ON THE DAY FOLLOWING the irregulars marched to Fort Adams and encamped on the plain some distance outside the walls. The sun died and rose again and they struck their tents and tramped through the village to the sound of the church bell calling the settlers to service. They halted at noon to rest the oxen near a deserted village. The white wattle-and-daub houses stood charred and derelict and axes and bayonets and spades and kettles lay where the settlers had dropped them. They marched on and encamped within a mile of Fort Cox and on the day following they rumbled past its stone barracks and the Captain admired the staff quarters with their cool verandas and high hedges of prickly pear enclosing green compounds shaded by trees and American aloes.
The sun hung close like a yellow stove and the dust floated up towards it and as they left the town they were followed by shouting groups of Hottentot and Fingo and others stood and watched in silence from their huts.
The kid saw an old grizzled man who leant forward on a carved stick and with him three crones whose wizened breasts hung to their waists. There were two men who wore nothing but a short cloak hung on one shoulder and there were children with stomachs as round as a pregnant woman’s. There were matrons also and young women bare-breasted and the kid looked at them and they stared back at him with dark eyes.
The Captain rode with the God-struck Lieutenant.
They have an incredible posterior development, he said.
The Lieutenant stared at him.
The women. Very developed in the rear.
The Lieutenant held the Captain’s gaze for a long time before he looked away.
They marched on, crossing the upper reaches of the Little Fat River by a stone bridge, and when the sun sat low and red in the west they pitched camp in a grove of mimosa.
They awoke at dawn with heavy rain beating on the patrol tents from low dark clouds and marched on without coffee as all fires had been extinguished by the downpour. They were met by a party of the Cape Corps who brought with them captured cattle and sheep and they drove the stock across the plain between a wall of fog to the south and the grim heights of the Kromme to the north. The Captain called on the scouts for extra vigilance but no attack came. They halted for breakfast at a dry riverbed with scattered pools of stagnant water in which trapped fish gasped and skittered. The kid caught in his nostrils a strange rich smell like roasted pork and burnt horn and found beneath a weeping willow tree a heathen with a large hole in his naked chest. The man leaned back as though sleeping against the tree trunk and his feet roasted quietly on the coals along with his intended meal.
The scouts brought in a prisoner who bled from a wound in his stomach and sat him under the tree with the dead man. This warrior wore a string of tiger teeth around his neck and the Captain coveted it. He spoke with Evans and Evans approached the prisoner with reaping hook in hand. The prisoner looked up at Evans and clasped his palms together and groaned and Evans seemed affronted by these gestures.
Like a dying cow in a hailstorm, he said.
The prisoner closed his eyes and waited. Evans frowned and reached for the string and sliced through it. The prisoner felt the teeth go and waited for some time and then opened astonished and grateful eyes and watched as his necklace was given to the Captain. Three Fingos stepped forward to kill the man but the God-struck Lieutenant berated them and they desisted. The Lieutenant set water and bread within the prisoner’s reach and moved the dead man’s feet from the coals. When the column moved on the two were seated there in silence under the tree before a thin strand of smoke which rose vertically into the blue.
The irregulars marched on across the steaming plain through clumps of mimosa and towards midday they passed the blackened ruins of a settler house where a mangy dog gnawed at the bones of an ass. In the afternoon they came upon a deep narrow river and crossed it in separate bodies at different points by slippery ledges of rock. A man slipped so that his feet went up before and his head caught an edge of granite. He was unconscious as he went over the waterfall.
They retrieved the body and buried it and encamped near the river and woke on the day following to find the ground white with frost and a bitter wind blowing from the Kromme. Within three hours the sun was scorching overhead and the irregulars were snoring in the shade of the mimosas. The Captain explored the banks of the river and shot two monkeys and three green and crimson parrots and a muscular lizard which he measured against a Hottentot voorloper and found the lizard to be longer and noted the observation in his book.
They remained in that place three days and were joined by other forces and patrols went out and returned with captured sheep and cattle and then they marched on in search of better pasture. They proceeded upriver and halted at a deserted government station. There was a burnt chapel and three roofless houses from which the irregulars pulled tables and benches and armchairs to place around their fires. In the evening Evans sat on a wooden throne like a dusty Viking looter and the men chewed on their ration of beef. A man called Jones offered Evans a juicy marrow bone.
A little more cow, your worship?
I don’t mind if I do, said Evans.
The kid laughed and Evans took the bone.
