Hervey 08 - Company Of Spears (33 page)

‘Stop! Damn you!’ shouted Fairbrother, drawing his pistol.

They neither heard nor cared.

Fairbrother sent a ball after them, but it only hastened the flight. ‘Bastard coward-Kaffirs!’ he spat.

Two spears struck the held horses. They squealed and reared. Two Xhosa, hair reddened, wide-eyed and naked but for civet aprons, rushed at them whooping wildly, clutching broken-shaft spears like short swords. Hervey sprang up and drew his sabre; Wainwright stood square to parry. But Fairbrother spurred forward, just getting in front of the dismounted pair as the Xhosa closed. He swung his mare’s quarters left into them, drawing his sabre as he did so, gaining the crucial moment’s surprise and getting in a nearside cut, almost severing an arm at the elbow before either of them could strike.

The second Xhosa thrust the spear-sword at Fairbrother’s thigh. It hit the cheroot case in his pocket and glanced off into the thick leather of the saddle arch. The Xhosa’s eyes rolled with sudden horror as Fairbrother brought the handguard of his sabre down hard into the man’s face, splitting open his nose like a ripe fruit. As the Xhosa crumpled clutching his bloody flesh, Fairbrother drove the point of his sabre deep behind the clavicle, then drew his second pistol and fired a following shot at the other man. The ball struck between the shoulders, and he fell writhing – then twitching; then still.

Fairbrother sheathed his sabre and took out his little Collier revolver. But he had no target. The Xhosa were gone as fast as they’d come.

Corporal Wainwright, hacking furiously at the thorn, shouted suddenly. ‘Here! And alive, sir!’ He pulled the terrified man from cover, and saw the hole in his shoulder.

Johnson had had to dismount to get the led horses in hand. He was struggling still, though one of them, the spearhead deep in its belly, was weakening.

Hervey saw that the pandour lay lifeless, so he closed to the wounded Xhosa instead. The ball had struck in the same place as the Burman ball had struck
him,
three years before. But there would be no surgeon of Mr Ritchie’s vulnerary skill to save this man’s arm; not unless they could get him to Graham’s Town, which they could not do inside of twenty-four hours – even by way of Trompetter’s Drift and with no Xhosa to trouble them. Not unless they rode through the night; even supposing they could find their way by moonlight.

Fairbrother had already calculated the odds, and the time and the distance. ‘We must back-track for Trompetter’s Drift at once,’ he began, calmly but insistently. ‘We might make a couple of leagues before nightfall, and every mile we get nearer the post is another mile further from the Xhosa, except we can’t be certain they won’t follow. We might run into the patrol, too.’ He looked hard at their captive as Wainwright dressed the wound.

‘We can’t leave him, I think,’ said Hervey.

‘Would you leave the pandour if he weren’t dead?’

‘No, indeed: not in a red coat!’

‘And an enemy of that red coat?’

‘A
wounded
enemy, Fairbrother. I would not chance him to the wild things here. Are you trying me?’

Fairbrother smiled grimly. ‘I am.’

And Hervey thought he knew why. Did Fairbrother imagine he might somehow think the worth of a man’s life, the effort to be expended in its preservation, was in some measure dependent on the shade of his skin? That the white – the grubby white – of a British soldier entitled him to the greater effort, more than any half-caste, and infinitely more than an ebony-coloured savage, who was so far removed from the decencies of good society as to be little more than an animal, to be killed to prevent its predation? ‘I believe you are more a soldier than you will admit. You are content to shoot a pandour in a red coat – in the back – and yet I surmise that a stricken enemy engages every last sentiment.’

‘It is not possible to shoot a fleeing man anywhere but in the back, Hervey.’ ‘

I know that!’

‘And by what right do we expect quarter, and aid, when we are fallen if we do not treat with an enemy, however base, in the same way?’

‘You push at an open door.’

Fairbrother sighed. ‘I wanted only to be sure. It has not always been the way on the frontier.’

