1972 - A Story Like the Wind (68 page)

François was now sure that !#grave;Bamuthi, on his early morning round of the traps, must have come across this group of armed men, probably an advance patrol under orders not to betray the main party behind by any shooting. They had been put in a terrible predicament by getting this man caught in the great trap. While struggling to release him they must have been surprised by !#grave;Bamuthi. Under orders not to shoot, they obviously had tried immediately to attack him with their bayonets and !#grave;Bamuthi, trained and wise in the darkness, would have defended himself so well that he killed the three of them in the process.

The conclusion raised François’s hopes higher still. Oh, what a battle there must have been, he thought, and if only !#grave;Bamuthi could be alive so that, by the side of a fire in another hut in another and greater Hunter’s Drift, he could still tell the tale to the end of his days to other children and grandchildren, as an example of what life can ask of men and what a man’s answer can be.

At that moment of quickening hope, however, Hintza came back from a precautionary reconnaissance of the bush in the vicinity. He was whimpering softly and pitifully and immediately started tugging at François’s slacks. François signed to Xhabbo that they would do well to heed Hintza and to follow without delay.

Some twenty yards on through the bush Hintza brought them to another dead African lying on his back but this time with the shaft of an assegal sticking in his body and standing up straight high above him. The length and nature of the shaft told François immediately that the spear was !#grave;Bamuthi’s beloved
uSimsela-Banta-Bami
. So they had come to witness the washing of He-Who-Digs-For-My-Children at last and all hope died within François because, if that great assegai was left standing there in the dead body of an enemy, it could only mean that it had ‘dug’ for !#grave;Bamuthi’s children for the last time; and that his own dead body could not be far away.

Hintza almost at once took them to !#grave;Bamuthi. He was lying some four yards away just round a curve in the track, with six bullets in his body. That, no doubt, had been the first burst of fire which François had heard from the rim of the hill. It had been also the final testimony to !#grave;Bamuthi’s courage and skill as a warrior because the fourth African, finding himself the only survivor of the patrol, clearly had felt compelled to break his orders and open fire on !#grave;Bamuthi, thus forcing the main attack on the homestead and kraals to begin sooner than planned. Despite the terrible burst of fire into !#grave;Bamuthi’s body, judging by the trail of blood between him and the dead man, his courage and spirit had been so great that he had still managed miraculously to kill his own killer before he died.

Unlike his attackers, moreover, he had died like a man completely at one and at peace with himself, for he was lying there with his eyes shut as if merely asleep, like a black marble statue of Homeric man in Africa, thrown from its pedestal in the bush that was his Athens, to lie there waiting for the reemergence of men of true worth to raise it upright from the dust for the future to mark and observe. François knelt down in the dust beside him. He found himself taking !#grave;Bamuthi’s hand, which felt still warm, and putting it to his lips he remembered with what tenderness !#grave;Bamuthi had looked down on the dead body of Uprooter-of-Great-Trees, and what a black hole the elephant’s going had made in the day. The hole, in that far-off magic lantern morning, diminished to a pin-prick compared to the void facing him now and he murmured, ‘Old Father, beloved Old Father, you were a great lord, and in this dark hour, He-Who-Dug-for-your-Children was your hand. Oh, I thank you for dying for us as you did. I thank you and bless you.’

And then Xhabbo was pulling him by the sleeve and saying, ‘Quick, Foot of the Day! There is someone else out there moaning. Listen, can’t you hear it?’ And François, his eyes blurred with tears, had to allow Xhabbo to lead him by the hand in the direction of the moaning, which he could not even hear because of his pain. Some sixty yards deeper into the bush, they came to a man who was making the moaning.

It was Mtunywa, Messenger, bleeding from several bullet wounds, and in desperate, if not dying, condition. The need for immediate action brought François back to all his practical senses. As he went down on his knees beside Mtunywa, he pulled out the field dressings he always carried in the pockets of his bush jacket, immediately tied them on round the two worst wounds, produced the two handkerchiefs he had on him and used them for two more bad wounds. That left only a fifth on the side of Messenger’s head, fortunately not so serious and one that could be left until François could tear a strip of clothing for dressing it.

