Theirs Was The Kingdom Page 5

  He was touched but astonished. It seemed to him strange and wayward that she should interpret a light-hearted remark concerning the length of their family as a broad hint that they should deny themselves the indulgence they had enjoyed over the years.

  “I’m not suggesting I should stop loving you in that sense, Hetty. You must know there are ways and means…”

  “Don’t tell me about them!” she snapped, “for I don’t want to hear and I certainly don’t want to practise them! I’ve heard other wives mention ‘ways and means’ aimed at not having children and to my mind it entails… well, cheating, if you like. There's only one way for a woman to love a man and show that she loves him, and I learned that from you, years ago.”

  There was no kind of answer to this, or none that he could think of. Pride in her, and gratitude, too, inflated him, so that he saw her as someone infinitely more complex than a sensual, buxom wife, a hit-and-miss mother, and the exasperatingly immature fugitive from reality that she had sometimes shown herself to be over the dips and peaks and levels of their marriage. Clearly she was a far more introspective person than he had imagined, for all his smug, masculine certainty that he knew every curve and cleft of her body, and every variant of her quicksilver temperament. He sensed, vaguely, that he had just learned something new about her secret evaluation of the partnership, an aspect she had succeeded in concealing over the years. She saw the row of children in that pew as her profits in an enterprise, but they were incidental to its main purpose, a purpose as well-defined as that which had translated him from mercenary to creator and driving force of a gigantic enterprise in a period of twenty-one years. Her essential purpose was to adjust to him, in all his changing moods, boosting him when he stood in need of a boost, sanctioning his erratic flights from the cares of office. It was to spend herself keeping age and self-doubt at bay and moderating the inevitable loneliness of a man who spent most of his waking hours among subordinates, using her body as an instrument trained and tempered to absorb his essential egotism, a task she not only relished but would share with no one, physically or spiritually. He thought, with an inward chuckle, “By God, it's lucky for both of us I’ve found all the solace I ever needed right here in her company. I wouldn’t care to find myself in a rival's shoes if she ever got to hear about it.”

  Suddenly he tired of the game of tinkering with the machinery of their marriage and drew her close to him, seeking her mouth and letting his hand slip the length of her back to caress the soft roundnesses of her buttocks, after which he addressed himself to the task of demonstrating that he not only understood her line of reasoning but also wholly endorsed it. Presently she stirred within his embrace, but it was only to enfold him with her legs and hold him there until he was spent and mocking the small glow of vanity his ardour invariably promoted on these occasions, particularly since he had passed the fifty mark and should, he told himself, have outgrown a young man's pride in performing so simple a function. The sensation of wonder persisted, however, long after they had pulled the blankets over them and she was asleep, her head turned to him, her left hand resting in the hollow of his hip, the truncated hip that represented, for him, his own invincibility and his wife's inexhaustible reserves of pluck and versatility, reflecting that she had never really extended herself until he was converted, in a single moment of time, from man to hulk during that shambles over at Staplehurst.

  He lay awake a long time, expressing his supreme satisfaction in her by stroking her disordered hair under his hand, thinking back on what she had said and on the units that had resulted from momentary encounters such as this, and it was a chain of speculation that led him, rummaging haphazardly among his thoughts, to that curious remark of hers about creating children who would—how had she put it?—“go out in the world and do all the things we could never hope to do in a single lifetime.” What had prompted that, he wondered? Was it the fact that one son and one daughter had already launched themselves, Alex halfway across the world to fight a few thousand savages, Stella into life-partnership with a man who might or might not know the art of training a vain, ignorant girl into a wife of Henrietta's calibre? Well, as to Stella, he was content to reserve judgement. No marriage was a cakewalk until years had passed and two people had learned the art of tolerance and the tricky business of adjusting to one another physically, an aspect of marriage of the first importance.