Hervey could believe it. It had not always been the way anywhere. He looked about him: a dead redcoat, two dying horses, two pandours fled: not circumstances to be proud of. An ambush, not much less; an affair of bad scouting (or at least
superior
scouting on the part of the Xhosa). This was no adornment to his reputation. But much more than that, it was notice that they themselves might yet end as vulture-meat in a tract of country that could no longer boast the King’s peace. He was not afraid, however. That sort of fear did not trouble him (he would stand his ground abler than any man who might challenge him hereabouts). Rather was he suddenly aware of how much he had taken for granted – that the Xhosa, whose reputation was hardly fearsome after all, were not as the Burmans or Maharatas, the Pindarees or the Jhauts. Neither was this country desert or tropical forest, nor like anything he had seen in the Peninsula or in France, or Canada. He knew he had been worsted. Courage and address on Wainwright’s and Fairbrother’s part had saved the day. And he was already drawing his conclusions. He had proceeded to the frontier in pursuit of the reiving party as if he had been commanding a troop of His Majesty’s Cavalry of the Line. It would not serve.

XVIII

THE SUN NEVER SETS WITH OUT FRESH NEWS

Later

An hour of straining every muscle and of bending every sense to the detecting of concealed Xhosa induced a feeling of exhaustion quite unlike any Hervey could remember. Although reason told him that every mile meant greater safety, in his water he could not quite feel it. Only when the scrub began to thin – both in thickness of the thorn and its occurrence – did he begin to feel the advantage shifting back in his direction. He had been in closer country – the Burman jungle, the Canadian forest – but he had never before supposed that the country gave the natural advantage to his opponent. The Burmans had known their jungle, and the Iroquois their forest, but Hervey had been certain it was possible to match them; here, in this strange mix of country, he half believed the Xhosa had some magic by which they transported themselves. How else had they covered the ground so quickly, and taken them unawares at the Gwalana’s head?

The wounded Xhosa had soon lost consciousness, and a fever now burned. Fairbrother had tried at first to question him, and to dull his pain and loosen his tongue with brandy; but he had learned nothing. Neither had they met the patrol from Trompetter’s Drift (it was not surprising: their charge, as Hervey himself had given it, was to scout the
east
bank of the river), nor even one of the routine patrols from Fort Willshire. Were the patrols diverted north, dealing with an irruption into the old Dutch areas?

The party’s one piece of fortune was that the pan-dours had returned to duty. Fairbrother had found them crouching in the scrub a mile or so from the Gwalana’s head, frightened, confused, only too pleased to see authority again and willing to submit to any punishment. Hervey had berated them in English – which they partially understood (and his manner had left no doubt) – and then Fairbrother had berated them in their own language, calling down every ancestral curse he could recall, shaming them to the point that they looked broken men.

‘Don’t let them fool you,’ he said, when at length Hervey dismissed them with but a day’s stoppage of pay. ‘They’re contrite now, but they’d run again as soon as look at you. We neither pay ‘em enough nor treat them as men, half the time. That and the Hottentot’s natural disinclination to soldiery. You have your martial races in India, do you not? Well, Hervey, these Hottentots ain’t no martial race.’

For the time being, however, the pandours worked willingly cutting thorn bushes, gathering wood, chivvied by Johnson, encouraged by Wainwright. There was perhaps an hour’s daylight left when they halted for the night – another league between them and the Xhosa, another league nearer the post at Trompetter’s Drift.
If
they had been capable of it. The horses were done, needing water and rest; they had led them for at least half the way. They themselves were footsore and just as weary. Half their kit and provisions they had abandoned (two horses destroyed and the priority to powder and cartridges). But they could not be certain that they
were
putting any distance between them and the Xhosa. Fairbrother had said he could not imagine why they would follow, but then, he had been first to admit his surprise that a Xhosa should carry a musket. Hervey had been sure they needed time to prepare for the night, to meet the Xhosa on ground of his choosing, properly disposed, ready. It was what he would have done with the Sixth in any rearguard, and he would do the same with a troop of mounted riflemen too. Thus far the prudence of the Peninsula applied as well in Africa.

When he had done all that he could for the security of the party – thorn bushes across the approaches to the bivouac, just out of spear-throwing distance, fires laid at the four points of the compass, with powder trails to each, and every man told off to an alarm post – Hervey spoke quietly to his coverman. ‘Rather a scrape, I’m afraid, Corporal Wainwright.’

