THE KID ROSE COLD and stiff in the dawn with a dampness in his groin and the dream lingering. He lay on the hard ground and smelt dew on dust and cold ashes. The morning was dull and misty and the tops of the mountains were hidden in cloud. The joiner found a coal and blew a flame from it and brewed coffee and the men sat drinking. They watched as a heathen woman came with a baby tied to her back and approached the camp. A Fingo guard looked at her and made a comment and another laughed and the woman stepped across the line and walked about searching among the tents and fires. She came to their flames and the men stared at her and she looked at the kid. The kid held her gaze for a long time and then he frowned and looked at the fire.
The woman bent and searched among their ashes finding the gristle the kid spat out the night previous and she blew the ash from it and the child stared with dark quiet eyes from the bed of her back. The woman, bent as she was, started speaking like one who works in a field and speaks to another and she rose and turned away and the kid listened to the rise and fall of her utterance and knew only that her opinion was emphatic.
The heathen were heard shouting on the heights and the Captain approached Johnny Fingo for translation. Johnny Fingo told him they questioned why they were kept on the mountain in the cold. A wagon train carrying the wounded rode out under cavalry escort and then the irregulars received their rations and strapped up their blankets and greatcoats and their sixty rounds of ball cartridge. As the cloud burned off they marched out into the mountains by a steep route which left them parched and dazed on the highlands at midday. They rested and drank and marched on and went down into a valley, a green grassy basin in a wooded amphitheatre. They came upon a heathen village and the Fingos discovered large quantities of grain hidden in cunning granaries beneath the floors of the huts and they plundered it and then they torched the dwellings.
There was a stream nearby and they bivouacked there and the General rode out with a cavalry company and detachments of Fingo and Hottentot levies and the party encountered no enemy and returned at dusk. There were fires lit and Evans was sleeping in the dust with his head on his pack when the kid heard the sound of a distant report and a piece of wood exploded in the fire and a pot of coffee fell slopping over Evans’ shin. Evans leapt to his feet bemused and cursing. The joiner and the kid had not finished laughing when there came another report and a man at a nearby fire roared and clutched his thigh and on examination found in it a lump of metal cut from the leg of a cooking pot. There were flashes on the dark slopes and the reports echoed and the Captain consulted with the General and a party was sent off to drive the heathen out of range. The light had faded in the west and the kid stepped away from the fires and watched. The two flashing straggling lines of intermittent fire climbed towards the sky and each flash was followed by the clap of a musket that rolled and bounced and echoed among the crags like a bastard cousin of thunder.
On the day following they ascended again and stood looking out over the basin of forest and glen and green grassy slopes and a foaming river and they saw the heathen swarming on the site of their night’s bivouac.
They always where you used to be, said Evans. The joiner spat.
The tracks of heathen oxen had been discovered and the irregulars followed them back down into the valley and they were opposed by Hottentot defectors and descended skirmishing through the forest. The defectors retreated before them and they came upon their huts and burned them and then they came upon the cattle, three hundred head, and returned with them up the mountain. They climbed a ridge and crossed a small pass in the foothills and looked down at the plain where the bulk of the force was already bivouacked. They descended, stumbling like zombies, and the Fingos cried out and conversed with the cattle that went before.
They came into the camp and they ate what was given them and they slept and on the day following they marched west along the mountains and climbed the face of an intervening ridge and crossed its summit and saw arrayed on the plain below the white tents of the standing camp which was a day’s march north-east of Fort Adams.
They remained there for three days and the Captain told them that the charge up the mountainside to take the rock fortress had been mentioned in the General’s despatches. On the second day a party arrived from Gatestown with the mail. The officer’s horse and two men had died on the rocky pass and of the six that remained three were wounded.
On the day following they remained in camp and tended their gear and groups of Fingos went out to discover heathen homesteads and burn them. The air was cold and bright and all across the foothills columns of smoke rose up straight and stately like the icons of a forgotten ritual from the time when apes first came to worship fire. Throughout the day the Fingos returned in laughing groups. They came laden with heathen corn and ornaments and apparel finely wrought and arcane toggery. The kid saw the man called Providence dance into the camp in a rich crown of otter skin and cowry shell and bright feathers.
The Fingos were much satisfied with their spoils and that evening they arrayed themselves in the ornaments and insignia of despoiled chieftains and commenced to sing in deep guttural voices. They beat with knobbed sticks on ox-hide shields and sixty men threw off their cloaks and blankets and stepped into the arena with spears aloft and began to dance. They stamped the ground as though the earth itself was a drum and a hundred chests resonated with it. The dancers jerked and bent and leapt and kicked and hung for a moment in the air with one foot high above their heads and then they dropped to drum upon the earth once more. They hissed like serpents and crept with low heads as though stalking an enemy and then they cried out and leapt again and plunged their spears, on which the living blood had only recently dried, into imaginary victims.
A party of elder warriors sat cross-legged in their tent smoking a hookah made from a bullock’s horn. Its downward point was filled with water and a reed stem was let into the side and this was surmounted by a rough stone bowl filled with a species of Indian hemp. The kid sat in the shadows and watched how each man opened his jaws and placed his lips to the mouth of the horn and sucked so that the herb glowed and spat in its bowl and the old men’s eyes glowed in turn and they lifted their heads and blew the peppery aromatic smoke up towards the mountains.