"Brave comrade!" Bazo greeted him with relief as Ralph loomed out of the dark. "Stand back to back, form a ring in which each of us will guard the other, and call out to other brave men to join us." Bazo turned his back to Ralph, and drew the woman Tanase to his side. It was she who glanced back and recognized Ralph as he stooped.
"It is Henshaw," she screamed, but her warning came too late.
Before Bazo could turn back to face him, Ralph had changed his grip on the assegai, using it like a butcher's cleaver, and with a single stroke he hacked across the back of Bazo's legs, just above the ankles, and the Achilles" tendons parted with a soft rubbery popping sound.
Bazo collapsed onto his knees, both legs crippled, pinned like a beetle to a board.
Ralph seized Tanase's wrist, jerked her out of the circle of firelight, and hurled her headlong to earth. Holding her easily, he tore off her short leather skirt and placed the point of the assegai in her groin.
"Bazo," he whispered. "Throw your spear upon the fire, or I will open your woman's secret parts as you opened those of mine." The Scouts used the first glimmerings of the new day to move slowly down the valley in an extended line, finishing the wounded Matabele. While they worked, Ralph sent Jan Cheroot back to where they had left the horses to fetch the ropes. He was back within minutes with the heavy coils of new yellow manila over the saddles of the horses that he led.
"The Matabele have scattered back into the hills," he reported grimly. "It will take a week for them to find each other and regroup."
"We won't wait that long." Ralph took the ropes and began making the knots. The Scouts came in as he worked. They were scrubbing their assegai blades with handfuls of dried grass, and Sergeant Ezra told Ralph, "We lost four men, but we found Kamuza, the and una of the Swimmers, and we counted over two hundred bodies." "Get ready to pull out," Ralph ordered. "What remains to be done will not take long."
Bazo sat beside the remains of the fire. His arms were bound behind him with thongs of rawhide, and his legs were thrust straight out in front of him. He had no control over his feet, they flopped nervelessly like dying fish stranded on a receding tide, and the slow watery blood oozed from the deep gashes above his heels.
Tanase sat beside him. She was stark naked, and bound like him with her arms behind her back.
Sergeant Ezra stared at her body, and he murmured, "We have worked hard all night. We have earned a little sport. Let me and my kanka take this woman into the bushes for a short while." Ralph did not bother to reply, but turned to Jan Cheroot instead. "Bring the horses, "he ordered.
Tanase spoke to Bazo without moving her lips, in the way of the initiates.
"What is the business of the ropes, Lord? Why do they not shoot us, and have done?" "It is the white man's way, the way that conveys the deepest disrespect. They shoot honoured enemies, and use the ropes on criminals." "Lord, on the day I first met this one you call Henshaw, I dreamed that you were high upon a tree and he looked up at you and smiled she whispered. "It is strange that in that dream I did not see myself beside you upon that tree." They are ready now," said Bazo, and turned his head to her. "With my heart I embrace you. You have been the fountainhead of my life." "I embrace you, my husband. I embrace you, Bazo, who will be the father of kings." She went on staring into his ravaged, ugly-beautiful face and she did not turn her head when Henshaw stood tall over them and said in a harsh tortured voice, "I give you a better death than you gave to the ones I loved."
The ropes were of different lengths, so that Tanase hung slightly lower than her lord. The soles of her bare feet, suspended at the height of a man's head, were very white and her toes pointed straight at the earth like those of a little girl standing on tiptoe. Her long heron neck was twisted sharply to one side, so that she still seemed to listen for Bazo's voice.
Bazo's swollen face was lifted towards the yellow dawn sky, for the knot had ridden around under his chin. Ralph Ballantyne's face was lifted also as he stood at the base of the tall acacia tree in the bottom of the Valley of the Goats looking up at them.
In one other respect, Tanase's vision was unfulfilled Ralph Ballantyne did not smile.
Lodzi came and with him came Major-General Carrington and Major Robert Stephenson Smyth S BadenPowell who would one day coin the motto "Be Prepared, and behind them came the guns and the soldiers. The women and children danced out from the laager at Bulawayo with bouquets of wild flowers for them, and they sang "For they are jolly good fellows" and wept with joy.
The senior ihdunas of Kumalo, betrayed by the Umlimo's promises of divine intervention, uncertain and with the fire in their bellies swiftly cooling, squabbling amongst themselves and awed by the massive show of military force that they had provoked, withdrew slowly with their imp is from the vicinity of Bulawayo.
The imperial troops sortied in great lumbering columns and swept the valleys and the open land. They burned the deserted villages and the standing crops and they drove away the few cattle that the rinderpest had spared. They shelled the hills where they suspected the Matabele might be hiding, and they rode- their horses to exhaustion, chasing the elusive black shadows that flittered through the forest ahead of them. The Maxims fired until the water in the cooling-jackets boiled, but the range was nine hundred yards or more and the targets were as fleet as rabbits.
So the weeks dragged on and became months, and the soldiers tried to starve the Matabele and force them into a set-piece battle, but the indunas sulked in the broken ground and took refuge in the Matopos Hills where the guns and the-soldiers dared not follow them.
Occasionally the Matabele caught an isolated patrol or a man on his own, once even the legendary Frederick Selous, elephant-hunter and adventurer extraordinary. Selous had dismounted to "pot" one of the rebels that were disappearing over the ridge ahead, when a stray bullet grazed his pony, and his usually impeccably behaved animal bolted and left him stranded. Only then he realized that he had out ridden the main body of his Scouts, and that the Matabele were instantly aware of his predicament. They turned back and coursed him like dogs on a hare.
It was a race the likes of which Selous had not run since his elephant-hunting days. The bare-footed and lightly equipped amadoda gained swiftly, so close at last that they freed their blades from the thongs and began that terrible humming war chant. Only then Lieutenant Windley, Selous" second-in-command, spurred in and pulling his foot from the left stirrup, gave Selous the leather and galloped with him into the ranks of the oncoming Scouts.
At other times the swing of fortune was towards the soldiers, and they would surprise a foraging patrol of Matabele at a drift or in thick bush, and hang them from the nearest trees that would bear the weight.
It was an inconclusive cruel little war, that drew on and on. The military officers who were conducting the campaign were not businessmen, they did not think in terms of Costa efficiency, and the bill for the first three months was a million pounds of sterling, a cost of 5,000 pounds per head of Matabele killed. The bill was for the account of Mr. Cecil John Rhodes and his British South Africa Company.
In the Matopos Hills, the indunas were forced towards starvation, and in Bulawayo Mr. Rhodes was forced just as inexorably towards bankruptcy.