The great and immediate need was to get Mtunywa somewhere away from the track because there was no doubt that the men who had organized the patrol would soon have people there to find out what had happened and why their patrol had broken their orders not to open fire.

Asking Xhabbo to take Mtunywa by the legs, François held one hand to the wound in the head to prevent the blood from leaving any marks on the grass, leaves and brush which might betray them. Then with his rifle slung over his shoulder and right arm round Mtunywa’s shoulder, they carried him as fast as they could to the ledge under which Xhabbo had once found shelter. They had barely got him there when they heard sounds of men laughing, shouting and carelessly trampling about the bush as if they owned it, coming towards the lion-trap from the direction of the homestead.

François knew their only chance now of escaping detection was to stop Mtunywa’s pitiful moaning, which was increasing as he got colder with shock and pain. Fortunately François also carried as well as his field dressings, some aureo-mycin and morphia tablets. Quickly he slipped a tablet of morphia and two of aureo-mycin to prevent infection of his wounds between Mtunywa’s lips and put his flask of water to the wounded man’s mouth. Instinctively Mtunywa, parched as the human being becomes from pain, loss of blood and shock, gulped up the water. In less than a minute, the moaning stopped. Suddenly released from pain, Mtunywa opened his eyes. Seeing François crouching beside him in the shelter, he smiled wide with relief as if he were not wounded at all and no longer in danger.

The impression, however, was immediately belied for the smile vanished as he remembered. He clutched François’s hand, murmuring slowly with many a pause and hesitation: ‘Oh, Little Feather, you must go and leave me to die as I must die…They know that you are not dead and somewhere near and alive…They are determined to find you in case you get away to tell others of what has happened here and warn them they are coming…I heard them talking as they left me for dead by the milking sheds. They said all must go out and search to find you. They are the same men we pulled out of the mud with the oxen that day. They know you and they want you dead. Leave me please, Little Feather, and go, go to our other father Mopani before it is too late. All…all in our kraals are dead from the smallest baby to the oldest lady. The Lammie of our house, the Princess of the Pots, the lady of the little mother-to-be of a thousand generations, all, all are dead…even
isi-Vuba
is killed. Ah there was a man! He was shot in the door of your home but even so he killed before he was killed and left us, with all dead except you and me…As for me, my shadow is lengthening for the journey to Amageba and I thank the Ama-tonga for letting me live to see you. For I see you, Little Feather, yes I see you and greet you!’

The Amatonga, of course, were the spirits of his people, and often openly called upon, but that ancient word Amageba was another matter and nearly unmanned François, because it was used only on the gravest of occasions in the Matabele spirit, being their sacred name for the land of their origin, and meaning the place in the far mountains where the evening shadows gather.

Moreover all the time Mtunywa spoke, his speech became slower and the words slurred, and François hoped against hope that he was not dying, but that the morphia was taking increasing effect. Soon, indeed, he appeared to fall into a deep sleep. It was just as well, because the careless talking and laughing of the men crashing through the bush had stopped. There was a long silence before one great cry of horror and anger after the other, broke from them, as they found first one dead African companion and then the other three. Their rage was so great that when they came across the body of !#grave;Bamuthi, they expressed it by firing burst after burst of bullets into his body as if they thought themselves capable of improving on death.

That done, they scattered and could be heard running up and down the track, crashing through the bush all round them, as if they did not believe !#grave;Bamuthi alone could have inflicted so much killing, and must have helpers near at hand. At one moment they came within three yards of the ledge, so close that François had to put a hand over Hintza’s mouth and nose, afraid that the snarl forming on his lips might turn into a fatal growl. Then he took his gun in his right hand ready to shoot.

But in time the men went away. Once more there was complete silence in the bush, for so long that François seriously considered whether he and Xhabbo should not take the unconscious Mtunywa, however difficult, stage by stage under cover of the bush up to the shelter of Mantis’s cave. But Xhabbo would not hear of it. François had never known him so firm. He just said that he had a tapping that told him that the men were searching everywhere and that they had to stay where they were until the evening.

