We grab and grope and kiss and lick and bite and collapse onto the heap of hides that makes up my bed. She lifts me from her and flings me to the ground and says something like I’m not lying for you, in Xhosa. She sits down on me and pulls down my pants and puts me inside her and her fluids instantly plash over my legs. She stuffs a tit into my mouth and she rides me ever faster while I’m instructed to suck ever harder and then to bite and just before I shoot my load she climbs off and straddles me with her shiny thighs and flattens my yard against my stomach with her foot and I spill all over myself and in making her exit she says I must take the Bengali to Kemp, there are things she wants to know from the white sorcerer.
I find Kemp and Edmonds in the wagon carefully covering up the few crates that won’t fit into that tent. The Bengali scratches at an insect bite on his stomach.
Mijnheer van der Kemp, this… slave… brings you the good wishes of Yese, the mother of the king and my wife in marriage according to the law of the Caffres.
Kemp and Edmonds introduce themselves. The Bengali snot-monkey with the little sly eyes and the smooth skin immediately starts questioning the missionaries. I’m convinced the fellow has dealings with Yese when I’m not around. The whoreson has the nerve to ask whether Kemp was sent by the British. Kemp remains nice and calm and sits back on the riempie chair and runs his fingers through his hair and strokes his majestic brow and says no he was sent by the God of heaven and earth who instructed him to come and proclaim his name under the mighty amaGaika. The slave, with a skimpier beard than Yese, his fright fired up by Kemp’s calm, becomes aggressive. He churns on again about the focking English until I pick him up by the scruff of his neck and show him in which direction he must scram. Kemp jumps up and runs into the tent and emerges with a handkerchief and shouts after the young prick. He hands him the handkerchief as a gift to Yese. I apologise for the whippersnapper’s arrogance. I help Kemp and Edmonds to move the wagon so that it will deflect the worst of the wind from the tent and then I chop them some wood and whatever I do, all that I see is Yese sprawling and panting under the smooth-skinned bumble-ballsack bouncing on top of her.
I’m still faffing about the missionaries when a few Caffres turn up with a fat cow as a gift from Ngqika and also the smaller mirror, which Edmonds receives with bent head. The little junior missionary is a pleasant soul, but too finely strung for this place. Kemp is a cultivated fellow himself, but underneath all the manners and placidity there is something in him, I don’t quite know what – obsession, ferality.
That evening I share their evening repast of sweet potatoes and dried fruit and biltong. As I get ready to leave, two young Caffre maidens turn up giggling at the tent. The younger of the two is Hobe, Ngqika’s buxom sister with the perky buttocks. They are bringing the missionaries calabashes full of clabber and junket. The missionaries take the calabashes and blushing and babbling try to get rid of the nymphs as quickly as possible. The girls see it and enjoy it. Later, when it starts raining, they’re outside again, keening. They plead with Kemp to let them in. The poor God-elected wretches have to ward them off at the tent flap. Hobe strokes Kemp’s claw and complains that her hut is leaking. He gives her a cowhide and then they’re gone, only the giggles remain suspended in the stuffy tent.
I ride home, behind me the tent that’s being washed away in the rain. Then I change direction and take up position outside Yese’s hut and try to figure out if she’s alone and turn away. She calls me in and dries me. Her body spreads all over me, her mouth is everywhere. I’m scarcely inside her or I spurt. She churns me up again and I can’t stop thinking of what other men have done to her and how they did it and if it hadn’t been me outside her tent, would she have invited any passing dangler in and what she would have done differently with him that she doesn’t do with me and this time I don’t last much longer and she smells of paint and clay and the third time I’m more up to it but roaring in my head resounds the sound of her telling me about how when she was young and a friend of Ndlambe appeared in her hut one night when she woke up and that he tupped her and that she doesn’t know why she didn’t say no or couldn’t say no even though she was of noble birth and her virginity inviolable and even though the merest word from her would have had the man’s head on a pole and that she’s so ashamed that he could simply take what he took and I ram into her and she looks at me and I close my eyes and all I can think of is how she felt all those years ago when she did not yet have this immense lap and had not borne children and was not yet mother of the goddam nation and free to have come and gone with me – gone so far away – and why it had been so easy for that dog’s-dick and she seizes me by the shoulders and I wonder why the hell I had asked so many questions and all that I see is how the young Yese can’t say no and doesn’t want to say no to him who staggered drunkenly into her hut and just takes what he wants and this time I am sure she also spends her savings and Godknows why it matters to me, but I’m not asking.
In the course of the next few days I’m forever being dragged along to the missionaries. Ngqika just can’t get his fill of the new sorcerers. His mood swings between an excited interest in this novelty and an icy regard that intimates that he’s looking forward to seeing them skewered on an assegai. Yese is also more and more twitchy. If anybody is to talk to the rain and the spirits she’ll be the one. She doesn’t trust these pink-roasted preachers. What kind of man keeps on saying no to all the woman-flesh that her son is offering them? she asks. Ngqika feels flattered by the attention of the Christian god and is particularly taken with the strange objects he scavenges from the missionaries’ tent. I, the translator of Caffre distrust and greed and Christian euphoria, must on top of this every now and again stop the other outlaws from blowing the missionaries’ brains out. If there’s one thing the ex-rebels can’t stand it’s a preachifying. Then on top of that it’s the English, the focking English, who have sent these two pious prophets to convert this lot of Heathens. Their blood is boiling and clearly it’s only more blood that will cool down theirs. If Kemp converts the Caffres, it niggles at their peace of mind, what then makes our little raggle-taggle of outcast Christians so different from the Heathens?
Ngqika is so chronically with the missionaries that he starts conducting his councils of war at Kemp’s tent. The king and his subjects call Kemp Jank’hanna, a hybrid of Johannes and the Xhosa word nyengane – unbreakable rock. Rock-head Kemp who deprecates all earthly delights. Ngqika’s captains and Ndlambe sit around discussing Kemp and Edmonds in Xhosa while the two missionaries have to scurry around serving biltong and rusks and the coffee that Ngqika drinks till he becomes as antsy as a naughty child. His captains argue heatedly whether the missionaries are spies and if they are here to bewitch the king with poisoned wine and murder him. Ngqika stands in the tent and teaches Jank’hanna a word or two of Xhosa. Back in the midst of the gathering he’s greatly pleased with the missionary’s musket and the bag of bullets in his arms.
I go to check that the poor man has another gun. He is affable, but I can see that he sees straight through my smile that hitherto has blinded everybody. He sees that I am the king of Graaffe Rijnet. Believe me, he sees the coldness and the relentlessness at the back of my eyes. I tell him he must resign himself, Ngqika won’t decide whether they can stay until he’s spoken properly with Ndlambe and Yese and his sister. His sister has been summoned, but she lives far away. I tell him that he should keep it as much of a secret as possible that he’s working for the London Missionary Society. I tell him that it’s possible that I’ve turned the Caffres against the English. When Ngqika spoke to an Englishman for the first time, he couldn’t understand who these people were or what they wanted or where they’d come from. Later Khula explained it to him like this: Imagine the whole Colony is a farm. Then the Cape is the big kraal, the Great Place of their king. The English have taken over the kraal and are now ruling the whole farm. These focking English are not from around here, they are robbers and plunderers; they are the Bushmen of the sea. Kemp starts laughing and I don’t have to apologise overmuch for having slightly complicated his arrival.