by Bowen, Peter
Chelmsford held his fire until they was four hundred yards away, and then the sides of the square rippled with flame and smoke and hundreds of warriors went down at once. They kept coming, and volleys rang out, and they fell, and they kept coming, and not one ever got within fifty yards of us, except a ten-year-old kid who overshot the troop he was following. A soldier reached over the breastwork, grabbed the little bugger, hauled him in, cuffed him into peacefulness, and sat on him for the rest of the fight.
It wasn’t long. The warriors went down like grass before a sudden wind, until suddenly they could take no more.
They retreated, and then they ran, and Chelmsford gave the order and the Lancers poured from the gaps in the corners. The troopers rode down the Zulus. A lance would dip. A Zulu would fall. The lance was pulled free with a sideways flick of the wrist, swept upright, down, and then the trooper would ride down another.
Some Zulus began to raise their shields over their heads and stop, but the troopers speared them anyway.
“That’s the Zulu sign of surrender, Kelly,” said Harford. “I don’t think that anyone has seen that for fifty years.” His voice was very soft and more than a little sad.
There wasn’t much left of the Zulu army. They lay in heaps out in front, the wind ruffling some of the ostrich feathers they wore; a few gutshot ones were screaming. Here and there a wounded Zulu would struggle to his knees, many rifles would fire, the body would roll away.
The troopers came thundering back.
Flames began to lick at the thornbush zareba around the kraal, the fired thatch of the huts began to smoke.
The Zulu war was over.
49
IT ONLY REMAINED TO capture the King. Chelmsford had been replaced, apparently, and had a couple of days more gone by before the Zulus gave battle, Chelmsford would have been retired in disgrace and never would have lived Isandhlwana down. He left.
Harford and me were ordered to find out where Cetshwayo was hiding. We knew only that he had been headed to the north, and that he had very few retainers.
The Zulus were completely broken. The few survivors had gone home, and most had taken their womenfolk and cattle to the high Drakensberg Range, to little mountain valleys. Since the Zulus made only total war, killing all men over twelve and taking the women and cattle, they expected the same.
Buller wanted Harford and me to take a troop with us, which we protested against. We was both sure that the King was in hiding because he was certain that he would be killed, and that once we impressed upon him the fact that the English would at most place him under house arrest for a while, he would come in. For one thing, all of the satellite tribes that had lived in terror of the Zulus would be pretty bold now and many of them had ample reasons for wanting to kill Cetshwayo “in any number of interesting ways,” Harford added. Buller jerked on his moustache for a while and then nodded. “If he’s got too many men you can get help—there will be fifty parties combing the area,” he said. “Just find him, that will do.”
Harford and me rode due north, skirting the burned kraal of Ulundi. The blackened ring was about three miles across. When some excited junior officers entered into the Royal hut and probed the floor of the hut with assegai blades, looking for hidden treasure, they had hit a metal strongbox buried about six inches deep. They dug it up, all in a lather, and opened it to find some three dozen boot-blacking brushes, mostly the worse for wear.
Harford had questioned captured Zulus as to the King’s whereabouts, and they loyally refused to tell him anything, even when we tried the old trick of taking one of them over the hill and firing a rifle over the bound and gagged native. We returned scowling and looking as fierce as we could. One of the women giggled and I couldn’t help smiling.
Then Harford had tried a different tack. Zulu family relationships are unbelievably complicated—they have forty words for cousins, and because they are polygamous, things get more than a little confused. But by piecing together Cetshwayo’s tangled relations Harford was able to find out that Cetshwayo had a fifteenth underassistant left-handed shirttail relation who lived high up in the Drakensberg, in a small canyon that had a narrow mouth and then opened up into a wide meadow, a place easy to defend and easy to keep the cattle in. The directions were pretty specific, so we rode toward it, planning to stop and move by night when we got close.
The weather had come off better—the rains had ceased being a constant drizzle, and we just got an hour or so in the late afternoon.
