The Angels Weep (44 page)

Dimly in his anguish he realized that his cries might bring
the
amadoda
, as the bleat of the goat brings the leopard,
and suddenly he wanted that to happen with all his soul.

‘Come!’ he yelled into the silent forest.
‘Come on. Come and find me also!’ And he stopped to
fire the Winchester into the air, and listen to the echoes go
bounding away down the valley.

At last he could run and scream no more, and he came up
panting against the bole of one of the forest trees.

‘Jonathan,’ he croaked. ‘Where are you, my
baby?’

Slowly he turned down and went down the hill. He moved like a
very old man.

At the edge of the camp, he stopped and peered shortsightedly
at something that lay in the grass, then he stopped and picked it
up. He turned it over and over in his hands, and then balled it
into his fist. His knuckles turned white with the strength of his
grip. What he held was a headband of softly tanned mole-skin.

Still holding the scrap of fur in his hand, he went into the
camp to prepare his dead for burial.

R
obyn St John
woke to the soft scratching on the shutter of her bedroom, and
she raised herself on one elbow.

‘Who is it?’ she called.

‘It is me, Nomusa.’

‘Juba, my little Dove, I did not expect you!’

Robyn slipped out of bed and crossed to the window. When she
opened the shutter, the night was opalescent with moonlight, and
Juba was huddled below the sill.

‘You are so cold.’ Robyn took her arm.
‘You’ll catch your death. Come inside immediately.
I’ll fetch a blanket.’

‘Nomusa, wait.’ Juba caught her wrist. ‘I
must go.’

‘But you have only just arrived.’

‘Nobody must know that I was here, please tell nobody,
Nomusa.’

‘What is it? You are shaking—’

‘Listen, Nomusa. I could not leave you – you are
my mother and sister and friend, I could not leave
you.’

‘Juba—’

‘Do not speak. Listen for a minute,’ Juba pleaded.
‘I have so little time.’

It was only then that Robyn realized that it was not the chill
of night that shook Juba’s vast frame. She was racked with
sobs of fear and of dread.

‘You must go, Nomusa. You and Elizabeth and the baby.
Take nothing with you, leave this very minute. Go into Bulawayo,
perhaps you will be safe there. It is your best
chance.’

‘I don’t understand you, Juba. What nonsense is
this?’

‘They are coming Nomusa. They are coming. Please
hurry.’

Then she was gone. She moved swiftly and silently for such a
big woman, and she seemed to melt into the moon shadows under the
spathodea trees. By the time Robyn had found her shawl and run
down the veranda, there was no sign of her.

Robyn hurried down towards the hospital bungalows, stumbling
once on the verge of the path, calling with increasing
exasperation.

‘Juba, come back here! Do you hear me? I won’t
stand any more of this nonsense!’

She stopped at the church, uncertain which path to take.

‘Juba! Where are you?’

The silence was broken only by the yipping of a jackal up on
the hillside above the Mission. It was answered by another on the
peak of the pass where the road to Bulawayo crossed the
hills.

‘Juba!’

The watch-fire by the hospital bungalow had burned out. She
crossed to it, and threw on to it a log from the woodpile. The
silence was unnatural. The log caught and flared. In its light
she climbed the steps of the nearest bungalow.

The sleeping-mats of the patients were in two rows, facing
each other down each wall, but they were deserted. Even the most
desperately ill had gone. They must have been carried away, for
some of them had been past walking.

Robyn hugged the shawl around her shoulders. ‘Poor
ignorant heathen,’ she said aloud. ‘Another
witchcraft scare, they will run from their own
shadows.’

She turned sorrowfully away, and walked through the darkness
back towards the house. There was a light burning in
Elizabeth’s room, and as Robyn climbed the steps of the
veranda, the door opened.

‘Mama! Is that you?’

‘What are you doing, Elizabeth?’

‘I thought I heard voices.’

Robyn hesitated, she did not want to alarm Elizabeth, but then
she was a sensible child, and unlikely to go into hysteria over a
bit of Matabele superstition.

‘Juba was here. There must be another witchcraft scare.
She ran off again.’

‘What did she say?’

