across the Vaal River.

  Two of their families defected, but four new ones joined, and it was in a party of ten wagons that they started their serious penetration of the veld. Vast areas depopulated by Mzilikazi’s early depredations had slowly started their recovery, but the journey in late winter of that year was still appalling: they came upon the roots of villages which had been totally destroyed. Not a hut remained, not an animal, only bleached bones. Tjaart said, ‘It’s as if a Biblical plague had wasted the land and its people.’

  One morning as the wagons moved across the empty veld with Tjaart and Paulus in the lead, Aletta broke into laughter, and when others asked the reason, she pointed at the two figures and said, ‘They look like two flat-topped hills moving across the landscape,’ and when the others studied them, they did indeed resemble walking mounds: heavy shoes, thick ragged trousers, bulking shoulders and flat hats with enormous brims—Tjaart ponderous and heavy, Paulus a true child of the veld. They were the walking mountains on whom a new society would be built.

  In October they reached as far north as the Pienaars River, where Paulus shot a large hippopotamus, providing meat for two weeks of their stay in that congenial place. They had now been in uncharted territory for three months, with no idea at all of where they would settle, but no one complained. This was so much better than the early days of the Mzilikazi terror, or those later days in Natal when massacres were frequent; here there was only loneliness and swift death if illness attacked; there was also food, and safety at night, and the incredible beauty of the veld.

  On 17 November 1841 Tjaart reached a major decision: ‘We’re going up to the Limpopo. I’ve always been told it’s the best part of Africa.’ Such a journey might require six months, eight months. But there was nothing else to do, so the ten wagons slowly pressed northward, into the land of the baobabs, the land of enormous antelope herds. On the southern shore of the river Paulus de Groot shot his lion. Of course, Tjaart and Balthazar stood behind him and shot at the same instant so as to avoid leaving a cripple to ravage the area, but they did not tell Paulus of this and all agreed that he had brought down the beast.

  These Voortrekkers spent from January 1842 to September exploring north of the Limpopo, moving out cautiously to ascertain whether or not the land which looked so peaceful contained enemy tribes, and at the conclusion of the fourth such pr
obe, Tjaart said, ‘The Kaffirs we’ve met all speak of a great city to the north. Zimbabwe. I think we should go see.’

  The other families, including Aletta, counseled against this, saying, ‘Mzilikazi lies in wait up there.’ But to Tjaart’s surprise he was supported by Balthazar Bronk, who had heard rumors that Zimbabwe was paved with gold: ‘I’ve asked the Kaffirs. They say Mzilikazi moved far west.’ So Tjaart, Balthazar, Paulus and two blacks set forth with six horses to reach Zimbabwe, and as they traveled through low scrub, decorated with euphorbias that looked like Christmas trees with a thousand upright candles, they caught something of the grandeur of this region; it was quite unlike land to the south of the Limpopo, but they noticed also that their horses were weakening, as if some new disease were striking them, and they began to hurry, eager to see Zimbabwe with its golden streets.

  At last they could view on the far horizon the vast hills of granite with their exfoliated layers of smooth stone, and they guessed that they were in the general region of the city, but when their horses faltered, they felt that they must turn back, and a serious conclave was held, with Balthazar wanting to return and Tjaart wishing to forge ahead just a little farther. Paulus, too, wanted to try, and his vote decided; Bronk would stay with the sick horses while the two others walked for three days: ‘If you see nothing by then, you must come back.’

  ‘Agreed.’

  So Tjaart, Paulus and the two servants walked the last miles, and from a hill they saw Zimbabwe, not the flourishing city paved with gold, but the ruins of a notable site, overgrown with trees, captured by vines, and populated by a tribe that knew nothing of past glories. On the ruins where great kings had knelt and along the overgrown streets which Arab traders had trod with bags of gold, baboons played and warthogs shuffled along, grunting and rooting among the fallen stones.

  It was a gloomy, sad place and Tjaart said, ‘Poor Balthazar. No gold here.’

  When they rejoined Bronk, he informed them that two of the horses had died: ‘I think a fly is biting them.’

  ‘It’s not biting us,’ Tjaart said.

  ‘The trip’s proved nothing,’ Balthazar complained.

  ‘It’s proved we don’t want to live up here. No gold for you, either.’

  So they returned south, three Voortrekkers leading four sick horses, and by the time they reached the Limpopo, two more were dead. Something in the vicinity of this river was inimical to horses, and when they rejoined their families, they found that the oxen were wasting away, too.

  ‘We must leave here,’ Tjaart said, and on 20 September 1842 they started slowly south, oppressed by a sense of defeat, which was exacerbated for Tjaart when Aletta began to show a distinct dislike for her granddaughter Sybilla. Because the little girl, now seven years old, was so extraordinarily beautiful, so fragile and so enticing, Aletta saw her as a reminder of her own aging. She was twenty-five now and the hated life of the frontier had attacked both her beauty and her figure, so that she sometimes considered herself actually ugly. ‘Won’t we ever settle in some town, Tjaart? I want to live with other people.’ When he rebuffed her, she took her discomfort out on little Sybilla, who proved a most infuriating child; for when Aletta berated her for some imagined fault, she merely looked at her grandmother, listened obediently, then walked away to find Paulus, who comforted her after such assaults.

  It angered Aletta to see the two children together, for obviously they inhabited a private world from which she would always be excluded; Sybilla’s habit of clinging to the boy’s hand, as she had done that awful night, irritated her, and whenever she saw this she shouted, ‘Sybilla, come in here. Girls don’t play with boys that way.’ And the little girl would just stare at her.

