by Peter Rimmer
When she drove the horse and buggy away from the hotel there was no sign of the man whose name she could not remember. It was cool in the morning and surprisingly the breakfast had settled her young stomach.
She began to sing as the horse trotted along. The servant from Elephant Walk, the one thing they all insisted went with her on her jaunts into Salisbury, sat silently. He was always more surly at the end of their stays in the town and as the man could not speak English and Fran could not speak Shona, there was nothing she could say to break his mood. It made the men on Elephant Walk think they had done the right thing by giving her protection and this made her laugh. If a lion wanted to eat them Fran rather thought there was nothing either of them could do. It really was a very strange life for a girl from Godalming she told herself as a herd of buck scattered into the trees. Far over on the horizon over the tops of the msasa trees the cumulus were beginning to build.
For the first time Fran had no real idea what she was going to do with the rest of her life.
The man on the bench seat next to Fran was convinced the war of liberation would be over in a week if everyone acted at the same time, Matabele and Shona. The stupid white men at Elephant Walk did not even know the difference between a Matabele, a Zulu from the south, and the scum that made up the scattered tribes of the Shona. His impis had been picking over them quite satisfactorily until Rhodes stole the land from his King Lobengula and Jameson rode into Gu-Bulawayo with armed mounted men and machine guns. There was nothing then they had been able to do but retreat to the north and wait their time for revenge.
The man they called the crocodile for his ability to snap with deadly effect when others thought he was asleep had commanded the impi that killed Alan Wilson and his Shangani patrol in '93 and knew the taste of victory. Enough of his warriors would always destroy a small number of whites as, like Wilson, their guns eventually ran out of ammunition.
Infiltrating Elephant Walk had been so simple he had wanted to laugh. He was induna of the Matabele, general to Lobengula King of the Matabele. They had thought him a useless savage and given him a job digging up trees for a few beans and salt and meat from game that belonged to Lobengula dead in his cave wrapped in the skin of a great black ox, buried with all the dignity rightful to the son of Mzilikazi, induna and general to the great Shaka, King of the Zulu. Silently Zwide recited the praise song to Shaka, followed by the song to Mzilikazi followed by the longest one of all and spoken first by Zwide at the burial cave, the praise song to his own King, Lobengula. At the time the furrows on his face were deep with concentration. Then he thought of the gold and ivory, the boxes of rifles buried with the king and smiled: the Matabele would rise greater than ever before.
The luck of being chosen to ride with the whore into Salisbury had only been what was due to him after the great trek from the Mopani Forest south of the Smoke that Thunders the whites were calling Victoria Falls. The journey had been dangerous but profitable. Now he knew that Jameson had left for the south and the country was theirs for the picking. Even the indignity of being servant to a woman had been worth this knowledge.
All he now had to do was convince the stupid Shona to act in unison by making all their bickering tribes work together. He, like Mzilikazi, a descendant of Zwide the great chief of the Zulu, would lead the Matabele back to their glory. And once he had chased away the whites he would see about the Shona. They would be his subjects as they had been the subject of Mzilikazi and Lobengula, praise their names.
He would slip away when he reached the farm. Quietly he wondered what the woman next to him would say if she knew he understood English, a task of learning placed on him by his king and learned from the white hunters that buzzed around the king’s kraal like blowflies on a kill. And the great white hunter Tinus Oosthuizen had not even recognised him away from his headdress of crane feathers and the skin of a great leopard he had killed with his own hands. Now dressed in dirty shorts and shirt discarded by a miner for one week's pay, he was not surprised. Anyway, the whites said all blacks looked the same. They really were very stupid.
It took a trained solider to quickly realise the stockade being built around the garden and houses was more than a fence to keep out wild animals. The trees they had stumped out to plant crops were being strategically placed between two sunken posts, tree trunk layered upon tree trunk, the sets of sunken posts conveniently at the width of a fully-grown msasa tree with the stump and canopy chopped off. The uneven nature of the trees left spaces for gun barrels. Against the far side of the tree fence, Tinus was stacking thorn bush but leaving sight holes at convenient intervals. Gregory Shaw had waited for his opportunity to talk to Tinus alone, away from the women and children.