‘Oh, just that we should go in to Bulawayo to escape
some sort of danger.’

Elizabeth came out onto the veranda in her nightdress,
carrying the candle.

‘Juba is a Christian, she doesn’t dabble in
witchcraft.’ Elizabeth’s tone was concerned.
‘What else did she say?’

‘Just that,’ Robyn yawned. ‘I’m going
back to bed.’ She started along the veranda, and then
stopped. ‘Oh, the others have all run off. The hospital is
empty. It’s most annoying.’

‘Mama, I think we should do as Juba says.’

‘What do you mean by that?’

‘I think we should go in to Bulawayo
immediately.’

‘Elizabeth, I thought better of you.’

‘I have an awful feeling. I think we should go. Perhaps
there is real danger.’

‘This is my home. Your father and I built it with our
own hands. There is no power on earth that will force me to leave
it,’ Robyn said firmly. ‘Now go back to bed. With no
help, we are going to have a busy day tomorrow.’

T
hey squatted
in long silent ranks in the long grass below the crest of the
hills. Gandang moved quietly down the ranks, stopping
occasionally to exchange a word with an old comrade in arms. To
revive a memory of another waiting before a battle of long
ago.

It was strange to sit upon the bare earth during the waiting
time. In the old days they would have sat on their shields, the
long dappled shields of iron-hard oxhide, squatting upon them not
for comfort but to hide their distinctive shape from a watchful
enemy until the moment came to strike terror into his belly and
steel into his heart; squatting upon them also to prevent some
young buck in the throes of the divine madness from prematurely
drumming upon the rawhide with his assegai and giving warning of
the waiting impi.

It was strange also not to be decked out in the full
regimentals of the Inyati impi, the plumes and furs and tassels
of cow-tails, the war rattles at ankle and wrist, the tall
headdress that turned a man into a giant. They were dressed like
neophytes, like unblooded boys, with only their kilts about their
waists, but the scars upon their dark bodies and the fire in
their eyes gave the lie to that impression.

Gandang felt himself choking with a pride that he once thought
he would never experience again. He loved them, he loved their
fierceness and their valour, and though his face was quiet and
expressionless, the love shone through in his eyes.

They picked it up and gave it back to him a hundred times.
‘Baba!’ they called him in their soft deep voices.
‘Father, we thought we would never fight at your shoulder
again,’ they said. ‘Father, those of your sons who
die today will be forever young.’

Across the neck of the hills a jackal wailed mournfully and
was answered from close at hand. The impi was in position, lying
across the Khami hills like a coiled mamba, waiting and watchful
and ready.

There was a glow in the sky now. The false dawn, that would be
followed by the deeper darkness before the true dawn. The deep
darkness that the
amadoda
loved and used so well.

They stirred quietly, and grounded the shaft of assegai
between their heels, ready for the order: ‘Up my children.
It is the time of the spears.’

This time the order did not come, and the true dawn flushed
the sky with blood. In its light the
amadoda
looked at
each other.

One of the senior warriors, who had won Gandang’s
respect on fifty battlefields, spoke for all of them. He went to
where Gandang sat alone to one side of the impi.

‘Baba, your children are confused. Tell us why we
wait.’

‘Old friend, are your spears so thirsty for the blood of
women and babes, that they cannot wait for richer
fare?’

‘We can wait as long as you command it, Baba. But it is
hard.’

‘Old friend, I am baiting for a leopard with a tender
goat,’ Gandang told him, and let his chin sink back on the
great muscles of his chest.

The sun pushed up and gilded the tree-tops along the hills,
and still Gandang did not move, and the silent ranks waited
behind him in the grass.

A young warrior whispered to another. ‘Already the storm
has begun. Everywhere else our brethren are busy. They will mock
us when they hear how we sat on the hilltop—’

One of the older men hissed a rebuke at him, and the young
warrior fell silent, but further down the ranks another youngster
shifted on his haunches and his assegai tapped against that of
his neighbour. Gandang did not raise his head.

Then from the hilltop a wild francolin called.
‘
Qwaali! Qwaali
!’ The sharp penetrating cry
was a characteristic sound of the veld, only a sharp ear would
have detected anything strange about this one.

