Warrior

'Down to ten rounds apiece, sir!' shouted Cox.

Hervey screwed up his courage for the decision. It was time. They could do no more. 'Very well, Corp' Cox. Form at the entrance to the kraal!'

He turned anxiously to see how were the dragoons.

He wished he'd kept Bugle Roddis by his side: now was the time to recall them too. 'Corp' French, tell Captain Fairbrother to break for the kraal!'

'Sir!'

Hervey reined round to make his own way back – at the trot so as not to dismay the riflemen.

He did not see Pampata at once. She stood in front of her warrior escort, just behind the melee, four-square as if in a trance, Shaka's toy spear in hand. When he did see, his blood ran cold.

He turned to make for her.

Ngwadi's line broke suddenly, overwhelmed like the wall of a dyke by a monstrous wave.

Mbopa's men poured through, and on at the solitary figure of Shaka's widow and her escort.

Pampata raised the toy spear high as they lunged.

Hervey galloped at them furiously.

But one spear and then another ripped open her belly.

And she fell to her knees, and cried defiantly, above all the noise of the battle: 'U-Shaka! '

XXIV

THE SERVICE OF THE STATECape Town, a month later

'I fear it will not serve well for you, Hervey, and I am very sorry for it. I have written in the strongest possible terms to the Colonies Office, absolving you of all blame in the affair, but it is most unfortunate that Huskisson has seen fit to leave the government. You will know Sir George Murray better than do I, but I do not count on his support as I did on Huskisson's. I fear daily for a dismissal. There's an Indiaman coming in on the tide even now!'

Hervey, for all his dismay – anger, even – at the late events in Natal, could not but pity his old friend's situation, especially now he had lost his best supporter in Whitehall, though even had there been a telegraph line from the Colonies Office to the Cape there could scarcely have been a dismissal communicated so fast. 'You acted as you saw best in the King's interest,' he replied firmly. 'Things might easily have gone our way. Fortune was not smiling on us that day.'

It was true, except that Fortune was not ultimately against them: they had made their escape from kwaWambaza, when few others – Ngwadi included – had done so.

'But now there is a chief on that throne who is ill disposed to us. For all that we know, Dingane may be gathering his strength even now.'

'I think it unlikely,' said Hervey, taking his coffee and moving to a chair by the open west window of the lieutenant-governor's office. 'It was in part Shaka's prolonged war-making that sowed the seeds of his fall. Dingane will likely as not wish a period of peace to consolidate his succession. It is, after all, a precarious one.'

Somervile rose from his desk and limped to the sideboard to replenish his cup. 'Your appreciation of the situation would do credit to a diplomatist. I wish only that my essay as a warrior had been as acute.'

'I think you chastise yourself unfairly. The warrior's trade is a difficult one even for the most practised. I never had a harder fight than at kwaWambaza.'

Somervile took a sip of his coffee, and stifled a sigh. 'The warrior's trade, as you reduce it thus, is not slaying, but being slain. That is why our nation – I might add, the world – honours the warrior, because he holds his life at the service of the state.'

'Perhaps 'King' rather than 'state' might be more . . . lyrical?'

'Do not dismiss the notion lightly, Hervey. You placed your life at the service of the nation, and I fear the nation will not repay you.'

Hervey half frowned. 'I have generally settled for penury in that direction in the past – as have we all in the service. Beggars in red, Somervile.' He knew, though, that in recent weeks Somervile had placed his own life in the service of the King, but that his old friend believed he would not now see the gilded appointment in Canada which Huskisson had promised him.

'I am especially sorry that . . . Shaka's favourite,' (he had noticed that Somervile had not been able to pronounce Pampata's name since kwaWambaza) 'should have perished, and in such a brute way.'

Hervey turned his head to the window. He had been trying for a month to put away both the fact and the image of her death. 'It is very hard not to think of this country as but one enormous brute place. I confess I will be well pleased to leave this fairest cape, for all its sunsets and sunrises.'

'And your dragoons?'

'They will not be mine for much longer . . . But, yes, they too are glad to be recalled. Though we leave behind a good few of them in the ground.'

Somervile knew that there were as many buried from natural causes as by hostile hand, but he honoured them just the same. 'How shall you proceed in the case of Captain Brereton?' he asked, his brow lined.

Hervey turned his head back. 'With recourse to the cardinal virtues.'

'The Platonic virtues, I trust you mean; not the Patristic excrescence.'

Hervey suppressed a smile. 'Indeed.'