1972 - A Story Like the Wind (67 page)

Getting to his feet, he turned round and whispered in turn to Nonnie, standing silently behind him using her utmost self-control not to give away to her own curiosity and spurred on now by a feeling of alarm. It was an immense triumph of will and loyalty to François, that she asked no questions and remained silent, although she was certain that the beating of her heart, both from the long, fast run and the fear within her, must be audible to both him and Hintza.

Francis could not see her face in the darkness, despite the brilliant starlight, but her nearness and her silence were enough somehow to move him extremely, and for the first time to be truly glad that she was there with him. ‘Well done, Nonnie,’ he found himself saying softly. ‘Well done. I only hope I was right to bring you along. There’s something terribly wrong, perhaps extremely dangerous about. We can’t be careful or quick enough. But just follow us like this and we’ll soon know.’

The warning may have been unnecessary and uttered only because by now his own feeling of danger had become almost overwhelming. There were, as he had emphasized to Nonnie, foreign, dangerous and hostile presences in the bush and all around them, because if that were not so, he was certain that just now Caruso would have called out his soaring Halleluyah to the first light, just drawing a red pencil line along the black sheet of the fast receding night; Garbo would have immediately added her own ardent Hosannah and old Chaliapin would have proclaimed on behalf of all the life of the bush that had come safely through so great and troubled a night, his profound Amen. Also old Adonis, perched high on the cliffs with a clear view of the explosion of night into a red dawn, would have commanded his nation with a series of booming barks to ‘rise and shine, as our great god, the sun, was about to rise and shine’. Only something terrible could have made these great heraldic officers of the bush suspend their duties of sounding their fanfare for the arrival of another day.

All these thoughts went through François like the shadow of a torn, storm-battered cloud driven by a high wind over the hill, as he started running forward again after Hintza, who was already lost in the darkness ahead. At the very place where the hills met the river they caught up not only with Hintza but also with another dark shape whom François recognized at first more by smell than sight as it came hurrying towards them. It was Xhabbo.

Overjoyed, François was about to utter the traditional greeting but Xhabbo gave him no time. Indeed he gave himself no time even to wonder why François was not alone, but he immediately seized him by the hand, pressed it hard and whispered, hoarse with haste, ‘Come quickly, utterly quickly, Foot of the Day. Come because we are all utterly in terrible danger.’

François had no time to question, or even to remonstrate for Xhabbo had sped, bounding up the hill so fast that he was already a blur up ahead despite the lifting of the dark. Hintza was at his heels, leading them up the side of the cliff. All François could do was to follow with Nonnie as fast as they could until they arrived, breathless, on top, some hundreds of feet above the river just as the dawn exploded in a turquoise sky to stand briefly like a Chinese fan of the brightest lacquer held in the hand of the day from just below the horizon. Xhabbo went down at once on his stomach behind a rock, signalled to François and Nonnie to do the same. Once certain that they were properly hidden, he began to explain.

‘They are coming, Foot of the Day, in their thousands,’ he said. ‘For thirty days now Nuin-Tara and I have seen them coming in their thousands in this direction. Although we have utterly hastened to come to you and warn you, we could not get to you before, as we could easily have done had they not been there. Oh, Foot of the Day, neither Xhabbo nor Xhabbo’s people have ever seen anything like it! There were so many of them and they were so utterly everywhere that we had to hide by day and travel only by night.’

François had no idea who ‘Nuin-Tara’ could possibly be. He recognized the word only as Bushman for ‘Daughter of a Star’, and one of the most exalted names a Bushman could bestow on a woman. Also, he was far more concerned with the ‘thousands’ who were coming and were everywhere in the bush. ‘But the thousands you mention Xhabbo, who are they and what are they coming for?’

Xhabbo’s low voice, raised just above a whisper answered sombrely: ‘Thousands of kaffirs, carrying arms just like the one that you are carrying, and many spears, knives and things that I do not know myself…All I know is that our kinsmen who come and go between the desert and the-world outside have now for many moons told us that the kaffirs were massing in the mountain valleys and bush on the far side of the desert and coming to kill everyone who is not a kaffir in the place of Foot of the Day and all the other places of the white men yonder.’