"What's going on Tinus?"
"I forgot you were a soldier. I can't really say. Instinct. The way the blacks look at me. We Boers have been in Africa a long time and never once was it easy. The man looking after Fran in Fort Salisbury is a Zulu. What's a Zulu doing in rags looking for work? And he won't look me straight in the eye. The Zulus have quite different features to the Shona."
"I can't tell one from another."
"You will…He's also got a bullet wound in his right thigh. Probably a couple of years old. Jameson has taken out the police and military and it makes me nervous. Why didn't someone tell Jameson that rushing into Johannesburg with a few armed men won't have the Uitlanders clapping their hands and joining the revolution? Those foreigners are a mix of every European race with a lust for gold mixed in with opportunist Australians and Americans. So, Kruger won't give them the vote. Who the hell wants the vote anyway! They want the gold. And if I know what our esteemed administrator is doing on behalf of Mr Rhodes you can be sure our Oom Paul Kruger, President of the Transvaal Republic, knows more about the plan to steal the Rand goldfields than I do. Which brings us back to us which is the main point in question. Without armed soldiers patrolling the country we are vulnerable. This is a stockade, Greg. To fight behind."
"I rather thought so. Do you need any help?"
"Check my lines of fire. Look for blind spots. All this may be a waste of time but it makes me feel less nervous."
The first rolling thunder of the day rumbled from the hills to the north as the horse and buggy drove through the path they had cut through the trees.
"When it rains that road will be impassable," said Tinus. "I want a word with that Zulu. I want to know who put a bullet in his leg."
Overhead the base of the cloud was black, the heat more oppressive than the day before. Lightning flashed nearer and nearer as Gregory inspected the fifty yards of built stockade. He should have gone to his wife whatever she had been up to in Fort Salisbury but could not face the contempt in her eyes. He had known her reputation in London, there was no getting away from that and the bad reputation had been part of her attraction. The side of him that wanted her to stay away was swamped with relief at her return. If only she stopped laughing at him, his impotency would go away. There was nothing physically wrong with him; it was all in his head. There had been many girls before Fran in London and none of them had left wanting. To make it different, to make it more important, to show that he was different to all the other men he heard about who had hopped in and out of her bed he had waited till after they were married and that was the disaster. He had even stayed sober, the man of the world showing his young bride the great carnal pleasures in life. And then it had happened. Nothing. A piece of rope would have done better and then she had laughed. Peel after peel of laughter and they had gone to sleep in twin beds without consummating their marriage. A week later 'the family solicitor' pointed out the terms of the family trust. He was left with a twenty-one-year old wife and nothing but a swathe of virgin African bush. He had told Henry about his impotence and Henry had said to wait and that was three years ago and he was still waiting. And he was forty-one-years old. Looking through the last rifle hole he wondered if what he wanted was a fight. Just as the first big raindrop dolloped on the side of his cheek he
heard Harry yelling at the top of his seven-year-old lungs.
"Mummy; it's raining! Mummy it's raining." And everyone ran out of the houses. Within three minutes the heavens opened and everyone ran back inside breathless with excitement.
"Home just in time," said Fran, thankful for the diversion. When she turned to give the black man an instruction where to put her case and the shopping he was gone. She shrugged. The stable boy had taken the horse and the house boy was told to bring in the parcels out of the rain. Then she joined in the celebration. Immediately the temperature had begun to fall. If the parcels got wet, the parcels got wet. Most important of all it was raining. And she was inside the house without a scene.