Africa was a beautiful country—a lateral one, the trees seemed to be constructed of piled lines of branches that ran with the yellow and red and ochre of the land. We saw a few lions asleep in the shade of a grove of acacias, and once a rhino, with a little white bird sitting on top of him.
Harford found lots of beetles. I found the critters interesting when they wasn’t collected in the middle of a pitched battle against fearful odds, me being the fearful and they being the odds. Harford finally told me that the damn beetle wasn’t particularly rare that he’d been crowing over while the Zulus was trying to kill us, but the opportunity for a joke was too good to pass up. I resolved that Harford was gonna get one real good before our association ended.
When we came nigh on to the place that Harford’s best guess was that the King was hiding in, we switched over to night work and began to work our way up the ridges. It was so simple to find. We crept to the edge of a steep hill in the early dawn and looked on down and saw a little valley maybe a mile by three, with a small kraal—a four-hut one—near a little stream. The herdboys was moving about a hundred head of cattle out to pasture, the women were making breakfast, a smoke haze rose from the cookfire. Not much of a place for a King, but then he hadn’t much of a kingdom left.
Nothing to do but wait. If he was there he’d have to come out to piss, and when he did we’d know, and that would be that. The mist burned off. A huge eagle flapped through the valley and then floated up on the breeze blowing up the hills.
Mid-morning I saw a woman take a calabash and a wooden plate of food into a hut and then she came back out. I kept watch while Harford slept—he’d never seen Cetshwayo, as I had. Nothing happened for another hour. Then a man emerged from the hut the woman had taken the food to and stood up. It was Dabulamanzi. Cetshwayo was right behind him. Cetshwayo stood up with Dabulamanzi’s help and he hobbled painfully off, holding his feet wide, like a man who’s been kicked in the balls hard.
Cetshwayo took fifteen minutes to get to where he could take a leak. He flung the damask cloth off and pissed for a long time—it hurt him so much to move that he must have been clenching his teeth against the pain in his bladder until he couldn’t stand that anymore. He slumped down on an old log when he was through and put his head in his hands, and Dabulamanzi sat beside him with his hand on Cetshwayo’s shoulder.
I nudged Harford awake and pointed and gave him the glasses. I whispered that the King was hurt. There was no sign of the guards. An old man came out of another hut and walked down toward the little stream and splashed water on himself.
“I think we can just slither down there and catch him,” I says. “I don’t think he has any guards. Except Dabulamanzi. We tell ’em that the King won’t be harmed nor anyone else—and some of those troops looking for him will harm him damn well, especially the Boers—they have sixty years of hate.”
“Dark would be better,” says Harford.
“They can’t see who is with us in the dark,” I says, “so we’ll end up shooting Dabulamanzi for sure.”
“I doubt you could hit him,” says a familiar voice behind me. “You leave a trail like an ox dragging a log.”
Marieke, of course, with her chum of a Bushman, still grinning.
Harford and me contested as to who could look dumber.
“What ... I managed to croak out, “in the hell ...”
Marieke laughed, low and soft, stuck her tongue out at me, and then laid down her gun and stuck her hands by her ears and waggled her fingers at me. B
ushman grinned and contributed farting noises.
I ain’t never been that dumbfounded.
“... are you doing here?” I finally stammered, lame as a one-footed mule.
Marieke bounced down and capered around us and she was laughing so hard that she had tears flowing down her cheeks.
“Great scout,” she says, “I have followed you ever since you left. You two oafs. I didn’t want to hurt your pride. I have often been ten feet from you.”
“They do say the Bushmen are better than any,” Harford offered.
“Go eat some bugs,” I snarls at him.
“I thought of slipping down in the night and cutting Cetshwayo’s throat,” says Marieke, “but I didn’t. Aren’t I good?”
Harford was making the choking noises upper-class Englishmen emit to signal that they are having an attack of mirth.
