Matabele stabbed upwards over handed deeply into his armpit. Mungo St. John grunted and spurred onwards.
'I'm here!' he shouted to Robyn. 'Don't worry, my darling.-' and a warrior stabbed him through the belly. He doubled over. His horse went down, sharp steel driven through its heart, and it seemed that it was all over, but miraculously Mungo St. John rose to his feet and stood foursquare with the pistol in his hand. His eye-patch had been torn from his head, and the empty eye-socket glared so demoniac ally that for a moment the warriors fell back and he stood in their midst with the terrible spear wounds in his chest and belly running red.
Gandang stepped out of the press, and a silence fell upon them all. The two men stood face to face for a long second, Mungo tried to lift the pistol, but his strength failed him, and then Gandang drove the silver blade through the centre of Mungo St. John's chest and it shot a hand's span out of his back.
Gandang stood over the body and placed one foot upon Mungo St. John's chest and pulled the blade free. It made a sucking sound like a boot in thick mud. It was the only sound, and after it was silence.
The silence was even more terrible than the war chant and the screams of dying men.
The dense press of black bodies hemmed in the coach, and hid the corpses of the dead troopers. The amadoda formed a ring around where Mungo St. John lay upon his back, his features still twisted into a grimace of rage and agony. His one eye glaring at the enemy he could no longer see.
One at a time the warriors lifted their heads and stared at the huddle of women and a child in the open body of the coach. The very air was charged with menace, their eyes were glazed with the killing madness, and blood still splattered their arms and chests and speckled their faces like a macabre war paint. The ranks swayed like prairie grass touched by a little breeze. In the rear a single voice began to hum, but before it could spread, Robyn St. John rose to her feet and from the height of the coach looked down upon them. The hum died out into silence.
Robyn reached forward and picked up the reins. The Matabele watched her and still not one of them moved. Robyn flicked the reins, and the mules started forward- at a walk.
Gandang, son of Mzilikazi, senior and una of the Matabele, stepped off the track, and behind him the ranks of his amadoda opened. The mules passed slowly down the lane between them, stepping daintily over the mutilated corpses of the troopers. Robyn stared straight ahead, holding the reins stiffly. just once as she drew level with where Mungo St. John lay, she glanced down at him, and then looked ahead again.
Slowly, the coach rolled on down the hill, and when Elizabeth looked back again, the road was deserted.
'They have gone, Mama,' she whispered, and only then did she realize that Robyn was shaking with silent sobs. Elizabeth put her arm around her shoulders, and for a moment Robyn leaned against her.
'He was a terrible man, but, oh God forgive me, I loved him so, she whispered, and then she straightened up and urged the mules into a trot towards Bulawayo.
Ralph Ballantyne rode through the night, taking the difficult and direct path through, the hills rather than the broad wagon road. The spare horses were loaded with food and blankets that he had salvaged from the railhead camp. He led them at a walk over the rocky terrain, husbanding them for whatever efforts lay ahead of them.
He rode with his rifle across his lap, loaded and cocked. Every half hour or so, he halted his horse and fired three spaced rifle shots into the starry sky. Three shots, the universal recall signal. when the echoes had muttered and rumbled away down the hills, he listened carefully, twisting slowly in the saddle to cover every direction, and then he called, yelling his despair into the silences of the wilderness. 'Jonathan! Jonathan!' Again he rode on slowly through the darkness, and when the dawn came he watered the horses at a stream and let them graze for a few hours, sitting on an ant-heap to guard them, munching biscuit and bully, and listening.
It was strange how many of the sounds of the bush could seem like the cries of a human child to someone who listened wishfully. The mournful 'quay' of a grey laurie brought Ralph to his feet with his heart hammering, the screech of a meercat, even the wail of the wind in the treetops disturbed him.
In mid-morning he up-saddled and rode again. He knew that in daylight there was greater danger of running into a Matabele patrol, but the prospect had no terrors. He found himself welcoming it. Deep inside him was a cold dark area, a place that he had never visited before, and now as he rode on, he explored it and found there such hatred and anger as he had never believed was possible. Riding slowly through the lovely forests in the clean white sunshine, he discovered that he was a stranger to himself, until this day he had never known what he was, but now he was beginning to find out.
