IT RAINED FOR THREE days and then it stopped and the water in the camp flowed away into the muddy river and the ground began to dry out. On the 4th of November the Lieutenant Colonel’s brigade left the post under the guard of invalids and the yellow dog Jack stayed with Clayton whose hand was much inflamed. They marched up the Shining Water Pass and took a position at its head to cover the ascent of the commissariat wagons. The sun shone and the irregulars lay about in the shade of a spreading mimosa and looked down over the lowlands. Evans was whittling at a branch with his reaping hook and he laid it down and Waine picked it up and turned it in his hand.
Anyone who volunteered is getting land, he said. Meant to be.
Land, said Evans.
What I said.
What sort of land?
I don’t know. Land. A parcel of land. A farm.
In one of these valleys?
Could be.
Evans stared at Waine and then he spat.
We volunteered, he said.
I know, said Waine.
So why we not getting land?
Skipper was meant to tell us, said Waine. He has to sign it off. Give us good behaviour.
He knows we meant to get land and he didn’t tell us?
That’s what Jack said.
Jack, said Evans.
Yes.
Happy Jack?
Yes.
Where’d you see Jack?
Gatestown. He’s working in a shop there. Working for a trader.
When were you in Gatestown?
I went with the post, said Waine. I volunteered.
Evans looked at him.
Some of those farms are already planted, said Waine. They have orchards.
Lots of them have orchards, said Evans.
Who owns them?
Settlers, said the joiner.
What if they dead, said Waine.
The men stared down into the valley.
Belonged to the Gaika before, said the joiner. Then to Totties. Totties planted those orchards. They’ll also want them.
And before that, said the kid.
What you mean before that?
Who owned them first?
Bushmen lived here, said the joiner. Like I told you. But they didn’t own the farms.
Why not?
Didn’t believe in it. They think it owns them.
It?
Yes.
What’s it?
Everything.
The men pondered.
How do you know, said the kid.
My father had one.
Owned one?
Yes.
They pondered further.
I’ve never seen a bushman, said Evans.
They gone, said the joiner. So it doesn’t matter.
So who gets the farms, said Waine.
The men stared at him.
You can get what you want, said Waine. Or you can just get old.
First we have to get through tomorrow, said the joiner.
Far below them to the south a great brigade moved into the Shining Water camp in readiness to work up the twins and clear the forest at the base of the Kromme. Beyond them a column of the Cape Corps and the Horse Brigade and detachments of settlers and Dutchmen and Fingo levies marched west below the southern slopes of the plateau towards the mouth of the Great Western Ravine and so there were three brigades ready to converge upon Mount Misery.
The day was spent in anticipation of battle and in the evening the Lieutenant Colonel moved through the lines from fire to fire and he conversed with each group of officers about the deployment of other forces and the strength of the enemy and the prospects for the weather.
Jinqi and Branders are somewhere on Mount Misery, said the Lieutenant Colonel. They disdain the open ground and fight in the forest. So we will occupy that forest and the other brigades will come up through the bush of the twins and the Great Ravine and the heathen will be squeezed in a vice. We are a band of brothers, said the Lieutenant Colonel, and tomorrow will be decisive, and then he retired to his patrol tent and he drank a generous measure of brandy and he slept.
At half past four o’clock on the morning of the 6th of November the brigade assembled without bugle call in dense fog and marched towards Mount Misery. Just after dawn the fog fell from the uplands like a receding tide. It exposed the plain above a sea of cloud and from this sea the higher peaks thrust up like islands. Some were wooded and some were bare and rocky and their jutting peninsulas stretched out into the soft whiteness and a man might almost have imagined that a prophet could step out and walk upon it.
The Captain sat his horse and took out his Dollond and trained it on Mount Misery. There were warriors gathered about a chieftain who stood next to a white horse and as the Captain watched further detachments came up out of the forest from the east and west and their leaders conferred with the heathen general on the high slope.
At seven o’clock the scouts watched a brigade moving up the Great Ravine and the irregulars advanced as part of four extended companies and entered the bush below Mount Misery. The village at the head of the pass had been rebuilt and the irregulars went forward to fire it.
The kid stood in a hut and saw the piles of bullock horns and hides that it contained.
They trade these for powder, said the joiner.
