Men of Men

Then they were through the line of Matabele, but the assegai had been plucked from the warrior's hand and the shaft stuck out of Tom's neck at a brutal angle that showed the point must be buried in his lungs. Still the gallant old pony carried his master on across the glade and into the first trees of the forest.

Then abruptly a double stream of frothy bright lungblood burst from Tom's nostrils, and splattered back against Ralph's boots. Tom died in full run. His nose dropped to the earth and he went over in a somersault that pitched Ralph high over his head.

Ralph smashed into the earth, and he felt as though his ribs were stoved in and his teeth cracked from his jaws, but he crawled desperately to his fallen rifle and jammed a fresh cartridge into the breech.

When he looked up, they were almost upon him, a line of racing red shields and pounding bare feet below; the war rattles on their ankles clashed and the hunting choru. s was like the deep baying of hounds.

One tall indoda lifted his shield high to clear his spear arm for the killing stroke, and the blade flashed as it started down, and then the movement froze.

"Henshaw!" The name exploded out of the warrior's straining throat, and then Bazo continued the stroke, but at the last instant rolled his wrist and the flat of the heavy blade smashed against Ralph's skull above his temple; and he pitched forwards, face down against the sandy earth, and lay still as death.

"You took the irons from the horse's hooves." Bazo nodded approval. "That was a good trick. If you had not slept so long this morning, we might never have caught up with you."

"Tom is dead now," replied Ralph.

He was propped against the trunk of a mopani tree.

There was a bright scarlet smear of gravel rash on one cheek where he had hit the ground when he was thrown from the saddle. The hair above his temple was caked with black dried blood where the flat of Bazo's blade had knocked him senseless, and he was bound at ankles and wrists with thongs of rawhide. Already his hands were vuff!" and blue from the constriction of his bonds.

"Yes!" Bazo nodded again gravely, and looked at the carcass of the horse where it lay fifty paces away. "He was a good horse, and now he is dead." He looked back at Ralph. "The indoda whom we will bury today was a good man, and now he is dead also."

All about them squatted ranks of Matabele warriors, all Bazo's men drawn up in a dense black circle, sitting on their shields and listening intently to every word spoken.

"Your men fell upon me without warning, as though I were a thief or a murderer. I defended myself as any man would do."

U "And are you not a thief then, Henshaw?" Bazo interrupted.

"What question is that?" Ralph demanded.

"The birds, Henshaw. The stone birds."

"I do not know what you speak of," Ralph challenged angrily, pushing himself away from the tree trunk and staring arrogantly at Bazo.

"You know, Henshaw. You know about the birds, for we have spoken about them many times. You know also the king's warning that to despoil the ancient places is death to any man, for I myself have told you of it., Still Ralph glared his defiance.

"Your spoor led straight to the burial place of the kings and straight away from it, and the birds are gone. Where are they, Henshaw?"

A moment longer Ralph continued his show, and then he shrugged and smiled and sank back against the tree.

"They are gone, Bazo, flown afar where you cannot follow them. it was the prophecy of the Umlimo, beyond the powers of mortal men to prevent."

At the mention of the prophetess, a shadow of sorrow passed over Bazo's face.

"Yes, it was part of the prophecy," he agreed. "And now it is time to carry out the orders of the king." He stood up and addressed the squatting ranks of Matabele.

"All of you heard the king's word," he said. "What must be done, must be done in secret; it must be done by me alone, and no other may witness it, nor speak of it after, even in a whisper, on pain of slow and lingering death.

You have all heard the king's word. "We have heard the king's word," they agreed in deep sonorous chorus.

"Go!" Bazo commanded. "Wait for me at great Zimbabwe, and wipe from your eyes the things you have seen this day."

His warriors sprang up and saluted him. They shouldered the body of the man that Ralph had slain, using their shields as a litter, and they bore him away.

The double column of running warriors snaked away across the glade and into the forest.

Bazo watched them go, leaning on his own shield, and then he turned back to Ralph, heavily and unwillingly.

"i am the king's man," he said softly. "Strictly charged with your death. What I have to do today will leave a deep scar in my heart for all my life, though I live to be an old greyhead. The memory of this thing will keep me from sleep, and turn the food sour and heavy in my belly." Slowly he paced to where Ralph lay and stood over him. "I will never forget this deed, Henshaw, though I will never be able to speak of it, not to my father or my favourite wife. I must Jock it in the darkness of my soul."

"If you must do it, then do it swiftly," Ralph challenged him, trying to show no fear, trying to keep his gaze steady.

"Yes," Bazo nodded, and shifted his grip on the shaft of the spear.

"Intercede for me with your God, Henshaw," he said, and struck.

Ralph cried out at the stinging burn of razor steel, and his blood burst from the wound and spilled into the dry earth.

Bazo dropped to his knee beside him and scooped up [ the blood in his cupped hands. He splashed it on his arms and chest. He smeared it on the haft and blade of his spear, until the bright steel was dulled.

Then Bazo leapt up and ripped a strip of bark from the mopani tree. He plucked a bunch of green leaves and came back to Ralph's side. He held together the lips of the deep wound in Ralph's forearm, then he placed the bunch of leaves over it and bound it up with the strip of bark.

The bleeding slowed and stopped, and Bazo hacked the rawhide bonds from Ralph's ankles and wrists and stood back.

He gestured at his own blood-sullied arms and weapon.

"Who, seeing me thus, would believe that I am a traitor to my king?" he asked softly. "Yet the love of a brother is stronger than the duty to a king."

Ralph dragged himself upright against the mopani trunk, holding his wounded arm against his chest and staring at the young induna.

"Go in peace, Henshaw," whispered Bazo. "But pray to your God for me, for I have betrayed my king and forfeited my honour."

Then Bazo whirled and ran back across the glade of yellow grass. When he reached the trees on the far side he neither paused nor looked back, but plunged into them with a kind of reckless despair.

Ten days later, with his boots scuffed through the uppers and the legs of his breeches ripped to tatters by arrow grass and thorn, with his inflamed and infected left arm strapped to his chest by a sling of bark, his face gaunt with starvation and his body bony and wasted, Ralph staggered into the circle of wagons that were outspanned beside the Bushman wells, and Isazi shouted for Umfaan and ran to catch Ralph before he fell.

"Isazi," Ralph croaked, "the birds, the stone birds?"

"I have them safe, Nkosi."

Ralph grinned wickedly, so that his dried lips cracked and his bloodshot eyes slitted.

"By your own boast, Isazi, you are a wise man. Now I tell you also, that you are beautiful to behold, as beautiful as a falcon in flight," Ralph told him, and then reeled so that he had to catch his balance with an arm around the little Zulu's shoulders.

Lobengula sat cross-legged on his sleeping-mat, alone in his great hut. Before him was a gourd of clear spring water. He stared into it fixedly.

Long ago, when he had lived in the cave of the Matopos with Saala, the white girl, the mad old witchdoctor had instructed him in the art of the gourd. Very occasionally, after many hours" staring into the limpid water, and after the utmost exercise of his concentration and will, he had been able to see snatches of the future, faces and events, but even then they had been murky and unclear, and soon after he left the Matopos this small gift had gone from him. Sometimes still, in desperation, he resorted to the gourd, although, as it was this night, nothing moved or roiled darkly beneath the still surface of the spring water, and his concentration slipping away. Tonight he kept toying with the words of the Umlimo.

Always the oracle spoke obliquely, always her counsel was shrouded in imagery and riddles. Often it was repetitive, on at least five previous visits to the cavern the witch had spoken of "the stars shining on the hills" and the sun that burns at midnight". No matter how doggedly Lobengula and his senior indunas had picked at the words, and tried to unravel the meaning that was tied up in them, they had found no answer.

Now Lobengula set aside the fruitless gourd, and lay back upon his kaross to consider the third prophecy, made in the croaking raven's voice from the cliff above the cavern.

"Heed the wisdom of the vixen before that of the dogfox."

He took each word and weighed it separately, then he considered the whole, and twisted it and studied it from every angle.

In the dawn there remained only one possible solution that had survived the night. For once the oracle seemed to have given advice that was unequivocal. It was only for him to decide which female was the "vixen" of the oracle.

He considered each of his senior wives, and there was not one of them that had any interest in anything beyond the begetting and suckling of infants, or the baubles and ribbons that the traders brought to Gubulawayo.

Ningi, his full-blooded sister, he loved still as his one link with the mother he barely remembered. Yet now when Ningi was sober she was elephantine and slowwitted, bad-tempered and cruel. When she was filled with the traders" champagne and cognac, she was giggling and silly to begin with, and then incontinent and comatose at the end. He had spoken with her for an hour and more the previous day. Little that she had said was sensible and nothing she had said could possibly bear on the terrible pressures of Lodzi and his emissaries.

So at last Lobengula returned to what he had known all along must be the key to the riddle of the Umlimo.

"Guards!" he shouted suddenly, and there were quick and urgent footfalls, and one of his cloaked executioners stooped through the doorway and prostrated himself on the threshold.

"Go to Nomusa, the Girlchild of Mercy, bid her come to me with all speed," said Lobengula.

Whereas I have been much molested of late by divers persons seeking and desiring to obtain grants and concessions of land and mining rights in my territories Now, therefore, for the following considerations: Item One, payment by the grantee to the grantor of 100 pounds per month in perpetuity.

Item Two, the provision by the grantee to the grantor of One Thousand Martini-Henry rifles, together with One Hundred Thousand rounds of Ammunition for the same.

Item Three, the provision by the grantee to the grantor of an armed steamboat to patrol the navigable reaches of the Zambezi river.

Now, therefore, I, Lobengula, King of the Matabele people, and Paramount Chief of Mashonaland, Monarch of all territories South of the Zambezi River and Northwards of the Shashi and Limpopo Rivers, do hereby grant Complete and exclusive charge over all metals and minerals in my Kingdom, Principalities and Dominions, together with full power to do all things that they may deem necessary to win and procure the same and to enjoy the profits and revenues, if any, derivable from the said metals and minerals.

in his fair hand, Jordan Ballantyne wrote out the document from mister Rudd's dictation.

Robyn Codrington read the text to Lobengula, and explained it to him, then she helped him attach the Great Elephant seal. Finally, she witnessed the mark that Lobengula made beside it.

"Damn me, Jordan, there's none of us here that can ride the way you can." Rudd made no effort to conceal his jubilation when they were alone. "It's speed now that counts. If you leave immediately, you can reach Khami Mission by nightfall. Pick the three best horses from those that we left there, and go like the winds my boy.

Take the concession to mister Rhodes, and tell him I will follow directly."

The twins ran down the front steps of Khami Mission and surrounded Jordan as he stepped down from the stirrup.

At the head of the steps, Cathy held a lantern high, and Salina stood beside her with her hands clasped demurely in front of her, and her eyes shining with joy in the lantern light.

"Welcome, Jordan," she called. "We have all missed you so."

Jordan came up the steps. "I can rest one night only," he told her, and a little of her delight died and her smile with it. "I ride south tomorrow at first light."

He was so beautiful, tall and straight, and fair, and though his shoulders were wide and his limbs finely muscled, yet he was lithe and light as a dancer and his expression gentle as a poet's as he looked down into Salina's face.

"Only one night," she murmured. "Then we must make the most of it They ate a dinner of smoked ham and roasted sweet yams, and afterwards they sat on the verandah and Salina sang for them while Jordan smoked a cigar and listened with obvious pleasure, tapping the time on his knee and joining with the others in the chorus.

The moment Salina had finished, Vicky leapt to her feet.

My turn," she announced. Uzzie and I have written a poem."

"Not tonight," said Cathy.

"Why?" demanded Vicky.

"Cathy," wailed the twins in unison. "It's Jordan's last night "That is precisely why." Cathy stood up. "Come on, both of you."

Still they cajoled and procrastinated, until suddenly Cathy's eyes slitted viciously, and she hissed at them with a vehemence that startled them to their feet, to bestow hasty pecks on Jordan's face and then hurry off down the verandah, with Cathy close behind.

Jordan chuckled fondly and flicked the cigar over the verandah rail. "Cathy is right, of course," he said. "I'll be in the saddle for twelve hours tomorrow, it's time we were all abed."

Salina did not reply but moved to the end of the verandah farthest from the bedrooms and leaned on the rail, staring down across the starlit valley.

After a moment, Jordan followed her, and asked softly: "Have I offended you?"

"No," she answered quickly. it's just that I am a little sad.

We all have such fun when you are here." Jordan did not reply, and after a minute she asked: "What will you do now, Jordan?"

"i shall not know until I reach Kimberley. If mister Rhodes is att Groote Schuur already, then I shall go there, but if he is still in London, then he will want me to join him., "How long will it take?"

"From Kimberley to London and back? Four months, if the sailings coincide."

"Tell me about London, Jordan. I read about it and dreamed about it."

He talked quietly, but lucidly and fluently, so that she laughed and exclaimed at his descriptions and anecdotes, and the minutes turned to hours, until suddenly Jordan interrupted himself.

"What am I thinking of; it's almost midnight."

She grasped at anything to keep him from going.

"You promised to tell me about mister Rhodes" house at Groote Schuur."

"It will have to wait for another time, Salina."

"Will there be another time?" she asked.

"Oh, I am sure there will," he answered lightly.

"You will go to England, and Cape Town, it could be years before you come back to Khami."

"Even years will not dim our friendship, Salina." And she stared at him as though he had struck her.

"Is that it, Jordan, are we friends, just friends?"

He took both her hands in his. "The dearest, most precious friends," he confirmed.

She was pale as ivory in the dim light, and her grip on his hands was like that of a drowning woman as she steeled herself to speak, but her voice, when at last she summoned it, was so strained that she was not sure he had understood her.

"Take me with you, Jordan."

"Salina, I don't know what you mean."

"I cannot bear to lose you, take me. Please take me."

"But he was confused and shaken, "but what would you do?"

"Whatever you tell me. I should be your slave, your loving slave, Jordan, for ever."

He tried to free his hands from hers, but he did it gently.

"You cannot just go away and leave me, Jordan. When you came to Khami, it was like the sun rising into my life; and if you go you will take the light with you. I love you, Jordan, oh sweet Jesus, forgive me, but I love you more than life itself."

"Salina, stop! Please stop now." He pleaded with her, but she clung to his hands.

"I cannot let you go without telling you, I love you, Jordan, I shall always love you."

"Salina." His voice was stricken. "Oh Salina, I love somebody else," he said.

"It's not true," she whispered. "Oh, please say it's not true.

"I am sorry, Salina. Terribly sorry."

"Nobody else can love you as much as I do, nobody would sacrifice what I would."

"Please stop, Salina. I don't want you to humiliate yourself."

"Humiliate myself?" she asked. "Oh, Jordan, that would be so small a price, you don't understand."

"Salina, please."

"Let me prove to you, Jordan, let me prove how joyfully I will make any sacrifice." And when he tried to speak, she put her hand lightly over his mouth. "We need not even have to wait for marriage. I will give myself to you this very night."

When he shook his head, she tightened her grip to gag his words of denial.

"So fret not, like an idle girl, That life is dash'd with flecks of sin."

She whispered the quotation, with quivering voice. "Give me the chance, dear Jordan, please give me the chance to prove that I can love and cherish you more than any other woman in all the world. You will see how this other woman's love pales to nothing beside the flame of mine."

He took her wrist and lifted her hand from his mouth, and his head bowed over hers with a terrible regret.

"Salina," he said, "it is not another woman."

She stared up at him, both of them rooted and stricken, while the enormity of his words slowly spread across her soul like hoar frost.

"Not another woman?" she asked at last, and when he shook his head, "Then I can never even hope, never?"

He did not reply, and at last she shook herself like a sleeper wakening from a dream to deathly reality.

"Will you kiss me goodbye, Jordan, just one last time?"

"It need not be the last-" But she reached up and crushed the words on his lips so fiercely that her teeth left a taste of blood on his tongue.

"Goodbye, Jordan," she said, and turning from him she walked down the length of the verandah as infirmly as an invalid arising from a long sick-bed. At the door of her bedroom, she staggered and put out a hand to save herself, and then looked back at him.

Her lips moved, but no sound came from them. "Goodbye, Jordan. Goodbye, my love."

Ralph Ballantyne carried up the rifles, one thousand of them, brand new and still in their yellow grease, five in a wooden case, and twenty cases to a wagonload. There were another ten wagonloads of ammunition, all for the account of De Beers diamond mines, another three wagonloads of liquor for his own account, and a single wagon of furniture and household effects for the bungalow that Zouga was building for himself at Gubulawayo.

Ralph crossed the Shashi river with a certain thousand-pound profit from the convoy already safely deposited in the Standard Bank at Kimberley, but with a nagging hollow feeling in the pit of his stomach.

He had no way of knowing whether Bazo had reported him to Lobengula as the abductor of the stone falcons, or whether one of Bazo's warriors had recognized him and, despite the king's warning, had told a wife, who had told her mother, who had told her husband. "Nothing moves in Matabeleland but the whole nation knows of it," Clinton Codrington had warned him once. However, the profits on this run, and the prospect of visiting Khami Mission again, were worth the risk.

On the first day's march beyond the Shashi, that risk was vindicated, for it was Bazo himself at the head of his red shields who intercepted the convoy, and greeted Ralph inscrutably.

"Who dares the road? Who risks the wrath of Lobengula?" And after he had inspected the loaded wagons, as he and Ralph sat alone by the camp fire, Ralph asked him quietly: "I heard that a white man died in the bush between great Zimbabwe and the Limpopo. What was that man's name?"

"Nobody knows of this matter, except Lobengula and one of his indunas," Bazo replied, without lifting his gaze from the flames. "And even the king does not know who the stranger was or where he came from, nor does he know the site of the grave of the nameless stranger." Bazo took a little snuff and went on. "Nor will we ever speak of this matter again, you and me."

And now he lifted his eyes at last, and there was something in their dark depths that had never been there before, and Ralph thought that it was the look of a man destroyed, a man who would never trust a brother again.

in the morning, Bazo was gone, and Ralph faced northwards, with the doubts dispelled and his spirits soaring like the silver and mauve thunderheads that piled the horizon ahead of him. Zouga was waiting for him at the drift of the Khami river.

"You've made good time, my boy."

"Nobody ever made better," Ralph agreed, and twirled his thick dark moustache, "and nobody is likely to, not until mister Rhodes builds his railroad."

"Did mister Rhodes send the money?"

"In good gold sovereigns," Ralph told him. "I have carried them in my own saddle-bags."

"All we have to do is get Lobengula to accept them."

"That, Papa, is your job. You are mister Rhodes" agent."

Yet three weeks later the wagons still stood outside Lobengula's kraal, their loads roped down under the tarpaulins while Zouga waited each day from early morning until dusk in front of the king's great hut.

"The king is sick," they said.

"The king is with his wives."

"Perhaps the king will come tomorrow."

"Who knows when the king will tire of his wives," they said, and at last even Zouga, who knew and understood the ways of Africa, became angry.

"Tell the king that Bakela, the Fist, rides now to Lodzi to tell him that the king spurns his gifts," he ordered Gandang, who had come to make the day's excuses, and Zouga called to Jan Cheroot to saddle the horses.

"The king has not given you the road." Gandang was shocked and perturbed.

"Then tell Lobengula that his impis can kill the emissary of Lodzi on the road, but it will not take long for the word to be carried to Lodzi. Lodzi sits even now at the great kraal of the queen across the water, basking in her favour."

The king's messengers caught up with Zouga before he reached Khami Mission, for his pace was deliberately leisurely.

"The king bids Bakela return at once, he will speak with him at the moment of his return."

"Tell Lobengula that Bakela sleeps tonight at Khami Mission and perhaps the night after, for who knows when he will see fit to talk with the king again."

Somebody at Khami must have put a spy-glass on the dust raised by Zouga's horses, for when they were still a mile from the hills, a rider came out to meet them at full gallop, a slim figure with long dark plaits streaming behind her lovely head.

When they met, Zouga jumped down from his saddle and lifted her from hers.

"Louise," he whispered into her smiling mouth. "You will never know how slowly the days pass when I am away from you."

"It's a cross you make us both carry," she told him. "I am fully recovered now, thanks to Robyn, and still you make me loiter and pine at Khami. Oh, Zouga, will you not let me join you at Gubulawayo?"