He reined in his horse on the crest of a high bare ridge, where watching Matabele eyes could have seen him from afar silhouetted against the blue, and deliberately he fired another three single shots.
When no file of running warriors came to the summons, his hatred and anger were stronger still.
An hour after noon, he climbed the ridge of the ancients where Zouga had killed the great elephant and looked down onto the Harkness Mine.
The buildings had been burned. On the far ridge the walls that Harry Mellow had built for Vicky were still standing, but the empty windows were like the eyes of a skull. The roof beams were stark and blackened, some of them collapsed beneath the weight of charred thatch.
The gardens were trampled, and the lawns were strewn with the debris of two young lives the brass bedstead with stuffing bursting out of the torn mattress, the chests of Vicky's dowry broken open and the contents scorched and scattered.
Further down the valley the mine store and office had been burned also. The stacks of blackened goods still smouldered, and there was the stink of burning rubber and leather on the air. There was another smell mingled with it, a smell like greasy pork cooking, the first time Ralph had smelled human flesh roasting, but instinctively he knew what it was, and he felt his stomach heave.
In the trees about the burned-out buildings roosted the hunch- backed vultures. There were hundreds of these disgusting birds, from the big black vultures with their bald red heads to the dirty brown birds with obscene woollen caps covering their long necks.
Amongst the vultures were the carrion storks, the raucous crows and the little wheeling black kites. It must be a rich banquet to attract such a gathering.
Ralph rode down off the crest and almost immediately found the first bodies. Matabele warriors, he saw with grim satisfaction, they had crawled away to die of their wounds. Harry Mellow had held out better than the construction gang at the railhead.
'That he should have taken a thousand of the black butchers with him,' Ralph hoped aloud, and rode on cautiously with his rifle at the ready.
He dismounted -behind the ruins of the mine store and tethered the horses with a slippery hitch, ready for a quick run. Here there were more dead Matabele, lying amid their own broken and discarded weapons.
The ash was still hot, and three or four corpses lay within the shell of the store. They had been burned to unrecognizable black mounds, and the smell of pork was overpowering.
Holding his rifle at high port, Ralph stepped carefully through the ash and debris towards the corner of the building. The squawk and flap of the vultures and the scavengers covered any small sounds he might make, and he was ready to meet the sudden charge of warriors that might be lying in ambush for him. He steeled himself also to the discovery of the corpses of Harry and pretty blonde little Vicky.
Burying his own mutilated loved ones had not hardened him to the horror of what he knew he would find here.
He reached the corner of the building, removed his hat and carefully peeked around the wall. , There were two hundred yards of open ground between the burned-out store and the open mouth of the No. 1 adit shaft that Harry had driven into the side of the hill. The open ground was heaped with dead warriors. There were piles and skeins of them, drifts and windrows of them. Some were twisted into agonized sculptures of black limbs and some of them lay singly, as though resting, curled into the foetal position. Most of them had been ripped and gnawed by the birds and the jackals, but others were untouched.
This killing ground gave Ralph a bitter feeling of pleasure.
'Good for you, Harry my boy, 'he whispered.
Ralph was about to step into the open, when his eardrums cracked with the brutal disruption of passing shot, so close that he felt his own hair flap against his forehead. He reeled back behind the shelter of the wall, shaking his head to clear the insect humming in his ears.
That bullet must have missed by an inch or less, good shooting for a Matabele sniper. They were notoriously poor marksmen.
He had been careless. The piles of dead warriors had distracted him, he had presumed that the impi had finished its bloody business and gone on, a stupid presumption.
He crouched low and ran back down the length of the burned building, sweeping his open flank with an eye sharpened by the hot rush of adrenalin through his veins. The Matabele loved the encircling movement. if they were out front, then they would soon be in his rear, up there amongst the trees.
He reached the
