Hervey 10 - Warrior (39 page)

How many? They were still too distant to tell. Before Umtata there had been dust, a sure sign of numbers and speed, but it was not the season. How far? The plain was featureless, and this light so strong . . . two miles, three perhaps?

When first he had seen Matiwane's
impi
before Umtata, his blood had run cold. Yes, there had been many, many more of them than could be following them now, but at Umtata he had sat before his troop of dragoons and a whole company of rifles. If there were only a dozen – half a dozen – Zulu yonder, then his situation was even more perilous than then.

He had but an hour before they would find the two of them.

He got onto all fours (even two miles away, the Zulu might see him), and retreated into the dead ground which would allow him to steal away unobserved.

And then he froze. Three hundred yards, no more, as if from out of the earth: two scouts, eyes to the ground – following spoor? He dropped to his belly and began crawling for a lone thorn bush ten yards off to his left.

How could he not have seen them? Were there more as close?

What in God's name could he do? If he ran back to the river, where could they hide? If they tried to cross . . . There was no time, even if the possibility.

All he could do was stop these two, and then take a chance of running with Pampata from the rest – upstream. No, down . . .

He could do it. He had pistol and sabre: the blade – and surprise – for the first, and the ball for the second. But if he used the pistol, the rest would at once quicken their pace, and their chance of escape would be even smaller. And he could not be certain of the pistol (there was not time to draw the charge and reload). How he wished for his percussion rifle!

No, he must take both with the sabre. He was fortunate, though: he had a minute or so more to plan his ambuscade.

Nevertheless he opened the pistol's firing pan and blew out the powder, taking a new cartridge and making sure there was dry primer. If the fight were going against him he would have no option but to put a ball in one of them – and take the consequences.

The Zulu were young but wore the red neck feathers of the seasoned warrior. One was scarred heavily about the body. They came on side by side. Pity: it gave him no advantage, for if he attacked from a flank the one would screen the other – though it meant he would not face both at once. He must attack from a flank
and
behind, allowing him freedom to swing his sabre. He could first slice the spear arm of the nearer, gaining precious seconds to despatch the other, before turning back to finish off the first. They carried the short, not the war shield: that would help. All he needed was that they continue on their line, passing the thorn bush the way he expected.

Fifty yards off, they stopped suddenly. They began casting around. He could not think why (he and Pampata had not halted at all). One of them picked up something – so small he could not tell. What had they dropped – a button, a bead?

They looked about, pointed towards the river, exchanged words – a murmur to him, no more – and then resumed their advance, but at a cautious walk. His every muscle tensed; his gut churned like a water wheel (so hard he forgot the pain in his shoulder). They would search the thorn bush, he was certain: it was the only cover between here and the river.

They separated, one to pass either side. What choice had he now but the pistol?

The scarred warrior – the more seasoned of the two? – was coming left of the bush, his spear arm therefore closest.

Hervey took a last, deep breath, then sprang like a cock at set-to.

For all his caution the Zulu turned too late, Hervey's blade cleaving savagely through the flesh of his upper arm and shattering the bone.

He didn't wait to see its effect, turning on his heels to launch at the second while he yet had surprise.

The second, younger, looked afraid, eyes wide, though he still came on.

Hervey drew his pistol.

The Zulu faltered – he knew what a ball did – and Hervey rushed him with the point of the sabre.

He tried to parry with his shield, drawing his spear arm back. But in went the point – four inches, deadly.

Hervey withdrew, turned his wrist and sliced upwards and left to disarm him.

The Zulu dropped his spear and fell to his knees.

Hervey drove his sabre deep into his side to be certain.

It was a thrust too many. The other Zulu, spear now in left hand, was on him like the leopard of the night.

But, left-handed, the spear had neither the force nor the precision of the real warrior's thrust. It pierced the cartridge case not the kidneys. Hervey sidestepped and caught the Zulu without a guard. He drove in his sabre so deep he had to wrench it free. The warrior fell writhing like an eel out of water.

Hervey watched, panting, as blood ran to earth. Both Zulu had taken killing points; there was no need of
coups de grâce.
Yet it was a full minute before they lay still and he could trust to leave them.

What inexpert warriors they had been compared with those at Umtata! And they the scouts, supposedly the best. He need have little fear of the host which followed in their footsteps – if only they were not so many.

He braced himself. There was now, perhaps, but three quarters of an hour before the host would be upon them.

He ran as fast as he could, back to the lala palm where Pampata lay. 'Come,' he shouted, holding out a hand. 'Come, now!'

She rose, not alarmed but uncertain. 'What is it,
mfowethu
?'

'Mbopa!' he gasped, pulling at her arm.

She saw the blood running down his scabbard. 'Where do we go?'

'Across! Across the river!'

He pulled her to the water's edge. He looked at the Thukela's great width, the greatest river of the country of the Zulu (fifty yards across, one hundred, who could tell?), and at its great speed. Was there point, even, in taking off his boots?

And then, like the Children of Israel in the wilderness, their deliverance appeared as if by the hand of God – in the upper part of a fever tree, which bobbed towards them in the slacker water near the bank.

'There!' he cried, pointing.

But Pampata could not see deliverance. She could see only death – and this she was not yet ready to give herself up to.

Hervey saw, and her sudden fearfulness moved him the more. 'Come,
dadewethu,
' he said firmly. 'Trust me.'

She turned to him, trustingly.

He put an arm around her, and together they leapt for the saviour-branch.

They held fast to the sodden branches as the current took them midstream, whence the great cloudy rush of water swept them away from Mbopa's horde, like flotsam in a mill race – though east, away from Ngwadi's kraal.What creatures they shared the river with Hervey gave not a thought to, for the Thukela itself, in its angry flood, was a greater threat to life and limb than any crocodile's jaws.