Who with, said the kid.
Traders, said the joiner. Settlers.
I meet one of them in a dark alley, said Evans. I’ll cut his throat.
The kid looked at him.
What you go to Norfolk Island for?
Lack of money, said Evans.
He took flint from his pocket and struck sparks onto a bundle of dry grass and kindling and after a time a flame licked up and the men watched it and then they stepped outside and watched the hut burn and then they moved on through the bush to turn the flank of an enemy position on the slopes above them.
They struggled through forest studded with immense boulders and all interwoven with twining asparagus trees and monkey ropes and other creepers and covered with thorny underwood. There were bushes of small hooked barbs which attached themselves to their victim with every movement so that the more a man struggled the more tangled he became. The Captain struggled in such a bush and it occurred to him that his situation was analogous to that of the European in Africa and he set a mental reminder to develop this theme in his notebook.
The Captain cursed softly and freed himself and proceeded over leafy ground which concealed fatal clefts and crevices and was strewn with fallen logs. Some of these logs supported the Captain’s weight and others were rotten and crumbled maliciously beneath his foot and deposited him cursing on the ground.
They battled through the bush and balls of lead flew twisting and humming about them. They had little idea of where they came from but stopped from time to time and fired in the direction of the reports. The Captain began to fear being cut off and he passed on an order to form a closer column and they veered to the right and came to a heathen homestead at the edge of the bush. The place came under fire and the irregulars took cover behind its low stone wall. The kid crawled along the wall and found a chink he could see through. There was open ground before him and then trees which rose up a rocky slope. The heathen were all among the trees and there were more gathering. They poured down a steady stream of fire and sometimes their balls struck the stones of the breastworks and splintered them and then they buzzed away into the clearing like large and lethal insects.
The kid heard a sound behind and he turned to look. The Lieutenant Colonel was dismounting from his horse next to a burnt hut in the middle of the clearing. The kid turned back and fired into the forest and ducked down and felt for a cartridge and bit it open and poured powder down his bore. He seated a bullet and placed a cap on the nipple. He looked behind and he saw that the Lieutenant Colonel was standing exposed and shouting and waving his hat.
The Lieutenant Colonel looked out across the plain to the north and pointed towards the heathen position and waved his hat at the distant artillery. The kid watched and the Lieutenant Colonel took a step forward and released his hat which hung for a moment in the air and then a ball took it. The Lieutenant Colonel watched his hat move through the air and then he looked down at his chest where it spewed out of him in a tangle of blasted cloth and flesh and bone and he said God damn you God damn you and then he fell.
The kid began to rise but Providence put a hand on his shoulder and kept him down. Men came out of the forest behind the homestead and ran to the Lieutenant Colonel. Lieutenant Gordon of the Highlanders stood and looked down at his leader and called for a stretcher. Another officer squatted at the Lieutenant Colonel’s head and lifted it and spoke to him but the Lieutenant Colonel’s eyes were vacant.
A ball passed through the squatting officer’s head and entered Lieutenant Gordon’s right thigh. The lead travelled on and its shape changed and it left Gordon’s right thigh and entered his left and destroyed the femur just below the point where its ball sat in the socket of the pelvis. The head-shot officer leant slowly forward and Gordon cried out and fell. The head-shot officer came down in a pious articulation of joint and limb and bending vertebrae that was the termination of a destiny born with time itself when it sprang forth from the singularity. He knelt over the Lieutenant Colonel with his broken skull resting on the Lieutenant Colonel’s chest. Gordon lay groaning and clasping his thigh and he formed with the two dead men in their bright uniforms a strange still tableau in the carnage.
The irregulars huddled behind their stoneworks and the heathen yelled in exultation and began to advance from rock to rock. They pointed at the Lieutenant Colonel as they came and they laughed.
Johnny bring stretcher, they shouted. Johnny bring stretcher.
It seemed for a time that the irregulars would be overcome and then shells and round shot came over from the artillery on the plain and the heathen and their defector allies began a careful retreat into the forest. The warriors were greased and naked and they carried nothing but their weapons and they slipped away through the undergrowth with the fluid agility of great silent cats and by the time the kid could bring his sights to bear they were always gone.