"That I will, my dear, just as soon as we have a roof on the cottage, and a ring on your finger."

,"You are always so proper." She pulled a face at him.

"Who would ever know?"

"i would," he said, and kissed her again, before he lifted her back into the saddle of the bay Arab mare which had been his betrothal gift to her.

They rode with their knees touching and their fingers linked, while Jan Cheroot trailed them discreetly out of earshot.

"We shall have only days longer to wait," Zouga assured her. "I have forced Lobengula's hand. This matter of the rifles will be settled soon and then you can choose where you will make me the happiest man on earth, the cathedral at Cape Town perhaps?"

"Darling Zouga, your family at Khami has been so kind to me The girls have become like my own sisters, and Robyn lavished care upon me when I was so ill, so burned and desiccated by the sun."

"Why not?" Zouga agreed. "I'm sure that Clinton will agree to say the words."

"He has already, but there is more to it. The wedding is all planned, and it is to be a double wedding."

"A double wedding, who are the others?"

"You would never guess, not in a thousand years."

They looked more like brothers than father and son, as they stood before the carved altar in the little whitewashed church at Khami.

Zouga wore his full dress uniform, and the scarlet cket, tailored twenty years before, still fitted him to perfection The gold lace had been renewed to impress Lobengula and his indunas, and now it sparkled bright and untarnished, even in the cool gloom of the church.

Ralph was dressed in expensive broadcloth with a high stock and cravat of watered grey silk that on this hot June day brought beads of sweat to his forehead. His thick dark hair was dressed with pomade to a glossy shine, and his magnificent moustache, twirled with beeswax, pricked out in two stiff points.

Both of them were rigid with expectation, staring fixedly at the altar candles which Clinton had hoarded for such an occasion, and lit only minutes before.

Behind them one of the twins fidgeted with excited anticipation, and Salina pumped up the little organ and launched into "Here comes the Bride", while Ralph grinned with bravado and, out of the side of his mouth, muttered to his father, "Well, here we go then, Papa. Fix bayonets and prepare to receive cavalry!"

They turned with parade ground precision to face the church door, just as the brides stepped through it.

Cathy wore the mail-order dress which Ralph had brought up from Kimberley, while Robyn had lifted her own wedding dress from its resting place in the leatherbound trunk and they had taken in the waist and let down the hem to fit Louise. The delicate lace had turned to the colour of old ivory, and she carried a bouquet of Clinton's yellow roses.

Afterwards they all straggled across the yard. The brides tottered on their high heels and tripped on their trains, clinging to the arms of their new husbands; and the twins pelted them with handfuls of rice, before running ahead to the verandah where the wedding board was piled with mountains of food and lined with regiments of bottles, the finest champagne from Ralph's wagons.

At one end of the table Ralph loosened his stock and held Cathy in the circle of his arm and a glass in his other hand as he made his speech: "My wife, "he referred to her, and the company hooted with laughter and clapped with delight, while Cathy clung to him and looked up at his face in transparent adoration.

Then when the speeches were ended, Clinton looked across the table at his eldest daughter. His bald head shone with the heat and excitement and the good champagne.

Will you not sing to us, my darling Salina," he asked.

"Something happy and joyous?"

Salina nodded and smiled, and lifted her chin to sing in her gentle voice: "However far you go, my love, I will follow too.

The highest mountain top, my love, Across deepest ocean blue."

Louise turned her face towards Zouga, and when she smiled the corners of her dark blue eyes slanted upwards and her lips parted and glistened. Below the tabletop Clinton reached for Robyn's hand, but his gaze stayed upon his daughter's face.

Even Ralph sobered, and sat attentively while Cathy laid her cheek upon his shoulder.

"No arctic night too cold, my love, No tropic noon too fierce.

For I will cleave to you, my love, "Til death my heart do pierce."

Salina sat very straight on the wooden bench with her hands in her lap. She was smiling as she sang, a sweet serene smile, but a single tear broke from her lower lid and descended, with tortuous slowness, the velvet curve of her cheek, until it reached the corner of her mouth.

The song ended, and they were silent for a long moment, and then Ralph pounded on the table with the flat of his hand.

"Oh bravo, Salina, that was superb."

Then they were all applauding, and Salina smiled at them and the single tear broke and fell to her breast, to leave a dark star upon the satin of her bodice.

"Excuse me," she said. "Please excuse me."

And she stood up and, still smiling, glided down the verandah. Cathy sprang to her feet, her face twisted with concern, but Robyn caught her wrist before she could follow.

"Leave her be," she whispered. "The child needs to be alone a while. You will only upset her further." And Cathy sank back beside Ralph.

"Shame on you, Louise," with forced jocularity, Clinton called down the table. "Your husband's glass is empty, are you neglecting him so soon?"

An hour later Salina had not returned, and Ralph's voice had become louder and even more assertive. "Now that mister Rhodes has got his charter, we can begin to assemble the column. Cathy and I will start back tomorrow with the empty wagons. Heaven knows we will need every pair of wheels, and I thought old King Ben would never take those rifles off my hands."

But Cathy was for once not drinking in every one of his words; she kept looking down the verandah, and again she whispered to Robyn, who frowned and shook her head.

"You talk as though the whole affair was arranged for your personal profit, Ralph." Robyn turned from Cathy to challenge her new son-in-law.

"Perish the thought, Aunty., Ralph laughed, and winked at his father down the length of the table. "It's all for the good of Empire and the glory of God."

Cathy waited until they were once more embroiled in amiable argument, and then she slipped away so quietly that Robyn did not notice until Cathy reached the end of the verandah. For a moment she looked set to call her back, but instead she made a move of annoyance and addressed herself to Zouga.

"How long will you and Louise remain at Gubulawayo?"

"Until the column reaches Mount Hampden. mister Rhodes doesn't want any misunderstanding between the volunteers and Lobengula's young bucks."

"I will be able to send up fresh vegetables and even a few flowers while you are at the king's kraal, Louise," Clinton offered.

"You've been too kind already," Louise thanked him, and then broke off, and an expression of deep concern crossed her face.

They all turned hurriedly in the direction she was staring.

Cathy had returned and climbed the verandah steps.

She leaned against one of the whitewashed columns. Her face was the muddy yellow of a malaria sufferer, and her brow and chin were blistered with droplets of sweat. Her eyes were tortured, and her mouth twisted with horror.

"In the church," she said. "She's in the church." And then she doubled over, and retched with a terrible tearing sound, and it came up her throat in a solid yellow eruption that soaked the virginal white skirts of her wedding gown.

Robyn was the first to reach the church door. She stared for only a moment and then she whirled and hid her face against Clinton's chest.

"Take her away," Zouga ordered Clinton brusquely, and then to Ralph. "Help me!"

The garland of pink roses had fallen from Salina's head, and lay below her on the floor of the nave. She had thrown a halter rope over one of the roof beams, and she must have climbed up on the table that Robyn used for her surgery.

Her hands hung open at her sides. The toes of her slippers were turned in towards each other in a touchingly innocent stance, like those of a little girl standing on tiptoe; but they were suspended at the height of a man's waist above the flagged floor.

Zouga had to look up at her face. The rope had caught her under one ear and her head was twisted at an impossible angle to one side. To Zouga her face seemed swollen to twice its normal size, and it was mottled a dark mulberry hue.

At that moment a merciful little breeze came in through the doorway and turned her slowly on the rope to face the altar, so that Zouga could see only her lustrous golden hair which had come down and now hung to her waist. That was still beautiful.

Cathy Ballantyne had never known such happiness as the months spent in the British South Africa Company camp on the Macloutsi river.

She was the only woman among nearly seven hundred men, and a favourite of all of them. They called her "Missus", and her presence was eagerly sought at every social activity with which officers and men diverted themselves during the long term of waiting.

The harsh conditions of camp life might have daunted another newly married girl of her age, but Cathy had known no others, and she turned the hut of daub and thatch that Ralph built for her into a cosy retreat with calico curtains in the glassless windows and woven grass native mats on the earth floor. She planted petunias on each side of the doorway, and the troopers of the column vied for the honour of watering them. She cooked over an open fire in the lean-to kitchen, and her invitations to dine were eagerly sought after by men who subsisted on canned bully beef and stamped maize meal.

She glowed with all the attention and excitement, so that from being merely pretty, she seemed to become beautiful, which made the men cherish her the more.

Then, of course, she had Ralph, and she wondered some nights as she lay awake and listened to his breathing, how she had ever lived without him.

Ralph had the rank of major now, and he told her with a wink and an irreverent chuckle, "We are all colonels and majors, my girl. I'm even thinking of making old Isazi a captain." But he looked so handsome in his uniform with frogged coat and slouch hat and Sam Browne belt, that she wished he would wear it more often.

With each day Ralph seemed to her to become taller, his body more powerful and his energy more abundant.

Even when he was away down the line hustling up the wagons, setting up the heliograph stations, or meeting with the other directors of the British South Africa Company in Kimberley, she was not lonely. Somehow his presence seemed always with her, and his absence made anticipation of his return a sort of secret joy.

Then suddenly he would be back, galloping into camp to sweep her up and toss her as high as if she were a child, before kissing her on the mouth.

"Not in public," she would gasp and blush. "People are watching, Ralph."

"And turning green with envy," he agreed, and carried her into the hut.

When he was there, everything was a breathless whirl.

He was everywhere with his long assured stride and merry infectious laugh, driving his men along with a word of encouragement or of banter, and occasionally with sudden murderous black rages.

His rages terrified her, although they were never directed at her; and yet at the same time they excited her strangely. She would watch him with fearful fascination as his face swelled and darkened with passion, and his voice rose into a roar like a wounded bull. Then his fists and boots would fly and somebody would roll in the dust. A Afterwards she felt weak and trembly, and she would hurry away to the hut and draw the curtains and wait.

When he came in, he would have that savage look on his face that made something flutter in the pit of her stomach, and it took all her will not to run to him, but to wait for him to come to her.

"By God, Katie my girl," he said to her once as he leaned on his elbow over her, the sweat still glistening on his naked chest, and his breathing as rough as though he had run a race, "you may look like an angel, but you could teach the devil himself a trick or two."

Though she prayed afterwards for strength to control the wanton sensations and cravings of her body, the prayers were perfunctory and lacked real conviction, and that lovely smug and contented feeling just would not go away.

With Ralph it was excitement all the time, day and night, when they were alone and when they were in company. She loved to watch the deference with which other men treated him, rich and famous men older than he was like Colonel Pennefather and Doctor Leander Starr Jameson, who were the leaders of the column. But then, she told herself, so they should. Ralph was already a director of the Chartered Company, mister Rhodes" British South Africa Company, and when he sat down at the boardroom table in the De Beers building, it was in the company of lords and generals and of mister Rhodes himself, though Ralph grinned and told her wickedly, "Great men, Katie, but not one of them whose feet don't stink in hot weather, same as mine."

A "You are awful, Ralph Ballantyne," she scolded, but she felt all puffed up with pride when she overheard two troopers talking of him and one said: "Ralph Ballantyne, there's a man for you, and no mistake."

Then at night, after they had made boisterous unashamed love, they would talk in the darkness, sometimes through most of the night, and his dreams and plans were the more enchanting for she knew that he would make them come true.

Her personal rapture was heightened by the mood of the seven hundred men around her, and each day's restraint as they waited for the word to move off increased the tension which gripped them all. Ralph's oxen brought up the guns, two seven-pounders, and the artillery fired shrapnel over the deserted veld beyond the camp, while the watchers cheered them as the fleecy cotton pods of smoking death opened prettily in the clear dry air.

The four Maxim machine-guns were unpacked from their cases and de-greased, and then, on a memorable day, the monstrous steam engine came chugging into the encampment, dragging behind it the electric generator and the naval searchlight which would be just another precaution against night attack by the Matabele hordes.

That night as she lay in his arms, Cathy asked Ralph the question they were all asking one another.

"What will Lobengula do?"

"What can he do?" Ralph stroked her hair, the way he might caress a favourite puppy. "He has signed the concession, taken his gold and guns, and promised Papa the roa d to Mashonaland."

"They say he has eighteen thousand men waiting across the Shashi."

"Then let them come, Katie, my lass. There are not a few amongst us who would welcome the chance to teach King Ben's buckaroos a sharp lesson."

"That's a terrible thing to say," she said without conviction.

"But it's the truth, by God."

She no longer chided him when he blasphemed so lightly, for the days and ways of Khami Mission seemed to be part of a fading dream.

Then one day, early in July of 1890, the mirror of a heliograph winked its eye across the dusty, sun-washed distances. It was the word for which they had waited all these months. The British Foreign Secretary had at last approved the occupation of Mashonaland by the representatives of the British South Africa Company.

The long ponderous column uncoiled like a serpent.

At its head rode Colonel Pennefather in company uniform, and at his right hand the guide Frederick Selous, whose duty it would be to take the column wide of any Matabele settlements, to cross the low malarial lands before the rains broke and to lead them up the escarpment to the sweet and healthy airs of the high plateau.

The Union Jack unfurled above their heads and a bugler sounded the advance.

"Heroes every one of them," Ralph grinned at Cathy.

"But it's up to the likes of me to see our heroes through."

His shirtsleeves were rolled high on his muscled arms and a disgracefully stained hat was cocked over one eye.

"When I come back, we'll be richer by eighty thousand pounds," he told her, and lifted her off the ground with his embrace.

"Oh Ralph, how I wish I were coming with you."

"You know mister Rhodes has forbidden any women to cross the frontier, and you'll be a damned sight safer and more comfortable at Lily's Hotel in Kimberley with Jordan to keep an eye on you."

"Then be careful, my darling," she cautioned him, breathless from his hug.

"No need for that, Katie, my sweet. The devil looks after his own."

"These are not men coming to dig holes." Gandang stood forth from the circle of indunas. "They are dressed as soldiers; they bring guns that can break down the granite hills with their smoke."

"What did the king promise Lodzi?" demanded Bazo. at he may come in peace to look for gold. Why does he march against us like an army?"

Bazo spoke for the young men. "Oh great King, the spears are bright and our eyes are red. We are fifteen thousand men; can the king's enemies stand against us?"

Lobengula looked at his handsome eager young face.

sometimes the most dangerous enemy is a hasty heart," he said, softly.

"And at other times, Bull Elephant of Kurnalo, it might be a tardy spear arm."

A shadow of irritation at importunate youth passed behind the king's eyes; then he sighed. "Who knows?" he agreed. "Who knows where the enemy lies?"

"The enemy lies before you, great King; he has crossed the Shashi river and he has come to take your land from you," Somabula told him. And then Gandang stood again: "Let the spears go, Lobengula, Son of Mzilikazi, let your young men run, or as the sun will rise tomorrow, that surely will you live to regret it."

"That I cannot do," Lobengula said softly. "Not yet. I cannot use the assegai when words may still suffice." He roused himself and his voice firmed.

"Go, Gandang, my brother, take your hot-hearted son with you. Go to the leader of these soldiers and ask him why he comes into my lands in battle array, and bring his answer to me here."

Frederick Selous rode ahead, a trooper with an axe following him, and he pointed out the trees to be cut.

The trooper blazed them with a slash of the axe, and followed Selous on. The axemen came up behind them, fifty of them, riding in pairs. One man dismounted, handed his reins to his partner, spat on his already callused hands and, hefting the axe, addressed himself to the trunk of the doomed tree.

While his axe thudded and the wood chips flew white as bone in the sunlight, the second man sat in the saddle, his rifle in his hands, and he watched the forest around him for the first plumed head and long tasselled shield to appear. When the tree crackled and toppled, the axeman mounted and they rode on to the next, where he took his turn on guard while his mate swung the axe. Behind them the bullock spans came plodding to chain the fallen trunks and drag them out of the road, and then the whole ponderous caravan rumbled forward.

It was slow work, and on the third day Ralph rode to the head of the column to discuss with Selous the possibility of using the steam engine to haul the smaller trees, roots and all, from the sandy earth. They had left their horses with a trooper and walked forward for a better view of the way ahead when Ralph said quietly: "Stand your ground, mister Selous. Do not draw your pistol, and, in God's name, do not show any agitation."

There were dark and moving shadows in the forest all around them, and then suddenly the dreaded long shields were there, forming a wall across their front.

"Has the king killed any white ment" a deep voice challenged. "If he has not, then why has this impi of warriors crossed his border?"

Tobengula has killed nobody," Ralph called back.

"Then have the white men mislaid something of value that they come to seek it here?" Ralph said quietly to Selous. "I know this man. He is one of the king's senior indunas. The one with the red shield behind him is his son; between them they disposed of eight thousand men. It would be as well to tread warily, mister Selous. We are surrounded by an army."

Then he addressed himself to the watching and waiting warriors: "The king has given us the road."

"The king denies that he called an army to enter his domain."

"We are not an army," Ralph denied, and Gandang threw back his head and laughed briefly and bitterly.

Then he spoke again: "Hear me, Henshaw, no white man steps beyond this place without the word of Lobengula. Tell that to your masters."

Ralph whispered briefly with Selous, and then faced Gandang again.

"We will wait," he agreed, "for the king's word."

"And we will watch while you wait," Gandang promise ominously, and at a gesture the warriors melted away into the forest again and it seemed they had never been.

"Pull in the pickets," Colonel Pennefather ordered. "Put the wagons into laager. Ballantyne, can you get a message back to Tuhon the heliograph and have someone post up to Gubulawayo to find what are Lobengula's real intentions." And, as Ralph turned to hurry away, "Oh, one other thing, Ballantyne, can you start the generator and have the searchlight ready to sweep the area around the camp tonight. We don't want those fellows creeping up on us in the dark."

Gandang and his son stood together on the crest of one of the little rocky kopjes that dotted the wide hot plain between the rivers.

They were alone, although when Bazo turned his head and looked down the steep back-slope of the hill, he could see the bivouac of their combined impis. There were no cooking fires to disclose their presence to the white men; they would eat cold rations and sleep in darkness this night. The long, black ranks squatted with enforced patience, dense as hiving bees beneath the shading branches of the mopani.

Bazo knew that he had only to lift his right arm above his shield to bring them to their feet and send them racing away, silent and ferocious as hunting leopards, and the thought gave him a savage joy. Reluctantly he turned back, and stood quietly with his shield not quite touching his father's.

The little afternoon breeze coming up from the river stirred their war plumes, and they gazed down upon the laager of the white men.

The bullocks had been penned within the circle of the wagons, and they could see the field guns and the Maxim machine-guns posted at the points of the barricade, their positions fortified with biscuit boxes and Ammunition cases from the wagonloads. The gun crews lounged near their weapons, yet somehow the whole scene appeared tranquil and unwarlike.

"In the dark hour before the dawn, we could take them before they could stand to their guns," murmured Bazo.

"It would be so quick, so easy."

"We will wait on the king's word," his father replied, and then started and exclaimed.

"What is it, my father?"

Gandang lifted his assegai and pointed with it southwards, to the pale blue horizon, far beyond the Shashi river, to the faint line of hills, shaped as fantastically as the turreted towers of a fairy castle.

On those far pale hills, something flickered and sparkled, a tiny speck of brightest white light, like a fire-fly in flight, or like the twinkle of the morning star.

"The stars," Gandang whispered with superstitious awe, "the stars are shining on the hills."

The little group of officers stood behind the tripod of the instrument and focused their telescopes on the distant twinkle of light.

The heliograph operator called the message aloud, at the same time scribbling it on his signal pad. "Jove advises hold your position pending clarification Lobengula's intention." Jove was the code for mister Rhodes.

"Very well." Pennefather closed his telescope with a snap. "Acknowledge message received and understood."

The operator bent to the prism of the instrument and made a minute adjustment in its focus, turning one mirror to catch the sunlight and the second to reflect it directly towards the line of distant hills; then he seized the handle and the shutter clattered as it blinked the beam of sunlight, speeding the dots and dashes of the Morse code instantaneously across fifty miles of wilderness.

Pennefather turned away and crossed briskly to the massive steam engine on its tall steel wheels. He looked up at Ralph on the footplate.

"Are you ready to light up, Ballantyne?"

Ralph removed the long black cheroot from between his teeth, and gave a parody of a military salute.

"Weve got sixty pounds of pressure on the boiler.

