Men of Men (82 page)

Suddenly a thought struck him, and he called down the line. ‘Captain Borrow.’

‘Sir?’

‘You have a Bible, don’t you? Let me have it, will you?’

Mungo’s batman had a fire going, and coffee brewing in the shelter, and he took Mungo’s coat to dry and spread a grey woollen blanket over his shoulders as Mungo squatted beside the
fire and paged slowly through the little leather-bound, travel-battered Bible.

He found the reference and stared at it thoughtfully:

Mungo wondered that he was still capable of surprising himself. There were still strange places in his soul that he had never explored.

He took a burning stick from the fire and lit his cigar, then plunged the glowing red of the brand into the black coffee to enhance the taste of the brew.

‘Well, well, Parson!’ he murmured aloud. ‘You have a sharper instinct than I ever gave you credit for.’

Then he thought of Robyn Codrington, trying to consider his feelings objectively, and without passion.

‘Do I love her?’ he asked, and the answer was immediate.

‘I have never loved a woman, and by God’s grace, I never will.’

‘Do I want her, then?’ And again there was no hesitation. ‘Yes, I want her. I want her badly enough to send anybody who stands in my way to his death.’

‘Why do I want her?’ he pondered. ‘When I have never loved a woman – why do I want this one? She is no longer young, and God knows, I have had my pick of a hundred more
beautiful. Why do I want her?’ and he grinned at his own perception. ‘I want her because she is the only one whom I have never had, and whom I will never have completely.’

He closed the Bible with a snap, and grinned wickedly across the wide river at the dark and silent mopani forest.

‘Well done, Parson. You saw it long before I did.’

T
he tracks of Lobengula’s wagons were clear to follow, even in the worsening light, and Wilson pushed the pace to a canter.

Clinton’s aged grey was exhausted by two weeks of hard trekking. He fell back little by little, until after five miles they were loping along with Captain Napier’s rear file. The mud
thrown up by the hooves ahead speckled Clinton’s face as though he was suffering from some strange disease.

The mopani thinned out dramatically ahead of the tiny patrol, and there were low bare hills on either hand.

‘Look at them, Padre,’ Wilson called to Clinton, and gestured at the hills. ‘There must be hundreds of them.’

‘Women and old men,’ Clinton grunted. The slopes were scattered with silent watching figures. ‘The fighting men will be with the king.’

The twelve riders cantered on without a check, and the thunder muttered and shook the sky above the low, swirling clouds.

Suddenly Wilson raised his right hand high.

‘Troop, halt!’

Clinton’s grey stood, head hanging and chest heaving between his knees – and Clinton was as grateful. At his best he was no horseman, and he was unaccustomed to such hard riding.

‘Reverend Codrington to the front!’ The order was passed back, and Clinton kicked the grey into a plodding walk.

At that moment a squall of rain stung his face like a handful of thrown rock-salt, and he wiped it off with the palm of his right hand.

‘There they are!’ said Wilson tersely, and through the drizzle Clinton could make out the stained and ragged canvas tent of a wagon rising above the scrub, not more than two hundred
paces ahead.

‘You know what to say, Padre.’ Wilson’s Scots accent seemed even stronger and was incongruous at this place and in these circumstances.

Clinton walked the grey forward another few paces, and then drew a deep breath.

‘Lobengula, King of the Matabele, it is me – Hlopi. These men wish you to come to GuBulawayo to parley with Daketela and Lodzi. Do you hear me, oh King?’

The silence was broken only by the scraping of a windblown branch and the rustle of the rain on the brim of Clinton’s old hat.

Then quite clearly, he heard the snick of a Martini-Henry rifle being loaded; and a young voice asked in whispered Matabele from the scrub near the wagon:

‘Must we shoot, Baba?’

A deeper, firmer voice replied in the same language. ‘Not yet. Let them come closer so there can be no mistake.’

And then the voices were blotted out by a grumbling roll of thunder overhead, and Clinton backed the grey up.

