Death on a Pale Horse (2 page)

Chelmsford's reconnaissance raised a slow wake of dust in its progress to the farther hills. The camp had now lost its commander and most of its mounted troops for the rest of the day. Its position would be held until dusk by the general's subordinate, Colonel Henry Pulleine, and his 24th Regiment of Foot.

The climbing sun burnt off the remaining drifts of morning mist. From its eastern ravine, the hunter heard that strange bee-like humming ebb and die, as if at the approach of the cavalry patrol.

With talons folded in its warm plumage, the observer's quiet companion swooped and soared again. It hovered low above an isolated hill that stood in the centre of the plain between the eastern ridge and the camp at the foot of Isandhlwana. This splendid bird showed no fear of the man. A body lying prone in the tall grass of the slope could do it no harm.

Avoiding the sun's reflection on the lenses of his field-glasses, the observer raised himself to inspect more fully the camp across the plain. He felt the dry flesh shrink on his face and the skin burn red on the points of his cheek-bones, under a ragged beard. The water-bottle beside him had been dry since the previous dusk, but he opened it from time to time and sucked at the cooler air of its interior, a substitute for water itself.

Then, stiff and ungainly, he stood up. It mattered nothing if they saw him now. With dawn and daylight, the time for suspicion was past. Twenty yards away, the dappled mare arched her neck and got slowly to her feet from the flattened grass. Everything was in place for the event that must follow, though the drama was not yet of his making. The period of his allotted patrol as a Natal Volunteer was not quite over, but he could move freely until the time came for his withdrawal through the camp itself. He had an hour in hand as he led the mare in an eastern semicircle to the near side of the ravine. There was silence now on all sides. By night, the perimeter guards were alert for a footfall or the brushing of grass. In the safety of daylight, no one below would pay him the least attention.

He worked his way carefully along the plateau until he could see the approach to the isolated Conical Kopje from east as well as west. Then, as he drew closer to the ravine, he heard again that strange, unaccountable buzzing. The mobilisation of a nation of bees. But still there was no movement to be seen on the plain below, nor on the ridges about him.

As he ambled to the east along the plateau, with the lazy progress of a Volunteer, his stony path ended presently at the sharp edge of the ravine, dropping five hundred feet to the level of the foothills. He walked the horse to the lip of this chasm. The sound of the hive grew louder until he stood behind chest-high scrub, where the ground sloped rapidly down. He looked through a gap in the branches into this narrow gorge and saw what he had known he was going to see.

A less-experienced observer might have thought that the sun and shade had played a trick upon his eyes. Where stretches of withered grass should have clothed the limestone slopes on either side of this declivity, the entire face of the ravine for a mile or more was dark and smooth, hung here and there with oval shields of animal hide. At several points, the sun caught polished metal. The humming that had echoed in the warmer air grew louder and more insistent. It was the warning of an army disturbed, of its warriors waking to the dawn of battle.

A stranger might have stood in admiration, for the carpet that covered the sides of the ravine was living and human. The massed battalions of a great Zulu battle force, perhaps ten thousand strong, lay or crouched in the concealment of this rift in the hills. Such was the flower of Cetewayo's tribes, young men who had yet to earn the prize of a woman by dipping their spears in the blood of an enemy.

He stepped back cautiously for better concealment. Here and there the first ranks were rising slowly, stiff from rest but impatient for combat. Isandhlwana was to be the arena of the young men's initiation. The washing of the spears. All their lives had been lived for this day.

Despite his own preparations and the care of his planning, a sudden fear at the sight of such numbers stung him like the shock of an icy plunge. But the lore of nature had taught him that there is no enduring courage without fear and its conquest. As he mounted the dappled horse, a last low-pitched humming was lost in the rustling of grass. The mighty army crouched together and quietly murmured its battle-cry.

“u-Suthu! u-Suthu!”

Putting spurs to the grey mare, its rider came jauntily down the slope like a returning scout, recrossed the plain, and passed through the outer picket-line into the 24th Foot's quiet camp. No one barred his way. It was enough that he wore the dark serge patrol-jacket and cord breeches of the Volunteers, a wide-awake hat, broad-brimmed with a silk band. No Volunteer would choose to ride the veldt by darkness. Where else could a man in such clothes come from but a night patrol? The picket captain had checked the horsemen of a patrol out from the camp before dusk. Many a rider now passed through the forward line of the 24th Regiment of Foot with less notice taken of him than if he had been a stray dog from a deserted kraal.

