by Peter Bowen
“Enough,” I roared, throwing my leg over the back of the horse and sweeping little Marieke off. She slid over, twisted in the air, and landed on her hands and bounced to her feet.
“Listen, you little brat,” I snarled, “this ain’t funny.”
She laughed some more at that. Well, I did have to grin.
“This is Baso,” she said, gesturing to the little feller with the bow. She rattled off a long string of words in the strangest language I have ever heard—sounded like a field of locusts, all clicks and whirrs.
Baso laughed like hell at what she was saying.
So I dallied with Marieke for a couple of days. There wasn’t anything about Marieke that you didn’t see in the first five minutes, if you could see it, but like folks of that sort, her very lack of guile made her pretty opaque. I found it hard to believe that she had decided, for instance, that we would go to America and get married and live with the Indians. My opinion in the matter was of no interest and so as not to embarrass me, it was never brought up.
I went to a little crossroad sutler’s store to get possibles and some tinned food the next day and saw a wanted poster with a bad drawing of her on it. Her father was no doubt popping out piles in throbbing dozens. He offered twenty-five pounds for her return. If he’d been there I’d have told the old bastard to save his money. He was already beat.
Baso was a Bushman. His arrows was poisoned and he could track anything. Anything at all. Marieke said the Bushmen can go to a place where an animal or man has crossed, go into a trance, and track where they went, even if they passed that way years before. Creepy little bastards. The Boers hunt them down and make house servants out of them. Usually they kill anyone over ten, but in Baso’s case he had just wandered into the farm one day and indicated he wanted a job. Baso never frowned, never looked angry, never spoke sharp. Smiled all the time. He made me nervous. I was afraid it would rub off.
Marieke and I would lay in the shade by a small stream and she would run her finger over my chest and ask me questions about America and the Indians. She had figured out that I would be a good father. We were going to have two boys and two girls. I’d had enough brats for my life just growing up with so many. When I said so she just looked at me like I had remarked on what a good idea it was and how much I was looking forward to it.
“You go on home,” I said, on the second day. “I have to get back to this here war.”
“No,” she said.
“Suit yourself,” says I, “but I have to go now. They’ll hang me otherwise.”
“I wouldn’t let them,” she purred.
So I rode off shaking my head. I knew that a little blonde head and a dark, woolly one would be sticking up from time to time. I just hoped that they would watch their backs.
I reported to Buller, who sent me to Harford.
“Fine work,” he said. “I’d heard you were dead.”
“Found any good beetles?” I snarled.
“Aplenty,” says he.
Both Chelmsford and Harford understood me, damn them.
“I believe we will be leaving in the morning to do a bit of scouting across the river,” says Harford. “Wouldn’t do to have the Zulus catch us napping. Just the two of us. By the way, how was Isandhlwana?”
“A perfect example of how them things go,” I snarls.
“Most unfortunate,” says he. “And Rorke’s Drift?”
“Downright tragic,” says I.
“We should see to your kit,” says he.
We spent most of the rest of the night patching up some gear for me—what I most regretted was that now I would be much more lightly armed. I was able to get a revolver, but the rifle I was to use would have to be a Martini-Henry.
We took off in the dark the next evening, headed for a place called Hlobane, a flat-topped mountain some forty miles in, where an allied tribe of the Zulus lived. It was a perfect defensive position, Harford told me, for there were only two ways up, nearly four hundred vertical feet, and the rest of the mountain was so sheer-sided that you might as well try to fly up, and carry your horse.
We skulked for a couple of weeks, saw no Zulus, and spied out this other tribe, who weren’t up to much—sensible folks, having a nice place like that to wait and see just what was going to happen.