Another half hour and she'll be whistling out of the valve."

"Very well." Pennefather hid his mystification. He neither understood nor admired these demoniacal contraptions "Just as long as we have light by nightfall."

Gandang sat on his shield with his fur kaross of monkey skins over his shoulders. The winter evenings were cold, even here in the lowlands. There were no fires in the bivouac, and he could barely make out the faces of his junior commanders who sat opposite him, for the last flush of the sunset was fading from the western sky. "It was something that all of us saw, and something that we have never seen before."

They murmured agreement.

"It was a star, fallen from the heavens, and it lay upon the hills. We all saw it."

"In the morning I will send two of our swiftest runners to the king. He must know of this terrible witchcraft."

He stood up and let his kaross fall. "Now I am going He did not finish the sentence.

Instead he dropped into a defensive crouch and flung up his shield to cover his head, and around him his warriors wailed like frightened children, their eyes wide and white, glinting in the flood of light that burst down upon them from the sky.

The evening stars were washed out by the brilliance of the great white beam that reached from earth to heaven, and threw the hills into crisp black silhouette.

"The sun has returned," Gandang croaked in religious terror. "It is the prophecy, the whole prophecy. The stone falcons have flown, the stars shine on the hills, and now the sun burns at midnight."

Fort Salisbury 20th Sept. 1890 My darling Kate, Over two months since last I kissed you, and I am missing your cooking, amongst other things!

You will see by the address that we have reached our destination, although we lost a man drowned, another to drink, a third bitten by a mamba and a fourth eaten by a lion, the Matabele touched not one of us.

So Lobengula kept his word, to the surprise of all, and the disappointment of not a few. After one exchange of insults with old Gandang at the head of 8,000 of his bully boys, they let us pass, and the rest of it was rather tedious, just sweat and blisters!

The great Selous almost lost us once, but then I showed him the pass through the hills which Isazi and I found when we made our little foray to Great Zimbabwe. Selous called it Providential Pass (providential that I was with him, I'd say), and he took the kudos (to which he is welcome). He will probably write another book about his feat!

We reached Mount Hampden on the 6th instant, and it gave me a turn to think that Papa had been the first man here all those years ago.

However, Pennefather, in his great wisdom, decided there was insufficient water there and moved us all twelve miles across here. Of course the man is a new chum, fresh out from home, so how is he to know that this place will turn into a swamp with the first rains.

"I intend to be well away by then!) I have visited some God-forsaken places on my travels, but this one gets the coconut! It's infested with lions, and I've lost 15 oxen to them already. The grazing is sour-!" and, the remaining beasts are losing condition, oh, how I long for the sweet-veld of Matabeleland. Trust the Matabele to pick the best stock country, so I'll not be too surprised when others start thinking about Lobengula's herds and pastures. If only the cunning old brighter had thrown his war spear and given us the excuse, we might be hoisting the flag over Gubulawayo now, rather than over this dreary spot.

Oh well! At least I am the only one here with whisky, two wagonloads of it, and doing a roaring trade at 10 shillings the bottle. You shall have the prettiest bonnet in Kimberley when I return, Katie my heart.

The day Pennefather hoisted the flag the boys were free to go their own way, and what a stampede there was! Everyone intent to be the first to peg the gold reef we've heard so much about. Some of them are crawling back already, tail between their legs. This is no Eldorado, if there is gold, they'll have to work for it, and then, of course, mister Rhodes and his British South Africa Company will take half of it. Of course, they all were happy enough about the Company's cut when they signed on, but they are starting to bellyache about it now.

We had a message on the "Helio" this morning that the British South Africa Company shares are selling for 3 pounds 5 shillings. each in London, and 5,000 new shareholders on the books in the first week. Well, all I can say is that whoever is paying that price has never seen Fort Salisbury!

"Young Ballantyne," says Leander Starr Jameson to me, "you were damnably lucky to take half your fees payable in B.S.A. shares valued at 1 pound each."

"Jarneson," says I, "it's strange how the harder I work and the harder I think, the luckier I get."

So I have 40,000 B.S.A. shares, Katie my love, and you will find here attached a letter addressed to Aaron Fagan, my solicitor in Kimberley, instructing him to sell every last one of them. Take it around to him posthaste, that's a good girl. We'll be well rid of them at a profit of 2 pounds 5 shillings each, and that's God's truth! Perhaps I'll buy you two bonnets when I come back!

Oh, if only we had Matabeleland, no wonder Lobengula left Mashonaland to the Mashonas! Though they don't call it that any more. The new name that is all the rage is Rhodesia, no less!

What an ungainly name it is, but no doubt mister Rhodes will be flattered and my brother Jordan will be delighted. They are welcome to my share of Rhodesia , Don't forget to take the letter to Fagan, mind!

Nonetheless, there is still a penny to be made here.

I have taken a partner, and we are building a General Store and Bar-room. He will run both businesses, as well as the Salisbury Depot for my wagons. He seems an honest lad, our Tom Meikle, and hard-working, so I have given him a wage of 5 pounds a month and ten percent of the profits, no point in spoiling him! just as cen soon as we get the building up and the stocks on the shelves, I will leave him to it and be on my way back to you.

mister Rhodes wants me to contract to erect the telegraph line from Kimberley to Fort Salisbury for him at a price Of 25,000 pounds I reckon there will be 10,000 pounds profit in it. You shall have three bonnets, Katie, I swear it to you!

I must leave here by the 10th of next month if I am to beat the rains. Once they start the mosquitoes are going to take over Fort Salisbury, and every river between here and the Shashi will be a flood that would break even Noah's heart.

Thus I expect to reach Kimberley by the end of October, so take a good look at the floor, Katie my sweet, for when I get there you will be looking at nought but the ceiling for a week, and my word on it!

Your loving husband, Ralph Ballantyne (Ex Major B.S.A. Police Retired!) We must have Matabeleland. It is as simple as that," said Zouga Ballantyne, and Jordan looked up sharply from his pad of Pitman's shorthand.

His father sat in one of the deep buttoned leather chairs facing mister Rhodes" desk. Beyond him the green velvet curtains were open and held with yellow tasselled ropes of silk. The view from this top floor of the De Beers Company buildings took in a wide sweep of the dry Griqualand plain dotted with camel-thorn trees, and closer to hand the stacking ground where the blue earth from the Kimberley mine was left to deteriorate in the brilliant sunshine before being made to yield up its precious diamonds.

Jordan had no eyes for the view now; his father's words had shocked him. But mister Rhodes merely hooded his eyes and slumped massively at his desk, gesturing for Zouga to continue.

"The Company shares are six shillings in London, against three pounds fifteen on the day we raised the flag at Fort Salisbury three years ago, " ,I know, I know," Rhodes nodded.

"I have spoken with the men that remain; I have spent the last three months travelling from Fort Victoria to Salisbury as you bid me. They won't stay, mister Rhodes.

They won't stay unless you let them go in and finish it."

"Matabeleland." Rhodes lifted his great shaggy head, and Jordan thought how terribly he had aged in these last three years. "Matabeleland," he repeated softly.

"They are sick of the constant menace of Lobengula's hordes upon their borders; they have convinced themselves that the gold they did not find in Mashonaland lies under Lobengula's earth; they have seen Lobengula's fat herds of choice cattle and compared them to their own lean beasts that starve on the thin sour veld to which they are restricted"

"Go on," Rhodes nodded.

"They know that to reach them the telegraph and the railroad must come through Matabeleland. They are sick to the guts with malaria and the constant fear of the Matabele. If you want to keep Rhodesia, you must give them Matabeleland."

"I have known this all along. I think we all have. Yet we must move carefully. We must be careful of the Imperial Factor, of Gladstone and of Whitehall." Rhodes stood up and began to pace back and forth before the shelves laden with leather-bound books titled in gold leaf.

"We need to prepare ourselves. You must remember, Ballantyne, that we have technically only the right to dig for gold. As long as Lobengula does not molest us, we cannot declare war upon him."

"But if Lobengula. were to interfere in any way with our people and their rights?"

"That would be another matter." Rhodes stopped in front of Zouga's chair. "Then I should certainly end his game for him."

"In the meantime the company's shares are six shillings each," Zouga reminded him.

"We need an incident," said Rhodes. "But in the meantime we have to prepare and I dare not put it on the wires. I want you to leave immediately for Fort Victoria to speak to Jameson. "Rhodes swung his big head towards Jordan. "Do not make notes of this, Jordan," he ordered, and Jordan dutifully lifted his pencil from the pad.

"Instruct Jameson to send me a series of telegrams on the new wires. Telegrams advising against war, that we can show the British Government and people when it is all over, but in the meantime tell him to prepare for war."

Rodes turned back to Jordan. "Take an instruction, Jordan. Sell fifty thousand B.S.A. Company shares for what they will fetch. Jameson must have what he needs to do the business. Tell him that, Ballantyne. I shall be behind him all the way, but we need an incident."

Ralph Ballantyne sat his horse on the heights of the escarpment which fell away before him, in a tumbled splendour of rocky hills and forests. The spring foliage turned the groves of msasa trees into clouds of pink and swelling scarlets, and the air was so clear and bright that he could pick out the telegraph line all the way to the horizon.

The wires were a gossamer thread that glistened red gold in the sunlight, so fragile, so insubstantial, that it seemed impossible that they ran, arrow straight, six hundred miles and more to meet the raithead at Kimberley.

Ralph's men had laid this line. The surveyors riding ahead to set up the beacons, the axemen following to clear the line, then the wagons bringing up the poles and finally the enormous spools of gleaming copper wire uncoiling endlessly.

Ralph had hired good men, paid them well, and visited them less than once a month. Yet he was proud as he saw the wires sparkle and thought of the importance and significance of this achievement.

Beside him his foreman cursed suddenly. "There it is!

The thieving bastards!" And he pointed to where the line of telegraph poles marched up the side of one forested hill. Ralph had thought that cloud shadow had dimmed the sparkle of the copper wire up this slope, but now when he focused his binoculars upon them he saw that the poles had been stripped bare.

"Come on," he said grimly, and rode forward. When they reached the bottom of the slope they found that one of the telegraph poles had been chopped through at the base, and felled like timber. The wires had been hacked IF through, and the scuff marks in the earth where it had been rolled into bundles had not yet been erased by the wind.

Slowly they rode on up the slope, and Ralph did not have to dismount to read the sign of bare feet.

"There were at least twenty of them," he said. "Women and children with them, a family outing, damn them to hell."

"It's the women that put them up to it" the foreman agreed. "That wire makes beautiful bracelets and bangles.

The black girls just love it."

At the top of the slope another telegraph pole had been felled and the wire snipped through, "They have got away with five hundred yards of wire," Ralph scowled. "But next time it could be five thousand.

Do you know who they are?"

The foreman shrugged. "The local Mashona chief is Matanka. His village is just the other side of the valley.

You can see the smoke from here., Ralph slipped his rifle out of its boot under his knee.

It was a magnificent new Winchester Repeater Model 1890 with his name engraved and chased with gold into the metal of the block. He levered a round into the breech.

"Let's go to see brother Matanka."

He was an old man, with legs like a stork and a cap of pure white wool covering his head. He trembled with fear and fell on his knees before this furious young white man with a rifle in his hand.

"Fifty head," Ralph told him. "And next time your people touch the wires it will be a hundred."

Ralph and his foreman cut the fattest cattle out of Matanka's herds and drove them ahead of them, up the escarpment and into the little white settlement of Fort Victoria which had grown up mid-way between the Shashi river and Fort Salisbury.

"All right," Ralph told his foreman. "You can take them from here. Turn them over to the auctioneer, we should get ten pounds a head for them."

"That will cover the cost of replacing the wires fifty times over," the foreman grinned.

"I don't believe in taking a loss when I don't have to," Ralph laughed. "Get on with you, I'll have to go down and square it with the gool doctor."

Doctor Jameson's office, as administrator of the Charterlands of the British South Africa Company, was a wood and iron building with an untidily thatched roof directly opposite the only canteen in Fort Victoria.

"Ah, young Ballantyne," Jameson greeted Ralph, and secretly enjoyed Ralph's frown of annoyance. He did not share the general high opinion of this youngster. He was too bumptious and too successful by a half, while physically he was all that Jameson was not; tall and broadshouldered, with a striking appearance and forceful Presence.

The wags were saying that one day Ralph Ballantyne would own the half of the Charterland that Rhodes did not already have his brand on. However, even Jameson had to grant that if you wanted something done, no matter how difficult, and if you wanted it done swiftly and thoroughly, and if you were prepared to pay top dollar, then Ralph Ballantyne was your man.

"Ah, Jameson." Ralph retaliated by dropping the mousy little doctor's title from the greeting, and by turning immediately to the other man in the room.

"General Sint John." Ralph flashed that compelling smile.

"How good to see you, sir! When did you get into Fort Victoria?"

Mungo Sint John limped across the room to take Ralph's hand, and his single eye gleamed.

"Got in this very morning."

"Congratulations on your appointment, sir. We need a good soldier up here, the way things are going." Ralph's compliment was an oblique jibe at Doctor Jameson's own military aspirations. Rhodes had very recently appointed Mungo Sint John as the Company's Chief of Staff. He would be under Jameson's administration, naturally, but would be directly responsible for police and military affairs in the Charterlands of Rhodesia.

"Did your men find the break in the wires?" Jameson interrupted them.

"Bangles, and bracelets," Ralph nodded. "That's what happened to the wires. I have given the local chief a lesson that I hope-will teach him to behave himself. I fined him fifty head of cattle."

Jameson frowned quickly.

"Lobengula considers Matanka to be his vassal. He owns those cattle, the Mashona merely tend the herds on the king's behalf."

Ralph shrugged. "Then Matanka will have some explaining to do, and rather him than me, and that's the truth., "Lobengula won't let this pass -" Jameson broke off, and the frown cleared. He began to pace up and down behind his desk with excited, hopping, bird-like steps.

"Perhaps," he twitched at his scraggly little moustache, perhaps this is what we have been waiting for. Lobengula will not let it pass, nor, by God, will we." He paused and looked at Ralph. "How soon will you have the wires restored?"

"By noon tomorrow," Ralph told him promptly.

"Good! Good! We must get a message through to your father at Gubulawayo. If he protests to Lobengula that his vassals are stealing Company property, and informs him that we have fined him in cattle, what will Lobengula do?"

"He will send an impi to punish Matanka."

"Punish him"

"Cut his head off, kill his men, rape his women and burn his village."

"Exactly." Jameson punched his fist into his palm. "And Matanka is on Company ground and under protection of the British flag. It will be our duty, our bounden duty, to drive off Lobengula's men."

"War!" said Ralph.

"War," agreed Sint John softly. "Well done, young fellow.

This is what we have been waiting for."

"Ballantyne, can you give me a tender to provide wagons and supplies for an expeditionary force, say five hundred men; we'll need twenty-five wagons, six hundred horses, when we drive for Gubulawayo."

"When do you expect to march?"

"Before the rains." Jameson was decisive. "If we go, then we'll have to finish it before the rains break.,"

"I will have a tender for you by the time the telegraph is reopened tomorrow., Ralph jumped down from the saddle and tossed his reins to the groom who came running.

Although it was only a temporary lodging which Ralph used on his infrequent visits to check the progress of his construction gangs, his transport stages and his trading posts, yet it was the grandest house in Fort Victoria, with glass in the windows and insect mesh screening the doors.

His spurs clattered on the steps as he stormed up onto the verandah, and Cathy heard him and came running with the baby on her hip.

"You are home so soon," she cried delightedly, rebuttoning her bodice from the feeding.

"Couldn't stay away from you two." He laughed and smacked a kiss on her mouth, then snatched the baby from her and tossed him high.

"Do be careful." Cathy hopped anxiously to try and take him back, but Jonathan gurgled joyously and kicked with excitement, and a trickle of milk reappeared and ran down his chin.

"Mucky little devil." Ralph held him high and sniffed at his son.

"Both ends at once, by God. Here, Katie." He handed the infant to her and held her around the waist.

"We are going to Gubulawayo," he said.

"Who?" She looked up at him in confusion.

"Sint John and the good doctor and I, and when we get there B.S.A. shares will go to five pounds. Last price I heard before the wires were cut was five shillings. The first message that goes out tomorrow is my buying order to Aaron Fagan, for fifty thousand British South Africans!"

Bazo's impi came sweeping down out of the western forests, silent as shadows and murderous as wild hunting dogs.

"Kill that dog Matanka," the king had ordered. "Kill him and all his men." And Bazo caught them in the dawn, as the first of them came out of their huts yawning and rubbing the sleep from their eyes, and then they chased the young girls cackling and shrieking like hens amongst the huts, and roped them in bunches.

"And all his men," had been the king's order, and some of Matanka's men were working for the white men, at the Prince Mine, one of the very few paying gold reefs in Mashonaland. They were breaking and carrying the rock.

"Do not interfere," Bazo told the mine overseer. "This is the king's business. No white man will be hurt, that is the king's order."

And they chased the Mashona labourers into the crushing plant and stabbed them as they hid under the sorting-tables.

They came racing down the telegraph line, five hundred red shields. The Mashona wiremen were unwinding the huge drums and stringing the shining strands.

"No white men will be hurt," Bazo shouted as he let his young men run. "Stand aside, white men." But now Bazo was mad with blood and boastful with the killing fever. "This is not for you, white men. Not yet, white men, but your day will come."

They dragged the Mashona down from the telegraph poles, and bayed about them like hounds tearing a fox to pieces, while the Mashona screamed to their white masters for protection.

"Bring in the cattle, all Matanka's cattle," the king had ordered, and Bazo's men swept the Mashona pastures, and drove the sprawling multi-coloured herds back into the west in the clouds of their own dust; and with the herds were mingled some of the white men's cattle, for one beast looks like another, and the marks burned by hot iron into the hide meant nothing to the Matabele warriors.

It was all done so swiftly that Jameson had to ride hard with his band of hastily assembled volunteers to catch them before they reached the frontier of the Charterland.

He had thirty-eight men with him, and when he saw the horsemen, Bazo turned back and with the massed warriors at his back he greeted Jameson.

"Sakubona, Daketela! I see you, Doctor! Fear not, by the king's orders no white man will be molested."

But the volunteers bunched their horses, and there was the snick of breech blocks and the rattle of bolts as they loaded. Thirty-eight against five hundred, and they were jumpy and white-faced.

The little doctor spurred forward, and Ralph murmured to Sint John: "By God, the man is a bantam cock, and he'll get us all into it yet."

But Jameson showed no agitation as he stood in the stirrups and called: "Men of Matabele, why have you crossed the border?"

"Hau, Daketela!"Bazo answered him with mock astonishment. "What border is this you speak of? Surely this land, all of it, belongs to Lobengula. There are no borders."

"The men you have slaughtered are under my protection."

"The men we killed were Mashona,"Bazo replied scornfully. "And the Mashona. are Lobengula's dogs, to kill or keep as he wishes." i'm "The cattle you have stolen belong to my people."

"All the Mashona cattle belong to the king."

Then Sint John shouted over him, "Careful, Jameson, there is treachery here, watch those men on your left."

Some of Bazo's men had pressed forward, the better to see and to hear. A few of them were armed with ancient Martini-Henry rifles, probably those with which Rhodes had paid the king for his concession.

Jameson swung his horse to face them.

"Back!" he shouted. "Back, I say." He lifted his rifle to enforce his order, and one of the Matabele instinctively copied the gesture, ha threatening the little group of mounted white men with his rifle.

Mungo Sint John flung up his rifle, and as it touched his shoulder he fired. The shot was a thunderous burst of sound in the dusty air, and the heavy bullet smashed into the Matabele's naked chest. His rifle clattered on the ground, and a little feather of bright crimson sprayed from his chest. The warrior pirouetted slowly, almost gracefully, until they looked into the shocking gape of the exit wound between his shoulder blades.

Then the warrior collapsed, and his legs kicked convulsively.

"Do not touch a white man!" Bazo bellowed into the terrible silence, but not more than half a dozen of the horsemen understood the language. To the others it sounded like a killing order. The crash of volleyed rifle fire mingled with the trample of hooves and whinny of panicky horses. The banks of blue gunsmoke blended with the billowing pale dust and the rippling plumes of running warriors.