Men came from the rear to bear away the dead and the irregulars proceeded after the heathen and they came eventually to a place where the forest dropped away into the Great Ravine. They lay among branches severed from the trees above by passing shells. There were boulders all about and many had been split by some previous cataclysm and the kid took refuge in a crevice. He found there beneath an overhang axes and bullet moulds and lead and cast balls and an assortment of leather ornaments and an armband of fine pale bone. The kid took up the armband and examined it and felt its smoothness. He put down his rifle and put the armband over his left hand and pushed it up onto his wrist and looked at it on his scratched grimy arm.
The irregulars took cover there and a scout arrived with orders for the Captain to remain in occupation of the position. The sun shone down and at midday they were baking in the heat. The kid lay low on the ground in good cover and he watched how a column of ants dragged the body of an insect across the earth.
At three o’clock in the afternoon clouds came down and settled on the ridge and within half an hour the kid could barely see the joiner in his place ten yards away and he shivered in the cold. At four o’clock the irregulars received orders to withdraw and they joined the rest of the brigade on a bare bleak ridge. Fires were made in the fog and the men did not speak. They went about their work and the cloud hung upon them like a pall and the glow of the flames was barely visible from a distance of more than a few yards.
The kid stood close to such a blaze and held out his hands to warm them and he looked up to see Evans loom out of nothingness as though called that instant from the void.
Where’s the coffee, he said.
There isn’t any, said the kid.
And food?
Herrid’s gone to see.
Herrid’s gone to get something for himself.
They stood around the fire and they waited.
They got the Lieutenant Colonel, said the kid.
Evans nodded and then he spat into the flames.
Were you there?
I was up in the forest to the side, said Evans. They damn near got me too.
And me, said the joiner.
So who’s in command now?
I don’t know who he is, said Evans, but he reasons like an oyster.
Off in the mist a lone sentinel paced before a solitary tent. Their previous commander lay within among the dead. A lantern cast a dim light on his red beard and his English cheeks and he stared up at the canvas roof with features frozen in a mask of grim satisfaction. The head-shot officer lay next to the Lieutenant Colonel and his face had been distorted by the ball that passed behind it. One of his eyes was missing and a strand of nerve hung out from the vacant hole. Men filed past to pay their respects and the dead lay there like statues formed from wax and their wounds were so variously grotesque that they could for all the world have been designed to horrify children at a carnival.
The Captain left the tent and went to see Lieutenant Gordon and found him laid on the ground beneath a rough shelter of green boughs. The Captain questioned the doctor and the doctor shook his head doubtfully and Gordon lay in a pool of seeping blood and watched them with frightened eyes.
A drizzling rain came down and the wind swept cold over the lofty bivouac and the hastily gathered fuel ran out and the fires died. The irregulars threw up little walls of loose stone and rock and sheltered behind them. Some dug holes in softer ground and piled the earth around and placed large flat slabs of stone above and crawled beneath like reclusive arthropods. So they made their beds and lay in them and soon enough all but the shivering sentinels were slumbering upon that windswept plain.
They were roused at dawn by the bugle’s reveille and found the highlands white with frost and they crowded around a few fires of logs which the sentries had scrounged in the night. The bodies of the dead were placed on a mule wagon and the wounded were placed on another and the party left for the fort at Post Retief. The irregulars went as escort and they had gone only a few hundred yards when Lieutenant Gordon began to howl with pain at the motion of the wagon and so he was placed on a stretcher and the Captain rode back to fetch men of his company to carry him.
They travelled on at the stretcher’s pace and the slow cortège passed over the grasslands. The sun came out and the frost melted and they moved over a plain all aglow with blossoming gladiolus and amaranth and aphelexis. The ground rose slightly to the west and this gentle ridge was so thickly covered with scarlet flowers that there might have been a swathe of bright cloth laid out there in preparation for some courtly celebration.
There were belts of bush that ran up from the wooded ravines below and Hottentot snipers were spotted and the little column steered out of range of those treacherous forests. They marched on and came upon fields of mushrooms and gathered them as they went. They could hear artillery fire behind them in the south and they skirted the edges of a luxuriant valley with green uplands and belts of forest. A little river ran through it and along its banks were burnt farmhouses. They passed a hill covered with tall bushes bearing great flowered grails all fluted with petals of pink and white and as they went one of the poles of Gordon’s stretcher broke and he fell to the earth with his leg bent out at an uncanny angle below the hip.