The Zulus was being scarce—after the mauling they’d got at Isandhlwana and Rorke’s Drift, it made sense. Evelyn Wood had recruited some Bushmen and other trackers and these spies reported regularly. The Zulus aren’t hunters, so they aren’t good at that. Harford told me that they would, when the taste for wild meat hit them, surround a huge area and then close in. This amounted to European hunting, so far as I was concerned, and I couldn’t imagine them closing in—this was Africa, mind you—on rhinoceroses, elephants, various big cats, and those black mambas.
We left on the twenty-seventh of March, in force, to assault Hlobane and provoke the Zulus. There had been a large detachment surrounded at Eshowe, in Zululand—the east column closest to the sea—ever since Isandhlwana.
To add to my pleasure, all of the goddamn Uys brothers was riding with us. Harford was teaching me Zulu.
I wondered where the Uyses’ blasted little sister was.
40
HLOBANE. CERTAIN PORTIONS OF that glorious engagement were unique. Hopping from one boulder to another—the boulders being the size of houses, for instance—and the ridiculous bad luck. Actually it was like most military campaigns, it’s a wonder any of them ever accomplish anything.
This was more on the order of a large raid—no tents, just mounted men with several days’ rations and a lot of ammunition. We reached Hlobane Mountain about four in the afternoon and then split up, about half of us to go up one trail, and the other half to go up another, and catch whoever was up there between us.
Hlobane was a plateau—about five miles long and six hundred feet above the plain—with a smaller plateau stuck on at one end, about a hundred feet from the top of it to the river below. There was a sharp spur ran from the big mountain down to the smaller plateau, narrow enough so a man might lead a horse down it, provided he blindfolded the horse first and he himself had a very good reason for going.
Buller was leading the troop going up the trail to the high mountain, and the plan was to drive the natives off the top down to the spur and then either negotiate or charge, depending.
The Uyses held a prayer meeting before we began to ride up—the Boers are very religious. Piet Uys’s explanations of this whole business was larded with a lot of quotes to the effect that the whites had dominion over the blacks. The whole Zulu war was simple to them, as simple as black and white. The whites would own all of the good land, the blacks would work it, and everybody would be happy. It seemed to me to be just a question of money, but then it usually is.
We started up, and dodged a few boulders which the natives up top tossed over just to keep things lively, and a couple of men were hit and several horses. Our fire drove the natives—they was called the abaQuabalitini or some such—off into hiding. We thought.
We got up top about an hour before sundown, and the place seemed pretty much deserted.
One of Buller’s scouts had noticed that there was another trail down off the mountain which went off to the east—it couldn’t be seen from below. He sent about eighty men down it, to flush out any natives there, and we moved west. I moved out to flank, got close to the edge of the sheer escarpment, looked over, and my heart went up in my throat. There was an easy ten thousand Zulus pounding toward us from the east, and I gaped for a moment. About a third of them broke off to cut off any retreat down the trail that the Border Horse had just gone down, while the rest loped toward the lower plateau. Wood’s and Buller’s plan had been a fine one, and now the Zulus were going to use it on us.
I raced to find Buller, and as I pounded up to him a lot of fire erupted from cover on top of the mountain. The abaQuabalitini had seen the Zulus and made their decision. I would have done the same.
Bulle
r swore and bellered orders and we forced our way down toward the razorback ridge which led to the lower plateau. Either we got down it before the Zulus below sealed it off, or we was going to join with the rest of them that made Glorious Last Stands.
A few of our men fell, and Buller insisted in stopping and picking up the bodies. The firing stopped—we had driven off the abaQuabalitini for the moment. We slung the dead across their horses and went on, and there was only one badly wounded man, who Buller held in front of him. He bled to death in minutes.
The trail was narrow as soon as it plunged down off the tabletop, and we were slowed terribly and strung out. Some of the men plunged for the narrow trail at the same time, and horses went down and the retreat was halted still further. The abaQuabalitini sensed our confusion, and began to come out of hiding and fire on us again. We lost perhaps half an hour, and when maybe one hundred of our hundred and fifty were still on the slow trail down, the Zulus plunged round the last spur of the mountain and raced to cut us off. The twenty men lowest on the trail made it to the plain and the safety of free flight (barring warthog holes or other unfortunate accidents to horses).