  As to how Alex was fairing, he could make a few guesses, based on his own experiences as a soldier. He would have learned by now that there was more to soldiering than dressing up and looking fierce, that to make headway in that field one needed more luck than ability. He thought of all the young men he had seen riding out to war in the wake of the old Colonel and in the moment before sleep came to him a stab of anxiety steered him into a brief disquieting dream, in which he was whisked back to the plain beyond Jhansi and had been unhorsed within inches of a fortune in rubies, the luggage of a man he had killed. Then, because he was essentially a man of action, who rarely dreamed and never recalled dreams, he slipped the extra notch or two into a deeper, more timeless sleep, with his hand still buried in his wife's hair and her limbs moulded to his in a pattern of sleep they had formed over the years.

  Two

  1

  THE ROUGH TRACK CURVED EAST ACROSS THE LOWER SHOULDER OF THE PLATEAU under a blue and cloudless sky as wide and empty as the Pacific. Over to the left, where the heat haze shimmered and lapped the sandstone base of the giant outcrop that broke the surface of the plain, the little white tents stood in trim rows, with here a red or a black dot moving to and from the waggon park, and there the lazy spiral of a cooking fire, where men of the South Wales Borderers and their native allies were preparing their midday meal.

  The scene, Alex Swann thought, glancing over his shoulder as he followed the trundling rocket-battery out of camp, was like a parody of war, the neatly ordered spread of soldiers and conical tents he had so often set out on the nursery floor at Tryst, a picture-book war that could easily end in the clamour of Phoebe Fraser's lunch bell, and a meal of cold beef and green salad, after which he would wander away with young George or Giles to the paddock to catch the ponies, forgetting the martial array on the floor upstairs.

  It was a time and a place for daydreaming. A wide, dusty plain under an incredibly tall sky, where the mind made a compound of past, present, and future so that it needed conscious effort to see oneself as a real soldier, with a real Martini-Henry in his saddle bucket, and a real six-chambered revolver slapping his thigh as the lean pony picked its way among the cracks and boulders of the makeshift track. Back at Helpmakaar, where the settlement had been thronged with soldiers and native levies like his own, the Natal Native Contingent, the feeling had grown on him that everyone there, from Lord Chelmsford downwards, was engaged in a gigantic game, for although newcomers like himself had been assured by Boer farmers that a brush with the Zulus was unlikely to prove a picnic, it did not seem credible that a nation of savages, notwithstanding their warlike traditions, could stem a three-pronged invasion across the Tugela and Blood Rivers for more than a week or two. After that, he assumed, it would be a kind of hunting foray among the drifts and kopjes, ending in some sort of truce dictated from London. Before the English spring came round they would all be back in Natal, swapping tall stories of their experiences, and looking about for new adventures in another continent, service with his father's old comrade, General Roberts, perhaps, currently grappling with Afghan tribesmen in the passes of the North West Frontier, or possibly further east, in Burma or Borneo. Thinking this, he reviewed his luck at getting here before the advance began and enlisting under a man of Colonel Durnford's reputation, wondering whether he owed his good fortune to his own unrelenting pleading or to his father's influence with South African merchant houses. Whichever it was he would have missed the boat if he hadn’t decided to go aboard with the minimum luggage, and most of that was now stored at Durban. His possessions, accoutrements aside, were limited to a razor that he
only needed to use twice a week; a Bible his former governess, Phoebe Fraser, had pressed on him; and ten sovereigns, the gift of his practical mother, snug inside the lining of his tunic and excess weight out here where the nearest store was thirty miles back along the route.