‘It is a trap, Major. There are armed Matabele in ambush about the wagons. I heard them talking.’

‘Do you think the king is there?’

‘I would not think so, but what I am sure of is that even now the main impi is circling back between us and the river.’

‘What makes you think that?’

‘It is always the Zulu way, the encirclement and then the closing in.’

‘What do you advise, Padre?’

Clinton shrugged and smiled. ‘I gave my advice on the bank of the river—’ He was interrupted by a shouted warning from the rear of the column. It was one of the Americans, his
accent unmistakable.

‘There is a force moving in behind us.’

‘How many?’ Wilson shouted back.

‘Plenty, I can see their plumes.’

‘Troop, about wheel!’ Wilson ordered. ‘At the gallop, forward!’

As the horses plunged back down the rough trail, the rain that had been threatening so long burst upon them in an icy silver cascade. It slashed at their faces, and stung their eyes, and drummed
on their oilskins.

‘This will cover our retreat,’ Wilson grunted, and Clinton flogged the grey’s neck with the loose end of the reins, for the old horse was falling back again.

Through the thick silver lances of falling rain, he caught a glimpse of waving war-plumes above the scrub; they were racing in to head off the patrol. At that moment the grey stumbled and
Clinton was thrown onto his neck.

‘Jee!’ He heard the war chant go up, and he clung desperately to the grey’s neck as it plunged to regain its balance.

‘Come on, Padre!’ somebody yelled, as the other troopers went pounding past him in the mud and the rain.

Then his horse was running again. Clinton had lost a stirrup, and he bumped painfully on the wet saddle, clinging to the pommel for a grip, but they were through. There were no shields or plumes
in the bush around them, only the twisting streamers of rain and the gloom of gathering night.

‘A
re you telling me, Napier, that Major Wilson has deliberately chosen to spend the night on the far bank, despite my direct orders to
return before nightfall?’ Mungo St John asked. The only light was that of a storm lantern. The rain had washed out the fires.

The tarpaulin over the heads of the two officers flogged in the wind, spilling gouts of rainwater over them, and the lantern flame fluttered uncertainly in its glass chimney, lighting Captain
Napier’s face from below so that he looked like a skull.

‘We got so close to Lobengula, General, within hail of the wagons. Major Wilson considered a retreat would not be justified. In any event, sir, the bush is swarming with the enemy. The
patrol has a better chance of surviving the night by stopping in thick bush and waiting for daylight.’

‘That is Wilson’s estimate, is it?’ Mungo demanded, putting on a grim expression. Yet inwardly, he congratulated himself on such an accurate assessment of the Scotsman’s
impetuous character.

‘You must reinforce the patrol, sir. You must send at least one of the Maxims across – now, this very hour.’

‘Listen carefully, Captain,’ Mungo ordered him. ‘What do you hear?’

Even over the rain and the wind there was an echo like the sound in a seashell held to the ear.

‘The river, Captain,’ Mungo told him. ‘The river is sparing!’

‘I have just forded it. You can still get across, sir. If you give the order now! If you wait until dawn, it may well be in full flood.’

‘Thank you for your advice, Napier. I will not risk the Maxims.’

‘Sir, sir – you can take at least one Maxim off its carriage. We can carry it in a blanket and swim across.’

‘Thank you, Captain. I will send Borrow across with twenty men to reinforce Wilson until morning – and this force will follow, with both Maxims, only when it is light enough to see
the ford and make the crossing in safety.’

‘General St John, you are signing the death warrant of those men.’

‘Captain Napier, you are overwrought. I shall expect an apology from you when you have recovered yourself.’

C
linton sat with his back against the bole of a mopani tree. He had one hand thrust into the front of his sheepskin jacket, to hold his travelling
Bible out of the rain. He wished above any other creature needs that he had light enough to read it.

All around him the rest of the tiny patrol lay stretched out on the muddy earth, bundled up in their rubber groundsheets and oilskins, though Clinton was certain that, like himself, none of them
was asleep – nor would any of them sleep that night.