Bazo's impi was streaming away into the forest, carrying their wounded with them, and slowly the rifle fire stuttered and faded, and the horses quietened. The little group sat, silent and appalled, and stared at the Matabele dead strewn across the open ground ahead of them. They looked like the abandoned toys of a petulant child.

Ralph Ballantyne had not drawn the gold-engraved Winchester from its boot, and there was a long unlit cheroot between his white teeth. He spoke around it, smiling ironically, but his eyes were cold and green and hard.

"I count thirty-three of "em down, Doctor Jim," he said loudly. "Not a bad bag really, even though they were sitting birds." And he struck a Vesta against the thigh of his riding breeches and lit the cheroot; then he gathered the reins and turned his horses's head back towards the fort.

Lobengula turned the small canvas bag of sovereigns in his narrow graceful hands. He stood in the centre of the goat kraal, and there were only three Matabele with him, Gandang and Somabula and Babiaan. The others he had sent away.

Before him stood a little white group. Zouga had brought Louise with him to the meeting. He had not dared leave her alone in the cottage beyond the stockade of the royal kraal, not with the mood of the Matabele as it had been ever since Jameson's massacre at Fort Victoria.

Facing the king also, but a little separated from the other couple, stood Robyn and Clinton Codrington.

Still fingering the bag of gold, Lobengula turned his face to Robyn.

"See, Nomusa, these are the gold queens that you advised me to accept from Lodzi."

"I am deeply ashamed, oh King," Robvn whispered.

"Tell me faithfully, did I give away my land when I signed the paper?"

"No, King, you gave away only the gold beneath it."

"But how can men dig for gold without the land over it" Lobengula asked, and Robyn was silent and miserable.

"Nomusa, you said that Lodzi was a man of honour.

So why does he do these things to me? His young men swagger across my land and call it their own. They shoot down my warriors, and now they gather a great army against me, with wagons and guns and thousands of soldiers. How can Lodzi do this to me, Nomusa?"

"I cannot answer you, oh King. I deceived you as I was myself deceived."

Lobengula sighed. "I believe you, Nomusa. There is still no quarrel between us. Bring your family, all your people here to my kraal that I may protect you through the dark times that lie ahead."

"I do not deserve the king's consideration." She choked on the words.

"No harm will come to you, Nomusa. You have Lobengula's word upon it." He turned slowly back to Zouga.

"This gold, Bakela. Does it pay me for the blood of my young men?" And he threw the bag at Zouga's feet. "Pick UP your gold, Bakela, and take it back to Lodzi."

"Lobengula, I am your friend, and I tell you this as a friend. If you refuse the monthly payment, then Lodzi will look upon it as a breaking of faith."

"Was not the killing of my young men a breaking of faith, Bakela?"

Lobengula asked sadly. "If it was not, then my people believe it to be so. The regiments are gathered, so that they darken the Hills of the Indunas; they wear their plumes and carry their assegais and their guns, and their eyes are red. The blood of Matabele has been spilled, Bakela, and the enemies of the king gather against him."

"Hear me, oh King, think a while before you let your young men run. What do they know of fighting Englishmen?" Zouga was angry now, and the scar on his cheek burned red as a welt raised by the lash of a whip.

"My young men will eat them up," said Lobengula simply. "As did the Zulu at the Hill of the Little Hand."

"After the Little Hand came Ulundi," Zouga reminded him. "The earth was black with the Zulu dead, and they put chains on the legs of the Zulu King and sent him to an island far across the sea."

"Bakela, it is too late. I cannot hold my young men, I have held them too long. They must run now."

"Your young men are brave when there are old Mashona women to stab, and young babies to disembowel, but they have never met real men."

Gandang hissed with anger behind the Icing's shoulder, but Zouga went on firmly.

"Send them home to dally with their women and preen their feathers, for if you let them run, then you will be lucky if you live to see your kraal burning and your herds being driven off."

This time all three of the senior indunas hissed, and Gandang started forward impulsively, but Lobengula spread his hand to restrain him.

"Bakela is a guest of the king," Lobengula said. "While he stands in my kraal, every hair of his head is sacred."

But the king's eyes had never left Zouga's face. "Go, Bakela, leave this day and take your woman with you.

Go to Daketela and tell him that my impis are ready. If he crosses the Gwelo river, I will let my young men go."

"Lobengula, if I leave then the last link between black men and white men is broken. There will be no more talking. It will be war."

"Then let it be so, Bakela."

It was hard riding. They took the road that Ralph Ballantyne's wagons had recently pioneered from Fort Salisbury to Gubulawayo. They left all their furniture and possessions in the cottage outside the stockade of the king's kraal, and they rode light, with a blanket roll on the pommel of the saddle and a food bag on one of the spare horses that Jan Cheroot brought up behind on a lead rein.

Louise rode like a man, astride and uncomplaining, and on the fifth day, unexpectedly, they came up with Jameson's column in camp around the skeletal headgear of Iron Mine Hill, where the volunteers from Salisbury and Fort Victoria had joined up.

"Zouga, is that how Jameson is going to challenge Lobengula's impi?"

The little encampment looked pathetically inadequate.

There were two dozen wagons, and on the canvas tents of most of them Zouga could make out the insignia of Ralph's transport company. But he pointed to the corners of the laager.

,"Machine-guns," he said. "Six of them, and they are worth five hundred men each. They have field guns also, look at their emplacements."

"Oh Zouga, do you have to go with them?"

"You know that I do."

They rode down into the camp, and as they passed the pickets there was a hail that startled the sentries and made Louise's horse shy and skitter.

"Papa!" Ralph came hurrying from the nearest wagon.

"My boy." Zouga jumped down from the saddle, and they embraced happily. "I should have known you would be wherever there was something doing."

Louise bent from the saddle and Ralph brushed her cheek with his fine moustache.

"I still find it difficult to believe that I have a stepmother so young and beautiful."

"You are my favourite son," she laughed. "But I'd love you more if you could arrange a hot bath." From behind the canvas screen Louise kept calling for more buckets of hot water, and Zouga had to carry them from the fire and top-up the galvanized hip-bath in which she sat with her thick, dark braids piled on top of her head, glowing pinkly from the almost boiling water and taking full part in the conversation beyond the screen.

Ralph and Zouga sat at a camp table with a blue enamel pot of coffee and a bottle of whisky between them.

"We have six hundred and eighty-five men all in."

"I warned Rhodes that he would need fifteen hundred," Zouga frowned.

"Well, there are another five hundred volunteers under Major Goold-Adams ready to move off from Macloutsi."

"They would never get here in time to take a part in the fighting." Zouga shook his head. "What about lines of supply and reinforcements? What happens if we get into trouble with the Matabele?

What chance of a relieving force?"

Ralph grinned devilishly. "I am the whole commissariat, you don't think I would split the profits with anyone else, do you?"

"Re-supply? Relieving force?"

Ralph spread his hands in negation. "The doctor informs me that we don't need them. God and mister Rhodes are on our side."

"If it goes against us, it will be death and mutilation for every man, woman and child this side of the Shashi river. Lobengula's impis are mad for war now. Neither the king nor his indunas will be able to control them once they begin."

"That thought had occurred to me," Ralph admitted. "i have Cathy and Jonathan at Fort Victoria, packed and ready, old Isazi is with them and one of my best young men. I have fresh relays of mules posted all the way from Fort Vicky to the Shashi. The hour Jameson gives the word for the column to march, my family will be on their way south."

"Ralph, I am taking Louise to Fort Victoria. Can she stay with Cathy and leave with her?"

"Nobody asked me," Louise called from behind the screen, and there was an angry splash of water. "I took a vow, until death us do part, Zouga Ballantyne."

"You also vowed to love, honour and obey," Zouga reminded her, and winked at Ralph. "I hope you don't suffer the same insubordination from your wife."

"Beat them regularly and give them plenty of babies," Ralph advised. "Of course, Louise must go with Katie, but you had better leave for Fort Vicky right away, the Doctor is champing at the bit to settle Lobengula's hash."

He broke off, and gestured at a trooper who was hurrying towards their wagon across the laager. "And it looks as though he has heard of your arrival at last."

The trooper saluted Zouga breathlessly. "Are you Major Zouga Ballantyne, sir? Doctor Jameson asks you please to come to his tent at your earliest convenience."

Doctor Jameson jumped up from the travelling-desk and bustled across the tent to meet Zouga.

"Ballantyne, I was worried about you. Have you come directly from Lobengula? What are the chances? What force do you reckon he disposes?" He broke off and scolded himself with a deprecatory chuckle. "What am I thinking of. Let me get you a drink, man!"

He led Zouga into the tent. "You know General Sint John, of course -" And Zouga stiffened, his face expressionless.

"Zouga." Mungo Sint John lounged in a canvas camp chair, but he made no effort to rise or offer his hand.

"How long it is. But you are looking well. Marriage agrees with you, I have not had the opportunity to congratulate you."

"Thank you." Zouga nodded. Naturally he had known that Mungo was the Doctor's Chief of Staff, but still he was not ready for his anger and bitterness at the confrontation. This was the man who had kept Louise as a mistress, had held her tender precious body. He found that he was trembling, and he thrust the picture from his mind, but it was replaced instantly by the image of Louise as he had found her in the desert, her skin burned off her in slabs by the sun, and it was Mungo Sint John who had let her go and made no effort to follow her.

"I have heard that your wife is in camp with you -" Sint John's single eye glowed maliciously. "You must dine with me tonight; it will be gratifying to discuss old times."

"My wife has had a long, hard journey." Zouga kept his voice level; he did not want to give Mungo the satisfaction of knowing how angry he was. "And in the morning I am taking her into Fort Victoria."

"Good!" Jameson cut in briskly. "That suits my own plans, I need a trustworthy man to put a message on the telegraph line for mister Rhodes.

But now, Ballantyne, what is the news from Gubulawayo, and how do you rate our chances?"

"Well, Doctor Jim, Lobengula's ready for you, his young men are spoiling for a fight, and you have a scanty enough force here. in the ordinary way I would say that to take it into Matabeleland without reinforcements or a relieving force in the offing would be suicide.

However "However?" Jameson demanded eagerly.

"Four of Lobengula's regiments, those he sent against Lewanika, the king of the Barotse, are still on the Zambezi, and Lobengula will not be able to use them."

"Why not?"

"Smallpox," Zouga said. "It's broken out in those regiments, and he dare not recall them to the south. They can take no part in the fighting."

"Half the Matabele army out of it," Jameson exulted.

"That's a nudge from on high, Sint John, what do you think?

"I would say it's still a risk, a damnable risk. But think of the stake. A whole country to be won with all its lands and herds and gold. I'd say if we are ever to march, we must march now."

"Ballantyne, your sister, the missionary woman, what's her name, Codrington, is she still at Khami? Is her family there with her?"

Zouga nodded, mystified, and Jameson snatched up a pencil and scribbled a message on his pad. Then he tore off the sheet and handed it to Mungo Sint John. Mungo read it and smiled. He looked like a bird of prey, beaknosed and fierce.

"Yes," he said. "Perfect." He passed the sheet to Zouga.

Jameson had written in block capitals.

URGENT FOR JOVE MATABELE REGIMENTS MASSED TO ATTACK STOP ENGLISH WOMEN AND CHILDREN IN THE POWER OF THE MATABELE TYRANT STOP IMPERATIVE WE MARCH AT ONCE TO SAVE THEM REPLY SOONEST "Even Labouchere couldn't quibble with that," Zouga emarked wryly. Labouchere was the London editor of Truth magazine, a champion of the oppressed and one of Rhodes" most eloquent and persistent adversaries. Zouga proffered the sheet, but Jameson waved it back.

"Keep it. Send it. I don't suppose you could leave this evening?" Jameson asked wistfully.

"It will be dark in an hour, and my wife is exhausted."

"Very well," Jameson agreed. "But you will return here as soon as you can with mister Rhodes" reply?"

"Of course."

"And there will be something else I want you to do on your return, a most important assignment."

"What is it?"

"General Sint John will explain." And Zouga turned suspiciously to Mungo.

Mungo's manner was suddenly placatory. "Zouga, there's not one of us who hasn't read your book Hunter's Odyssey. I would say that it's the bible of anybody wanting to know about this country and its people."

"Thank you." Zouga was unbending still.

"And one of the most interesting sections is the description of your visit to the oracle of the Umlimo in the hills south of Gubulawayo."

"The Matopos," Zouga told him.

"Yes, of course, the Matopos. Could you find your way back to the witch's cavern? After all, it has been over twenty-five years?"

"Yes, I could find it again." Zouga did not hesitate.

"Excellent," Jameson interrupted. "Come along, Sint John, do tell him why." But Mungo seemed to digress.

"You know the old Zulu who works for your son "Isazi, Ralph's head driver?" Zouga asked.

"That's the one. Well, we captured four Matabele scouts and we put Isazi in the stockade with them. He can pass for a Matabele, so the prisoners spoke freely in front of him. One of the things we learnt is that the Umlimo has called all the witch doctors of the nation to a ritual in the hills."

"Yes," Zouga agreed. "I heard of it before I left Gubulawayo. The Umlimo is preaching war, and promises a charm to the impis that will turn our bullets to water."

Ah, so it's true then." Mungo nodded, and then, thoughtfully: "Just what influence does this prophetess have?"

"The Umlimo is a hereditary figure, a sort of virgin demi-deity that has her origins long before the arrival of the Matabele in this land, perhaps a thousand years or more ago. First Mzilikazi and then Lobengula have fallen under her spell. I have even heard it whispered that Lobengula served an apprenticeship in sorcery under the Umlimo's guidance, in the Matopos."

"Then she does wield power over the Matabele?"

"Immense power. Lobengula makes no important decision without her oracle. No impi would march without her charms to protect them."

"If she were to die on the day we march into Matabeleland?"

"It would throw the king and his warriors into consternation. They would probably act recklessly. The Umlimo's charms would perish with her; her advice might turn like a serpent and strike the receiver.

They would be demoralized, and it would take at least three months to choose a prophetess to replace her. During that time the nation would be vulnerable."

"Zouga, I want you to take a party of mounted men the toughest and the best we have. I want you to ride to the witch's cave and destroy her and all her witch doctors."

Will Daniel was Zouga's sergeant. He was a Canadian who had been twenty years in Africa without losing his accent. He had fought the tribes on the Fish river and in Zululand. He boasted that he had killed three of Cetewayo's men with a single shot at Ulundi and made his tobacco pouch from the scalp of one of them. He had been in the Gazaland rebellion and fought at the Hill of the Doves against the free burghers of the Transvaal Republic. Wherever there had been trouble and shooting, Will Daniel had forged his bloody reputation. He was a big man, heavy in the gut, prematurely bald with large round ears that stood out from his polished scalp like those of a wild dog. His fists were gnarled, his legs bowed from the saddle " and he wore a perpetual wide white grin which never touched his cold little eyes.

"You don't have to like or trust him," Mungo Sint John had advised Zouga. "But he is the man for the job."

With Will Daniel went his henchman, Jim Thorn, half Will's size but every bit as vicious. A skinny little Cockney with the grey tones of the slum-dweller so deeply etched into his gaunt melancholy face that five thousand African suns had been unable to erase them. Doctor Jameson had released him from the Fort Victoria gaol, where he was waiting trial for beating a Mashona servant to death with a rhinoceros-hide siambok. His pardon depended on his conduct during the campaign. "So you can rely on him to do whatever needs doing," Mungo had pointed out to Zouga.

The other thirteen troopers were men of a similar type.

They had all volunteered under Doctor Jim's Victoria Agreement and signed the enlistment document, a document which Jameson made sure remained secret. No copy of it went to the High Commissioner in Cape Town nor to Gladstone's Government in Whitehall, for it promised the volunteers a share of Lobengula's land and cattle and treasures; the word "loot" was specifically mentioned in the text.

On the first night out Will Daniel had come silently to where Zouga slept a little apart and, as he stooped over Zouga's recumbent form, a wiry arm had whipped suddenly around his neck and the muzzle of a Webley revolver was thrust under his ribs with sufficient force to drive the air from his lungs.

"Next time you creep up on me, I'll kill you," Zouga hissed into his face; and Will's teeth flashed in the moonlight as he grinned appreciatively.

"They told me you were a sharp one."

"What do you want?"

"Me and the boys want to sell our land rights, three thousand morgen each, that's ninety thousand acres. You can have them for a hundred each."

"You haven't earned them yet."

"That's a chance you gotta take, skipper."

"I thought you were on guard duty, sergeant."

"Well, it was just for a moment, sir."

"Next time you leave your post, I'll shoot you myself, without bothering about a court martial."

Daniel stared into his face for a moment.

"Yep, I reckon you would too," Will grinned mirthlessly.

Zouga led the patrol south and westwards through the forests where once long ago he had hunted the wandering herds of elephant. Now the tuskers were all gone, and even the herds of lesser game were wild from the unrestrained hunting of the new settlers and they scattered at the first approach of the small party of horsemen.

Zouga avoided the established roads between the Matabele regimental towns, and when they had to pass close to a settlement or the cultivated lands surrounding it, they did so at night. Though he knew that the impis had all answered Loberigula's call and were already assembled at Thabas Indunas, still he felt a vast relief when the granite domes of the Matopos rose above the treetops ahead of them and in single file his horsemen followed him into one of the steep-sided valleys.

That night there was a deputation of four troopers led by Will Daniel and Jim Thorn.

"The boys have all voted, skipper. We will take a hundred for the lot." Will grinned ingratiatingly. "There's not one of us have the price of a drink to celebrate when we get home, and you have that money belt around your belly. it must be damned heavy by now, and no good it will do you if a Matabele sniper puts a bullet in your back."

The smile was still on Will's face, but the threat was naked in his eyes. If Zouga did not buy their land grants, it might be a bullet in the back. They would divide up the contents of his money belt anyway.

Zouga considered defying the big ugly sergeant, but there were fifteen of them. The gold in his belt could be his death warrant. He was in enough danger from the Matabele.

"I have seventy-five sovereigns in my belt," he said grimly.

"Fine," Will agreed. "You've got yourself a bargain, Major."

Zouga wrote out a contract of land grant sale on the back page of his message pad, and twelve of them signed it. Will Daniel and two other illiterates made their marks, and then they squabbled over the division of the gold sovereigns from Zouga's belt. Zouga was relieved to be rid of them, and as he returned the pad to his saddlebag, he realized abruptly that, if those grants were valid, then Will Daniel was right. He had got a bargain. He decided that when he rejoined Jameson's column, he would buy up all the other grants that were on offer from any of the rootless drifters who wanted to sell for the price of a bottle of whisky.

Zouga had forgotten just how intense were the peculiar brooding silences of the magical Matopos hills. The silence was a thing of weight and substance that made their spirits quail. No bird twittered or danced upon a twig in the dense undergrowth that pressed in upon the narrow path, and no breeze reached into the depths of the granite-sided valleys.

The silence and the heat wcighed even upon the hard and unsusceptible men who followed Zouga in single file. They rode with their rifles held across their laps, their eyes narrowed against the glare from the sparkling chips of mica in the granite walls, watchful and anxious, the dense dark green bush about them charged with a nameless menace.

At times the narrow game trails they were following pinched out or ended abruptly in the gut of a valley, and they were forced to retrace their route and try another; but always Zouga kept working south and west. Then, on the third day, he was rewarded.

He cut the broad beaten road that led from Gubulawayo to the hidden valley of the Umlimo. It was wide and smooth enough for Zouga to spur his horse into a canter. At Zouga's orders, his troopers had muffled their equipment, and put leathers over the hooves of their mounts, so the only sound was the creak of saddlery and the occasional brush and whip of an overhanging branch.

The earlier uneasiness was gone now, and they leaned forward in their saddles, eager as hunting dogs on the leash with a hot scent in their nostrils. Jameson had promised them a bonus of twenty guineas each and all the loot that they could carry away from the valley of the Umlimo.

Zouga began to recognize landmarks that he passed.

There was a pile of rocks, the largest of them the size of Sint Paul's dome, and three others, graded down in size, all of them weathered to almost perfect spheres and balanced one upon the other, and he knew they would reach the entrance to the valley before noon. He halted the patrol and let them snatch a quick meal standing at their horses" heads as he went down the line checking their equipment and assigning each of them a separate task.