The Zulus were coming by the hundreds, and a nasty melee developed right at the base of the mountain, and then the ones cut off turned and spurred their horses uphill. Several hundred warriors went after them, while the others pursued the mounted men whose blown and sometimes injured horses were heading off toward Kambula.
Lucky me. I had been far enough back to draw future disembowelment over having my guts ripped open right now. When we got back up to the sloping saddle between the lower plateau and the huge upper one, there were a couple of hundred abaQuabalitini leaping down the trail to join in the fun.
I couldn’t remember when I had been so happy. Off to our left there was a frightening jumble of boulders which tumbled down to the plain, and we made for that, spurring our foaming horses down. Some slipped and fell, throwing their riders into crevices.
My horse made four huge bounds, throwing sparks off the rocks from his iron shoes. We were about halfway down when he caught a leg in a vine—I heard the bone snap, even with all the racket around—and he pitched me forward. A scrubby little tree broke my fall, removing portions of my face for the favor. The boulders here was not so big, and I scrambled down to the plain and scurried off, more afraid of being crushed by a horse bouncing down from above than I was over the Zulus just then.
And here come Buller and such men as he had with good horses.
One of them swung me up behind him and turned around and we galloped on a zigzag course through the thornbush, heading toward Kambula. The man put me down about six or seven miles away, well along the track, and I followed the trail, listening good for Zulus behind me. I was sure that a detachment would be sent down the trail toward Kambula after the folks who escaped from the mountain.
All of this was going on in a thunderstorm, too, for which I was grateful, as all the lightning and rain was distracting and I could use all the distractions luck could give me.
A few men on blown or limping horses caught up to me, and we went on at about the same pace toward safety. I must admit I was a little off to the side and mostly out of notice, being tired and out of sorts and not wishing company.
For once this got me into more trouble than not. I damn near stepped on two Zulus who were hiding behind a thornbush—they must have been scouts sent out some time before and likely had no idea of what was going on a few miles to the south and east of us. I didn’t see them until there was a sudden flash of lightning. They was intent on watching the trail and the racket from the storm covered over my own sounds.
I was suddenly angry. I still had my pistol, drew it, and found the cylinder had fallen out—fine British goods, that—and these two fellers was lying full length facing away from me. I found a nice rock and bashed in one’s head, and when the other rolled away in surprise I jumped him and used an old trick Washakie showed me—kicked him in the throat. Man with a busted windpipe sort of concentrates on it, you know. I finished him off with a spear and went back to the trail.
At about first light Buller and such as he could save came up and hallooed us. They was two to a horse, mostly, and we was all ragged and wet, and as a military disaster goes I thought it sort of second-rate. I’d been in lots worse. Recently, even.
There was pretty good light in an hour or so. I looked down at the ground, and at my left leg. My jaw dropped open. I had a tremendous gash up and down my thigh, and the blood had soaked my trousers—I’d been wondering why they felt kind of lumpy, and why that boot squelched different.
To this day I have no idea when I got speared—must have been someone I didn’t even see and I must have been mounted—and until I commenced to wonder about it, it didn’t hurt, and then it hurt like hell and then I began to limp.
“You’re wounded,” I heard Buller growl behind me. “Come on then, up behind me.” He sort of plucked at me and I swung up—Buller was one of the strongest men I have ever known.
He was slashed and hacked, his uniform had been shredded, and he had, I found out later, sabered his way back through the Zulus time and time again to get someone out. One of those iron sorts. Head of oak, the British say.
A party come from Kambula late in the day with fresh horses. They had a surgeon with them. He give me a big slug of brandy and then sewed up my leg, me biting a twig damn near in two during the process. Hell, I thought, it will only hurt worse later. Then they slung me up on a horse, and we moved at a fast trot on to Kambula.