Gandang rose to his feet. ‘The leopard comes,’ he
said quietly, and stalked up to the vantage point from which he
could look down the full length of road that led to the town of
Bulawayo. The sentry who had sounded the call of the wild
pheasant pointed wordlessly with the hilt of his assegai.

There was an open coach and a troop of horsemen upon the road.
Gandang counted them, eleven riding hard, coming directly out
towards the Khami hills. The figure that led them was
unmistakable, even at this distance. The height in the saddle,
the alert set of head, the long stirrups.

‘Hau! One-Bright-Eye!’ Gandang greeted him softly.
‘I have waited many long moons for you.’

G
eneral Mungo
St John had been awakened in the middle of the night. In his
nightshirt he had listened to the hysterical outpourings of a
coloured servant who had escaped from the trading-store on the
Ten-Mile Drift. It was a wild tale of slaughter and burning, and
the man’s breath smelled of good Cape brandy.

‘He’s drunk,’ said Mungo St John flatly.
‘Take him away, and give him a good thrashing.’

The first white man got into town three hours before dawn. He
had been stabbed through the thigh and his left arm was broken in
two places by blows from a knobkerrie. He was clinging to his
horse’s neck with his good arm.

‘The Matabele are out!’ he screamed. ‘They
are burning the farms—’ and he slid out of the saddle
in a dead faint.

By first light there were fifty wagons formed into a laager in
the market square; without oxen to draw them, they had been
manhandled into position. All the town’s women and children
had been brought into the laager and put to work making bandages,
reloading ammunition, and baking hard bread against a siege. The
few able-bodied men that Doctor Jameson had not taken with him
into captivity in the Transvaal were swiftly formed into troops,
and horses and rifles were found for those who lacked them.

In the midst of the bustle and confusion, Mungo St John had
commandeered a fast open coach with a coloured driver, picked out
the most likely and best mounted troop of horsemen, and using his
authority as acting Administrator given them the order.

‘Follow me!’

Now he reined in on the crest of the hills above Khami
Mission, at the point where the track was narrowest and the tall
yellow grass and the forest hemmed it in like a wall on each
side, and he shaded his single eye.

‘Thank God!’ he whispered. The thatched roofs of
the Mission that he expected to see billowing with smoke and
flame stood serenely in the quiet green valley beyond.

The horses were sweating and blowing from the pull up the
hills, and the coach had lagged two hundred paces behind Mungo.
As soon as it came up, without giving a moment’s rest to
the mules, Mungo shouted, ‘Troop, forward!’ and
spurred away down the track, with his troopers clattering behind
him.

Robyn St John came out of the thatched rondavel that was her
laboratory, and as soon as she recognized the man that led the
column, she placed her hands upon her boyish hips and lifted her
chin angrily.

‘What is the meaning of this intrusion, sir?’ she
demanded.

‘Madam, the Matabele tribe is in full rebellion. They
are murdering women and children, burning the
homesteads.’

Robyn took a step backwards protectively, for Robert had come
pale-faced from the clinic to hang onto her skirts.

‘I have come to take you and your children to
safety.’

‘The Matabele are my friends,’ said Robyn.
‘I have nothing to fear from them. This is my home. I do
not intend leaving it.’

‘I do not have time to indulge your predilection for
obstructive disputation, madam,’ he said grimly, and stood
in the stirrups.

‘Elizabeth!’ he bellowed, and she came onto the
veranda of the homestead. ‘The Matabele are in revolt. We
are all in mortal danger. You have two minutes to gather what
personal items your family may need—’

‘Take no heed of him, Elizabeth,’ Robyn shouted
angrily. ‘We are staying here.’

Before she realized his intention, Mungo had pricked his horse
with a spur, backing it up towards the laboratory doorway; then
he stooped from the saddle and caught Robyn about the waist. He
swung her up over the pommel of the saddle, with her backside in
the air and her skirts around her hips. She kicked and yelled
with outrage, but he walked his horse alongside the open coach
and with a heave of his shoulder dumped her in another flurry of
petticoats onto the back seat.

‘If you do not stay there, madam, I will not hesitate to
have you bound. It will be most undignified.’