“You could have been killed!” I says. I was scared for her.
“No,” says Marieke. “You would have been, but my Bushman and I killed them first. Perhaps you don’t know what you are doing here so well.”
“I say,” said Harford, “we still have to see about Cetshwayo.”
“We go down on foot,” I says.
“Want me to lead you?” says Marieke. “I wouldn’t want you to fall and hurt yourself.”
“You’ll have to stay up here,” says Harford, looking at Marieke. “Cetshwayo would rather die than surrender to a party which included a woman.”
“I’ll stay,” says Marieke. “The three of you can keep your little secret.”
“I still think that we should ride,” says Harford.
“Not on your damn life,” says I.
“Call if you need help,” says Marieke.
“I still think we should ride,” says Harford.
“No,” I says. “Let’s go.”
Harford gave way, and we tied our horses good and slipped down the mountain, keeping to the brush and stopping to look every once in a while. Cetshwayo waddled back to his hut and went inside, and Dabulamanzi sat crosslegged in the shade by the door.
We slipped into the kraal through a gate in the back and the first inkling that Dabulamanzi had that something was wrong was when I hissed at him from about five feet away, with my rifle pointed at his head.
Harford babbled a steady stream of Zulu at him and Dabulamanzi answered with a number of angry questions, and finally they quieted down. Dabulamanzi stood up, looking at me thoughtfully for a long time. I gave him a seegar. He went over to the fire and got a glowing brand and brought it back and we smoked out in the sun. Harford crawled through the low door of the hut and commenced to speak to Cetshwayo. I could hear his deep bass rumbling, and Harford’s baritone reply.
Harford come out in about fifteen minutes.
“The King can’t walk,” he said. “He’s so fat the insides of his thighs are rubbed raw from his flight. We’ll have to find a cart.”
Carts being a scarce commodity in this end of Africa, I wondered how we were going to do that.
“Why don’t you go up and get the horses and we’ll see,” said Harford. “We have some salve in the packs, don’t we?”
I climbed back up. Marieke and the Bushman were sitting on a rock, grinning. I got our horses and brought them back down and Harford and Dabulamanzi and Cetshwayo were by this time out in front of the hut. Cetshwayo was sitting on a big carved stool, his raw legs spread and his hands on his knees. He looked at me when I come up, and rumbled a question at Harford.
“He asked why should he trust a man who had his messengers hung,” said Harford.
“They was hung by a troop of scouts who had no business doing it, and when I wasn’t there,” I says. “Tell him the man responsible was hung, too.” It was a lie, but under the circumstances I thought it was a good idea.
The cart was a real problem. I finally said to Harford that we ought to rig a travois and at least get the King down to the plain. There was likely to be several hundred men down there and we could figure out something then.
I cut some poles and we took some cowhides from the hut and rigged a sling that would hold Cetshwayo and after a considerable amount of argument got him to try it, after Harford spoke to him sharp and told him it was either that or walk. Dabulamanzi watched us go. He wasn’t wanted for anything and it was safer here for him than it was most places.
I led my horse with Cetshwayo behind. The trail was good, mostly sand, and the one rocky place we come to jounced him around a little, but he was used to it by then.
Harford spelled me every hour, leading my horse while I rode, and about five in the afternoon we come out on to the rolling hills below the Drakensberg and seen a troop of men on the horizon. I waved to them and they begun to ride over.
They was Imperial troops, led by a captain name of Knox Leet. I mean both those words was his last name.
Harford told him about the capture of the King and how bad off the King was in the way of walking and that the King sure as hell couldn’t straddle a horse, not that he would anyway, never having done it. So they hung a litter between two horses and lifted the King onto that. Off they went bearing their prize—and be damned to them, I said.
“Cheer up, Kelly,” said Harford. “They are true sons of Empire. They are good and honest men. They won’t claim that they talked Cetshwayo into surrendering, modesty will forbid it. They won’t mention us. Gentlemen respect the modesty of others. Christ, I’m tired of the whole mess.”
