THE IRREGULARS LEFT Gatestown in a ragged column with scouts riding ahead. They ascended a long hill to the tableland and in the late morning they gained the rimlands and saw before them sun-struck valleys and grassy plains dotted with mimosa and thorny succulents. There were rocky outcrops containing forested gorges and behind them the mountains, rank on rank, vast and austere.
On the day following they entered a rocky pass winding up through stony hills that sang with the voltaic hum of insects. At the tail of a valley they proceeded between a wall of rock and a vertiginous ravine. The path owned holes as deep as horse ponds and rocks the size of the arms chests strapped to the wagons. Spoked wheels crunched and squealed over the bones and dried skins of oxen and horses slaughtered in ambush. Gorged vultures lumbered into the air and hauled themselves towards the crags from which the spears and gunfire had come down. Three large apes occupied these outposts now. They sat back on their haunches and conversed among themselves with furrowed brows. A female delved in another’s fur and removed a blood-gorged tick and ate it and looked down at the activity below with an expression as thoughtful as a vintner’s assessing the product of an auspicious year.
The column descended from the pass by a steep rough road and passed through sandy country scattered with thorny bush. They came to a place where the road turned left towards Fort Cox and they took the right fork to Fort Adams and arrived at last at a lonely quadrangular fortification close to a ford of the Little Fat River and they encamped on the opposite bank.
That night the kid and Evans sat separate at a small fire and chewed on black biscuit while beef charred on the coals. Evans turned the meat with his reaping hook and then commenced to file and polish the weapon and examine its glint in the light of the flames. The kid stared into the coals and saw there flickering and shifting the enactment of ambuscade and slaughter and other prophecies for which there are no words.
On the day following their road ran along the foot of a gaunt black cliff, its summits fringed with overhanging trees and scarlet geranium and red aloe blossoms like spearheads glowing from the forge. The kid looked up and saw standing heraldic against the blue an antelope as large as a dragoon’s stallion, taut and crowned with spiral horns that augured the void and then a whip cracked in the column. When the kid looked up again the sky was empty save for high black filaments, floating scavengers that rode on updrafts a mile above.
He marched with Evans and the joiner and the men fell to talking about how they came there. Evans was reticent about his provenance.
What happened to your ear?
Blackpool.
The kid stared at Evans for a moment but Evans said no more and the kid looked at the joiner.
You?
Needed the money. What’s your problem?
The kid said he had been a mate’s servant and the mate had difficulties with the skipper and the skipper left the Cape without them. The kid had been in need of forage when Happy Jack rolled past fed and fuelled and offering employment.
Happy Jack, said Evans.
They marched in silence for a time and watched how the dust rose and fell about the feet of the men before.
Evans looked at the joiner.
These heathens.
What about them?
They fight with spears.
Some of them.
The joiner eased the hard leather strap of his rifle upon his shoulder.
Old Thunder says they have a choice. Obey the law, or go live other side the Big Fat.
What law?
Our law.
Who’s Old Thunder?
The General.
The kid pondered. Where’s the Big Fat?
The joiner pointed to the east.
They left the cliff behind them and commenced to ascend a long steep winding road littered with the bones and carcasses of horses and bullocks. Their own animals groaned and staggered and they took the wagons up in two portions with double teams on each. The Hottentot drivers put aside their whips and brought out six-foot lengths of hide as thick as a man’s wrist at the handle and when these failed they took the tails of the oxen in their hands and sank their teeth into them and then they bent them until they broke. When the irregulars gained the summit there were twenty further carcasses left behind for the jackals and the wolves and the circling scavengers above.
They passed along the edge of a ravine guarded by sentinel euphorbias and they marched down a dusty track through clumps of spekboom. In the north were plains of red sand and bush-covered hills. The mountains stood footed in their plates and mantled in folds of blue. Beyond the peaks were unseen grasslands where snow falls sometimes and beyond them in turn plains so vast that a man can stop for three days and watch a herd of antelope pass continuous before his wondering eyes like a tide.
On the day following the irregulars rose late and proceeded by the side of the stream. In the mid-morning they came to the foot of a short steep hill and the Hottentot drivers in the rear began to make preparations for breakfast. They kindled fires and pounded coffee and rummaged in their bags for pieces of raw meat. The blackened lumps of flesh emerged studded with copper caps and dusted with crumbs of powdered biscuit. The foremost wagons were yoked once more with double teams and before they topped the hill the drivers below had devoured their charred meal and extinguished their fires and wiped their clasp knives clean of grease and ash in the sparse coils of their hair.
They marched on at a good pace and passed a military settlement burnt and looted and derelict. At the ford of a small brook a wagon broke down and the irregulars unloaded it and carried its contents to the far side and then they spoked the wagon, inch by inch, across the drift while the joiner and the driver chose a small straight tree and chopped it down and fashioned a new shaft to connect the front axle to the yokes once more.
In the heat of the afternoon they gained the summit of a low hill and saw Fort Adams below them; a dusty excuse for a citadel lying on the flatlands by the side of the upper reaches of the Nameless River. In its centre was a cluster of battered white houses and next to these a group of domed Fingo huts. The outpost was all enclosed by picketing and low mud walls mounting a few guns and old musquetoons and the sun struck the dwellings fiercely so that they shimmered.
As the column descended they were met by a party of mounted officers and soon after a carnival of naked Hottentots and Bastaards who sang and danced as they accompanied the irregulars through the gates.
The oxen were unyoked and watered and tents were pitched and the Captain and the God-struck Lieutenant were shown to their rooms which owned uneven floors of dried cow dung and rough walls of wattle-and-daub below smoke-blackened rafters and sooty thatch. When the Captain’s trunk was brought in he took from it a Dollond telescope and went to stand in the crooked doorway and trained it on the mountains to the north. He stood there for some time and then he handed the telescope to the Lieutenant.
I have seen the indifference of the Kabyles in the Atlas mountains, he said. But here we have a poorly armed throng of savages parading themselves within six miles of a garrison of the British Empire.
That night the kid shared a tent with Evans and the joiner and ten others. Evans groaned in his sleep and muttered of the lash and Norfolk Island and in the morning they woke to Herrid’s shouts and dressed and began to assemble for Sunday service. Before communion with God could commence there were shouts from the Fingo levies.
Several hundred naked men were struggling like demons in a cloud of dust. They wielded short knobbed sticks with which they struck each other blows to the head that reported like rifle shots and removed tufts of hair and skin so that blood flowed freely. A party of disputants, fearing themselves outmanoeuvred, took up their stabbing spears and entered the throng in a tight unit slashing left and right.
The Commandant ordered a field gun to be loaded with grapeshot and swung round to bear on the men but Johnny Fingo poured a palmful of black powder into the bore of an ancient musket and seated a ball above it. He placed the butt of the weapon on a hitching post and fired off a blast which echoed across the hills and the mountains and stilled the disputing warriors. They were tall men and well made and they stood silent and pale with dust and streaks of bright blood flowed down their faces. They looked like a demon horde, vigorous and powerful and struck dumb by a miracle.