A spare stretcher was taken from a wagon and Gordon’s leg was laid straight. He screamed as the broken bone ends ground against each other and he was placed upon the stretcher and they proceeded as before. There were columns of cloud in the north and as these thunderheads descended their lower surfaces took on a hue of dark indigo. A gust of wind came up and eddied about and picked up sand and dry grass and leaves and strew them across the track. The wind stopped and a profound silence fell.
There came a click. And then light. It was all about them and the plain and the wagons were gone and there was only light. The world returned with a rumble so prodigious that it might have come from enormous cannons rolled across a wooden deck directly above the irregulars’ heads. Hail began to fall and rain with it and within minutes the invaders and their mounted officers and the wounded and the dead were all impartially soaked and all but the dead were shivering.
The storm passed and the column moved into a narrow glen by the side of an exuberant stream. The road was rocky and the mules slipped on the wet rocks and the wagons lurched and clattered. The wounded yelled out in agony as they bounced upon their wooden beds and the dead rolled stiffly on theirs.
They negotiated a bend in the track and emerged and saw the fort that stood alone on rising ground with its walls dwarfed by the ramparts of a dark amphitheatre of mountains beyond. These peaks rose up all around and their long slopes merged with the murky cloud. A stray beam of light came down and lit the little citadel and it appeared like a tiny daub of brightness painted upon a vast and gloomy canvas.
The cortège approached across the plain and a detachment came out to meet them and helped to carry the wounded through the gates. The dead were taken into the commissariat forage store and placed in hastily made coffins and a sergeant major nailed them home.
In the afternoon the thunder mingled with the report of distant guns and together these sounds rolled out in solemn signal across the highlands. The mourners arranged themselves by their regiments and waited. The coffins were borne out and a muddy firing party presented arms. Pipers piped a skirling tune and the mourners marched in slow time and they stopped at the newly dug graves and a captain of the Highlanders read the funeral service. The kid stood there with his chin resting on the butt of his rifle and he thought about the yellow dog. The coffins were lowered and Herrid shouted an order and the roar of a hundred guns reverberated three times across the plateau.
In the evening the Captain visited Lieutenant Gordon and found him frightened and hurting and plagued by flies upon a thin straw mattress. Next to him lay a sergeant whose leg had been amputated at the knee. This man complained of a great pain which emanated from the limb he no longer possessed. Beside him was Ricketts who had been wounded on the pass below Mount Misery on the 14th of October. Ricketts was glad of the new company and spoke happily of what he would do when he was well. He struggled up on an elbow and spat redly onto the mud floor and then he lay back again and smiled and blood bubbled from the wound in his chest.
That night the Captain sat with the other officers at a long deal table on a floor of stamped ant heap in a bare white room. They ate a stew of mushroom and beef from shared bowls as the hospital detachment had found it easier to provide a dinner than it had to find the plates to serve it on. The men talked in low voices and one took out a scrap of paper which he said bore the last words that the Lieutenant Colonel had written. It was a request for wine and porter and sago and milk to be provided for the wounded at the Lieutenant Colonel’s expense. Some bottles of the ordered wine were brought out in evidence and although they were of indifferent quality the officers drank them and their voices caught in their throats as they reminisced about their late commander.
On the day following the Captain rose early and went to visit Lieutenant Gordon and found that his wound had mortified during the night and that he had expired with the dawn and Ricketts not long after him. The irregulars left the fort some hours later in escort of a small herd of commissariat cattle. They retraced their steps across the uplands and towards midday they saw the combined division with its retinue of wagons stretched across the plain two miles ahead.
The Captain rode across and learned that the heathen had once more baffled attempts to dislodge them from the forests on the day previous and that a captain of the Highlanders was mortally wounded and seven other men dead. He received orders to proceed down the Shining Water Pass and he rode back and the irregulars and their cattle turned east for the head of the pass and they came to it in the early afternoon.
The first mile of the track was much ravaged by the recent storms and the wagons teetered down through gullies four feet deep in places and the beaten sun was sinking behind the Kromme in great swathes of crimson and pink and azure by the time the irregulars reached their tents in the Shining Water Valley.