First comes the trader. Then the missionary. Then the red soldier.
Zulu King Cetshwayo kaMpande
“Aaaah.”
Jack raised an eyebrow at Elizabeth’s groan. She had one boot off, and was tugging off the other. She caught his quizzical look and turned away, her face flushed.
“I’m not used to wearing shoe– boots.”
She wiggled her toes through her socks, and he felt an almost unpleasant sensation of desire stir within him.
“Do you have any bags?”
She shook her head. “Just the clothes on my back.”
Jack got up and rummaged in his chest. Took out a sleeping shirt, hand embroidered by his mother.
“You can have this to sleep in.” It should be suitably voluminous on her. She looked set on undressing, and he had to remind himself she wasn’t a private. Didn’t know how things were done.
The enlisted men slept in their uniforms. Lived in their uniforms. Which is why they looked like an army of vagabonds.
He held the nightshirt out and she stared at it, making no attempt to take it from him, as if confounded by the garment.
She looked otherworldly with her short, jagged hair and her big green eyes, some strange magical creature, suddenly dropped into reality.
“Thank you.”
She rose from Bob Harries’s abandoned cot and gently tugged the garment from his hand, then stood there, waiting.
“Sorry. I’ll step outside while you change.” He hadn’t blushed since he was a lad, but he felt the heat in his cheeks and hoped the dim light hid it.
He walked out into the cool, clear night and wondered what in hell he was going to do.
Clasping his hands behind him, he rocked on his heels and tipped his head back to look at the sky. To keep quiet about a woman masquerading as a private was most definitely an offense. To speak up would ensure her being booted out of camp, and at most escorted back to Helpmekaar. From there, she’d have little or no options. But to allow her to continue with them . . . well, he’d be complicit in taking a woman onto the battlefield.
“I’m ready.” Her voice was low and he clamped down hard on his back teeth. Her soft call sounded like a woman calling her lover to bed.
How long had it been since he'd slept with a woman? Not since his injury in the Cape six months ago. Not for a good six months before that.
Like a man going to his last supper before execution, Jack walked reluctantly back into his tent.
The small mission station of Rorke’s Drift was at last in sight. Poised at the top of the Nostrope Pass, Elizabeth saw the winding Buffalo River and the green hills of Zululand spread out before her. Far in the distance, the peak of Isandlwana rose out of the hazy plateau.
Excitement surged in her chest and she jumped over a rock in the path. Home had never looked more beautiful.
How would the British ever win this war? They could barely move their troops and supplies ten miles in three days. And Elizabeth knew the terrain got no better over the border.
“Jumping for joy, is it?” Private Johnson called from the ox-wagon behind her.
“The end is in sight, Johnson.”
“Not the end, the beginning,” Johnson muttered.
“At least it’s the end of this trip.” She grinned, too happy to let anything get her down. “We’ll get some rest down there.”
To her right, a mounted company of the Natal Native Contingent came past in their yellow uniforms. They were hailing each other in Zulu, and she looked at them longingly. Wished she were part of their circle, even though they were the enemy.
There were many men here who were from Natal; white farmers, and tribesmen sent by chiefs who wanted to see Cetshwayo crushed.
They were joking as they rode about having Zululand in sight. About the land and cattle that would soon be theirs.
“Wish you knew what they were saying, eh?” Johnson called to her.
Elizabeth shook her head. She understood all too well. They were poorly provisioned and poorly equipped, and if that didn’t tell them how little their safety and comfort meant to the men who asked them to risk their lives for a British cause, they deserved what they got.
She shrugged her shoulders, forcing their problems from her mind. Tonight she would see Lindani. They’d agreed it was too soon to meet before then, had set the time and place before she’d even joined the column.
She missed him, missed speaking in Zulu.
Too many times to mention she’d heard the tribesmen in the Central Column speaking in the Zulu tongue, and found it hard to respond to Lieutenant Chambers in English.
“Bird. Less daydreaming, more working,” Chambers yelled from his horse, riding between the wagons to check their progress down the treacherously steep road. “If you don’t keep up, these wagons will arrive before you.”
Not bloody likely, Elizabeth thought, but jogged obediently forward, resting her hand on the side of the ammunition cart. The whole cart bounced wildly as the driver hit a rock, forcing her to step away.
Chambers gave a squawk of distress. “I’ve told you to be careful with the ammunition,” he shouted at the driver, galloping forward. “I don't want those bullets damaged.”
Elizabeth stopped short. Chambers had said that to her before. The first time she’d met him.
“Bird, move your bloody arse. We need to get down there before the rest of the wagon train, and believe me, we’ll be working way past sundown.”
Johnson passed her in his wagon, and the look he sent her was conspiratorial. He made a gesture at Chambers’ back that tugged a smile on her face.
She started moving forward again, her mind a swirl of damaged bullets and jammed guns. Of the pride of the British arsenal – useless.
Elizabeth wanted to go home. She stood, swaying with exhaustion next to her cot, and longed for it. Longed for sitting around the fire with the women and sharing stories of the day’s work, of the children’s exploits.
She shivered in the evening air as the stranglehold of heat began to lift, cooled like feverish flesh against the black satin of night.
If she could only talk to Lindani, ask if he had any news of home, she was sure this terrible fatigue that clung to her would lift.
Her nerves were stretched tight under her skin, making her jump at everything, making her hands flutter in fear at every meal, every time Chambers or one of the men looked too long at her face. She walked with her head down wherever she went, sure everyone was watching her.