François, who knew the word kaffir (which is derived from the Arabic for unbeliever, and was one that the slave traders from Zanzibar imposed upon the long-suffering indigenous Bantu peoples of Africa), would never himself have used the term on any black man, since it had long since become an insult to them. Yet he knew from Old Koba that the Bushmen, who had been even more cruelly persecuted by the black people ‘ than by the white, had adopted this term for the black man as their own name of scorn for them. He was about to ask Xhabbo for more information when about a half a mile away to the west of where they were lying, there came a great shout.

It was a shout of all that stood for courage in man who, however great the inducement to fear and no matter how hopeless his cause, maintained his stand to the point of death. As such it was the purest human sound François had ever heard. Everything in him responded to it and urged him to go instantly to the man who had uttered it. But Xhabbo, feeling the muscles in François’s body beside him gathering to rise, held him down by force, saying fiercely, ‘No, Foot of the Day. We
cannot
help. It is utterly too late.’

The cry, of course, was that of !#grave;Bamuthi calling that ‘To me!’ to what must, by now, be the awakening Matabele kraals and homestead. The call had barely died away, François was still struggling wildly with Xhabbo, and Hintza was beginning to whimper with confusion as to why François and he were not speeding down already to that beloved voice calling to all that was free of fear in man and dog, when the quick staccato stutter of a burst of fire from an automatic rifle shattered the heavy silence below.

As the stutter of sound ended abruptly in the bush, somewhere near the lion-trap, it was followed from the direction of the kraals, Hunter’s Drift, the clearing, the ford and the river by the blast of military whistles.

The blast sounded ridiculously normal, as if it were doing no more than setting some Cup Final in motion, until it was succeeded by an immense war cry coming from far down in the throats of hundreds of men and, hard upon the cry, an eruption of automatic fire from a thousand or more rifles sending burst after burst of controlled fire to end the calm of morning.

François for the moment stopped struggling. It was too late to do anything about Hunter’s Drift. Sick in heart and body at what he knew for certain was happening down below to all those people whom he loved so dearly and to whom he owed so much, too stricken even for tears, he assured Xhabbo he would not do anything foolish. But he had to go and look. Xhabbo’s grip relaxed and he nodded his agreement.

Then the two of them together, very carefully, raised themselves to look over the boulder behind which they had been lying. The light was good enough for them to see that the vast clearing around the homestead was filled with men in uniform, obviously well-trained and disciplined, surrounding the kraals, gardens and homestead in organized platoons. They were directing their volley of automatic rifle fire into the buildings and kraals and apparently at whatever and whoever might be coming out of them.

There was indeed nothing François could do to help, although if alone he might perhaps have been driven by the extremity of the tragedy and outrage in him to rush down the hill and shoot until he had no ammunition left. But the thought of Nonnie and Xhabbo stopped him.

He looked at Nonnie and found that she too was looking over the boulder, her head close beside him, her face white and tense and her eyes full of horror. She turned to François. ‘Oh Coiske, what’s happening? What can we do?’

To his astonishment and intense admiration there were no tears in her eyes as she spoke, only horror and anger, naked and unafraid, over the cause of the horror. He was about to reply when he became aware of someone crawling up behind them. Alarmed, he looked quickly over his shoulder and found himself staring into a beautiful Bushman girl face, all the more poignant because the eyes were so young.

He heard Xhabbo explain: ‘Nuin-Tara. She is utterly my woman.’

François, boorish with haste, greeted her abruptly and found himself saying urgently, ‘Xhabbo, it may not be possible to go down into the clearing and do anything against those men shooting my people. But here, from the hill, we have bushes and trees enough for cover to enable us to go to the aid of the man whose shout we heard down by the lion-trap.’

‘But that too was only the shout of a kaffir!’ Xhabbo objected, amazed.

François did not need to forgive Xhabbo the remark, because how could Xhabbo possibly have known the facts? He just answered sadly, ‘It may have been a call from what you call a kaffir, Xhabbo. But for me it was a call from a man who ever since I can remember was a father, brother, friend and sometimes even a mother to me…While there is a chance that I can help, I must go. There is a great tapping inside me, Xhabbo, which you yourself would tell me it would be foolish to ignore. It says. Foot of the Day, you must go to him.’