  The sun was blisteringly hot and sweat built a crescent of beads under the blunt peak of his pith helmet, plastering shirt and tunic to his back, like a football jersey after an early autumn game on the pitch at Mellingham. He thought about Mellingham, his mind dancing away into the heat haze; of old Greenacre, who had been so eager to accompany him but had gone, instead, into his father's scent factory, poor devil; and of old Jumbo Bellchamber, his study-mate, cramming for the Foreign Office exams. He was, he supposed, unique in possessing folks prepared to give him his head in these matters, to let him discover for himself what he wanted to make of his life. He was luckier still in having a mother predisposed in favour of the military life, even though he was not absolutely decided on it as yet and was still, in a sense, experimenting. There was no question of going into a scent factory, like poor old Greenacre, or mugging for an office life, like Bellchamber, but there were any number of choices open to him; anything, say, from a permanent commission in the cavalry, to trying his luck as a planter in one of the scores of new colonies where Victoria was God's vicereine. The choice, at all events, was his and that was what mattered. Most chaps’ mothers, he imagined, would have made a frightful scene over his abrupt departure in October, within a month of his sister's wedding to that flabby-looking hussar with the fancy name.

  The pony was making heavy going of the track, and so was the rocket battery team up ahead. He could hear the harsh clatter of its undercarriage, the slither of the mules’ hooves on sun-slippery stones, the apathetic shouts of the drivers. A dozen lengths behind him, jogging along two by two, rode the Basutos, as unlikely a set of soldiers as he had ever seen, notwithstanding their fancy getup and martial frowns whenever they remembered to stop grinning. It was a pity, in a way that he had not arrived in time to sign on with a trained European unit, where troopers took a pride in their appearance. Those people who could have taught him something about native warfare, but he assumed that could be remedied as soon as Cetywayo had sued for peace. He could then assess the prospects of a real military career, using his experience out here as a door-opener.

  The sun was a ball of bedstead brass and he was almost asleep in the saddle when Lieutenant Copland came spurring back, reining in level with him and shouting something about the Colonel wanting the Basutos to ride up on the plateau and see if there was any sign of Zulus or Zulu cattle beyond the ridge. He shouted an order and extended his left arm, reflecting as he did so that this was the first order he had issued since he had arrived in Africa, the first he had ever issued to grown men. The thought brought a faint blush to his cheek and he kicked his pony ahead across the scrub in case the natives should notice his callowness. In less than ten minutes he was a hundred feet above the track, with a clear view of Isandlwana, the great sandstone outcrop, on his immediate left, and the skyline of the plateau right ahead. Six Basutos had followed him, in very leisurely fashion, he noticed. No one would ever make soldiers out of such material, and it occurred to him that Lord Chelmsford would have been well-advised to mount the invasion with European troops and use the local levies as drivers and carriers en route, leaving a majority back at the mission station at Rorke's Drift. In another moment he had topped the rise and could enjoy a magnificent view of the entire plain, forty miles of it he would say, and all as empty as a moon crater, despite the crawling passage of Durnford's pigmy column a mile ahead, and two thousand other pigmies back at the camp on the lower slopes of Isandlwana. Then, recalling his purpose up here, he waved to the Basutos to close up, at the same time unslinging his binoculars, the loan of that affable regular, Lieutenant Melville, whom he had met back at Rorke's Drift two days ago. He lifted the glasses, sweeping the broad declivity north of the track.

  Something moved down there and he paused to wipe the sweat from his eyelids. A cow or a bullock, then two, then a dozen, browsing along the gentle slope about eight hundred yards to the north, where there was the long downslope of a shallow valley, a donga they would call it here, with waist-high scrub growing on it and a boulder-strewn bed like the surface of the track he had just left.

  He was still watching the cattle when he heard the high-pitched scream from the nearest Basuto, level with him now but fifty yards or so nearer the camp. For a second or so he thought the man must be clowning, but then two other troopers scrambled up beside him and at once all three were gibbering and gesticulating, jabbing their fingers down towards the herd, indicating a dark, motionless blur that spread itself across the scorched landscape from a point just north of the cattle, and on beyond them, as far as the eye could reach. He wondered vaguely what it could be, his mind conjuring with a variety of improbable alternatives: a vast spread of tarpaulins, or acres of plum jam, or a wilderness of ripe blackberries, if blackberries grew on African plateaux. And then he saw that the patch was formed by a mass of densely packed men, thousands and thousands of men, squatting on their haunches, or sprawled at ease in the spidery grass of the donga and other dongas further afield, relaxed but watchful, statuesque but somehow projecting a terrible menace.