She craved a moment of rest from being Private Bird. Surely even ten minutes of being Elizabeth, the bird of heaven, would ease the dread?
And what of Elizabeth Jones?
The question made her freeze mid-sway.
She had put Elizabeth Jones aside long ago. The young girl who was proper, obedient. Beloved child of Jonathan and Elaine, now lying in a grave in China. What life would Elizabeth Jones have had if she had reached England?
She slipped out of her jacket and flicked it with a snap to get rid of the dust, dismissing the twists of her exhausted mind. Despite how badly she longed to be home, to see Lindani, she was barely capable of putting one foot in front of another.
She couldn’t sneak out now anyway, she reasoned, sitting with a groan and pulling the boots from her aching legs. Most of the men were still talking around the campfires, and she was too afraid someone would see her. Might as well get a bit of sleep first.
Her hand moved to the buttons of her shirt. Oh, to take off these terrible, terrible clothes. Layers of sweat-soaked fabric that clung to her, dragging her down. If only she could. The coarse rub of cotton and itch of wet wool, gone. The thought of it made her rest her hand on the button long after she’d decided she could not risk it.
She lay her head on the pillow, and drew her legs up to her chest, then stretched them out.
It had been a long day. So had every day, but helping Chambers organize the stores as they set up camp had been backbreaking.
Tonight, she had no reserves left.
As she sunk into sleep, she tried to think of Lindani, but instead, Jack Burdell’s face came to her, lit from below by a lamp in the darkness, his stern brows almost meeting in a frown above his straight nose as he turned towards her, his eyes as blue as the Zululand sky.
The whisper of clothes being removed woke her. She came to suddenly, with heart thundering, panic-stricken as to how much time may have passed. She made no sound or movement, lying still, her eyes half-closed as she watched Burdell in the weak candlelight.
His back was turned to her and he lifted his shirt over his head. She saw the sweet dividing line of his spine, the wide, muscular set of his shoulders, marred at the top by an angry scar.
And suddenly she felt weak.
Burdell had come in late every night during the awful trip from Helpmekaar to Rorke’s Drift. When he spoke to her, which was as little as possible, he angled his body away, his eyes almost never meeting hers. And yet in the few times their gazes did clash and jerk away, there was a heat. An energy that made Elizabeth hot inside and as eager as Burdell to escape the confines of the tent, the forced intimacy, and get as far away from him as possible.
He unbuckled his belt and stepped out of his trousers, standing only in his drawers. She saw his hands go to his waist to unbutton them, watched as he began to slip them off, then stopped mid-thigh, cursed softly, and pulled them back on.
He was keeping them on because of her presence in his tent, she realized. She also realized something else. The Zulus were right to focus on the back of the upper thigh as an area of sexual titillation. She felt a curious, tight sensation in the pit of her stomach. She closed her eyes, and lay quietly, listening to him complete his bedtime rituals.
She would never look at him in the same way again.
At last, the deep, steady breathing from Burdell’s side of the tent allowed her up from her cot. She bit down on a groan as she sat to pull on her boots, her body heavy, aching in every joint and muscle.
She hoped Lindani and Malusi were still waiting for her. She had no idea of the time, but sensed it was long after they’d agreed to meet.
She edged off the low bed, careful to stop it creaking, and went to stand at the tent entrance, straining to hear any sound. Someone sniffed loudly close by. A hacking cough, from too many nights spent sleeping on rain-soaked ground, came from a few tents down.
Someone muttered close by and there was a rustle of clothing. Changing her mind, Elizabeth went to the back of the tent, lay down and rolled under the canvas.
Burdell’s tent was at the edge of the camp, and she scrambled to her feet and slipped through the last few tents. Malusi had instructed her to head upstream and her way was lit faintly by the waning half moon, hanging clear in a sky that still harboured some of the rain clouds from the storm earlier.
Somewhere in the veld an animal hooted, a whoop of surprise or fear. It sounded close, but perhaps it came from the other side of the river. Most animals steered clear of the massive tent settlement, afraid of the noise and smells.
Even so, as soon as she was out of earshot of the camp, she trod loudly through the long, green grass to scare away the snakes, for once grateful for her boots.
She followed the river, cut deep in its bed of orange rock, until the camp was no long visible behind her.
She whistled, the sharp, carrying sound of the herd boys.
For a moment, there was silence, and then the whistle was answered. She saw Lindani’s head pop up from the steep riverbank wall, saw the flash of white from his eyes and teeth. He pulled himself up easily, gracefully, and stopped short of her. She could see he was angry for the wait, his scowl exaggerated in the moonlight.
“What went wrong?” He looked over her shoulder as if expecting trouble, then focused on her face. “You look ill.”
“Just very tired.” She yawned and rubbed her eyes. “I fell asleep waiting for the camp to quieten down so I could come to you.”
“You’re working hard?” Lindani frowned.
“It is not the work, although it is hard. It’s the lying. I want to answer people in Zulu, thank people the Zulu way, use Zulu expressions. I have to constantly guard against myself.”
Lindani opened his mouth to reply, but before he could say anything, another head appeared over the river bank wall.
“Get out of the moonlight.” Malusi’s tone was hard.
Elizabeth shared a look with Lindani that was part embarrassment for their obvious mistake, part resentment. They turned and jumped down the bank to join Malusi.
Crouching under the overhang, shoulder to hip with Lindani, already damp with spray from the river, her fatigue lifted.
She was among friends at last.