"Sergeant, you and trooper Thorn are to stay close behind me. We will be the first through the pass and into the valley. There is a small village in the centre of it, and there may be Matabele amongst the huts. Don't stop for them, even if there are warriors with them, leave them for the others. Ride straight on to the cave at the end of the valley; we must find the witch before she can escape."

"This witch, what does she look like, skipper?"

"I am not sure, she may be quite young, probably naked."

"You leave "er to me, mate." Jim Thorn grinned lasciviously and nudged Will, but Zouga ignored him.

"Any woman you find in the cave will be the witch.

Now don't be put off by the sound of wild animals, or strange voices, she is a skilled ventriloquist." He went on, giving precise details, and ended grimly: "Our orders are harsh, but they may eventually save the lives of many of our comrades by breaking the morale of the Matabele fighting impis., They mounted again, and almost immediately the road began to narrow so that the branches brushed their stirrups as they passed, and Zouga's horse stumbled in a narrow stream, clumsy with the leathers over its hooves.

Then he was through and he looked up the sheer granite cliff that blocked their way. The entrance to the passage through the rock was a dark vertical cleft and high above it a thatched watch-hut was perched in a niche of the granite. [ As he stared up at it, Zouga saw an indistinct movement on the ledge.

"Look out above!" Even as he yelled, a dozen black men appeared on the lip of the cliff, and each of them hurled a bundle of what looked like staves out over the edge.

They scattered as they fell, and the steel sparkled as the weighted heads dropped, points first, towards them.

There was a fluting sound in the air all around them, soft as swallows" wings, then the rattle of steel against rock and the thud of the points into the earth beneath the hooves of the horses.

One of the steel-headed javelins caught a trooper in the side of his neck, driving down behind the collar bone, deep into one lung so that when he tried to scream the blood gagged him and bubbled out over his chin. His horse reared and whinnied wildly, and he fell backwards out of the saddle; and then all was milling, shouting confusion on the narrow track.

Through it Zouga craned to watch the ledge, and saw the defenders lining the lip again, each with another bundle of javelins on his shoulder. Zouga dropped his reins and used both hands to aim his rifle vertically upwards.

He emptied the magazine, firing as rapidly as he could pump cartridges into the breech, and though his aim was spoiled by the dancing horse under him, one of the men on the ledge arched over backwards with his arms windmilling wildly and then fell free, writhing and twisting and shrieking in the air until he hit the rock in front of zouga's horse, and his screams and struggles ceased abruptly.

The rest of the men on the ledge scattered away, and Zouga waved the empty rifle over his head.

"Forward! he yelled. "Follow me!" And he plunged into the forbidding crevice that split the cliff vertically from base to crest.

The passage was so narrow that his stirrup irons struck sparks from the rock walls on each side of him, but he looked back and saw Will Daniel pounding along behind.

He had lost his slouch hat. His bald head was washed with sweat, and he was grinning like a hungry hyena as he reloaded his rifle from the bandolier across his chest.

The passage turned sharply, and the white sand that floored it splashed up under the hooves, and the mica chips sparkled even in the gloom. Ahead of Zouga a tiny freshet of clear water fountained from the rock, and his horse gathered its front feet under its chest and jumped the stream easily; then suddenly they burst out from the narrow passage, back into the sunlight again.

The hidden valley of the Umlimo lay in a green basin below them, the little village of huts at its centre; and in the base of the cliff beyond it, a mile or so away, Zouga could make out the low entrance of the cavern, dark as the eye cavity in a bleached skull. It was all exactly as he remembered it.

"Troop, into line wheel!" he shouted as his horsemen galloped out into the open behind him; and they swung into extended formation, facing the valley, the rifles unsheathed and cocked, impatient and fierce as they saw before them the prize they had come so far to find.

"Amadoda!" shouted Will Daniel, pointing at the band of warriors that were trotting out of the village to face the line of horsemen.

"Twenty of them," Zouga counted swiftly. "They'll give us no trouble." And then he stood in his stirrups. "Walk march, forward!"

The horsemen moved down the slope, keeping their line, while the warriors lifted their shields high and raced to meet them.

"Troop, halt." Zouga ordered when the nearest Matabele was a hundred paces ahead. "Pick your targets."

The first volley, carefully aimed by hard and experienced soldiers, scythed the line of charging warriors like the reaper's steel; and they went down, falling over their shields, plumes tumbling from their heads, assegais pinning harmlessly into the earth, and yet a handful of them came on without checking.

"Fire at will!" Zouga called, and looked over the sights of his rifle at a bounding Matabele, watching him grow in size with every pace, seized by a strange reluctance to kill a brave man such as this one.

Jee! the Matabele yelled defiantly, and raised his shield to clear his spear arm. Zouga shot him in the notch of bone at the base of his throat and the Matabele spun sharrly round, hit the ground with one shoulder and rolled against the legs of Zouga's horse.

Half a dozen of the Matabele had broken in the face of those deadly volleys, and were running back towards the village. The others were strewn about in front of the line of horsemen.

"After them." Zouga hardly raised his voice above a conversational tone. "Forward! Charge!"

"Sergeant Daniel. Trooper Thorn, to the cave." He swung his horse's head to gallop clear of the cluster of huts, and there was the body of one of the fallen Matabele directly in his path. He altered course again to miss it, and both Thorn and Daniel pulled a length ahead of him.

Then the Matabele rolled lithely to his feet, and dodged in front of Zouga. Playing dead was an old Zulu trick, and Zouga should have been ready for it. But his rifle was in his left hand, and he tried to get it across, at the same time trying to turn his horse and shouting an impotent challenge at the warrior.

The Matabele extended his spear arm stiffly and let the running horse impale itself upon the broad silver blade. It went deeply into the heaving chest between the front legs, and the horse reeled from the blow and then went over on its side.

Zouga barely had time to kick his feet out of the irons and jump clear before the carcass hit the earth with all four legs kicking briefly at the sky.

Zouga landed badly, but gathered himself and whirled to face the warrior. He was only just in time to deflect the blood-smeared assegai as the Matabele struck at his belly. The steel rang against the barrel of his rifle and then they were straining chest to chest.

The man smelled of woodsmoke and ochre and fat, and his body was hard as carved ebony and slippery as a freshly caught catfish. Zouga knew he could not hold him for more than a few seconds, and with one hand on the muzzle and the other on the breech Zouga rammed the barrel of the rifle up under the man's chin into his bulging corded throat, and hooked desperately with the wel of his spur for the ankle.

They went over backwards, Zouga on top, and he threw all his weight onto the rifle at the moment they hit the hard earth, savagely driving it into the Matabele's throat, and the neck broke with a crunch like a walnut in a silver nutcracker. The warrior's lids fluttered down over the smoky bloodshot eyes and the body went limp under Zouga's chest.

Zouga pushed himself to his feet and looked around him quickly. His troopers were amongst the huts, and there was the thudding of scattered rifle fire as they ffnished off the survivors of that gallant but futile charge.

He saw one of his men chase a scampering old naked crone, her empty dugs swinging and her thin legs almost giving under her with terror. He rode her down, and then backed his horse up to trample her, shouting and swearing with excitement and firing down into the frail, withered body that lay crushed against the earth.

Beyond the village, Zouga saw two horses going up the slope towards the base of the cliff at full gallop, and even as he started forward, they reached it and Daniel and Thorn jumped from the saddles and disappeared into the mouth of the cavern.

It was half a mile from where Zouga had fallen to the base of the cliff. He reloaded his rifle as he ran. The fight with the Matabele had shaken him, and his riding boots hampered each step. It took him many long minutes to toil up the slope to where Daniel and Thorn had left their horses, and by then he was badly winded.

He leaned against the stone portal of the cavern, peering into the black and threatening depths, while each breath he drew jarred his whole body. Tumultuous echoes boomed out of the blackness of the cavern, the shouts of men and the bellowing and snarling of wild animals, the screams of a woman in terrible anguish and the crash of rifle fire.

Zouga pushed himself away from the cliff and stooped through the entrance. Almost immediately he stumbled over a body. It was that of an old man, his hair pure white and his skin wrinkled like a dried prune. Zouga stepped over him, into a puddle of his dark, sticky blood.

As he moved forward, Zouga's eyes accustomed to the gloom, and he peered about him at the mummified bodies of ancient dead piled haphazard against the walls of the cavern. Here and there white bone gleamed through the parchment of leathery dried flesh, and an arm was raised in a macabre salutation or a gesture of supplication.

Zouga moved on through this grisly catacomb, and ahead of him there was a diffused source of light. He quickened his pace as another gale of wild screams was this time mingled with booming inhuman laughter that bounced from the rocky walls and roof.

He turned a corner of jagged rock and looked down into a natural amphitheatre in the floor of the cavern. It was lit by the flames of a flickering orange fire, and from above by a single beam of sunlight that came in through a narrow crack in the high arched roof. The sunbeam was dimmed to an unearthly blue by the tendrils of curling smoke from the fire, and like the limelights of a theatre stage it dramatized the group of struggling figures on the floor of the amphitheatre beyond the fire.

Zouga ran down the natural steps, and had almost reached them before he realized what they were doing.

Between them Daniel and Thorn had the body of a young black girl stretched out on the rocky floor, the girl was naked, on her back with her limbs spreadeagled. Her "led body was as glossy as the pelt of a panther, her limbs were long and shapely. She was struggling with the desperation of a wild animal in a trap. But her screams were muted by the fur kaross wrapped about her head, and Jim Thorn knelt upon her shoulders, pinning her helplessly while he twisted her arms back against the joint of the elbows and roared with cruel laughter that was too loud for his skinny body.

Will Daniel was over the girl, his face swollen and dark with congested blood. His belt and breeches were down across the back of his knees. He was grunting and snuffling like a boar at the trough. His pale buttocks were covered with a fuzz of sparse curly black hair. He drove against the girl with a wet slapping sound like a washerwoman pounding laundry on a slab.

Before Zouga. could reach him, Will Daniel's whole body stiffened and jerked spasmodically and then he rolled off the tender young body, and he was bloodied from the knees to the navel of his sagging, hairy paunch.

"By God, Jim my lad," he panted at the little trooper, "that was better than a belly ache. Get up on the bitch for your turn-" Then he saw Zouga coming out of the shadows, and he grinned at him. "First come, first served, Major-' Zouga took two strides to reach him, and then he kicked him in his smiling mouth with the heel of his riding boot. Will Daniel's bottom lip split open like the petals of a rose, and he scrambled to his feet, spitting out white chips of tooth, and hauling up his breeches over his monstrous nakedness.

"I'll kill you for that." He tugged at the knife on his dangling unclinched belt, but Zouga thrust the muzzle of his rifle into his belly, doubling him over at the waist, and then whirled to slam the butt against Jim Thorn's temple, as Thorn was reaching for his abandoned rifle.

"Get on your feet," Zouga told him coldly, and, swaying and clutching the swelling above his ear, Jim Thorn backed off against the wall of the cave.

"I'll get you for this," Will Daniel wheezed painfully, still holding his belly, and Zouga turned the rifle back onto him.

"Get out," he said softly. "Get out of here you filthy bloody animals."

They shuffled up the steps of the amphitheatre; and from the shadows of the cavern entrance, Will Daniel yelled again, his voice blustering and angry.

"I'll not forget this, Major bloody Ballantyne. I'll get you yet!"

Zouga turned back to the girl. She had pulled the kaross off her head, and she crouched on the stone floor with her legs curled up under her. She was trying to staunch the flow of her virgin blood with her hands, but she stared at Zouga with the tortured ferocity of a leopard held by the serrated jaws of a spring trap.

Zouga felt an overwhelming compassion sweep over him, yet he knew there was no succour he could give her.

"You, who were Umlimo, are Umlimo no longer," he said at last, and she drew back her head and spat at him.

The frothy spittle splattered against his boots, but the effort made her whimper with pain and press her hands against her lower belly.

A fresh trickle of bright arterial blood snaked down her thigh.

"I came to destroy the Umlimo," he said. "But she is destroyed not by a bullet from a gun. Go, child. The gift of the spirits has been taken from you. Go swiftly, but go in peace."

Like a wounded animal she crept on her hands and knees into the dark maze of tunnels beyond the amphitheatre, leaving a speckle of bloody drops upon the stone floor.

she looked back at him once. "Peace, you say, white man. There will be no peace, ever!"

And then she was gone into the shadows.

The rains had not yet come, but their heralds soared up to the heavens, great ranges of cumulus cloud, their heads shaped like mushrooms. Silver and blue and imperial purple, they stood above the Hills of the Indunas.

The heat seemed trapped beneath them. It clanged down upon the iron hills like a blacksmith's hammer on the anvil. The impis were thick as safari ants upon the slopes; they squatted in dense ranks their shields under them, their assegais and guns laid on the rocky earth@ before them, thousands upon thousands they waited, every plumed head craning down towards the royal kraal at the foot of the hills.

There was the beat of a single drum. Tap, tap! Tap tap! And the great black mass of warriors stirred like an amorphous sea monster rising from the depths.

"The Elephant comes! He comes! He comes!" It was a soft growl in all their throats.

Through the gates of the stockade filed a small procession, twenty men wearing the tassels of valour, twenty men walking proud, the blood royal of Kumalo, and at their head the huge heavy figure of the king.

Lobengula had thrown off all the European gee-gaws, the brass buttons and mirrors, the gold brocaded coat and he was dressed in the regalia of a Matabele king.

The headring was on his brow, and heron feathers in his hair. His cloak was royal leopardskin, spotted gold, and his kilt was of leopard tails. His swollen ankles, crippled with gout, were covered by the war rattles, but he mastered the agony of the disease, striding out with ponderous dignity, so the waiting impis gasped with the splendour of his presence.

"See the Great Bull whose tread shakes the earth., In his right hand he carried the toy spear of polished redwood, the spear of kingship. Now he raised the puny weapon high, and the nation came bounding upright; and the shields, the long shields that gave them their name, bloomed upon the slope of the hill, covering it like a garden of exotic deadly flowers.

"Bayete!" The royal salute roared like the surf of a winter sea breaking on a rocky headland.

"Bayete! Lobengula, son of Mzilikazi."

After that great burst of sound, the silence was daunting but Lobengula paced slowly along the ranks, and in his eyes was the terrible sorrow of a father for the sons who must die. This was the hour which he had dreaded from the first day he took the little redwood spear in his right hand. This was the destiny which he had tried to avoid, and now it had overtaken him.

His voice boomed, and he lifted the spear and pointed to the east.

"The enemy that comes upon us now is like -" the spear shook in his hand, "like the leopard in the goat kraal, like the white termites in the kingpost of a hut. They will not stop until all is destroyed."

The massed regiments of Matabele growled, straining like hunting dogs against the leash, and Lobengula stopped in the centre of their lines and threw the leopardskin cloak back from his right arm.

He turned slowly until he faced into the east, where Jameson's columns were massing far over the horizon, and his spear arm went back to its full stretch. He stood poised in the classic stance of the javelin-thrower, and there was a soft susurration in the air as ten thousand lungs filled with breath and held it.

Then, with a heart-stopping shout, the cry of a man crushed under the iron wheel of his own destiny, Lobengula hurled the war spear into the east, and his shout was echoed by ten thousand throats.

"Jee! Jee!" They roared, and stabbed at the air with the broad silver blades, stabbing at the still invisible enemy.

Then the impis formed, one behind the other. Led by their indunas, their matched shields overlapping, they swept past the king, fierce in their pride, leaping high and flashing their assegais, and Lobengula saluted them: the Imbezu. and the Inyati, the Ingubu and the Izimvukuzane, the "Moles-that-burrow-under-a-mountain", with their matt red shields held high and Bazo, the Axe, prancing at their head. They wound away into the eastern grasslands, and Lobengula could still hear their singing, faintly on the heated air, long after the last of them had disappeared from view.

A little group of indunas and guards still attended the king, but they waited below at the gate of the stockade.

Lobengula was alone upon the deserted hillside; all the dignity and regal pride had gone out of his bearing. His grossly swollen body slumped like that of a very old and sick man. His eyes were rheumy with unshed tears, and he stared out into the east without moving, listening to the fading war chants.

At last he sighed, shook himself, and hobbled forward on his crippled distorted feet.

Painfully he stooped to retrieve the little redwood spear, but he paused before his fingers touched it.

The blade of the spear of kingship had snapped through. He picked up the broken pieces and held them in his hands, and then he turned and shuffled slowly down from the Hills of the Indunas.

The Company flag stood high above the laager on a slightly crooked pole of mopani.

It had hung limply in the stupefying heat all that morning, but now as the patrol rode in across the open ground above the river bank, it unfurled briefly on a random current of air, snapped as though to draw attention to itself, and then extended its full glory for a moment, before sagging wearily once again.

At the head of the patrol, Ralph Ballantyne turned to his father who rode at his side. "That flag makes no bones about it, Papa."

The pretty crosses of Sint George, Sint Andrew and Sint Patrick that made up the Union Jack, had the Company insignia superimposed upon them, the lion gardant with a tusk of ivory held in its claw and the letters under it T.S.A.C.I, British South Africa Company.

"Servants of the Company first, and of the queen a good deal later."

"You're a cynical rascal, Ralph." Zouga could hardly suppress his smile. "Are you suggesting that there is a man in all our Company here for personal gain rather than glory of Empire?"

"Perish the thought." This time Ralph chuckled. "By the way, Papa, how many land grants have you bought up so far? I am losing count, is it thirty or thirty-five?"

"This is a dream I worked for all my life, Ralph. It's coming true before our eyes, and when it does, I'll have c my fair reward, and nothing more."

The laager was drawn up in its rigid square three hundred yards from the steep banks of the Shangani river, in the centre of a dried-out clay pan. The surface was as flat and bare as a tennis court. The clay had cracked into irregular briquettes that curled up at the edges. They crunched under the horses" hooves as Zouga led the patrol in.

They had been out for two days, scouting the road beyond the river, and Zouga was pleased to see that during his absence Sint John had taken Zouga's advice and had his axemen hack down the brush around the edges of the pan to open the field of fire. Now any attacker have to cross three hundred yards of bare clay to reach the square of wagons, all of it under the evil little Cyclopean scrutiny of the Maxims.

As they cantered up, a party unchained the wheels of one of the wagons and dragged it aside to allow them to enter, and a sergeant in Company uniform saluted Zouga as he passed and called after him.

"General Sint John's compliments, sir, and will you report to him directly."

"My bet is that you need a drink." Mungo Sint John took one look at the dust that clung like flour in Zouga's beard and the dark patches of sweat that had soaked through his shirt. Coldly Zouga nodded his thanks and poured from the bottle that held down one corner of the map.

"The impis are out in full array," he said, and let the whisky soak the cloying dust from the back of his throat before going on. "I have identified most of them. There's Gandang's Inyati, and Manonda's Insukamini -" He reeled off the names of the indunas and their impis, glancing at the notes he had made on his pad. "We had a brush with the "Moles" and had to shoot our way out and ride for it, but still we reached the Bembesi river before turning back."

"Where are the impis, Ballantyne? Damn it, man, we have advanced seventy miles from Iron Mine Hill and seen neither hide nor hair of them," Jameson demanded almost petulantly.

"They are all around us, Doctor. A thousand or more in the trees just across the river, and I cut tracks that showed that two more impis have circled out behind us.

They are probably lying across the Longiwe Hills watching every move we make., "We must bring them to battle," Jameson fretted. "Every day the campaign lasts is costing the shareholders money."

"They won't attack us here, not while we are in laager, not across open ground."

"Where then?"

"They will attack in the Zulu way, in broken ground, or thick bush. I have marked four likely deffles ahead of us, places where they will be able to creep up close on either side or lay to ambush the wagons as we pass."

"You want us to walk into their trap, rather than draw them out?"

Mungo asked.

"You'll not draw them out. I think their commander here is Gandang, the king's half-brother. He is far too cunning to come at us in the open. If you want to fight them, it must be in the bad ground."

"When the serpent is coiled, with his head drawn back and his mouth agape to show the venom hanging like drops of dew upon his fangs, then the wise man does not stretch out his hands towards him." Gandang spoke softly, and the other indunas cocked their heads to listen to his words. "The wise man waits until the serpent uncoils and begins to creep away, then he steps upon the head and crushes it. We must wait. We must wait to take them in the forests, when the wagons are strung out, and the outriders cannot see one another. Then we cut the column into pieces and swallow each one, a mouthful at a time."