Tell you this, he said. I’ve sailed some stinking ships in my time. With cannibals for shipmates.
Cannibals, said the joiner.
Cannibals. And this is a whole lot better.
Providence the Fingo formed the pulpit of the chapel into a snug sleeping place and his companions used a large stone to grind their coffee in the font. The God-struck Lieutenant watched through narrowed eyes but he said nothing.
On the third evening of their stay a company of cavalry rode in with word from the General that Jinqi, the chieftain on the white horse, was in the area with a large force armed with muskets. The next morning the irregulars watched as an officer rode out with the levies and three companies of Highlanders and a six-pound howitzer. The party returned in the night and before dawn came the irregulars were on the march escorting a train of wagons and slaughter oxen to Fort Cox. They were joined on the way by a Dutchman with his wife and family, three silent women and a giant of a son and three thousand sheep for company. After a day’s march they came by a more direct route to the place of roasting feet and as they approached three vultures lumbered away like well-fed bishops disturbed in fiscal negotiation. The two bodies lay in the shade of the tree and stared at the heavens from dusty eyeless holes. They had been eviscerated and their spines were visible in the blackened rotting cavities of their chests and their organs of generation had been eaten so that they appeared like appalling travesties of the very idea of gender.
The irregulars moved on into the dusk until they had escaped the odours of the dead and then they halted and drew the wagons into a circle on an open plain. They made their fires within and the Captain posted sentries without and beyond them a picquet of Fingos who faced the darkness with much unease. Inside the wagons the Captain sat with the God-struck Lieutenant who stared silent at the flames and the irregulars formed their own circles around their own fires and the Hottentots likewise. The Fingos were separate also and conversed loudly and with much emphasis and exclamation and the kid listened to the strange explosive clicks of their consonants and the long deep music of their vowels as he went to sleep.
At three o’clock the Captain rose with the moon and called for the wagons to be yoked and the men rose cursing and stumbling in the dim light and within half an hour they were on the march. The sun rose and they passed through a thick chilly mist which lay in a depression like soup in a bowl. They emerged into green humming bush which glowed with bright scarlet clusters of bignonia and Fort Cox baked in the centre of a green plain below.
The town when they gained it was dusty and heat-struck and the kid found a patch of shade to sleep in while wagons were loaded at the commissariat and the Dutch farmer contemplated his ruin. At nine o’clock that evening they marched again and halted at midnight to let the oxen graze and at two o’clock they rolled on through the dark and through the day following. The next night they were stumbling lost and drunk with tiredness when the kid spotted the fires of the encampment which had moved in their absence.
They remained for a week at the new place while patrols went out without result and the heathen attacked a train of wagons near Fort Cox and carried off the powder and lead and ambushed the post riders on the rocky pass near Gatestown killing six and wounding three. The Captain cursed the incompetence of his commanders and Evans sharpened his reaping hook and the joiner pored over a book he had acquired at Fort Cox. The kid lay on his back in the shade and stared at the sky. Monkeys chattered and crested green parrots with purple and crimson tails flew from tree to tree in clamorous groups. There were hundreds of turtle doves whose soft calls graced the long afternoons and every evening men went out with guns and blasted them out of the trees and out of the sky and collected their dead bodies and plucked and cleaned them and baked them into crude blackened pies.
The Captain went out shooting quail along a reedy watercourse and found the corpses of two heathen killed by previous patrols. He examined the bodies and took a tape from his pack and measured their length and carefully assessed the circumference of their skulls before washing the tape with soap in a nearby pool and noting his findings in his book.
On the fourth day at the encampment a dark cloud was seen in the west and the men stared at it and wondered and the Hottentot drivers quickly secured the coverings of their wagons. As the irregulars began to understand the truth the dust storm was upon them. For two days they lived in a burning wind that turned them into ochre wraiths and their eyes and nostrils and ears were fringed and clogged with fine red grit. The Captain wore strange wire goggles with dark blue glass and stared out through them like a startled explorer.
On the sixth day the dust storm blew over and was replaced in the west by a thick cloud of smoke where the heathen were destroying English grazing. As night fell the irregulars stood and watched while the plain was licked up by tongues of orange flame that bled up into the sky in a lurid red.
On the seventh day they struck their tents and marched across the charred earth and within hours they were all impartially black and the grey ash rose around their feet and around the feet of the oxen and the horses and they appeared like strange dark ghosts that trod and rolled in their own vaporous mists across the fields of desolation.