As soon as we were in the camp I pitched off the horse and landed with a thud in the mud.
41
THERE WASN’T MUCH TO do for the next twenty-four hours but sleep. I had lost a lot of blood and rode or walked a long damn way. I was in a hospital tent with about twenty other wounded men. A couple of them had fever, and one was so delirious that they had tied him to his bed and put a rubber plug in his mouth to keep him from swallowing his tongue. The man in the bed next to me had a bad wound—it had gone gangrenous. The stink was awful.
When the medico bustled in—reeking of the medicinal brandy—and he tried to look at my leg I snarled at him and made a few gestures with my crutch. You know the type, you go in for a hangnail and he’ll end up killing you. So he blinked at me and moved on to the feller with the gangrenous leg, took off the dressing, tut-tutted, slopped some sort of disinfectant on it, and then put the same bandage back on.
This was too much. As soon as the addled sonofabitch tottered off I looked over at the feller. He was feverish, but still alert.
“I can fix that wound for you,” I says. “If you let that old bastard at it he’ll kill you.”
He didn’t look a bit frightened, just raised his eyebrows. “Really?” says he.
“Got to get some maggots on that,” says I. “They’ll clean out that proud flesh in a hurry.”
“Really?”
“My father was a doctor, not a quack like this old fool,” says I.
“By Jove, do it, if you can.”
What an upper-class Brit was doing in the tent with the rest of us scum was beyond me, but there he was.
He had a crutch next to his bed, which I borrowed, and using his and mine I stumped off—they’d left one boot on, mind you.
Finding maggots wasn’t difficult—there was always a pile of something around an army encampment. I scanned the horizon for a tornado of flies, went to it, and found all I needed. I filled half a water glass with nice wriggly ones, stumped back, and poured them bit by bit on his wound.
There was a bluish-black hole in his lower leg; he’d likely scratched himself on a thorn or something and gone on sick call—a mistake—and I covered the wound liberally with maggots and tore off strips and a pad and covered it up.
“When these ones ain’t eating so fast we’ll scrape ’em off and get a fresh batch.”
When the doctor came back we both growled and waved our crutches at him. He was even drunker than he had bee
n earlier, and went out without a murmur, probably thinking that we was some sort of hallucination.
Late in the afternoon Buller stopped by to congratulate all us brave subjects of the Queen, etc., etc. Buller looked fit and rested and had on a new uniform. I figured he’d only ridden forty miles today and killed maybe twenty Zulus, just to get the blood up, don’t you know.
He came up to where I was laying and says something to the effect that he appreciated-it-old-chap-is-there-anything-I-can-do?
“Yes,” I says. “Can you get the two of us out of here before that drunken idiot kills us both?”
“Oh,” says Buller. “Quite.”
He went off, and I heard his bettering, and inside of fifteen minutes we was put up in a roomy tent by ourselves, with a nice bottle of brandy on the folding nightstand between the beds. I took a poke around and discovered that the tent was Buller’s—he shared it with another officer.
The maggots did their work in about a day, and where there had been a big black hole with a white and green end to it, there was now just angry red flesh—but it was live.
“I feel much better,” said the feller. “By the way, my name is Arthur Ansall. The Honorable Arthur Ansall.”
“Adendorff,” says I.
Arthur was pretty wore out, so he went to sleep, and I didn’t see him again for a few years. By then he was Lord Beaker.
I hitched a ride on an outgoing cart, after telling Buller in a note that I was just going to Durban until my wound healed and would be back and hoped sincerely that he would have found new and interesting ways to get me killed by then. Left the forwarding address of my hotel.
The driver of the cart was a Boer, name of Pretorius, and I have never moved faster in anything else with wheels that didn’t also ride on rails. The Boer picked up relays of horses across the country, and turned his reins over to another man at nightfall. So, I thinks, they are carrying dispatches or something.
