The Angels Weep (28 page)

These three animals were moving in single file across the
vlei. The old stink-bull leading them was almost black with age,
the cow that followed was splotched with reddish fawn, and the
half-grown calf was a lovely soft beige.

The calf was dancing. Ralph had never seen anything like it.
It was swaying, and turning in slow and elegant pirouettes, the
neck twisting and untwisting, swinging first to one side then to
the other. Every few paces the mother turned back anxiously to
watch its offspring, and then torn between duty and maternal
love, swung again to follow the old bull. At last, quite slowly,
with a kind of weary grace, the calf slumped to the grassy earth,
and lay in a tangle of long limbs. The mother hovered for a
minute or two, and then in the way of the wilderness, deserted
the weak and went on after her mate.

Ralph and Harry rode up, slowly, almost reluctantly, to where
the calf lay. Only when they reached it were they aware of the
fatal mucous discharge from jaws and nostrils, and the diarrhoea
painting the dappled hind-quarters. They stared at the corpse in
disbelief, until suddenly Harry wrinkled his nose and
sniffed.

‘That smell, the same as the oxen—’ he
started, and suddenly realization dawned upon him. ‘A
murrain,’ he whispered. ‘By the sweet name of the
Virgin, Harry, it’s some kind of plague. It is wiping out
everything, game and oxen.’ Under his deep tan, Ralph had
turned a muddy colour. ‘Two hundred wagons, Harry,’
he whispered, ‘almost four thousand bullocks. If this thing
goes on spreading, I’m going to lose them all.’ He
reeled in the saddle so that he had to clutch at the pommel for
his balance. ‘I’ll be finished. Wiped out – all
of it.’ His voice trembled with self-pity, and then a
moment later he shook himself like a wet spaniel, sloughing off
despair, and colour rushed back into his darkly handsome
face.

‘No, I’m not,’ he said fiercely.
‘I’m not finished yet, not without a fight
anyway.’ And he whirled to face Harry. ‘You’ll
have to bring the women back to Bulawayo alone,’ he
ordered. ‘I’m taking the four best horses.’

‘Where are you going?’ Harry asked.

‘Kimberley.’

‘What for?’

But Ralph had pivoted his horse like a polo pony, and was
lying along its neck as he raced back towards the single wagon
that had just come out of the forest behind them. Even as he
reached it, one of the lead oxen collapsed and lay convulsed in
the traces.

I
sazi did not
go to the kraal the following dawn. He was afraid of what he
would find. Bazo went in his place.

They were all dead. Every single bullock. They were already
stiff and cold as statues, locked in that dreadful final
convulsion. Bazo shivered, and pulled his monkey-skin cloak more
closely around his shoulders. It was not the dawn chill, but the
icy finger of superstitious awe that had touched him.

‘When the cattle lie with their heads twisted to touch
their flank, and cannot rise—’ he repeated aloud the
exact words of the Umlimo, and his dread was carried away by the
jubilant rush of his warlike spirits. ‘It is happening,
just as it was prophesied.’

Never before had the Chosen One’s words been so
unequivocal. He should have seen it immediately, but the
whirlwind of events had confused him so that it was only now that
the true significance of this fatal plague had come upon him. Now
he wanted to leave the laager, and run southwards, day and night,
without stopping, until he reached that secret cavern in the
sacred hills.

He wanted to stand before the assembled indunas and tell them:
‘You who doubted, believe now the words of the Umlimo. You
with milk and beer in your bellies, put a stone in their
place.’

He wanted to go from mine to farm to the new villages the
white men were building where his comrades now laboured with pick
and shovel instead of the silver blade, wearing the ragged
cast-offs of their masters rather than the plumes and kilts of
the regiment.

He wanted to ask them, ‘Do you remember the war song of
the
Izimvukuzane Ezembintaba
, the
Moles-that-burrow-under-a-mountain? Come, you diggers of the
other men’s dirt, come rehearse the war song of the Moles
with me.’