‘Ay, sir.’

‘One of us must be awake at all times – you or I.’

‘Ay, sir.’

‘The pandours will stand sentry at the thorn in turn, but one or other of us will have to see they keep post.’

Corporal Wainwright nodded. He understood perfectly well. Johnson was probably as capable, but he did not have the rank, and it would be unfair. And Captain Fairbrother, for all that he had fought with as much nerve as he had ever seen, was not
regiment.
‘Sir.’

‘It will be dark in half an hour. Captain Fairbrother says the Xhosa don’t as a rule attack during the night unless they’re sure of their advantage, but I wouldn’t rule out an attack at last light, perhaps to rattle us, and then a full-blown affair at dawn. So we may hear them all night, keeping us from sleep, or else they’ll use the dark to creep into position for the dawn. Either way, not a happy prospect.’

‘We’ll be right, sir.’

Hervey smiled to himself. This was not bravado, just the proper confidence of a non-commissioned officer who had learned his trade in a dozen different scrapes. ‘I would have wished those pandours had a faithful taste for scouting, that’s all. We should have a better notion of whether we’d been followed.’

‘Maybe, sir; but not certain. We’re doing only what we’d be doing anyway.’

Hervey nodded. Wainwright spoke the truth. There could never be a time to take the night’s ease for granted.

‘Do we break camp
before
first light if we hear nothing in the night, sir?’

It was the usual practice, so long as the enemy could not get wind of the move: not an easy thing to manage even with some distance between the lines, so to speak. Here, where the Xhosa might rush in from no further than the spear’s flight, and with the moon set, it would be the very devil of a fight. No, Hervey’s instinct was to let the dawn come, when they would then have the advantage of their firearms. He shook his head. ‘We’ll stand to as if defending our position, Corporal Wainwright.’ And then, fearing he had exposed his own doubts too much, he half smiled. ‘It’s of no matter. I do not count the Xhosa especially brave. Had they pressed a little more determinedly we should have been caught, I think. There cannot have been but the three of them.’

‘I reckoned so too, sir. But I think as I should do the scouting in the morning. If they gets behind us tonight then I don’t think the pandours’ll be right. I mightn’t know the country as well as them, but I’d do a better job if it comes to another fight.’

Hervey put a hand to Wainwright’s shoulder. ‘I don’t doubt it – than both of them combined. Very well. And you’ll take the first watch, until midnight?’

‘Sir.’

‘Good man.’ Hervey turned; but then he had second thoughts. ‘We’ve come a long way since that morning on Warminster Common, have we not, Corporal Wainwright?’

‘Sir.’ Wainwright smiled ruefully. ‘And not yet five and twenty.’

Hervey had not considered it. ‘Indeed?’

‘Tomorrow, sir.’

‘The strangest thing!’

‘There’s not been too many birthdays since the Common when I haven’t heard a shot, sir.’

‘The devil!’

‘But I reckon it must be the same with you, sir.’

Hervey knew it, but he doubted he had ever been in such position: no notion of where or how many the enemy, and so little with which to defend himself – and his reputation. He smiled back, dutifully. ‘What should we do with peace, eh, Corporal Wainwright?’

‘Ay, sir,’ replied his coverman, just as dutifully.

Hervey nodded, fixing him with a look that said everything that would not be permitted in words, and then turned and stepped sharply to where Johnson was crouching by the pack saddles.

Johnson stood and held out a mess of tea. ‘Just mashed.’

Hervey took it, again with but a nod. It had been more times than either of them could count: Johnson’s ability to make tea in the most unpromising conditions seemed rarely short of miraculous. There had been tea before dawn on the morning of Waterloo, when the rain had lashed down all night (Hervey reckoned there could have been few general officers so favoured), and Johnson had since perfected what he called his ‘patent storm kettle’, first fashioned ten years ago in an Indian bazaar. It was rather easier now to get a flame, though: no need of flint and tinder-box with Mr Walker’s new sulphur friction matches.