Xhabbo’s wisdom and the veracity of his tapping were soon made manifest. For it was not long before they heard the sound of many men returning. This time happily they came not to search but to bury their dead. When they came to the lion-trap Franpois plainly heard the sounds of picks and shovels digging. The digging went on until the early hours of the afternoon when it stopped, to be followed soon after by the sound of earth being shovelled back to cover in the graves they had dug.

It was not, François estimated, until nearly four in the afternoon that the burial party at last withdrew. Once the burying was over, they obviously relaxed in the shade of that great wild fig tree in order to eat the food they had brought. When they had gone, François was on the point of suggesting that they could perhaps risk taking Mtunywa with them up the hill, when he felt Mtunywa’s hand, which he had been holding all the time in his own and stroking for comfort as he had stroked Hintza when still a bewildered puppy, stiffen. He looked down and Mtunywa, too, was dead, carrying perhaps as his last act and deed as a messenger, a report to the Amatonga of the apparent triumph of evil over goodness and courage, their especial gift to man, despite the exertions of their servant !#grave;Bamuthi.

He looked at Xhabbo and whispered, ‘He’s dead.’

Xhabbo did not answer in words. Instead he put out his right hand and hooked its little finger round François’s own, the Bushman act of expressing a feeling of oneness with another. And through this contact, more than any words could possibly have conveyed, there flowed into François a stream of strength and understanding, coming not only from Xhabbo but through him from hundreds and thousands of others who, in long centuries of their remorseless history had been hunted down first in the far north, then on in the south, generation after generation had been pursued and slaughtered by more powerful men, until now only a tiny fragment remained in that desert towards which the sun was sinking.

The strength was all the purer because, despite that inexorable succession of killing, they had never lost their love of life, nor the will to live, nor the capacity to love even those others coming, like François, from a breed of men who had joined in their persecution. If there were in life a specialist in knowing precisely what the tragedy which had just been inflicted on François and Nonnie meant, none could have been greater than Xhabbo. Feeling this, François was freed as much as one caught up in such a torrent of horror and tragedy could be, to think of Nonnie. He wanted to go to her at once in the cave but again Xhabbo refused. He insisted that they wait there until the sun was about to touch the trees. Even then he led the way up the hill with as great a care as they had come in the morning.

How wise he was in this was proved when near the rim of the cliff on which they had sheltered in the morning, there suddenly emerged on the skyline almost larger than life in the glass of evening, the dark silhouettes of men with rifles and fixed bayonets on their shoulders, going vigilantly towards Hunter’s Drift. For a moment François feared he would see Nonnie and Nuin-Tara prisoner in the midst of the men, since they were coming from the direction of the cave. But they were just another platoon which had obviously been searching far and wide in the bush for him, and returning, unsuccessful, to their base. He and Xhabbo and Hintza waited, hidden in the brush long after the men had vanished. The sun was about to go below the horizon before they went om to arrive safely at the entrance to Mantis’s cave. As they arrived the sun vanished and left a vast fire, flickering, flaming and turning the dust of the desert that was Xhabbo’s home and which filled the sky, into sparks soaring into the darkening blue.

Xhabbo was about to go down on his knees to crawl through the entrance when Nuin-Tara emerged. François knew enough of Bushman eyes by now to see the acute relief which came to her. But that was all that he could measure it by, because she made no sound and merely went up to Xhabbo, dignified with her certainty that words were unnecessary and all that needed doing was for her to take his hand in hers and hold it.

She was followed by Nonnie who, the moment she saw François, ran to him and threw her arms round him, not saying anything but crying with relief as if she would never be able to stop. Finally she managed to blurt out, ‘You see, I was sure you were killed as well when we heard the shooting below…Thank God you’ve come…Oh Coiske, Coiske, you’ve come, that’s all that matters. You’ve come and I don’t care what happens now. But what are we going to do?’