For a moment more, the plain was silent. The first chant from the tribes had been too deep in the ravine to carry this far. The returning horseman dismounted, walked his horse past the headquarters tents, and tethered the mare to its rail. So far as the smartly uniformed imperial riflemen were concerned, he might not exist. Yet the plan he had proposed to his confederates was now unfolding as effortlessly as a flag in the wind.

He let his loitering footsteps carry him past the tent of Colonel Henry Pulleine of the 24th Foot. Pulleine was the only man with the rank to be camp-commander in Lord Chelmsford's absence. His Natal Volunteers supplementing the regular infantry consisted of mercenaries, freebooters, and bounty-hunters. They were apt to be known for indiscipline and brutality. Their commanders despised a gentleman like Pulleine as instinctively as he deplored them. With a facetious irony, they called themselves “Pulleine's Lambs.”

The flap of the colonel's tent was open by this hour of the morning, revealing his stocky, moustached figure as he turned from a long mirror. He had been standing before it while his batman adjusted the scarlet tunic with its gold-fringed epaulettes. The servant executed a running backward bow and retrieved Henry Pulleine's white pith helmet from its place on a chest of drawers. A sword hilt glittered like new silver as the colonel buckled on his white belt. Equipped for duty, he turned to the opening of the canvas.

Before walking forward, he had picked up several company reports laid on a trestle table by his adjutant. Now he put them down again. A blond giant in the regular scarlet and blue of the 24th Foot, his peaked cap clasped under his arm, had pushed before him.

“Sar' Major Tindal, sir. Permission to report loss of mess equipment, sir!”

“Loss?” Pulleine glanced at him, not understanding. He turned back and looked down at the company commanders' reports on his desk again but appeared to find no explanation there.

The anonymous horseman kept his inconspicuous distance from the conversation. He made a convincing play of piercing a further hole in his belt with an awl from his knapsack, maintaining a frown of concentration. It surprised him that they had noticed their loss already. Not a syllable of the words between the two men escaped him. Pulleine shook his head.

“Very well, sergeant-major. Loss of what?”

Tindal was quiet and confidential. Like many of his regiment, his voice retained the low lilt of his Welsh valley.

“Owain Glyndwr, sir. Missing from the mess-tent, sir.”

“Nonsense. What the devil would anyone want with him?”

As even the Natal Volunteers knew by now, Owain Glyndwr was a piece of regimental mythology, the mummified head of an Abyssinian sharpshooter, brought back as a trophy after the storming of Magdala in 1867. Pickled by the surgeon-major, it had become an object of veneration to younger officers in the boisterous aftermath of regimental guest-nights.

“Not nonsense, sir,” said Tindal quickly. “He's gone. And Dai Morgan do say someone was creeping about last night when Mr. Pope's dogs did bark. Perhaps a native spy was out in the hills, sir.”

Pulleine looked up and scrutinised the sergeant-major a moment longer before replying.

“Sar' Major! Inform Private Morgan and anyone else to whom it may apply that the purpose of this expedition is to repulse a Zulu invasion of the province of Natal. I will not have any officer or batman playing the fool at a time like this. If I hear more of this matter, or if I find that Private Morgan has laid his hands on an unauthorised rum-ration again, he and you will be visited as if by the Wrath of God. Is that plain?”

“Sir,” said Tindal smartly.

“Very well, sar' major. Dismiss!”

Pulleine was still standing in the opening of the tent as the bugles blew “Column Call” and the regimental NCOs prepared to call the names of the men who had fallen in by companies. The colonel shouted across to one of his subalterns.

“Mr. Spencer!”

As he watched them casually, the hunter identified Spencer as the fair-skinned young captain who went everywhere with a pet terrier running at his heels. Spencer now crossed to the colonel's tent and saluted self-consciously, the fair skin colouring a little under the trim line of his ginger moustaches.

“Mr. Spencer, as orderly officer last night, please explain to me this report of the removal of Owain Glyndwr from the guard-tent!”