Clutching the Bible above his heart, he had the certain prescience of his own death, and he made the astonishing discovery that it had no terrors for him. Once, long ago, before he had
discovered how close at hand was God’s comfort, he had been afraid, and now the release from fear was a blessed gift.

Sitting in darkness, he thought of love, the love of his God and his woman and his daughters – and that was all that he would regret leaving behind him.

He thought of Robyn as he had first seen her, standing on the deck of the American slaver
Huron
with her dark hair aflutter on the wind and her green eyes flashing.

He remembered her upon the rumpled sweat-soaked childbed as she struggled to give birth, and he remembered the hot slippery and totally enchanting feeling of his first infant daughter’s
body as it slithered from Robyn’s body into his waiting hands.

He remembered the first petulant birth wail, and how beautiful Robyn had been as she smiled at him, exhausted and racked and proud.

There were other small regrets – one that he would never dandle a grandchild, another that Robyn had never come to love him the same way he loved her. Suddenly Clinton sat up straighter
against the mopani, and inclined his head to listen, peering out into the utter blackness from whence the sound had come.

No, it was not really a sound – the only true sound was the rain. It was more like a vibration in the air. Carefully, he returned the precious book to his inside pocket, then he made a
trumpet of his bare hands and pressed them to the wet earth, listening intently with his ear to the funnel.

The vibration coming up from the ground was that of running feet, horny bare feet, thousands of feet, trotting to the rhythm of an impi on the march. It sounded like the very pulse of the
earth.

Clinton crawled and groped his way across to where he had last seen Major Wilson lie down under his plaid. There was no glimmering of light under the midnight clouds, and when his fingers
touched coarse woven cloth, Clinton asked softly:

‘Is that you, Major?’

‘What is it, Padre?’

‘They are here, all around us, moving back to get between us and the river.’

T
hey stood-to while the dawn tried vainly to penetrate the low roof of cloud above them. The saddled horses were merely humped shapes just a
little darker than the night around them. They were drawn up in a circle, with the men standing on the inside, rifles resting on the saddles as they peered out into the thick bush that surrounded
them, straining for the first glimpse as the grey light settled gently, like a sprinkling of pearl dust upon their dark, wet world.

In the centre of the circle of horses, Clinton knelt in the mud. With one hand he held the reins of the grey horse, and with the other he held the Bible to his chest. His calm voice carried
clearly to every man in the dark waiting circle.

The light grew stronger; they could make out the shape of the nearest bushes. One of the horses, perhaps infected by the tension of the waiting men, whickered and scissored its
ears.

Now they all heard what had alarmed the horse. The faint drumming approached from the direction of the river, growing stronger with the dawn light.

There was the metallic clash of a rifle breech from the silent waiting circle of dismounted men, and half a dozen gruff voices echoed Clinton’s quiet
‘Amen!’

Then suddenly someone shouted. ‘Horses! Those are horses out there!’

And a ragged little cheer went up as they recognized the shape of slouch hats bobbing against the sullen grey sky.

‘Who is it?’ Wilson challenged.

‘Borrow, Sir, Captain Borrow!’

‘By God, you’re welcome.’ Wilson laughed as the column of horsemen rode out of the forest into their defensive circle. ‘Where is General St John; where are the
Maxims?’

The two officers shook hands as Borrow dismounted, but he did not return Wilson’s smile.

‘The general is still on the south bank.’

Wilson stared at him incredulous, the smile sliding off his face.

‘I have twenty men, rifles only, no Maxims,’ Borrow went on.

‘When will the column cross?’

‘We had to swim our horses across. By now the river is ten feet deep.’ Borrow lowered his voice so as not to alarm the men. ‘They won’t be coming.’

‘Did you make contact with the enemy?’ Wilson demanded.

‘We heard them all around us. They called to each other as we passed, and we heard them keeping pace with us in the forest on either hand.’

‘So they are massed between us and the river, and even if we cut our way through to the river, the ford is impassable. Is that it?’