François finished. Suddenly he remembered the moment when he had heard Mopani’s quiet voice beside him, ‘You take him, Cousin’, and he had had to shoot Uprooter-of-Great-Trees. Indeed, just for a second the image of that other morning was bright in his mind. All that was happening around them suddenly became another Uprooter-of-Great-Trees, mad on marula spirit, which perhaps only he could take.

Xhabbo protested no more. He merely said: ‘Foot of the Day, if you go, Xhabbo goes. All Xhabbo asks is that this your woman goes immediately with Nuin-Tara to Mantis’s cave and waits there, not to come out again, but to wait and wait until we come back, if ever we come back.’

As far as Nonnie was concerned, this corresponded with François’s own deepest wishes. However much Nonnie pleaded he ordered her with authority to go with Nuin-Tara. So with Nuin-Tara not uttering a word of protest but setting the example, Nonnie was compelled to crouch low, and follow her to Mantis’s cave which happily was near at hand. Deeply afraid that this might be the last time she would see François alive, Nonnie looked back just before she went down to crawl through the narrow entrance to the cave, but François had vanished.

He and Xhabbo, with Hintza in front, were already some way down the hill making their way carefully under cover of the brush to where !#grave;Bamuthi’s ‘To me!’ had thundered out.

There was no longer any regular automatic fire to be heard from the homestead and kraals, but every now and then a single shot would still thud in their ears, as if the attackers were inspecting their field of battle and finishing off the wounded who were not killed outright in the main attack.

Except for those odd sounds of distant rifle fire, the silence in the bush was complete as if all that had lived and made their homes there over the long millennia were overcome with horror and lost. The voices which would have filled the blue and delicate silver of any other autumn morning with music were silent. So great a silence made it all the more imperative that none of them should make a sound because any noise, however small, just then, could easily bring disaster.

Fortunately, young as they were, Xhabbo and François were old and rich in the experience of going noiselessly and unseen through the bush. They came, without being heard or seen, to that great ledge close by the track where François had hidden the sorely wounded Xhabbo eighteen months before. Xhabbo recognized the place instantly and his archaic face, just briefly, was illuminated with a glimmer of a smile, as a sign to François of how vivid still was his gratitude to what François had done for him that day.

François immediately responded, moved as people are when the nearness of death banishes all that is false and illusory. He put his hand on Xhabbo’s shoulder and was amazed how all differences and distance from another person, physically, culturally and in every rational way so removed from him, indeed how even all his own inner ‘otherness’ was abolished by that touch. It was as if they were not two but one in the same skin. He would have lingered, perhaps, to draw on such a feeling of togetherness to add to his courage for the way into the world of fear and death ahead of them, had not Hintza suddenly uttered a sharp warning. He was standing still, the hair on his magnetic ridge erect, nose and tail aligned in the direction of the lion-trap.

Xhabbo and François both stared at where Hintza was pointing but saw nothing. At a sign from Xhabbo they both went down flat on their stomachs. Hintza following their example, they all three slowly wriggled silently forward until François saw, through the bush immediately ahead of him, what looked like an extremely blotchy piece of jungle-green linen. He crawled closer. In a minute he found himself looking at a dead African in camouflaged uniform, lying on his back, an enormous jagged wound over his heart where the blood had barely congealed, and the latest automatic rifle with a short little modern bayonet fixed to it, resting on top of a bush beside him. The wound that had killed the man, he was certain then, had been inflicted by !#grave;Bamuthi. Far from being horrified at the sight of the dead man, a bright light of a strange joy flared fiercely in the darkness within him. ‘Oh, pray God you killed them all before they could kill you, Old Father.’

Xhabbo must have reached a similar conclusion because already he and Hintza were wriggling on beyond. Some five yards away they found another dead man. He was stabbed between the shoulders as if surprised by !#grave;Bamuthi from behind and beyond this body they came at last to the lion-trap. There, another dead uniformed African lay, held firmly in the trap by the leg as Xhabbo had been.