But it was not yet full term, there was the third and final
act of the Umlimo’s prophecy to unfold, and until then
Bazo, like his old comrades, must play the white man’s
servant. With an effort, he masked his savage joy, withdrawing
behind the inscrutable face of Africa. Bazo left the kraal of
dead bullocks and went to the remaining wagon. The white women
and the child were asleep within the body of the vehicle, and
Harry Mellow was lying wrapped in his blanket under the chassis
where the dew could not wet him.

Henshaw had deserted them late the previous afternoon, before
they had even reached the bank of the Lupani river. He had chosen
four horses, the swiftest and strongest. He had charged Bazo most
strictly with the task of leading the little party back to
Bulawayo on foot, then he had kissed his wife and son, shaken
hands briefly with Harry Mellow, and galloped away southwards
towards the drift on the Lupani, leading the three spare horses
on a long rein and riding like a man chased by wild dogs.

Now Bazo stooped beside the wagon and spoke slowly and clearly
to the blanket-wrapped figure beneath it. Though Harry
Mellow’s grasp of Sindebele improved each day, it was still
equivalent to that of a five-year-old and Bazo had to be sure he
understood.

‘The last of the oxen is dead. One horse was killed by
the buffalo, and Henshaw has taken four.’

Harry Mellow sat up quickly and made the decision. ‘That
leaves one mount each for the women, and Jon-Jon can ride up
behind one of them. The rest of us will walk. How long back to
Bulawayo, Bazo?’

Bazo shrugged eloquently. ‘If we were an impi, fast and
fit, five days. But at the pace of a white man in
boots—’

They looked like refugees, each servant carrying bundles of
only the most essential stores upon his head, and strung out in a
long straggling line behind the two horses. The women were
hampered by their long skirts whenever they walked to rest the
horses, and Bazo could not contain himself to this pace. He
ranged far ahead of the others and once he was out of sight and
well beyond earshot, he pranced and stamped, stabbing with an
imaginary assegai at a non-existent adversary, and accompanying
the
giya
, the challenge dance, with the fighting chant of
his old impi.

The first verse of the song commemorated the impi’s
assault on the mountain stronghold of Pemba, the wizard, when so
long ago Bazo had climbed the subterranean passage to the top of
the cliff. It was as a reward for this feat that Lobengula had
promoted Bazo to induna, had given him the headring, and allowed
him to ‘go in to the women’ and choose Tanase as his
wife.

Dancing alone in the forest, Bazo sang the other verses. Each
of them had been composed after a famous victory, all except the
last. That verse was the only one that had never been sung by the
full regiment in battle array. It was the verse for the last
charge of the Moles, when with Bazo at their head, they had run
onto the laager on the banks of the Shangani river. Bazo had
composed it himself, as he lay in the cave of the Matopos, near
unto death with the mortification of the bullet wounds in his
body.

Now suddenly there was another verse. It came into
Bazo’s head complete and perfect, as though it had been
sung ten thousand times before.

And Bazo, the Axe, shouted it to the msasa trees in their soft
mantles of red leaves, and the trees bowed slightly to the east
wind, as though they, too, were listening.

R
alph
Ballantyne stopped at King’s Lynn. He threw the reins to
Jan Cheroot, the old Hottentot hunter. ‘Water them, old
man, and fill the grain bags for me. I will be away again in an
hour.’

Then he ran up onto the veranda of the sprawling thatched
homestead, and his stepmother came out to meet him, her
consternation turning to delight, when she recognized him.

‘Oh Ralph, you startled me—’

‘Where is my father?’ Ralph demanded, as he kissed
her cheek, and Louise’s expression changed to match the
gravity of his.

‘In the north section, they are branding the calves
– but what is it, Ralph? I haven’t seen you like
this.’

He ignored the question. ‘The north section,
that’s six hours’ ride. I cannot spare the time to go
to him.’

‘It’s serious,’ she decided.
‘Don’t torture me, Ralph.’

‘I’m sorry.’ He laid his hand on her arm.
‘There is some dreadful murrain sweeping down out of the
north. It hit my cattle on the Gwaai river, and we lost them all,
over one hundred head in twelve hours.’

Louise stared at him. ‘Perhaps—’ she
whispered, but he cut across her brusquely.