“Sar' Major Tindal is investigating it, sir. Someone seems to have taken the head from the mess trophy-case in the small hours of this morning.”

“I am aware of that, Mr. Spencer.” Pulleine rested his hand on his sword-hilt in the brightness of the African sun. “Be so good as to find the culprit, put him in close arrest, and bring him to me at defaulters' parade tomorrow morning. Understood?”

Spencer hesitated. Unlike his brother captains, he seemed a diffident young man who took awkwardly to the self-assurance of professional soldiering.

“With respect, sir.”

“Well?” Pulleine released the hilt and adjusted the angle of the scabbard again.

“The men suspect an intruder in the camp last night, near ‘B' Company lines.”

“The devil they do, Mr. Spencer! Then why, in God's name, was something not done at the time?”

“Morgan reported a wide-brimmed hat. Whoever he was, he was close to the wagons and the guard-tents.”

“Mr. Spencer,” said Pulleine softly, “almost every Natal Volunteer wears a patrol-jacket and a wide-awake hat. How could one of them—or more—fail to be in the area? You must do better than that, sir.”

Spencer was not so easily defeated.

“Mr. Pope's men saw something as well.”

“Mr. Pope is now out on picket-guard. You may speak to him when he's relieved. Meantime, let me have no more cock-and-bull stories. This is regimental mischief, you may be sure of that. Find the culprit and put him in detention. I have no doubt that he can be named easily enough.”

Spencer saluted, called his terrier to heel, and marched back to the waiting lines of the parade square.

The hunter's curiosity was satisfied. He promised the world that it had not seen the last of “Owain Glyndwr.” Across the camp ground, bugles finished blowing and the NCOs began to call the names of the men who had fallen in by companies. The sun rose higher in the burning-mirror of the sky, its heat shimmering distantly from the stone ridges that overlooked the plain on all sides.

Presently, a trail of dust drifted from the west, where the Buffalo River marked the frontier dividing Natal from Cetewayo's Zulu Kingdom. Across this rough terrain moved a column of mounted detachments, a further company of infantry, and a rocket-battery with its strange launching-troughs drawn on limber wheels. The scarlet tunic'd foot-soldiers and the monocled cavalry officers in dark blue were preceded by a regimental band playing
Men of Harlech
in march time. The sun fired the silver instruments of the bandsmen, giving this support column of Durnford, the junior colonel, the air of a bank holiday carnival.

Among the horsemen, Durnford was easily picked out by the sleeve of his withered left arm pinned to his tunic. Presently he dismounted on the garrison ground at the centre of the camp and strode across to report his arrival to Pulleine. The patient onlooker waited until he saw Durnford leave Pulleine's tent twenty minutes later, after a delayed breakfast of beef and porter. The horsemen of the column were formed up again for a sweep across the plain from west to east, to root out any forward positions of the tribes in the foothills.

Pulleine had every reason to feel confident. The battalions of the tribes carried no arms beyond their shields of animal skin stretched over light wooden frames and their metal-tipped spears or assegais. Looking about him, the colonel saw a park of British wagons holding half a million rounds of ammunition and enough of the latest quick-firing Martini-Henry rifles to equip two thousand infantry. There was a rocket-battery, and a Royal Artillery battery of seven-pounder guns, as well as the new continuous-firing Gatling guns mounted on limber wheels.

It was the rifles that would stop an attacking formation by a wall of timed-volleys. Even at five or six hundred yards, the aimed and coordinated fire of trained infantry using the Martini-Henry would be lethal to any assault.

Durnford's horsemen were moving leisurely towards the eastern foothills. Now it was the senior man of the Natal Volunteers, Boss Strickland, who grinned and elbowed his way through a cheering mob of his men about the guard-tents. Their clothes were shabby by contrast with the spotless white-and-scarlet of the British regiments, but their self-confidence was at a peak.

The hunter moved aside and remained in earshot by unobtrusive attendance to his tethered mount. He could hear easily enough the loud argument that developed as Strickland entered the colonel's tent. Pulleine had come to defend Natal, but Strickland and his friends had followed him for booty. These mercenaries were anxious to be off the leash and into the villages. Strickland's tone was half a drawl and half a sneer. Pulleine's reply was breathless with exasperation.