little felucca. I want you here in Nativity Bay and you can be sure that when the time comes I will have much employment for you.' Cornish looked suitably mollified, and Dorian went on, 'Now, I want to go over the plans to engage the enemy as soon as they show themselves in the offing.' They spent the rest of that day and most of the night in conclave, going over every conceivable eventuality.
'Our fleet is so small, and the enemy so numerous, that our success will depend on each ship working in concert with the others. At night I will use signal lanterns and, during the day, smoke and Chinese rockets. I have drawn up a list of the signal codes we will employ, with copies for Batula and Kumrah written out fair in Arabic by Mistress Verity.'
In the dawn the three little ships, Sprite, Revenge and Tasuz's felucca, took advantage of the ebb of the tide and the offshore wind and sailed out of the bay, leaving only the Arcturus at anchor under the guns of the fort.
Beshwayo had moved his kraal fifty miles further downriver, but Bakkat had no difficulty in leading them directly to it, for every footpath and all the cattle tracks fanned out from it like the strands of a web, with King Beshwayo, the royal spider, at the centre. The lush and rolling grasslands through which they rode were heavily populated by his herds.
Regiments of the king's warriors were guarding the cattle. Many had fought with Jim against the Amahin. They all knew that Beshwayo had made him his blood-brother, and their greetings were enthusiastic. Each regimental and una detached fifty men to join the escort that led the wagons towards the royal kraal. The swiftest runners raced ahead to alert the king of their imminent arrival.
Thus Jim's entourage was several hundred strong by the time they crossed the last ridge and looked down into the basin of hills where oeshwayo's new kraal stood. It was laid out in an enormous circle, divided internally into rings within rings like an archery target. Jim guessed that it might take even Drumfire almost half an hour to gallop around the outer circumference.
The kraal was surrounded by a high stockade, and at its heart was a vast cattle pen in which all the royal herds could be contained. Beshwayo liked to live close to his beasts, and he had explained to Jim how the inner enclosure also served as a fly trap. The insects laid their eggs in the fresh cattle dung where they were trodden under the hoofs of the milling herd and could not hatch.
The outer circles of the kraal were filled with the closely spaced beehive huts that housed Beshwayo's court. The king's bodyguard lived in the smaller huts. The larger huts of the king's numerous wives stood within an enclosure of woven thorn branches. In a separate smaller enclosure were fifty elaborate structures that housed the indunas, Beshwayo's councillors and senior captains, and their families.
All these were dwarfed by the king's palace. It could not, by any stretch of semantics, be called a hut: it stood as tall as an English country church it did not seem possible that sticks and reeds could have been built up so high without collapsing. Every single reed used in its construction had been selected by the master thatchers. It was a perfect hemisphere.
'It looks like the egg of the roc!' Louisa exclaimed. 'See how it catches the sunlight.'
'What's a roc, Mama?' demanded George, from the sling on his father's back. 'An't that the same as a stone?' He had picked up that form of negative from his grandfather, and clung to it stubbornly despite her protests.
'A roc is a huge and fabulous bird,' Louisa answered.
'Can I have one, please?'
'Ask your father.' She smiled sweetly at Jim.
He pulled a wry face. 'Thank you, Hedgehog. No peace for me for the next month.' To distract George he touched Drumfire with his heels and they trotted down the last hill. The escorting warriors burst into a full-throated anthem of praise to their king. Their voices were deep and melodious, stirring the blood with their magnificence. The long column of men, horses and wagons snaked down across the golden grassland, the warriors keeping perfect step. Their headdresses waved and nodded in unison; each regiment had its own totem, heron, vulture, eagle and owl, and they wore the feathers of their clan. Around their upper arms they wore the cow tails of honour, awarded by Beshwayo for killing an enemy in combat. Their shields were matched, some dappled, some black, others red, while a few of the elite regiments carried pure white ones. They beat upon them with their assegais as they approached the kraal across a parade- ground. At the far end of this wide expanse the imposing figure of Beshwayo waited for them, seated on a carved ebony stool. He
was stark naked, displaying to all the world the proof that the dimensions of his manhood exceeded those of any of his subjects. His skin was anointed with beef fat and he shone in the sunlight like a beacon. The captains of his regiments were drawn up behind him, his indunas crowned with the rings of authority on their shaven heads, his witch doctors and his wives.