‘It’s killing everything, giraffe and buffalo and
oxen, only the horses have not been touched yet. But, by God,
Louise, I saw buffalo lying dead and stinking on each side of the
track as I rode southwards yesterday. Animals that had been
strong and healthy the day before.’

‘What must we do, Ralph?’

‘Sell,’ he answered. ‘Sell all the cattle at
any price, before it reaches us.’ He turned and shouted to
Jan Cheroot. ‘Bring the notebook from my
saddlebag.’

While he scribbled a note for his father, Louise asked,
‘When did you last eat?’

‘I cannot remember.’

He ate the slabs of cold venison and raw onion and strong
cheese on slices of stone-ground bread, and washed it down with a
jug of beer, while he gave Jan Cheroot his instructions.
‘Speak to nobody else but my father. Tell nobody else of
this thing. Go swiftly, Jan Cheroot.’ But Ralph was up in
the saddle and away before the little Hottentot was ready to
ride.

Ralph circled wide of the town of Bulawayo, to avoid meeting
an acquaintance and to reach the telegraph line at a lonely
place, well away from the main road. Ralph’s own
construction gangs had laid the telegraph line, so he knew every
mile of it, every vulnerable point and how most effectively to
cut off Bulawayo and Matabeleland from Kimberley and the rest of
the world.

He tethered his horses at the foot of one of the telegraph
poles and shinned up it to the cluster of porcelain insulators
and the gleaming copper wires. He used a magnus hitch on a
leather thong to hold the ends of the wire from falling to earth,
and then cut between the knots. The wire parted with a singing
twang, but the thong held, and when he climbed down to the horses
and looked up, he knew it would need a skilled linesman to detect
the break.

He flung himself back into the saddle, and booted the horse
into a gallop. At noon he intersected the road and turned
southwards along it. He changed horses every hour, and rode until
it was too dark to see the tracks. Then he knee-haltered the
horses, and slept like a dead man on the hard ground. Before
dawn, he ate a hunk of cheese and a slice of the rough bread
Louise had put into his saddlebag, and was away again with the
first softening of the eastern sky.

At mid-morning, he turned out of the track, and found the
telegraph line where it ran behind a flat-topped kopje. He knew
the Company linesmen hunting for the first break in the line
would be getting close to it by now, and there may be somebody in
the telegraph office in Bulawayo anxious to send a report to Mr
Rhodes about the terrible plague that was ravaging the herds.

Ralph cut the line in two places and went on. In the late
afternoon, one of his horses broke down. It had been ridden too
hard, and he turned it loose beside the road. If a lion did not
get it, then perhaps one of his drivers would recognize the
brand.

The next day, fifty miles from the Shashi river, he met one of
his own convoys coming up from the south. There were twenty-six
wagons in the charge of a white overseer. Ralph stopped only long
enough to commandeer the man’s horses, leave his own
exhausted animals with him, and then he rode on. He cut the
telegraph lines twice more, once on each side of the Shashi
river, before he reached the railhead.

He came upon his surveyor first, a red-haired Scot. With a
gang of blacks, they were working five miles ahead of the main
crews, and cutting the lines for the rails. Ralph did not even
dismount.

‘Did you get the telegraph I sent you from Bulawayo,
Mac?’ he demanded without wasting time on greetings.

‘Nowt, Mr Ballantyne.’ The Scot shook his dusty
curls. ‘Not a word from the north in five days – they
say the lines are down, longest break I’ve heard
of.’

‘Damn it to hell,’ Ralph swore furiously, to cover
his relief. ‘I wanted you to hold a truck for
me.’

‘If you hurry, Mr Ballantyne, sir, there is an empty
string of trucks going back today.’

Five miles further on Ralph reached the railhead. It was
crossing a wide flat plain dotted with thorn scrub. The boil of
activity seemed incongruous in this bleak, desolate land on the
edge of the Kalahari Desert. A green locomotive huffed columns of
silver steam high into the empty sky, shunting the string of
flat-topped bogies to the end of the glistening silver rails.
Teams of singing black men, dressed only in loincloths, but armed
with crowbars, levered the steel rails over the side of the
trucks and as they fell in a cloud of pale dust, another team ran
forward to lift and set the tracks onto the teak sleepers.