"Yet my young men are tired of waiting," said Manonda, facing Gandang across the fire. Manonda was the commander of the elite Insukamini impi, and though there was silver on his head, there was still fire in his heart. They all knew him to be brave to the edge of folly, quick to take an insult, and quicker still to revenge it.

"These white barbarians have marched unopposed across our lands, while we trail around them like timid girls guarding our maidenheads and giggling behind our hands. My young men grow weary of waiting, Gandang, and I with them."

"There is a time for timidity, Manonda, my cousin, and there is a time to be brave."

"The time to be brave is when your enemy stands brazenly before you. They are six hundred, you have counted them yourself, Gandang, and we are six thousand."

Manonda grinned mockingly around the circle of listening men. On the brow of each was the headring of high office, and on their arms and legs the tassels of courage.

"Shame on those that hesitate," said Manonda, the Bold.

"Shame on you, Bazo. Shame on you, Ntabene. Shame on you, Gainbo." His voice was filled with scorn, and as he said each of their names they hissed with angry denial.

Then suddenly here was a sound from beyond the circle of squatting indunas, a sound in the night that chilled and silenced them all. It was the eerie wail of mourning for the dead, and as they listened it came closer, and with it were many other voices.

Gandang sprang to his feet and challenged loudly.

"Who comes?"

And out of the darkness a dozen guards, half dragged and half carried an old woman. She wore only a skirt of untanned hyena skin, and around her neck the grisly accoutrements and trappings of the witch's trade. Her eyes were rolled up into her head so that the whites flashed in the firelight, and her spittle foamed on her slack lips. From her throat issued the wails of mourning for the dead.

"What is it, witch?" Gandang demanded, his superstitious fears twisting his mouth and darkening his eyes.

"What tidings do you bring?"

"The white men have desecrated the holy places. They have destroyed the chosen one of the spirits. They have slaughtered the priests of the nation. They have entered the cave of the Umlimo in the sacred hills, and her blood is splashed upon the ancient rocks. Woe unto all of us. Woe unto those who do not seek revenge. Kill the white men. Kill them all!" The witch threw off the restraining hands of the guard and, with a wild shriek, hurled herself into the midst of the leaping flames of the watch-fire.

Her skirt burst into flames. Her wild bush of hair burned like a torch. They drew back in horror.

"Kill the white men," screamed the witch from out of the flames, and they stared as her skin blackened and her flesh peeled from off her bones. She collapsed and a torrent of sparks flew up into the overhanging branches of the forest, and then there was only the crackle and drum of the fire.

Bazo stood in the stunned silence, and he felt the rage rising from deep within his soul. Staring into the flames at the black and twisted remains of the witch, he felt the same need of sacrifice, an atonement and a surcease from the rage and the grief.

He saw in the yellow flames an image of Tanase's beloved face, and something seemed to tear in his chest.

Jee!" he said, drawing out the war cry, giving expression to his rage. Jee!" He lifted the assegai and pointed the blade in the direction of the river and the white men's laager which lay not more than a mile beyond the dark silhouette of the hills. Jee!" and the night breeze turned the tears cold as the snow-melt from the Drakensberg mountains upon his cheeks.

Jee!" Manonda took up the chant, and stabbed towards the enemy, and the divine madness descended upon them. Gandang was the only one who had reason and fear of consequence left to him.

"Wait!"he cried. "Wait, my children and my brothers."

But they were gone already, racing away into the darkness to rouse their sleeping impis.

Zouga Ballantyne could not sleep, though his back and thighs still ached for rest from hard riding, and the earth under his blanket was no harder than that on which he had passed a thousand other nights. He lay and listened to the snores and occasional dreamers" gabble from the men around him, while vague forebodings and dark thoughts kept him from joining them in slumber.

Once again vivid memories of the little tragedy in the cave of the Umlimo returned to plague him, and he wondered how long it would be before the news of the atrocity reached the king and his indunas. It might take weeks for a witness to come down from the cave of the Matopos, but when that happened, he would know it by the actions of the Matabele indunas.

From the opposite side of the laager a sky-rocket went hissing up into the night sky, and popped into little red stars high in the heavens. The pickets had been firing a rocket every hour, to guide a missing patrol into the laager.

Now Zouga reached under the saddle that was his pillow and brought out the gold hunter watch. In the light of the sky rocket he checked the time. It was three o'clock in the morning. He threw off his blanket, and groped for his boots. While he pulled them on, his premonition of lurking evil grew stronger.

He strapped on his bandolier and checked the Webley service revolver hanging on the webbing. Then he stepped over the sleeping blanket-wrapped forms around him and went down to the horse lines. The bay gelding whickered as it recognized him, and Jan Cheroot woke.

"It is all right," Zouga told him quietly, but the little Hottentot yawned and, with the blanket over his shoulders like a shawl, hobbled across to stir the ashes of his cooking-fire. He set the blue enamel coffee pot on the coals and, while it was heating, they sat side by side and talked quietly like the old friends that they were.

"Less than sixty miles to Gubulawayo," Jan Cheroot murmured. "It's taken us more than thirty years, but now at last I feel we are coming home."

"I have bought up almost forty land grants," Zouga agreed. "That is nearly a quarter of a million acres. Yes, Jan Cheroot, we are coming home at last. By God, it's been a long, hard road, though, from the pit of Kimberley mine to the Zambezi -" Zouga broke off and listened.

There had been a faint cry, almost like a night bird, from beyond the laager.

"The Mashona," Jan Cheroot grunted. "The general should have let them stay in the laager."

During the slow trek up from Iron Mine Hill, many small groups of Mashona had come to the wagons, begging protection from the assembling Matabele. They knew from bitter experience what to expect when the impis swept across the land in battle array.

"The general could not take that chance." Zouga shook his head. "There may be Matabele spies amongst them, he has to guard against treachery."

Mungo Sint John had ordered the refugees to keep clear of the laager, and now there were three or four hundred, mostly black women and children, camped amongst the thorn trees on the river bank, five hundred yards from the nearest wagon.

Zouga lifted the coffee pot from the coals and poured the steaming black brew into his mug, then he cocked his head again to listen. There was a faint hubbub, a distant chorus of shrieks and shouts from the direction of the river. With the mug in his hand Zouga strolled across to the nearest wagon in the square, and climbed UP onto the disselboom. He peered out of the laager, towards the river.

The open expanse of flat clay was ghostly pale in the tarlight, and the treeline beyond it was solid blackness.

There was nothing to be seen, except, he blinked his eyes rapidly, for they were playing him false. Nothing except the blackness of the treeline seemed to be closer, the blackness was spreading towards the laager across the pale clay, like spilled oil or a pool of blood.

Now there was a sound, a rustle like locust wings when the swarms pass overhead, and the engulfing blackness was coming closer, with eerie swiftness.

At that moment another sky-rocket went swooshing up into the night sky, and when it burst, it flooded the pan with a soft, pink light and Zouga dropped the mug of steaming coffee.

The earth was black with the Matabele horde. It swept like a black tide towards the wagons, rank upon rank of great oval shields, and the assegais twinkled in the reflection of the rocket flare.

Zouga pulled the pistol from its holster, -and fired towards the racing black wall of shields.

"Stand to your guns," he bellowed, the heavy revolver bouncing and crashing in his fist. "The Matabele are coming!

Stand to your guns." And from the black tide swelled a sound like a swarm of bees when the hive is overturned.

The hammer of Zouga's revolver clicked on a spent cartridge, and he jumped down from the disselboom and raced down the line of wagons to where the nearest Maxim was placed.

Throughout the laager there was a rush of bodies and the shouts of frightened men running to their posts, and as Zouga reached the corner of the square, the machinegunner came stumbling out from his bed under a wagon body. His face was a pale blob, and his hair was hanging into his eyes. He was in stockinged feet and his braces dangled down his legs as he hitched his breeches and plumped himself down on the little seat that was built onto the rear leg of the Maxim tripod.

His number two loader was nowhere to be seen, perhaps lost in the milling confusion of newly-awakened bodies, so Zouga stuffed the revolver into his belt and dropped upon his knees beside the ungainly weapon. He yanked the top off the ammunition box and lifted out the first length of the canvas belt.

"Good-oh, mate!"muttered the gunner, as Zouga lifted the shutter in the side of the breech and passed the brass tag loader of the belt through the block.

"Ready! Load one!"he snapped, and the gunner jerked back the crank handle on the opposite side of the block and let it fly home, and the gib at the top of the extractor gripped the first round, The spears were drumming on the rawhide shields now, and the deep humming chorus of the running warriors was almost deafening. They could only be yards from the barricade of wagons, but Zouga did not look up. He concentrated all his attention on the intricate task of loading the Maxim.

"Load two!" The gunner cranked again, and the feed block clattered. Zouga jerked the brass tag leader and the gunner let the handle fly back the second time. The first round shot smoothly into the breech.

"Loaded and cocked!" Zouga said, and tapped the gunner on the shoulder. Now they both looked up. The front rank of shields and war plumes seemed to curl over where they squatted beside the weapon, like a wave breaking on a beach.

it was the moment of the "closing in" that the amadoda loved and lived for, already the shields were going up on high to free the spear arms and the steel rasped as the blades were cleared for the stabbing.

The joyous roar of the killing chant sundered the night; they were at the wagons, breaking into the laager, and the gunner sat stiffly upright with the gun between his knees and both hands on the traversing handles. He hooked his fingers through the rings of the safety guard, and as it lifted, he pressed his thumbs down on the chequered firing button.

The muzzle was almost touching the belly of a tall plumed warrior coming in between the wagons when the thick barrel shuddered, and a bright bar of flickering light sprang from the muzzle and the hammering clatter dinned upon Zouga's eardrums. It sounded as though a giant was drawing a steel bar horizontally across a sheet of corrugated iron, and miraculously the warrior was blown away.

The gunner traversed the Maxim back and forth, like a meticulous housewife sweeping a dusty floor, and the continuous muzzle flashes lit the open clay pan with a dancing unearthly light.

The black tide of Matabele was no longer advancing; it stood static in front of the wagons; and though its crest foamed with dancing plumes and the shields that formed the body of the wave heaved and clattered and tumbled, they came no closer. They were dammed by the stroking, flickering bar of light that sprang from the Maxim gun. The solid stream of bullets played like a jet of water from a firehose upon them, and as each of the chanting warriors came racing up, he died on the same spot as the man in front of him had died, and he fell upon his corpse, while another warrior appeared in the space he had left, and the gun swung back, hammering and jerking, and that man went down, his shield clattering on the baked clay of the pan and the flash of the gun reflected from the burnished steel of his assegai as it went spinning from his nerveless hand.

All around the square the Maxims ripped and roared, and six hundred repeating rifles underscored that hellish chorus. The air was blue with gunsmoke, and the reek of cordite burned the throats of the troopers and made their eyes run, so that they seemed to he weeping for the terrible butchery in which they were engaged.

Still the Matabele came on, though now they had to clamber over a shapeless barricade of their own dead, and the gunner beside Zouga lifted his thumbs from the button trigger and twirled the elevation wheel of the Maxim, lifting the muzzle an inch so as to keep the fire on the belly line of the warriors as they climbed over the mounds of corpses.

Then once again the gun fluttered and roared, the glossy black bodies jerked and twitched and bucked as the stream of bullets tore into them.

Still the Matabele came on.

"By God, will they never stop!" yelled the gunner. The muzzle of the gun glowed cherry red, like a horseshoe fresh from the forge, and the steam from the water jacket whistled shrilly as the coolant boiled.

The bright brass cases spewed from the extractor. they pinged and pattered against the iron-shod wheel of the wagon and formed a glittering mound beneath it.

"Empty gun!" Zouga yelled, as the end of the belt whipped into the clattering breech. They had been firing for less than sixty seconds, and the case of five hundred belted cartridges was empty.

Zouga kicked it aside and dragged up a fresh case, and the Matabele surged towards the silent gun.

"Ready, load one!" Zouga yelled.

"Load two!" They were swarming into the gap between the wagons.

"Loaded and cocked!" And once again that fluttering beat like the wings of a dark angel dulled their senses, and the barrel swung back and forth, back and forth, washing them away into the darkness.

"They're running," shouted the gunner. "Look at them run!"

In front of the wagons lay nothing but the piles of bodies. Here and there a dying man made feeble little movements, groping for a lost assegai or trying to staunch one of the awful holes in his flesh with fumbling fingers.

Beyond the massed corpses, the wounded and maimed were dragging themselves back towards the treeline, leaving dark wet smears on the clay. One of them was on his feet, staggering in aimless circles, using both hands to hold his bulging entrails from falling out of the open pouch of his belly. The Maxim had gutted him like a fish.

Beyond the trees the sky was a marvellous shade of ashes of roses, and the clouds were picked out in smoking scarlets and pipings of pale gold as the dawn came up in silent fury over the reeking field.

"Them black bastards have had enough." The Maxim gunner giggled with mirthless, nervous reaction to that glimpse that he had just had into hell itself.

"They'll be back," said Zouga quietly, as he dragged up another case of belted ammunition and knocked off the lid.

"You did all right, mate," the gunner giggled again, staring with wide horrified eyes at the piles of dead.

"Refill the water in your condenser, soldier," Zouga ordered him. "The gun's over-heating, you'll have a jam when the next wave hits., "Sir!" The gunner realized suddenly who Zouga was.

"Sorry, sir."

"Here is your loader." The number two came up breathlessly. He was a fresh-faced lad, curly-headed and pinkcheeked. He looked more like a choirboy than a machine-gunner.

"Where were you, trooper?" Zouga demanded.

Checking the horses, sir. It was all over so quickly., "Listen!"

Zouga ordered, as the boy took his place at the gun.

From the treeline, across the bloodied clay pan, came the sound of singing, deep and sonorous in the dawn.

It was the praise song of the "Moles-who-burrow-under-a-mountain".

"Stand to your gun, trooper," Zouga ordered. "It's not over yet."

And he turned on his heel and went striding down the line of wagons, reloading the revolver from his belt as he went.

Singing, Bazo strode down the squatting lines of his impi, and they sang with him.

He had held their shattered ranks just beyond the edge of the treeline as they came streaming back from the square of wagons. They were re-grouped now, singing as they screwed their courage for the next assault. What remained of Marionda's impi was mingled with his. They had been in the first wave of the attack, and very few of them were left.

Suddenly there was a great rushing sound in the air above the tree tops, like the onrush of the first wild storm of summer. Then in the midst of the squatting ranks a tall column of smoke and dust and flame sprang into the air, and the bodies of men were flung high with it.

"Kill the smoke devil," somebody screamed, and another shell burst amongst them, and another, leaping fountains of smoke and flame; and the maddened warriors fired their ancient Martini-Henry rifles at these smoke devils, killing and wounding their comrades on the far side.

"They are not devils," shouted Bazo, but his voice was lost in the barrage of artillery fire, and the pandemonium of warriors trying to defend themselves against something they did not understand.

"Come!" Bazo bellowed. There was only one way to bring them under control again.

"To the wagons. Forward to the wagons. "And those close enough to hear him followed, and the others, seeing them go, went bounding after them. They came out of the treeline in a swarm, and the other shattered impis heard the war chant go up, and turned again back onto the open pan of pale grey clay, and immediately that terrible clattering din, like the laughter of maniacs, began again and the air was filled with the flute and crack of a thousand whiplashes.

"They are coming again," Zouga said quietly, almost to himself. "This is the fifth time."

"It's madness." Mungo Sint John murmured, as the racing ranks came out of the trees and over the lip of the river bank, their plumes seething like the surface of boiling milk as they came onto the guns.

The field guns were depressed to the limit of their travel, the fuses screwed down to their shortest range, and the shrapnel bursts were strangely beautiful in the morning sky, popping open like pods of new cotton, shot through with pretty red fire.

The storm of small-arms fire was like the monsoon rains beating on an iron roof, and as the impis came into the drifting banks of gunsmoke, the dense ranks thinned out, and lost momentum, like a wave sliding up a steep beach.

Once again the wave faltered, and just short of the wagons it stopped, hesitated and then was going back, and the storm of gunfire continued long after the last of them had disappeared amongst the trees. In a kind of insensate fury the Maxim bullets tore wet white slabs of bark off the tree trunks, and then one after the other fell silent.

Standing beside Zouga, Doctor Jameson scrubbed his hands together gleefully. "It's all over. Their impis are destroyed, shattered, blown away. it's better than we could ever have hoped for. Tell me, Sint John, as a military man, what do you estimate their losses to be so far?"

Mungo Sint John considered the question seriously, climbing up onto one of the wagons the better to survey the field, ignoring the spattering of Martini-Henry rifle fire from the edge of the treeline where a few Matabele snipers were making very poor practice; convinced that raising their sights to the maximum made the bullets more powerful, most of their fire crackled high over the heads of the men manning the wagons.

Standing on the wagon Mungo Sint John lit a cheroot without transferring his attention from the carnage which surrounded them. At last he said gravely, "Not less than two thousand casualties, perhaps as many as three."

"Why don't you send a party out to count the bag, Doctor?" Zouga suggested, and Jameson did not recognize the sarcasm.

"We cannot spare the delay, more is the pity. We can still get in a full day's trek. That will look good in the Company report." He pulled the gold chain from his fob pocket and sprang the lid of his watch with his thumbnail. "Eight o'clock," he marvelled. "It's only eight o'clock in the morning. Do you realize that we have won a decisive battle before breakfast, gentlemen, and that by ten o'clock we can be on our way to Lobengula's royal kraal?

I think we have done our shareholders rather proud."

"I think," Zouga cut in gently. "That we still have a little more work to do. They are coming again."

"I don't believe this," Mungo Sint John marvelled.

Bazo paced slowly down the sparse ranks. This was no longer an impi. It was a pathetic little band of desperate survivors. Most of them had bound up their wounds with bloody bunches of green leaves, and their eyes had that strange fixed stare of men who had just looked into eternity. They were no longer singing, they squatted in silence, but they were still facing towards the white men's laager.

Bazo passed beyond the shortened line and paused under the spreading branches of a wild teak tree. He looked up.

Mationda, the commander of what had once been the glorious Insukamini impi, hung by his neck from one of the main branches. There was a thong of rawhide around his throat, and his eyes were still open, bulging in a defiant glare towards his enemies. His right leg, shattered above the knee by machine-gun fire, was twisted at an ugly angle and hung lower than his other leg.

Bazo lifted his assegai in a salute to the dead induna.

"I greet you, Manonda, who chose death rather than to drink the bitter draught of defeat," he shouted.

The Insukamini impi was no more. Its warriors lay in deep windrows in front of the wagons.

"I praise you, Manonda, who chose death rather than to live a cripple and a slave. Go in peace, Manonda and speak sweetly to the spirits on our behalf."

"""Now"

Bazo turned back and stood before the waiting, silent ranks. The early morning sun, just clearing the tree tops, threw long black shadows in front of them.

"Are the eyes still red, my children?" Bazo sang out in a high clear voice.

"They are still red, Baba!" they answered him in bass chorus.

"Then let us go to do the work which still waits to be done."

Where ten amadoda had raced in that first wave, now two made the last charge across the blood-soaked clay.

Only one of that pitiful band went more than halfway between the treelines and the wagons. The rest of them turned back and left Bazo to run on alone. He was sobbing with each stride, his mouth open, the sweat running in oily snakes down his naked chest. He did not feel the first bullet that struck him. It was just a sudden numbness as though part of his body was missing, and he ran on, jumping over a pile of twisted corpses, and now the sound of the guns seemed muted and far-off, and there was another greater dinning in his ears that boomed and echoed strangely like the thunder of a mighty waterfall.

He felt another sharp tug, like the curved red-tipped thorn of the "wait-a-bit" tree hooking into his flesh, but there was no pain. The roaring in his head was louder, and his vision narrowed so that he seemed to be looking down a long tunnel in the darkness.

Again he felt that irritating but painless jerk and tug in his flesh, and he was suddenly weary. He just wanted to lie down and rest, but he kept on towards the flashing white canvas of the wagon tents. Yet again that sharp insistent pull as though he was held on a leash, and his legs buckled under him. Quite gently he toppled forward and lay with his face against the hard sun-baked clay.