The rain lasted a torrential hour and was a great relief. The lamps had been lit and the drinks poured and Gregory had said 'that tasted good'. Everyone had noticed his wife sat on the opposite side of the room but everyone carried on polite conversation. They talked of the rain, they talked of the children. Politics and Fran, seething in each of their separate minds, was kept to themselves. They even laughed more than usual which was a sign of the tension. Outside the wind was still blowing through the trees but the thunder was so far away only the dogs could hear: two of them were cowed under the dining room table, both of them short-haired ridgebacks, the lion dogs they were now calling Rhodesian ridgebacks. The light from the kerosene lamp picked out the eyes of the two frightened dogs and Tinus smiled. The dogs preferred to face a wounded buffalo than rolling thunder far, far away and wondered if the fear was built in to all of them from the great distant past. The two fox terriers, the danger alarm clocks of Elephant Walk came from a different ancestry: both were rolled out on their sides full of food and fast asleep: the problems of man at that moment were very far away.
It took Zwide all night to find the kopje and the Jackalberry tree close to which he had buried his rifle. Driving through the trees next to the whore he had taken in the stockade and the thorn bushes to stop an assegai attack he knew in the instant the white men were not as stupid as he thought. For the first time in his manhood he felt the cold stab of fear in his belly. The whore's husband was looking through loop-holes in the stockade with an air of confident familiarity and the big hunter was looking at Zwide. For a brief intense moment he prayed to his ancestors for help and a fat drop of rain hit the back of his hand. He saw the big man look up at the sky and the whore's husband stopped checking the lines of fire from the stockade. The whore, sensing the rain thrashing the reins on the back of the horse and the lurch forward, gave Zwide the excuse to fall out of the open-sided cab. The whore intent on the horse and the road did not turn as he looked back at the buggy. Having made a previous reconnaissance like any good solider he knew which way to run and by the time the heavens opened with the torrents of rain he was two hundred yards into the msasa trees heading north west on the blazed trail that would take him to the Martini-Henry rifle, one of the guns he had taken from the buried cave of King Lobengula, the lid of the box replaced carefully to show no tampering. The two ammunition belts that crossed his body were stuffed with cartridges. With the coming of the rain the light went completely and Zwide stopped in his track fearful of losing the blazed trail made by breaking small green twigs on the lower branches of the trees.
He was shivering with a mixture of cold and fear and sometimes when the wind blew the trees a certain way after the downpour had finished he could catch glimpses of the light from the house. In the middle of the night the clouds cleared and the new moon showed the broken branch next to his shoulder where he had stopped when the light went out. All night he waited and only in the yellow light of morning did he begin the lopping run of the Zulu through the trees running fast on the blazed trail.
By the time Tinus came looking for him he was five miles away and still running at the same speed with the rifle and ammunition strapped to his back. Zwide ran all morning and only when the sun was risen to its full did he stop by a stream for more than a drink of water. He was hungry but more exhausted and safely wedged in a tree he went to sleep for the rest of the day woken only by the rain. Below the tree, alone and oblivious of danger a male kudu was browsing the green leaves. The bullet hit the kudu's heart, the animal’s leisurely browsing turning to the throes of death. By the time Zwide climbed down from his tree the animal was stone dead. With the knife he had cached with his rifle he cut open the animal's belly, searching for the kidneys and liver. With warm blood dripping from his jaw, Zwide ate his fill and conquered his fear. With the skin of the kudu covering his body he spent a warm dry night under the overhanging rock of a kopje. In the morning he walked the long stride eating up the miles on his way to the hills behind the ruins of Gu-Bulawayo, twenty miles from the new town the whites were calling Bulawayo (as if they had not stolen enough from his people). In the hills of the Matopos he would plan the massacre of the whites in the greatest of detail.
With the previous night's rain having soaked the ploughed lands, the men and the six field labourers planted out the corn each using a short handled Dutch hoe to cover the kernels with two inches of top soil. The straight lines, three feet apart, were made with stretched twine between pegs. Each planting down the line was one foot apart and Seb was satisfied the reaping between the stands of maize corn would be uniform and ripe cobs would not be left in the lands. Three kernels were placed in each hole to have three chances of germination. The field officer from the Charter Company had told them what to do without charge. The hope was the grass turned into the virgin soil would provide enough fertiliser for the corn to grow to the height of a man's head with one or more cobs on each stand.