Jim reined in and fired a musket shot into the air. Beshwayo loved to be saluted thus, and he let forth a bull bellow of laughter. 'I see you, Somoya my brother!' he shouted, and his voice carried three hundred yards across the parade-ground.
'I see you, great black bull!' Jim shouted back, and urged Drumfire into a gallop. Louisa pushed Trueheart up alongside him. Beshwayo clapped his hands with delight to see the horses run. In the sling on his father's back George was kicking and struggling with excitement to be free.
'Beshie!' he yelled. 'My Beshie!'
'You had best let him down,' Louisa called across to Jim, 'before he does you or himself an injury.'
Jim hauled the stallion to a skidding halt on his haunches, lifted the child out of the sling with one hand and leaned out of the saddle to lower him to the ground. George took off at a run straight at the Great Bull of Earth and the Black Thunder of the Sky.
King Beshwayo came to meet him half-way, picked him up and hurled him high into the air. Louisa gasped and closed her eyes in trepidation, but George shrieked with delight as the king caught him before he hit the ground, and sat him firmly upon his gleaming muscular shoulder.
That night Beshwayo slaughtered fifty fat oxen and they feasted and drank huge clay pots of frothing beer. Jim and Beshwayo boasted and laughed and told each other amazing tales of their feats and adventures.
'Manatasee!' Beshwayo encouraged Jim. 'Tell me again how you killed her. Tell me how her head sailed up into the air like a bird.' He demonstrated with an extravagant sweep of his arms.
Louisa had heard the story repeated so often, for it was Beshwayo's favourite, that she pleaded the duties of motherhood as an excuse to leave the royal presence. She carried George, protesting sleepily, to his cot in the wagon.
Beshwayo listened to Jim's account of the battle with even more pleasure than the first time he had heard it. 'I wish I had met that mighty black cow,' he said, when the tale was told. 'I would have put a nne son in her belly. Can you imagine what a mighty warrior he would have been, with such a father and mother?'
'Then you would have been forced to live with Manatasee, the raging lioness.'
'No, Somoya. After she had given me my son, I would have made her head fly even higher into the sky than you did.' He roared with laughter and thrust the beer pot into Jim's hands.
When at last Jim came to join her in the car dell bed, Louisa had to help him climb over the afterclap. He collapsed on the mattress, and she removed his boots for him. The next morning it required two mugs of strong coffee before Jim announced dubiously that, if she nursed him well, he might just survive the day.
'I hope so, my darling husband, for I am sure you recall that this very day the king has invited you to attend the Festival of the First Flowers,' she told him, and Jim groaned.
'Beshwayo drank twice as much of that infernal brew as I did. Do you not think he may have the good sense to cancel the festival?'
'No,' said Louisa, with an angelic smile. 'I do not think he will for here come his indunas to escort us.'
They led Louisa and Jim back to the parade-ground. The open expanse was lined with dense ranks of young warriors dressed in all the finery of feathers and animal-skin kilts. They sat upon their shields, silent and still as statues carved from anthracite. At the entrance to the great kraal, carved stools were set out for Jim and Louisa beside the empty stool of the king. Behind that the king's wives were squatting in double ranks. Many were beautiful young women, and nearly all were in some stage of gravidity, from a gentle swelling to full bloom, breasts bursting with abundance, belly buttons popping out. They exchanged knowing smiles with Louisa, and watched the antics of golden-headed George, their dark eyes swimming with the strength of their maternal feelings.
Louisa sighed and leaned across to Jim on his stool. 'Does not a woman have a peculiar type of beauty when she is to have a baby?' she asked ingenuously.
Jim groaned. 'You pick the oddest times to become subtly suggestive,' he whispered. 'Think you not that one George is about all this world can stomach?'
'She might be a girl,' Louisa pointed out.
'Would she look like you?' Despite the glare he opened his eyes a little wider.
'As like as not.'
'That bears some thought,' he conceded, but at that moment there sounded from within the walls of the kraal a shattering fanfare of kudu horn trumpets and a crash of drums.