The sound of the guns had ceased, but in its place was another sound, it was the sound of cheering; behind the wall of wagons the white men were cheering themselves.

Bazo was tired, so utterly deathly tired. He closed his eyes and let the darkness come.

The wind had swung suddenly and unseasonably into the east, and there was a cold dank mist lying on the hills. the fine guti which made the trees drip dismally and chilled every bone in Tanase's body as she trudged up a narrow path that led to a saddle between two pearly grey granite peaks. Over her shoulders was a leather cloak and on her head she balanced a bundle of possessions which she had salvaged from the cave of the Umlimo.

She reached the saddle and looked down into yet another valley choked with dense, dark green undergrowth. She searched it eagerly, but then her spirits slowly fell again. Like all the others, it was devoid of any human presence.

Since she had left the secret valley, the moon had reached its full, and waned to nothingness, and was once again a curved yellow sliver in the night sky. All that time she had searched for the women and children of the Matabele nation. She knew they were here, hiding somewhere in the Matopos, for it was always the way.

When a powerful enemy threatened the nation, the women and children were sent into the hills, but it was such a vast area, so many valleys and deep labyrinthine caves that she might search a lifetime without finding them.

Tanase started slowly down into the deserted valley.

Her legs felt leaden, and another spasm of nausea brought saliva flooding from under her tongue. She swallowed it down, but when she reached the floor of the valley, she sank down onto a moss-covered rock beside the little stream.

She knew what was the cause of her malady; though she had missed her courses by only a few days, she knew that the loathsome seed that her pale, hairy, balloonbellied ravisher had pumped into her had struck and taken hold, and she knew what she must do.

She laid aside her load and searched for dry kindling under the trees where the gub had not yet dampened it.

She piled it in the protected lee of a sheltering rock, and crouched over it.

For many long minutes she concentrated all her will upon it. Then at last she sighed, and her shoulders slumped. Even this minor power, this small magic of firemaking, had gone from her. As the white man with the golden beard had warned her, she was Umlimo no longer.

She was just a young woman, without strange gifts or terrible duties, and she was free. The spirits could make no demands upon her, she was free at last to seek out the man she loved.

As she prepared to make fire in the conventional manner, with the tiny bow for twirling the dry twig, two passions gave her strength to face the ordeal ahead of her her love and her equally fierce hatred.

When the contents of the little clay pot boiled, she added the shreds of dried bark of the tambooti to it, and immediately the sweet odour of the poisonous steam cloyed upon the back of her throat.

The straight sharp black horn of the gemsbuck had been clipped off at the tip so that it could be used for cupping blood, or as a funnel for introducing fluids into the body.

Tanase spread the leather cloak below the rock shelter and lay on it, flat upon her back, with her feet braced high against rough granite. She had lubricated the, horn with fat, and she took a deep breath, clenched her jaw upon it, and then slid the horn into herself. When it met resistance, she manipulated it carefully, but firmly, and then her breath burst from her in a gasp of agony as the point found the opening and forced its way still farther into her secret depths.

The pain gave her a strange unholy joy, as though she were inflicting it upon the hated thing that had taken root within her. She lifted herself on one elbow, and tested the contents of the little clay pot. It was just cool enough for her to be able to bear the heat when she plunged her forefinger into it.

She took up the pot and poured it into the mouth of the long black funnel, and this time she moaned, and her back arched involuntarily, but she poured until the pot was empty. there was the coppery salt taste of blood in her mouth, and she realized that she had bitten through her own lip. She seized the horn and plucked it out of herself, and then she curled up on the leather cloak and hugged her knees to her bosom, shuddering and moaning at the fire in her womb.

In the night the first terrible cramps seized her, and she felt her belly muscles spasm up hard as a cannon ball under her clutching hands.

She wished there had been something formed, a tiny replica of that white animal that had rutted upon her, so that she could have wreaked a form of vengeance upon it. She would have delighted in mutilating and burning it, but there was nothing substantial on which to expend her hatred. So despite the purging of her body, she carried her hatred with her still, fierce and unabated, as she toiled on deeper and deeper into the Matopos.

The joyful cries and sweet laughter of children at play guided her, and Tanase crept along the river verge, using the tall cotton-tipped reeds as a screen until she overlooked the green pool between its sugary sandbanks.

They were girls sent to fetch water. The big, black clay pots stood in a row on the white sand with green leaves stuffed in the mouths to stop them slopping over when carried balanced on the girls" heads.

However, once the pots were filled, they had not been able to resist the temptation of the cool, green waters, and they had thrown off their skirts and were shrieking and sporting in the pool. The eldest girls were pubescent with swelling breast buds, and one of them spotted Tanase in the reeds and screamed a warning.

Tanase was just able to catch the youngest and slowest child as she was disappearing over the far bank, and she held the wriggling little body, glossy black and wet from the river, against her bosom while the child wailed and struggled with terror.

Tanase cooed reassurances and stroked the little girl with gentling hands until she quietened.

"I am of the people," she whispered. "Don't be afraid, little one."

Half an hour later the child was chattering gaily and leading Tanase by the hand.

The mothers came swarming out of the caves at the head of the valley to greet Tanase, and they crowded about her.

"Is it true that there have been two great battles?" they begged her.

"We have heard that the impis were broken at Shangani and again those that remained were butchered like cattle on the banks of the Zambesi? "Our husbands and our sons are dead, please tell us it is not so," they pleaded.

"They say the king has fled from his royal kraal, and that we are children without a father. Is it true, can you tell us if it is true?"

"I know nothing," Tanase told them. "I come to hear news, not to bear it. Is there not one amongst you who can tell me where I may find Juba, senior wife of Gandang, brother of the king?"

They pointed over the hills, and Tanase went on, and found another group of women hiding in the thick bush.

These children did not laugh and play, their limbs were thin as sticks, but their bellies were swollen little pots.

"There is no food," the women told Tanase. "Soon we will starve."

And they sent her stumbling back northwards, seeking and questioning, trying to blind herself to the agonies of a defeated nation, until one day she stooped in through the entrance of a dim and smoky cave, and a vaguely familiar figure rose to greet her.

"Tanase, my child, my daughter."

Only then did Tanase recognize her, for the abundant flesh had melted off the woman's frame and her once bounteous breasts hung slack as empty pouches against her belly.

"Juba, my mother," Tanase cried, and ran into her embrace. It was a long time after that before she could speak through her sobs.

"oh my mother, do you know what has become of Bazo?"

Juba pushed her gently to arm's length and looked into her face. When Tanase saw the devastating sorrow in Juba's eyes, she cried out with dread.

"He is not dead!"

"Come, my daughter," Juba whispered, and led her deeper into the cave, along a natural passageway through the living rock, and there was a graveyard smell on the cool dark air, the odour of corruption and rotting flesh.

The second cavern was lit only by a burning wick floating in a bowl of oil. There was a litter against the far wall, On it lay a wasted skeletal body, and the smell of death was overpowering.

Fearfully Tanase knelt beside the litter and lifted a bunch of leaves off one of the stinking wounds.

"He is not dead," Tanase repeated. "Bazo is not dead."

"Not yet," agreed Juba. "His father and those of his men who survived the white men's bullets, carried my son to me on his shield. They bid me save him, but nobody can save him."

"He will not die," said Tanase fiercely. "I will not let him die." And she leaned over his wasted body and pressed her lips to the fever-hot flesh. "I will not let you die," she whispered.

The Hills of the Indunas were deserted; no beast grazed upon them for the herds had long ago been driven afar to try to save them from the invaders. There were no vultures or crows sailing high above the hills, for the Maxim guns had laid a richer feast for them barely twenty-five miles eastwards at the Zembesi crossing.

The royal kraal of Gubulawayo was almost, deserted.

The women's quarters were silent. No child cried, no young girl sang, no crone scolded. They were all hiding in the magical Matopos hills.

The barracks of the fighting regiments were deserted.

Two thousand dead on the Shangani, three thousand more at Zembesi, and nobody would ever count those who had crawled away to die like animals in the caves and thickets.

The survivors had scattered, some to join the women in the hills, the others to cower, bewildered and demoralized, wherever they could find shelter.

Of all the fighting impis of Matabele, only one remained intact, the Inyati regiment of Induna Gandang, the king's half-brother. Gandang alone had been able to resist the madness of hurling his men over open ground at the waiting Maxim guns, and now he waited for his king's orders in the hills just north of the royal kraal with his impi gathered about him.

In all of Gubulawayo, there was one small group remaining. Twenty-six of these were white men and women. They were the traders and concession-hunters who had been at the kraal when Jameson had marched from Iron Mine Hill. With them, were the Codrington family, Clinton and Robyn and the twins. Lobengula had ordered them all to remain under his protection, while the impis were out in battle array, and now he had called them to the goat kraal for his last audience.

Drawn up before the two new brick-built houses which had replaced the great thatched hut, were Lobengula's four Cape wagons with the teams already in the traces.

About the wagons were a small party of the royal retainers: two of the king's senior wives, four elderly indunas, and a dozen or so slaves and servants.

The king himself sat on the box of the leading wagon.

in that wagon were all Lobengula's treasures, a hundred big tusks of ivory, the little sealed pots of uncut diamonds, and the canvas bags stencilled with the name "The Standard Bank Ltd" containing the sovereigns paid to him during the four years since he had granted the concession to the British South Africa Company, four thousand sovereigns, less than a sovereign for every one of his dead warriors.

Around the wagon were gathered the white men, and Lobengula looked down upon them. The king had become an old man in the few short weeks since he had thrown the war spear on the Hills of the Indunas. There were deep lines of sorrow and espair carved around his mouth and eyes. His eyes were rheumy and shortsighted, his hair bleached silver-grey, his body bloated and misshapen, and his breathing was racked and irregular like that of a dying animal.

"Tell your queen, white men, that Lobengula kept his word. Not one of you has been harmed," he wheezed.

"Daketela and his soldiers will be here tomorrow. If you go out upon the eastern road, you will even meet them before nightfall." Lobengula paused and sed to catch his breath, then went on. "Go now. There is nothing more I have to say to you."

They were silent, subdued, and strangely chastened, as they trooped out of the goat kraal. Only Robyn and her family remained.

The twins stood on each side of Robyn. At twenty-one years of age, they were as tall as she. it seemed that the three of them were sisters, for they all had the clear eyes and glossy hair of healthy young women.

Clinton Codrington, standing behind them, stooped and bald, dressed in sober broadcloth that was mossy green with age and shiny at the cuffs and elbows, seemed father to Robyn as well as to the twins.

The king looked down upon them with a terrible regret.

It is the last time that you will make my eyes glad, Nomusa," he said.

oh King, my heart is on fire for you. I think of what has happened and how I advised you."

Lobengula held up his hand to silence her. "Do not torture yourself, Nomusa. You have been a true friend of many years, and what you did was done in friendship.

Nothing you or I could have done would have changed the manner of it. It was the prophecy; it was as certain as the fall of the leaves from the msasa trees when the frosts are on the hills."

Robyn ran forward to the wagon, and Lobengula stooped to take her hand.

"Pray to your three gods that are one god for me, Nomusa."

"He will hear you, Lobengula, you are a good man."

"No man is all goodness or all evil," the king sighed.

"Now, Nomusa, soon Daketela and his soldiers will be here. Tell him that Lobengula says thus. "I am beaten, white men, my impis are eaten up. Let me go now, do not hunt me further, for I am an old sick man. I wish only to find a place where I may mourn my people, and at last die in peace."

"I will tell them, Lobengula."

"And will they listen, Nomusa?"

She could not face him, and she dropped her eyes. "You know they will not listen."

"My poor people," whispered Lobengula. "Will you look after my poor people when I am gone, Nomusa?"

"I swear it to you, oh King," Robyn said fiercely. "I will stay at Khami Mission until the day that I die, and I will devote my life to your people."

Then Lobengula smiled, and once again there was a flash of the old mischievous twinkle in his eye.

"I give you the royal permission which I denied you all these years, Nomusa. From this day forward any of my people, man or woman or child of Matabele who wish to pray with you, you may pour water on their heads and make the cross of your three gods over them."

Robyn could not reply.

"Stay in peace, Nomusa," said Lobengula, and his wagon rumbled slowly out through the gates of the stockade.

Clinton Codrington reined in the mule on the crest of the rise above the royal kraal, and he groped for Robyn's hand. They sat silently on the seat of the little Scotch cart, watching the last pale shreds of dust thrown up by the king's wagons disappearing away in the north across the grassy plain.

"They will never leave him in peace," Robyn said softly, "Lobengula is the prize," Clinton agreed. "Without him, Jameson and Rhodes will have no victory."

"What will they do with him!"she asked sadly. "If they catch him."

"Exile, certainly," Clinton said. "Sint Helena Island, probably. It's where they sent Cetewayo."

"Poor tragic man," Robyn whispered. "Caught between two ages, half savage and half civilized man, half cruel despot and half a shy and sensitive dreamer. Poor Lobengula."

"Do look, Papa!" Vicky called suddenly, pointing down the rude track towards the east. There was a thick column of dust rising above the tops of the thorn trees, and even as they watched, a distant troop of mounted men rode out onto the grassy plain with badges and weapons twinkling in the sunlight.

"Soldiers," whispered Lizzie.

"Soldiers," repeated Vicky gleefully. "Hundreds of them." And the twins exchanged a bright ecstatic glance of complete understanding and accord.

Clinton picked up the reins, but Robyn tightened her grip on his hand to restrain him.

"Wait," she said. "I want to watch it happen. Somehow it will be the end of an age, the end of a cruel but innocent age."

Lobengula had left one of his trusted indunas in the royal kraal, with instructions to lay fire to the train as soon as the last wagons were clear. In the mud-brick building behind the king's new residence were the remains of the hundred thousand rounds of Martini-Henry ammunition for which he had sold his land and his people. There were also twenty barrels of black powder.

"There!" said Robyn, as the pillar of black smoke and flame shot hundreds of feet straight up into the still air.

Only many seconds later did the shock wave and the great clap of sound pass over where they watched from the ridge, and the smoke, still spinning upon itself, blossomed into an anvil head high above the shattered kraal.

Lobengula's house that had given him such pleasure and pride was only a shell, the roof blown away and the walls fallen in.

The beehive huts of the women's quarters were ablaze, even as they watched, the flames jumped the stockade and caught in the roofs beyond. Within minutes the whole of Gubulawayo was in leaping, swirling flames.

"Now we can go on," Robyn said quietly, and Clinton shook up the mule.

There were thirty horsemen in the advance scouting party, and as they galloped up, the tall straight figure leading them was unmistakable.

"Thank God that you are safe!" Zouga called to them.

He was handsome and heroic in the frogged uniform with his brass badges of rank ablaze in the sunlight, and the slouch hat cocked forward over his handsome, gravely concerned features.

"We were never in any danger," Robyn told him. "And well you knew that."

"Where is Lobengula?" Zouga sought to divert her scorn, but she shook her head.

guilty of one act of treachery against "Lobengula "You are an Englishwoman," Zouga reminded her. "You should know where your loyalties lie."

"Yes, I am an Englishwoman," she agreed icily, "but I am ashamed of that today. I will not tell you where the king is."

"As you wish." Zouga looked at Clinton. "You know that it is for the good of every one in this land. Until we have Lobengula, there will be no peace."

Clinton bowed his bald head. "The king has gone to the north with his wagons and wives and the Inyati regime."

"Thank you," Zouga nodded. "I will send an escort with you to the main column. They are not far behind us.

Sergeant!"

A young trooper with triple chevrons on his sleeve spurred forward. He was a fine-looking lad, with high English colour in his cheeks and broad shoulders.

"Sergeant Acutt. Take the six men from the rear three files and see this party to safety."

Zouga saluted his sister and brother-in-law curtly and then ordered. "Troop, at the gallop. Forward!"

The first two dozen troopers went clattering away towards Gubulawayo, while the sergeant and his six men wheeled in alongside the cart.

Vicky turned her head and looked directly into the young sergeant's eyes. She took a long slow breath that pushed her bosom out under the faded cotton of her blouse. The sergeant stared, and the flush of dark blood rose from the high stock of his tunic and suffused his cheeks.

Vicky wetted her pouting lips with the tip of a pink tongue, and slanted her eyes at him, and Sergeant Acutt seemed about to fall out of the saddle, for Vicky's gaze had struck him from a range of less than six feet.

"Victoria!" Robyn snapped sharply, without looking back over her shoulder.

Yes, Mama." Hurriedly, Vicky slumped her shoulders forward to alter the cheeky thrust of her bosom to a more demure angle, and composed her expression into dutiful gravity.

TELEGRAM MESSAGE RECEIVED FORT VICTORIA 10TH NOVEMBER 1893 RELAYED BY HELIOGRAPH TO GUBULAWAYO:

FOR JAMESON STOP. HER MAJASTY'S GOVERNMENT DECLINES TO DECLARE MATABELE A CROWN COLONY OR PLACE IT UNDER THE JURISDICTION OF THE HIGH COMMISSIONER STOP. HER MAJESTY'S FOREIGN SECRETARY AGREES THAT THE CHARTER COMPANY IS TO PROVIDE THE MACHINERY OF GOVERNMENT FOR THE NEW TERRITORY STOP. BOTH MASHONALAND AND MATABELELAND NOW FALL WITHIN THE ADMINISTRATIVE AREA OF THE COMPANY STOP. COMPANY SHARES QUOTED AT 8 pounds LONDON CLOSE STOP. HEARTIEST CONGRATULATIONS TO YOU YOUR OFFICERS AND MEN FROM JOVE FOR JAMESON URGENT AND CONFIDENTIAL DESTROY ALL COPIES STOP. WE MUST HAVE LOBENGULA STOP. NO RISK TOO GREAT NO PRICE TOO HIGH FROM JOVE "Reverend. Codrington, I am sending out a considerable force to escort Lobengula in." Jameson stood at the fly of his tent, looking out beyond the laager to the blackened ruins of the royal kraal. "I have already sent this message after the king." Jameson came back to his desk and read from his pad: "Now, to stop this useless killing, you must at once come back to me at Gubulawayo. I guarantee that your life will be safe and that you will be kindly treated."

"Has the king sent you a reply?" Clinton asked. He had declined a seat and stood stiffly in front of the camp table that served Jameson as a desk.

"Here." The doctor handed Clinton a grubby, folded scrap of paper. Clinton scanned it swiftly: I have the honour to inform you that I have received your letter and have heard all what you have said, so I will come... This is written by a half-caste rogue, named Jacobs, who has joined up with Lobengula," Clinton muttered, as he glanced through the rest of the wandering, misspelt and barely literate note. "I know his handwriting."

"Do you think the king means it?" Mungo Sint John asked. "Do you think he means to come in?"

Clinton did not turn his head towards where Mungo toiled in a canvas camp chair across the tent.

"Doctor Jameson, I do not condone your actions or those of your infamous Chartered Company, but I came here at your bidding in order to do what little I can to redress the terrible wrongs that have been perpetrated on the Matabele people. However, I draw the line at having to speak or in any way communicate with this henchman of yours."

Jameson frowned irritably. "Reverend, I would like you to bear in mind that I have appointed General Sint John as Administrator and Chief Magistrate of Matabeleland Clinton cut in brusquely. "You are, of course, aware that your Chief Magistrate was once a notorious slave-trader, buying and selling the black people over whom you now give him supreme powers?"

"Yes, thank you, Reverend, I am aware that General Sint John was once a legitimate trader, and I am also fully aware that while a serving officer of Her Majesty's navy, you led an attack on his ship, an action which led to your being courtmartialled, imprisoned and cashiered from the service. Now let us continue, Reverend. If you do not wish to talk directly to General Sint John, you may address me instead."

In the camp chair Mungo Sint John crossed his beautifully polished riding boots and smiled lazily, but his eye was bright and sharp as a bared blade. "Doctor Jameson, would you ask the good priest if he is of the opinion that Lobengula will give himself up?"

"Would you?" Clinton asked, still without a glance in Sint John's direction.

"No," Mungo replied, and nodded his head significantly at Jameson.

