'That's a naval tactic!' 'As soon as the wind rises, we will build a great fire.' Bazo confirmed it immediately. Each of you will throw his bundle upon it as he passes, and we will go forward in the darkness and the smoke. It will avail them not at all to shoot their rockets into the sky, for our smoke will blind the gunners.' Ralph imagined how it might be, the warriors emerging from the impenetrable rolling bank Of smoke, not visible until they were within stabbing range, swarming over the wall of wagons or creeping between the wheels. Three thousand of them coming in silently and relentlessly even if the laager were warned and alerted, it would be almost impossible to stop them. The Maxims would be almost useless in the smoke, and the broad-bladed assegais the more effective weapon at such close range.
A vivid image of the slaughter burned into his brain, and he remembered Cathy's corpse, and imagined beside it the mutilated remains of Jonathan and of Elizabeth, her white smooth flesh as cruelly desecrated. His rage came strongly to arm him, and he stared down into the amphitheatre at the tall heroic figure with the ravaged face, laying out the terrible details of the massacre.
'We must leave not a single one of them. We must destroy the last reason why Lodzi should bring his soldiers. We will offer him only dead bodies, burned buildings and silver steel, if he makes the attempt.' Then in his rage Ralph shouted with the other amadoda, and hummed the wild war chant, his features as contorted as theirs, and his eyes as wild.
'The indaba is ended,' Bazo told them at last. 'Go now to your sleeping-mats to refresh yourself for the morrow. When you rise with the sun, let your first task be to cut, each of you, a bundle of dry grass and green leaves as heavy as you can carry.' Ralph Ballantyne lay beneath his fur kaross on a sleeping-mat of woven reeds, and listened to the camp settling into sleep about him. They had withdrawn into the narrower reaches of the valley. He saw the watch-fires dwindle, and the circles of their orange light shrink in upon them. He listened to the murmur of voices subside, and the breathing of the warriors near him changing, becoming deeper and more regular.
Here the Valley of the Goats was broken rocky defile, choked with thick thorn scrub, so that the imp is could not concentrate in one place. They were spread out in pockets, down the length of the valley, fifty men or so in each small clearing, the narrow twisted paths through the thorn scrub overshadowed by the taller trees, which formed a canopy overhead.
The darkness became more menacing as the last fires died into powdery grey ash, and Ralph, lying beneath the fur blanket, gripped the shaft of his assegai and judged his moment.
It came at last, and Ralph drew back the kaross stealthily. On all fours he crept to where the nearest warrior lay, groping gently for him. His fingers touched the bare skin of an arm. The warrior started awake at the touch, and sat bolt upright.
'Who is it?' he asked in a thick guttural voice, rough with sleep, and Ralph stabbed him in the stomach.
The man screamed. It was a cry of ringing mortal agony that bounded from the rocky sides of the valley, cutting through the silences of the night watch, and Ralph bellowed with him.
'Devils! Devils are killing me!'He rolled over and stabbed another warrior, wounding him so he yelled in surprise and pain.
'There are devils here!' At fifty other watch-fires down the valley, the men of Ballantyne's Scouts were stabbing and screaming with Ralph.
'Defend yourselves, there are ghosts at work!' 'Topti!
Witchcraft! Beware the witches!' 'Kill the witches!' 'Witchcraft!
Defend yourselves!' 'Run! Run! The devils are amongst us.' Three thousand warriors, every one of them steeped from childhood in superstition and witch lore awakened to the screams and wild cries of dying men, and the panic-stricken warnings yelled by men come face to face with the devil's legions. They awakened in blinding suffocating darkness, and seized their weapons and struck out in terror, yelling with fright and the comrades they wounded shrieked and struck back at them.
'I am wounded. Defend yourselves from the devils. Hah! Hah!
The devils are killing me!' The night was filled with running figures that collided and stabbed and cried.
The valley is haunted!' 'The devils will kill us all!' 'Run!
Run!' Then from the head of the valley rose such a monstrous iron-lunged braying, such a cacophony that it could only be the voice of the great demon himself. Tokoloshe, the eater of men. It was a sound that drove terrified men over the last frontier of reason, into the realms of witless insensate pandemonium.
On his hands and knees, Ralph crawled down the narrow pathway, keeping below the level of the slashing spears, silhouetting the frantic figures of running men against the faint light of the stars, and when he stabbed up at them, he aimed for the groin and belly rather than the killing stroke, so that the men that he maimed added their cries to the uproar.
From the head of the valley, Harry Mellow blew another blaring blast on the brass foghorn, and it was echoed by the screams of men blundering up the sides of the valley and escaping into the open grassland beyond.
Ralph crept forward, listening for a single voice in the thousands. In the first few minutes hundreds of fleeing warriors, most of them unarmed, had escaped from the valley. In every direction they were disappearing into the night, and each second they were followed by others, men who would have unflinchingly charged. into the smoking muzzles of the Maxim machine- guns, but who were reduced by fear of the supernatural to mindless panic-stricken children. Their cries faded with distance, and now at last Ralph heard the voice for which he had waited.
'Stand fast, the Moles,' it roared. 'Stand with Bazo. These are not demons.' And Ralph crept towards the sound.
In the clearing ahead of him, a camp-fire fed with fresh logs flared up sullenly, and Ralph recognized the tall figure with wide gaunt shoulders, and the slim woman at his side.
'This is white men's trickery,' she cried, beside her lord.
'Wait, my children.' Ralph sprang up and ran through the dense scrub to them. 'Nkosi,' he cried. He did not have to disguise his voice, it was rough and hoarse with dust and tension and battle-lust. 'Lord Bazo, I am with you! Let us stand together against this treachery.'
'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,'