  He could see them clearly now, a dense and utterly silent mass, and it was hardly necessary to fumble with Melville's binoculars in order to identify them as a Zulu impi, or a dozen impis, with yet another vast column in motion over to the far left, moving at the double to encircle the lion-shaped hill where the tents were pitched and the blobs of scarlet still moved leisurely to and fro between tent lines and waggon park.

  His immediate reaction was to lug his pony round and ride pell-mell down the slope towards the track and the security of the column, but then, hard on the heels of this thought, was another that kept him sitting there, gazing down at what looked to be the entire Zulu nation. His immobility had to do with years of automatic responses to raucous-voiced seniors at Mellingham, cries that insisted he passed the ball, or added his weight to the scrum, or looked up into the sun to judge the flight of a spinning cricket ball arching its way towards the boundary. With a tremendous effort he braced himself, hearing his breath wheezing in his throat, and feeling his right hand falter as it reached out and grasped the scorching butt of his bucketted rifle. The Martini-Henry came out but at that moment the nearest Basuto galloped past, whirling his arms and still screaming, so that his pony swerved and almost unseated him; he cursed the man in a shrill voice and spurred after him, grabbing his bridle and pulling him to a halt.

  He could have spared himself the effort. The man, and the others behind him, were all but incoherent, eyes rolling wildly, blunt fingers stabbing in the direction of the donga, so that he sought to steady them by raising his rifle and firing down into the silent black mass, then wheeling and spurring his pony back along the ridge, with some idea of despatching one Basuto west to warn the camp and the others northeast to overtake Durnford and the rocket battery that he could just see lurching round a bend in the track.

  Someone, the N.C.O. probably, anticipated him. Before he reached the eddying group a horseman detached himself, shooting off towards the tent lines like a whipper-in heading a pack of hounds from a false scent. Then, riding in a tight knot, the rest of the patrol went skittering down the slope uttering shrill cries that were lost in a low, reverberating hum that rose from the donga on the other side of the crest. It was a very curious, inhuman sound, a low, sustained buzz, like the sound that might emerge from a gathering of all the hornets in the world, and it was the hum rather than the certainty that he was in the presence of an army of trained spearmen that terrified him. It was as much as he could do not to follow the Basutos, but some instinct, deeply rooted in his personal past, or in the ancestral tug of a dozen martial Swanns, held him to the crest, rifle in his hand, binoculars thumping on his chest, and as the sustained groan of the Zulus rose in pitch he kicked
the pony a few yards higher up the slope and forced himself to look down the further side.

  What he saw there now amazed him, amazement succeeding terror, for the scene in the donga had magically transformed itself in a little over a hundred seconds. All the men he had seen down there were now in motion, loping up the gentle slope towards him and moving in superbly dressed lines, plumes nodding, braced assegais flashing, oxhide shields thudding as they swung up and down in a kind of devil-dance on the forearms of the warriors. The thrum of their naked feet made a background music to their hideous humming and suddenly the whole plain was filled with the sound, so that men pottering about that camp two miles or more away must have been alerted.

  The nearest ranks were perhaps four hundred yards distant when he fired again, and then again. It was like peppering the wall of a castle with a reed pea-shooter, of the kind he had used to tease old Melroy's cows grazing beside the river at Tryst. He did not know whether either of the bullets found a mark, but the recoil of the weapon struck his shoulder like the blows of a club and he heard the shots—tiny, popping, irrelevant sounds in all that uproar. Then he swung away and went cantering down the southern slope at breakneck pace, aiming to strike the track some half a mile ahead of the point where he had left it. As he rode he saw that the strung-out column was already alive to its terrible situation. Groups of men, in advance and in rear of the rocket battery, were falling back at an oblique angle, making for a rocky ridge that ran out from Isandlwana at an angle of about forty-five degrees that would afford some kind of rallying point for a fighting withdrawal to the camp.