"Reverend, General Sint John is taking out a flying column to bring Lobengula in. I want you to go with him, please," Jameson said.

"Why me, Doctor?"

"You speak the language fluently."

"So do many others, Zouga Ballantyne is one of them.

He is also a soldier."

"Your brother-in-law has other important work to do "Stealing the king's cattle," Clinton cut in acidly.

It was already common knowledge that Zouga Ballantyne had been given the task of rounding up the vast Matabele herds and bringing them in to Gubulawayo for distribution.

However, Jameson might not have heard the remark, and he went on smoothly. "Besides, Reverend, you and your wife have been close friends of Lobengula for many years, he trusts and likes you. But, since it was Major Ballantyne who delivered our ultimatum, Lobengula looks upon him as an enemy."

"Not without reason," Clinton murmured dryly. "However, Doctor, I refuse to be your Judas goat."

"Your presence with the column may help to avert another bloody conflict, with the inevitable result of hundreds if not thousands more Matabele slaughtered. I would think it your Christian duty to try to prevent that."

Clinton hesitated, and Mungo murmured. "Do point out, Doctor Jim, that after Lobengula surrenders, Reverend Codrington will be in a position to comfort and protect him, to ensure that the king is kindly treated and that no harm befalls him. I give him my word on that."

"Very well," Clinton capitulated sadly. "On the understanding that I am to be the king's protector and advisor, I will go with your column."

"They follow," Gandang said softly. "They still follow."

And Lobengula lifted his face and looked at the sky. The rain drops, heavy and hard as newly minted silver shillings, struck his cheeks and forehead.

"The rain," said Lobengula. "Who said they could not follow us in the rain?"

"It was me, my King but I was wrong," Gandang; admitted. "When he marched from Gubulawayo, One-Brighteye had three hundred men and four of the little guns with three legs which chatter like old women. He also had wagons and one big cannon."

"I know this," said the king.

"When the rains came, I thought that they had turned back, but now my scouts have come in with heavy news to tell. One-Bright-Eye has sent back half of his men and the wagons the cannon and two of the little three-legged guns. They could not ride over the mud, but-" Gandang paused.

"Do not try to spare me, my brother, tell me it all."

"He comes on with half his men, and two little machine-guns drawn by horses. They are travelling fast, even in the mud."

"How fast?" the king asked quietly.

"They are a day's march behind us, tomorrow evening they will camp here on this very river."

The king pulled the tattered old coat around his shoulders. It was cold in the rain, but he did not have the energy to crawl under the canvas of his wagon tent.

He looked out across the watercourse. They were camped on the Shangani river, but almost a hundred and fifty miles higher than where the first battle of the war had been fought upon the headwaters of this same river.

They were in thick mopani forest, so thick that a road had to be chopped through it to allow the king's wagons to pass. The terrain was flat and relieved only by the clay hills of the termite nests that dotted the forest, some of them as large as houses, others the size of a beer keg just big enough to smash the axle of a wagon.

The sky, grey and heavy as the belly of a pregnant sow, pressed down upon the tops of the mopani. Soon it would rain heavily again, these fat drops were merely a warning of the next deluge to come, and that trickle of muddy water, the colour of a drunkard's bile, down the middle of the watercourse would be a roaring torrent again within minutes of the onslaught.

one hundred and fifty men, Gandang," the king sighed. "How many have we?"

"Two thousand," said Gandang. "And perhaps tomorrow or the next day Gambo may come to join us with a thousand more."

"Yet we cannot stand against them?"

"The men we would eat. It is those little guns with three legs, oh King not even ten thousand warriors, each with the liver of a lion, could prevail when they begin to laugh. But if the king commands, we will run "No" It is the gold," Lobengula said suddenly. "The white men will never let me be until they have the gold.

I will send it to them. Perhaps then they will leave me in peace.

Where is Kamuza, my young induna? He speaks the language of the white men. I will send him to them."

Kamuza came swiftly to the king's bidding. He stood attentively in the spattering rain beside the front wheel of the wagon.

"Place the little bags of gold in the hands of the white men, Kamuza, my trusted induna, and say to them thus, "You have eaten up my regiments and killed my young men, you have burned my kraals and scattered the women and children of Matabeleland into the hills where they burrow for roots like wild animals, you have seized my royal herds, and now you have my gold. White men, you have it all, will you now leave me in peace to mourn my lost people?" There were ten bags of white canvas, stamped with black lettering. They made a heavy burden for one man to carry. Kamuza knelt and tied them together in bunches, and then packed each bunch into a leather grain bag.

"To hear is to obey, Great Elephant," Kamuza saluted his king.

"Go swiftly, Kamuza, Lobengula. ordered softly. "For they are close upon us."

Will Daniel sat his own horse, with the brim of his hat pulled down to protect the bowl of his clay pipe from the drizzling rain, and over his shoulders he wore a rubber groundsheet which glistened with moisture and gave him a pregnant, clumsy look as he slumped barrelbellied in the saddle.

On lead reins he held two other horses, one was a pack animal whose burden was covered by a white canvas sheet. Daniel no longer bore the lofty rank of sergeant.

After his conduct at the secret valley of the Umlimo, Zouga Ballantyne had seen him reduced to trooper, and as an additional mortification, he was now acting as batman to one of the officers of the flying column. The packhorse carried Captain Coventry's traps.

The other horse belonged to Will's old comrade in arms, Jim Thorn. That worthy was crouched behind a thorny shrub a short way off, with his belt hanging around his neck and cursing bitterly in a low monotone.

"Filthy bleeding water, stinking bloody rain, God-forsaken country, "

"Hey, jimmo, your backside must be on fire by now.

That's the twelfth time today."

"Shut your ugly face, Will Daniel," Jim shouted back, and then dropped back into his dismal monotone.

"Bloody gut-breaking trots "Come on, Jim my lad." Will lifted the brim of his hat to peer about him. "We can't fall too far behind the rest, not with the bush crawling with bloody black savages."

Jim Thorn came out from behind the bush re-buckling his belt, but wincing with another bout of stomach cramps. He climbed gingerly up into the saddle, and the three horses plodded along in the deep yellow muddy ruts of the horse-drawn carts which carried the two Maxim machine-guns.

The rear of the column was out of sight ahead of them amongst the dripping mopani trees. The two of them had soon learned to loiter at the back away from the scrutiny of the officers, so that they would not be ordered into the thigh-deep mud when the Maxim carts bogged down and had to be man-handled through one of the glutinous Imopani holes".

"Look out, Will!" Jim Thorn yelled suddenly, and his oilskins flapped like the wings of a startled rooster as he tried to draw his rifle from its scabbard. "Look out, bloody savages!"

A Matabele had stepped silently out of the thick bush alongside the cart tracks, and now he stood directly in front of the horses and held up his empty hands to show the white men that he was unarmed.

"Wait, jimmo@" Will Daniel called. "Let's see what the bastard wants."

"I don't like it, man. It's a trap." Jim searched the bush around them nervously. "Let's shoot the black bugger and get out of it."

"I come in peace!" the Matabele called in English. He wore only a fur kilt, without armlets and leg tassels, and the rain shone on his smoothly muscled torso. On his head was the headring of an induna.

The two mounted men both had their rifles out now, and were aiming from the hip, covering Kamuza at pointblank range.

"I have a message from the king."

"Well, spit it out then," Will snapped.

"Lobengula says take my gold, and go back to Gubulawayo."

"Gold?" demanded Jim Thorn. "What gold?"

Kamuza stepped back into the scrub, picked up the leather grain bag, and carried it to them.

Will Daniel was laughing excitedly as he pulled out the little canvas bags. They jingled softly in his hands.

"By God, that's the sweetest music I ever heard!"

"What will you do, white men?" Kamuza demanded.

"Will you take the gold to your chief?"

"Don't fret yourself, my friend." Will Daniel clapped him delightedly on the shoulder. "It will go to the right person, you have the word of William Daniel hisself on it."

Jim Thorn was unbuckling his saddle-bags and stuffing the canvas sacks into it.

"Christmas and my birthday all in one," he winked at Will.

"White men, will you turn and go back to Gubulawayo, now?" Kamuza called anxiously.

"Don't worry about it another minute," Will assured him, and ferreted a loaf of hard bread out of his own saddle-bag. "Here's a present for you, bonsela, present, you understand?" Then to Jim. "Come on, mister Thorn, it's Mister I'll be calling you now that you are rich."

"Lead on, mister Daniel," Jim grinned at him, and they spurred past Kamuza, leaving him standing in the muddy pathway with the mouldy loaf of bread in his hands.

Clinton Codrington came slipping and sloshing along the bank of the Shangani river. The lowering clouds were bringing on the night prematurely, and the forests on the far bank were dank and gloomy.

The thunder rumbled sullenly, as though boulders were being rolled across the roof of the sky, and for a few seconds the rain spurted down thickly and then sank once more to a fine drizzle. Clinton shivered and pulled up the collar of his sheepskin coat as he hurried on to where the Maxim carts stood at the head of the column.

There was a tarpaulin draped between the two carts and beneath it squatted a small group of officers. Mungo, Sint John looked up as Clinton approached.

"Ah, parson!" he greeted him. Mungo had learned that this address irritated Clinton inordinately. "You took your time." Clinton did not reply; he stood hunched in the rain and none of the officers made room for him beneath the canvas.

"Major Wilson is going to make a reconnaissance across the river with a dozen men. I want you to go with him to translate, if he meets any of the enemy."

"It will be dark in less than two hours," Clinton pointed out stolidly.

"Then you had best hurry."

"The rains will break at any minute," Clinton persisted.

"Your forces could be split "Parson, you bother about brimstone and salvation let us do the soldiering." Mungo turned back to his officers. "Are you ready to go, Wilson?"

Allan Wilson was a bluff Scot, with long, dark moustaches and an accent that burred with the tang of heather and highlands.

"You'll be giving me detailed orders then, sir?" he demanded stiffly. There had been ill-feeling between him and Sint John ever since they had left Gubulawayo.

"I want you to use your common sense, man," Sint John snapped. "If you can catch Lobengula, then grab him, put him on a horse, and get back here. If you are attacked, fall back immediately. If you let yourself be cut off, I will not be able to cross the river to support you with the Maxims until first light, do you understand that?"

"I do, General." Wilson touched the brim of his slouch hat. "Come on, Reverend," he said to Clinton. "We do not have much time."

Burnham and Ingram, the two American scouts, led the patrol down the steep bank of the Shangani. Wilson and Clinton followed immediately behind.

Clinton's lanky, stooped frame, in the scuffed sheepskin jacket and with a shapeless stained hat pulled down over his ears, looked oddly out of place in the middle of the uniformed patrol of armed men. As he came level with Mungo Sint John, standing on the top of the bank with his hands clasped behind his back, Clinton bent low from the saddle of his borrowed horse and said, so quietly that only Mungo heard him, "Read "1 Samuel, chapter eleven, verse fifteen." Then Clinton straightened, gathered the old grey gelding with which he had been provided by the Company, and the two of them went sliding untidily down the cutting in the steep bank which the Matabele had dug to take Lobengula's wagons across.

At this point, the Shangam river was two hundred yards across, and as the little patrol waded the deepest part of the channel, the muddy waters reached to their stirrup irons. They climbed the far bank and almost immediately were lost from view in the dripping woods and poor light.

Mungo Sint John stood for many minutes, staring across the river, ignoring the fine, drizzling rain. He was wondering at himself, wondering why he had sent such a puny force across the river, with only hours of daylight left. The priest was right, of course, it would rain again soon. The heavens were leaden and charged with it. The Matabele were in force. The priest had seen the Inyati impi under its old and crafty commander, Gandang, escorting the wagons away from Gubulawayo.

If he were going to reconnoitre the lie of the land beyond the river, then he knew that he should have used the last of the daylight to ford his entire force. It was the correct tactical disposition. That way the patrol could fall back under the protection of the Maxims at any time during the night, or he could go forward to relieve them if they ran into trouble.

Some demon had possessed him when he gave the orders. Perhaps Wilson had finally irritated him beyond all restraint. The man had argued with him at every opportunity, and had done his best to subvert Mungo's authority amongst the other officers, who resented the fact that he was an American over British officers. It was mostly Wilson's fault that this was such an unhappy and divided little expedition. He was well rid of the overbearing and blunt Scotsman, he decided. Perhaps a night spent in company with the Inyati regiment would take some of the pepper out of him; and he would be a little more tractable in the future, if there was a future for him. Mungo turned back to the sheltering tarpaulin strung between the gun carriages.

Suddenly a thought struck him, and he called down the line. "Captain Borrow."

"Sir?

"You have a Bible, don't you? Let me have it, will you?"

Mungo's batman had a fire going, and coffee brewing in the shelter, and he took Mungo's coat to dry and.

spread a grey woollen blanket over his shoulders as Mungo squatted beside the fire and paged slowly through the little leather-bound, travel-battered Bible.

He found the reference and stared at it thoughtfully: And he wrote in the letter, saying, Set Uriah in the forefront of the hottest battle, and retire ye from him, that he may be smitten, and die.

Mungo wondered that he was still capable of surprising himself. There were still strange places in his soul that he had never explored.

He took a burning stick from the fire and lit his cigar, then plunged the glowing red of the brand into the black coffee to enhance the taste of the brew.

"Well, well, Parson!" he murmured aloud. "You have a sharper instinct than I ever gave you credit for."

Then he thought Of Robyn Codrington, trying to consider his feelings objectively, and without passion.

"Do I love her?" he asked, and the answer was immediate.

"I have never loved a woman, and by God's grace, I never will."

"Do I want her, then?" And again there was no hesitation. "Yes, I want her. I want her badly enough to send anybody who stands in my way to his death."

"Why do I want her?" he pondered. "When I have never loved a woman, why do I want this one? She is no longer young, and God knows, I have had my pick of a hundred more beautiful. Why do I want her!"and he grinned at his own perception. "I want her because she is the only one whom I have never had, and whom I will never have completely."

He closed the Bible with a snap, and grinned wickedly across the wide river at the dark and silent mopani forest.

"Well done, Parson. You saw it long before I did."

The tracks of Lobengula's wagons were clear to follow, even in the worsening light, and Wilson pushed the pace to a canter.

Clinton's aged grey was exhausted by two weeks of hard trekking. He fell back little by little, until after five miles they were loping along with Captain Napier's rear file. The mud thrown up by the hooves ahead speckled Clinton's face as though he was suffering from some strange disease.

The mopani thinned out dramatically ahead of the tiny patrol, and there were low bare hills on either hand.

"Look at them, Padre," Wilson called to Clinton, and gestured at the hills. "There must be hundreds of them."

"Women and old men," Clinton grunted. The slopes were scattered with silent watching figures. "The fighting men will be with the king."

The twelve riders cantered on without a check, and the thunder muttered and shook the sky above the low, swirling clouds.

Suddenly Wilson raised his right hand high.

"Troop, halfl' Clinton's grey stood, head hanging and chest heaving between his knees, and Clinton was as grateful. At his best he was no horseman, and he was unaccustomed to such hard riding.

"Reverend Codrington to the front!"The order was passed back, and Clinton kicked the grey into a plodding walk.

At that moment a squall of rain stung his face like a handful of thrown rock-salt, and he wiped it off with the palm of his right hand.

"There they are!"said Wilson tersely, and through the drizzle Clinton could make out the stained and ragged canvas tent of a wagon rising above the scrub, not more than two hundred paces ahead.

"You know what to say, Padre." Wilson's Scots accent seemed even stronger and was incongruous at this place and in these circumstances.

Clinton walked the grey forward another few paces, and then drew a deep breath.

"Lobengula, King of the Matabele, it is me, Hlopi.

These men wish you to come to Gubulawayo to parley with Dakatela and Lodzi. Do you hear me, oh King?"

The silence was broken only by the scraping of a windblown branch and the rustle of the rain on the brim of Clinton's old hat.

Then quite clearly, he heard the snick of a Martinihenry rifle being loaded; and a young voice asked in whispered Matabele from the scrub near the wagon: "Must we shoot, Baba?"

A deeper, firmer voice replied in the same language.

"Not yet. Let them come closer so there can be no mistake."

And then the voices were blotted out by a grumbling roll of thunder overhead, and Clinton backed the grey up.

"It is a trap, Major. There are armed Matabele in ambush about the wagons. I heard them talking."

"Do you think the king is there?"

"I would not think so, but what I am sure of is that even now the main impi is circling back between us and the river."

"What makes you think that!"

"It is always the Zulu way, the encirclement and then the closing in."

"What do you advise, Padre?"

Clinton shrugged and smiled. "I gave my advice on the bank of the river-" He was interrupted by a shouted warning from the rear of the column. It was one of the Americans, his accent unmistakable.

"There is a force moving in behind us."

"How many?" Wilson shouted back.

"Plenty, I can see their plumes."

"Troop, about wheel!" Wilson ordered. "At the gallop, forward!"

As the horses plunged back down the rough trail, the rain that had been threatening so long burst upon them in an icy silver cascade. It slashed at their faces" and stung their eyes, and drummed on their oilskins.

"This will cover our retreat," Wilson grunted, and Clinton flogged the grey's neck with the loose end of the reins, for the old horse was falling back again.

Through the thick silver lances of falling rain, he caught a glimpse of waving war-plumes above the scrub; they were racing in to head off the patrol. At that moment the grey stumbled and Clinton was thrown onto his neck.

"Jee!" He heard the war chant go up, and he clung desperately to the grey's neck as it plunged to regain its balance.

"Come on, Padre!" somebody yelled, as the other troopers went pounding past him in the mud and the rain.

Then his horse was running again. Clinton had lost a stirrup, and he bumped painfully on the wet saddle, clinging to the pommel for a grip, but they were through.

There were no shields or plumes in the bush around them, only the twisting streamers of rain and the gloom of gathering night.

"Are you telling me, Napier, that Major Wilson has deliberately chosen to spend the night on the far bank, despite my direct orders to return before nightfall?" Mungo Sint John asked. The only light was that of a storm lantern. The rain had washed out the fires.

The tarpaulin over the heads of the two officers flogged in the wind, spilling gouts of rainwater over them, and the lantern flame fluttered uncertainly in its glass chimney, lighting Captain Napier's face from below so that he looked like a skull.

"We got so close to Lobengula, General, within hail of the wagons.

Major Wilson considered a retreat would not be justified. In any event, sir, the bush is swarming with the enemy. The patrol has a better chance of surviving the night by stopping in thick bush and waiting for daylight., "That is Wilson's estimate, is it?" Mungo demanded, putting on a grim expression. Yet inwardly, he congratulated himself on such an accurate assessment of the Scotsman's impetuous character.

"YOU Must reinforce the patrol, sir. You must send at least one of the Maxims across, now, this very hour."

"Listen carefully, Captain," Mungo ordered him. "What do you hear?"

Even over the rain and the wind there was an echo like the sound in a seashell held to the ear.

"The river, Captain," Mungo told him. "The river is spating!"

"I have just forded it. You can still get across, sir. If you give the order now! If you wait until dawn, it may well be in full flood."

"Thank you for your advice, Napier. I will not risk the Maxims."

"Sir, sir, you can take at least one Maxim off its carriage. We can carry it in a blanket and swim across."

"Thank you, Captain. I will send Borrow across with twenty men to reinforce Wilson until morning, and this force will follow, with both Maxims, only when it is light enough to see the ford and make the crossing in safety."

"General Sint John, you are signing the death warrant of those men."

"Captain Napier, you are overwrought. I shall expect an apology from you when you have recovered yourself."

Clinton sat with his back against the bole of a mopani tree. He had one hand thrust into the front of his sheepskin jacket, to hold his travelling Bible out of the rain.

He wished above any other creature needs that he had light enough to read it.

All around him the rest of the tiny patrol lay stretched out on the muddy earth, bundled up in their rubber groundsheets and oilskins, though Clinton was certain that, like himself, none of them was asleep, nor would any of them sleep that night.

Clutching the Bible above his heart, he had the certain prescience of his own death, and he made the astonishing discovery that it had no terrors for him. once, long ago, before he had discovered how close at hand was God's comfort, he had been afraid, and now the release from fear was a blessed gift.

Sitting in darkness, he thought of love, the love of his God and his woman and his daughters, and that was all that he would regret leaving behind him.