Marieke popped out of the bushes as soon as the last of the troopers cleared the far rise.
“I’ll be on my way,” says Harford, sweeping off his hat. “And my compliments to the young lady.” He rode off west.
“Where’s your nigger sidekick?” I snarls. “Never mind. I can hear him grinning back in the bushes.”
Marieke had learned real quick that the best way to aggravate me was just to smile sweetly. She’d save her breath for appropriate moments when a real cutting insult would best bring on a fit of the apoplexy in me, an affliction which my family always had. Piss us off enough we just drop dead. I figured I’d be lucky to see thirty, which was a bit over a year away.
“When we get married,” she says, “I want to go to America.”
“If we get married,” I says. “I’ll think about it.”
“I’ll tell my brothers that you have fornicated me.”
This did give me pause. With any luck, all her damn brothers was dead—her father had died at Hlobane.
“And if they can’t manage your death, I’ll tell my cousins.”
“How many cousins you got?” I says.
“Enough,” says she.
“How many is enough?”
“One lame rabbit farmer,” says she.
Our conversations were always more or less like that. In her young heart she was as much a black Irish as I, even though she was Dutch.
We made our way south, keeping to the trails and avoiding the roads. When we passed by Ulundi the wind brought a horrible stink from the corpses. The sky was full of kites and a funny stork-like bird that acted like a vulture. It had two long feathers sticking out of the sides of its head straight back.
“Secretary bird,” says Marieke. The damn thing did sort of look like a clerk in a stingy banking house.
One night when we lay looking up at the stars, I asked her if she wouldn’t be sad to leave Africa. She said no. I couldn’t understand it. All of the time that I had been here, the way the land lay and the things that grew on it and the animals that walked on it had seemed so strange to me. I didn’t fit and there wasn’t any way I ever would.
By and by we come to the Uys home farm. Marieke rode on down. It was evening, and she hadn’t been inside but a few minutes when a fearful bellering and caterwauling erupted. Her two brothers and her mother and Marieke come spilling out onto the porch and then into the dusty yard, all hollering at once. Marieke cracked one brother so hard in the knee with the butt of a pistol I had given her that he sort of fell out of the discussion
and leaned on this and that around the porch, clutching his kneecap and whistling through his nose. The three who could walk went back inside and there commenced the sounds of a lot of breaking crockery.
I waited a decent interval until the noise reached a good, steady roar, and rode hell for leather toward Durban. Well, that’s the sort of bird that I am.
50
THE CLERK AT THE hotel smiled pleasantly at me and told me that there were no rooms available. I told him that I would take an unavailable one then and to please get the manager. The manager came and found one for me—a cramped little thing in the attic—and I sent the bellhop out with some money to get me some new duds.
I had my first good meal in weeks, and I sauntered around for a while after dark. The shops was all decked out in bunting and there was Union Jacks fluttering from every porch and the sounds of gay parties came spilling out into the streets. They was celebrating the great victory of Ulundi, of course.
The next day I spent getting drunk with Harford.
I asked him what the King had said in the hut.
“He asked me to shoot him,” Harford said, “since he thought the English would decapitate him—it is the custom to do that to deposed Zulu rulers, and he could see no reason that the English would not treat him so. Then he wanted to know the fate of Dabulamanzi, and then he wanted to know why the war began in the first place.”
“Could you tell him?”
“I told him it was no different from the rise of the Zulus—as a nation they are only about fifty years old. They were founded by a man named Shaka, who I gather was as ferocious a creature as ever walked the earth. He was the one who invented the regiments and the Zulu method of attack. He was something of a horror—once developed a mild interest in embryology and cut open three hundred pregnant women by way of research. Alive, that is.”
We swapped war stories for a while, and this and that, but the truth of the matter was that we really didn’t like each other much and we made an early evening of it.