But no ark of Noah's could have been a surer rescue than the fever tree. As the Thukela began swinging north, the velocity of the flood took the pair back towards the southern bank. Hervey would have been grateful for any landing, but then as suddenly as they had first been swept midstream, the river swung east again, and he and Pampata, like a billiard ball on and then off the cushion, were carried towards the north bank.

Not knowing how deep was the water even at the river's edge, for he could feel nothing beneath his feet, Hervey let go of the tree in faith, and grasped for the root of a lala palm projecting just far enough for him to reach with his left arm at fullest stretch.

The pain in his shoulder – whether by the leopard's claws or the great weight of water – almost made him let go. Pampata, who had not once struggled in their tumble downstream, content to place her life in the arms of this stranger whom she called brother, now saw what she must do, and with a strength that defied explanation pulled herself along his outstretched arm to the tree root. The weight that had pinned him now shed, and his right arm free at last, Hervey was able to hold on with both hands, and together they edged along the root to the bank, until at last they could drag themselves clear of the water – in utter exhaustion.

They lay a good while, side by side, without speaking. Hervey did not even open his eyes. Mbopa's men were a mile and more away; they might have been a hundred. They certainly could not know where he and Pampata were. And the sun's warmth was healing . . .

'
Ukhululekile?
' he asked at length.

He thought he asked if she were 'all right', if she were 'well'. He asked, however, if she were 'comfortable'.

Pampata had lost her cloak, but it was not cold lying on the ground, not in the warmth of the sun and the satisfaction of the escape. '
Ngikhona
. . . I am there,
mfowethu.
'

She said it in a strange way: in a way that spoke of a threshold crossed.

*

Slowly, but very surely, as the afternoon sun replenished them, they sat up and looked about at their unexpected haven. Then, rising to their feet, they surveyed the Thukela, their saviour and (they prayed) now their guardian. They looked towards the country they must enter, a hillier, more broken country than hitherto. And then Pampata turned back to him, and pointed to his scabbard, the blood long washed away, and asked why it had run red.

He told her. And in telling her he felt ill at ease, for he had killed her fellow Zulu, for all that they would have killed both of them.

Pampata, too, seemed distracted. Her arms fell to her sides, and she gazed at him distantly.

He could not meet her gaze. Instead, he took off his tunic and offered it to her.

She thanked him, and said that she had no need, and that she could not wear the mantle of a warrior – that she was unworthy to wear it.

Hervey fumbled with his words, but managed to say that he had met no braver woman.

And in their incomprehension of each other's exact meaning, they resumed their journey, silent.

Two days and two nights they marched, sometimes wearily uphill, sometimes in a jogtrot which was easier than picking up one foot after the other. They encountered few men or boys, and only a handful of women. Even the beasts of the field hid themselves. When they did come across a herdsman, or a woman carrying water, there was no alarm – only curiosity at a woman travelling alone with so strange a thing as a man with a white face. Only once, when curiosity looked as if it might become a challenge, did Pampata have to show the little spear, and its effect was immediate and powerful; she could have possessed no better
laissez-passer.
And all whom they met were generous with what they carried – dried meat, honey, maize cakes, milk – so that both of them were able to journey without the declining strength which Hervey had earlier feared.

They crossed the Umhlatuzi with ease, as Pampata predicted they would. It was but a stream compared with the Thukela, for as she explained, it was not born of uKhahlamba, the barrier of spears. Like the Inonoti, it sprang – or rather, seeped – from the ground, just as blood from the finger at the prick of a thorn.

But although they had maize and meat, Hervey saw that Pampata's gait was becoming uneven. She protested it was not, and would not let him speak of it, but in the afternoon of the third day, as they climbed to the plateau of Esi-Klebeni, Shaka's birthplace, she could no longer conceal her distress, and he grasped her arm, forcing her to halt.

When he knelt and took her feet, he could scarce believe she had been able to walk at all, for there were abrasions of every degree. She hung her head a while, as if despairing, before throwing it back defiantly and saying she would use the medicine of the
inyaga impi,
the war doctor, pointing at the green all about them. 'Here will be
u-joye,
' she said insistently, 'the warrior's relief.'

And so she limped painfully about the slopes of Esi-Klebeni until they found the medicinal shrub, and Hervey picked the dark green leaves which reminded him so much of his boyhood nettling, though they were much larger, and Pampata crushed them to a fine pulp between two stones, and then Hervey smoothed the poulticepulp on the soles of her feet and between her toes, and laid her down so that the medicine could work its power.

She lay for an hour, no more, and during that time Hervey scouted for a mile along the slopes for any distant sign of Mbopa's men. But there was none. When Pampata rose and said she would continue, he told her there was no one following them – not, at least, within range of striking them unawares – and that they might lessen their speed. She bowed, but within half an hour she had resumed the pace of before. Only when a thick mist descended on the plateau did they slow, but it did not prevent their taking many a wrong turn, so that by nightfall he supposed they had made no more than half the true progress their efforts deserved.

Indeed, he was downcast, to a degree that overtook his resolution to think only of what lay ahead. No matter that the dragoons had been under Brereton's orders: they were his dragoons, his troop, Brereton merely having the temporary honour of command. He bore responsibility for their death, if only that he had not taken radical action in his doubts about Brereton's capacity for command. No one would blame him, of course (and certainly not formally); the system was the system. If Brereton was in command, then his was the responsibility. But he could not absolve himself so easily. And in Johnson's case, his was the responsibility alone. Johnson had been under his orders, not Brereton's.