  On the southward journey Tjaart kept his group well to the east, and by the middle of November 1842 they had reached a protected valley some hundred miles south of the Limpopo. Here they camped for three months, collecting ivory from the vast herds of elephants that roamed off to the east in the dense forests that presumably led down to the distant ocean. They were quite content to stay clear of those rich lands: ‘We want no more lowlands. Boers are meant to live on the highveld with the gazelles.’

  On 10 February 1843, in the middle of a promising summer, the ten wagons, loaded with ivory, resumed their drift south, and after four weeks of easy travel, Paulus shouted one dawn, ‘Look at them come!’

  Startled, still half-asleep, they did not know what to expect. They had been so long removed from enemy tribes that they were quite unprepared for laagers, and none were now necessary, for from the veld to the west came a line of the finest sable antelope any of these wanderers had ever seen. They were larger, sleeker than those that had crossed De Kraal before the trek, and their coats were of a warmer hue. The white of their bellies shone in the morning sunlight, as did the distinctive blaze across their faces. But it was their horns which dominated—forty, fifty inches long, gracefully backcurved and awesome.

  ‘Look at them!’ Tjaart said, echoing the boy’s delight. Even Aletta showed interest in the splendid beasts as they moved gracefully, unconcernedly away from the wagons.

  ‘Where are they going?’ Bronk asked, and Tjaart said, ‘I think they’re leading us home.’ And he turned the wagons eastward, not trying to follow the sables, for they might gallop off at any moment. For some reason, the animals were not frightened by the wagons, so for part of that morning the two groups moved together, sables majestically in front, their horns shining in sunlight, the men and women behind, praying that they might soon reach the end of their wandering.

  And then from the low and level fields that lay to the west of the lake, the Voortrekkers saw for the first time the quiet beauty of Vrijmeer, with its protecting mountains and the two signal hills. After seven full years of wandering, they had come home to what in the developing new language would henceforth be called Vrymeer.

  They were not alone, for as they approached the lake they saw at the eastern end the collection of huts and lean-tos occupied by Nxumalo and his complicated family.

  ‘Enemy!’ Bronk cried, reaching for his gun.

  ‘Wait!’ Tjaart advised, after which he walked forward cautiously, gun at the ready, primed to defend himself if need be but also ready to accept friendship if that were proffered.

  From his rondavel Nxumalo saw the white people approaching, and prudently he took down his stabbing assegai, and almost naked, strode forth to meet the newcomers.

  Slowly, cautiously the two men approached each other, and in the heart of each there was a weariness with killing. Tjaart wanted no more rivers of blood and sorrow; Nxumalo had fled the excesses of King Shaka and the evil force of Mzilikazi. They were older men now, Tjaart fifty-four, Nxumalo one year more, and they sought repose beside some lake. Fate, at the end of wars and tribulations, had brought them to the same spot, and it would be madness for them to contest it.

  Passing his gun to Paulus, Tjaart extended his hands to show that he carried no weapons, and at this gesture of friendliness, Nxumalo, now white-haired, handed his assegai to his son. Paulus and the black boy waited as the two men moved cautiously forward, stopped an arm’s length apart, and stared at each other. Finally, Nxumalo, on whose land this meeting was taking place, pointed to the lake and said that it was a safe, strong place. Tjaart, knowing little of the Zulu language, said haltingly that he had had this lake in his heart for all the years of his life, that his grandfather had discovered it and passed along remembrances of it. Pointing to the rondavels, he indicated that his people would build theirs at this spot, too, and this Nxumalo understood.

  ‘There is room,’ he said. In the days before King Shaka had run wild he had seen many tribes living side by side, and it could be done again.

  But Tjaart, whose ten wagons represented just about the same population power as Nxumalo’s accumulation, felt it necessary to demonstrate that the white men had certain advantages which the blacks would be wise to respect. Turning to Paulus, he told the boy, ‘Shoot us a bird. Or an ant
elope.’

  At that moment the sables elected to move on, and in doing so, came into range of the little fellow, who took careful aim, fired, and dropped the last in line. Nxumalo was dutifully impressed by two things: that the white man could kill at such a distance and that he would want to kill an animal as splendid as the sable antelope.

  When the hartebeest huts were finished, identical with the rude sheds occupied by Hendrik van Doorn one hundred and forty-nine years earlier, a most fortunate thing occurred, one which Balthazar Bronk was able to utilize to the general advantage of the white community.

  Relations with Nxumalo’s tribe had prospered, and it was apparent that whites and blacks could share Vrymeer in harmony. There was no trouble about land, nor hunting rights, nor anything else; Nxumalo tried to make it clear, as he learned bits of Dutch, that his Zulu would in no way become vassals of the white men, nor would they work for them on any regular basis like their Coloured servants; they, too, were free and proud of that. But when during the building of the huts the blacks volunteered much labor and showed the newcomers how best to utilize the terrain for drainage, Tjaart said confidently, ‘They’ll soon be working for us.’ It was a happy, prosperous relationship, with the Voortrekkers providing an occasional antelope for Nxumalo’s pots and with certain women of the tribe volunteering to care for the white babies while their mothers worked at other tasks.

  The situation did not exactly please Bronk and his group; they wanted the blacks to become slaves, as the Bible directed, and there was even some talk of eliminating Nxumalo’s tribe altogether, in obedience to the precepts of Joshua, which Balthazar was skilled in quoting:

  ‘And they smote all the souls that were therein with the edge of the sword, utterly destroying them: and there was not any left to breathe: and he burnt Hazor with fire … And all the spoil of these cities, and the cattle, the children of Israel took.’

  To the surprise of all, Tjaart opposed this draconian solution, whereupon Bronk countered with the suggestion that the blacks be converted into servants, as the Bible ordered in so many places, but this, too, Tjaart rejected, saying, ‘We have searched so long for a place in which we can live in peace, let us do so here.’ And since he was the acknowledged leader of the group, this counsel was accepted.