Tinus had briefly looked for the Zulu early that morning and put the man out of his mind, concentrating on the more important task of farming. The man had probably run off when he saw the rain to stop being put in the lands...It was a backbreaking job which Tinus with his great height suffered from more than the others.
An hour before dusk with the black clouds threatening more rain Tinus left the planting with his .375 rifle and went looking for game. He walked north-west into the bush as the game to the south and east had become shy from constant hunting. The bush was thicker to the north and the game more difficult to track. As the first drops of rain splattered down on the leaves of the trees, the deluge in the west where the squall of rain was already slanting down in a thick wedge of water, Tinus shot a female impala at eighty yards killing the animal with one shot. Running across the clearing through the elephant grass that had been flattened by the previous night's storm, Tinus recovered his kill and slit the animal's throat. The last reflexive pumps of the animal's heart spurted rich blood from the jugular vein. When the flow stopped, Tinus hoisted the carcass onto his shoulder and began to trot in the direction of the house, quickly finding a game track that led in the right direction. Tinus kept the wind on the same side of his face as the carcass and rifle jigged on his back. He could hear Harry yelling at his sister about something which made him think of Barend and Tinka. Then he thought of Alison and smiled again. She was a better Boer wife than he could even have imagined. Into his fourth long stride down the game trail he saw the first broken twig and stopped in his track. From years in the bush his unconscious mind had registered the unusual. Kudu pulled down on the leaves and never broke a twig that bent upwards. When he found the second bent twig, the leaves still green, the break still fresh he knew what he had found Then he saw the spoor of bare feet on the ground leading north-west and looked back over his shoulder to the trail.
"That's no ordinary Zulu," he said out loud, "that man knows what he is doing."
Chapter 3: March 1896
Four months later when the main rains were over the Reverend Nathanial Brigandshaw, missionary to the tribes of the Shona made his half-yearly duty call on Elephant Walk. Bess his wife had been left on the mission as the Reverend thought it appropriate to keep his wife away from the appalling scandal that overshadowed the English community in and around Fort Salisbury. It was quite clear that
Captain Shaw was unable to control his wife and it was up to the Reverend Brigandshaw to have a stern word in his ear: whatever would the natives think, Nathanial thought in constant alarm. The Bible was quite clear: there should be no adultery and coveting of other people’s wives and if the English could not set a proper example how was he to bring the word of Jesus's church to the black people and have them obey the word of God. And by all reports the woman came from a good family.
The Reverend drove himself not wishing to make a black man his servant and was surprised to find a strong gate made from thick tree trunks barring his way into the family compound. On either side of the gate thorn bush had been stacked around a high stockade that ringed the properties. Tethering the horse to a post he used his brown Malacca cane to imperiously knock on the gate door. After five minutes and thoroughly frustrated he shouted on the top of his voice and Emily, his sister-in-law slid back the bar and opened the heavy gate.
"Morning Nat. What are you doing here?"
"Visiting of course. What does it look like?"
"Flock not behaving like Christians, I suppose?"
"Not this one anyway." Even after the main rains it was hot and sticky and the Reverend's stock of charity was low.
Emily said nothing and waited with the high door open until her brother-in-law drove into the compound. She found him a sanctimonious hypocrite and only good manners prevented her from telling him so. She would never forgive him for siding with Arthur. Now, obviously, poor Gregory was going to get it in the neck as Emily doubted if the great missionary to Africa would confront the source of the problem. If he did, she rather thought he would come off second best. Fran had the ability to turn a criticism of herself into a character assassination of the critic. Fran always attacked, never defended.
"While you are rubbing down your horse I'll go find Sebastian. I'm sure he'll be delighted to see his brother."
