Mijnheer Buys, he says, this soil is not suited to the seed of the word of God.
I ride to the Great Place. Ngqika does not want to see me. I ride back to Kemp and make a fire. Ngqika can go and fart figs! He can get married till the cows shit copper coins, I’m going to celebrate with the missionaries. By dusk Kemp is once again bombarded with the whinges of his Hottentots and of Edmonds. They grumble and gripe to him about the leopards and the Bushmen and the sun. Kemp says the hand of the Lord has thus far protected them from the cunning wiles of Satan. Kemp says the doors that the Almighty unlocks with the key of David, no man dares bolt again. Edmonds moans about the savage Caffres. He says they’ll never be at home here. Kemp says they followed him of their own free will.
When I set foot on this shore, this I’ve told you before, Brother Edmonds, I knew that I was doing so with the death sentence already in me.
Edmonds with his trembling lower lip is on the verge of saying something when a captain appears at the tent opening with Hobe and another young girl. He offers the fillies to the missionaries and invites them to come and partake of the festivities. Edmonds explodes and abuses the Caffre and curses his name as the scheming spawn of vipers and seducers and chases them all away. The missionaries kneel immediately to conceal the bulges in their pants and start praying against the beguilements of the flesh. I wonder how Kemp would deal with such beguilements, on these sultry nights, if brother Edmonds were not sharing a tent with him. I bid them good bye; the two are so engaged with the Lord God that they don’t hear me. On horseback I follow the captain with the young girls and accept the offer on behalf of Jank’hanna and load Hobe and her little friend on the saddle in front of me and go make them rejoice greatly by the riverside. I take them with me to the feast and I claim my place by the fire near my son the king. Yese does what she’s supposed to do with a singing and a sprinkling of herbs and then disappears again. I go and seek her out in her hut. She says I can lie with her, but no touching. She says she’s tired. She says I may hold her. A few years ago she would have joined in the dancing outside. She would have sneaked off into the bushes with me. We would have come back to the fire and laughed with the people and drained a calabash of beer and there would have been no end to us. She says she wonders about her son; she starts talking about her people and their future. I stroke her tummy and can’t find the navel. I stroke lower till I come across a frizzle. She slaps my hand away. She snores.
The fires are still burning bright; Ngqika has gone to initiate his bride. I summon the soberest captain and tell him to go and tell the king that if he wants to treat me – his interpreter and adviser and husband of his mother – with so little of the respect due from a son to his father, then I’m getting out. Then I’m going back to the Tambookies and I’m taking his white sorcerer with me.
Beyond the flames the two young girls of earlier are dancing. In a haze of beer and meat I shepherd them out of the kraal. See me thrusting myself into the second one, even though everything I had to offer has already been spilt on Hobe’s tummy where the little muscles dimple and flex. Did you see her roar with laughter when my seed spurted over her navel? I carry on ramming into the second one until she’s weeping. I am the king here.
When the sun rises over the 5th of October I am with great display and blaring of trumpets inspanning my oxen so that every Caffre in Caffraria will know that Coenraad Buys, the great Khula, is not to be treated like a dog by any little whippersnapper. The next-to-last ox is still waiting for his yoke when Ngqika and his advisers are next to the wagon. The king demands to know what this inspanning is all about.
You have said, oh king, that I am your father. But that is not how a son behaves. You have asked me for the hand of my daughter when she comes of age, and I have consented. I am your father and future father-in-law. I am nobody’s goddam subject.
The chappie is all of a sudden ten years old again and inspects his feet and is full of apologies. I seize the opportunity and rip into him. Why does he distrust Jank’hanna? Why does he spit on the man’s loving-kindness? The king mutters that the wedding occupied him. All the ceremonies, the arrangements, the preparations. I chase him back to Kemp. The advisers stay out of my way. On the way to the Christian tent one of the elders tries to warn me. Ngqika is cruel when he punishes, his people fear his temper and would rather eat his shit. They damnwell don’t know the wrath of Coenraad de Buys. The king seats himself majestically before Kemp and delivers a long-winded address that I translate verbatim into my best Dutch. He gives the missionaries leave to choose a stretch of veldt on the other side of the Keiskamma and to occupy it. He swears that he will never insult or harm Jank’hanna. He takes copious leave and promises Jank’hanna three oxen.
The king and his retinue have hardly disappeared behind the nearest bushes when the missionaries start packing up. The next morning we find that five of Kemp’s oxen are missing. Not all the Caffres are delighted with Jank’hanna’s moving in. I go and look for the oxen, find them in a small kraal and go and lambast Ngqika about these transgressions. He orders the chancers to hand back the oxen. It rains and thunders without cease. I drive the oxen in Kemp’s wake and catch up with them on the other side of the Keiskamma and the Debe. On 16 October, that accursed day, a few Caffres on horseback charge towards us and one jumps off and runs to me and tells me that my house and wagon with the Tambookies have been torched and that one of my Hottentots’ horses was lying dead there and that my wives and children were missing and clears out before I can bash his skull in.
You cry to impress others. Every tear screams: Look what you’ve done to me. If you cry when you’re on your own, then you cry to prove to yourself that your sorrow is not an illusion. With your tears you tell yourself a story of sorrow. With your crying you start to make yourself at home in your sorrow. I think of Maria and Nombini and immediately of Yese. I think of Elizabeth and how I will never give her to Ngqika. I see Maria in our hut on Brakkerivier. I wonder if Nombini lies as still under whoever now lays hands on her at night. I don’t cry.
Two days later Stoffel Botha comes charging up on a dog-tired horse and shouts at us from a distance. He’s raced from the Tambookies to come and tell me that Maria and Nombini and the offspring are alive. The Tambookie captain rescued them. I ask Kemp to pray with me. I howl so that the dogs start howling in response. I weep until Kemp, too, is moved to tears. When he consoles me, I believe myself.
The rain and thunder don’t stop. Botha and I and the Hottentot Henry and Thomas Bentley the English deserter ride ahead to make sure that Kemp’s ramshackle wagon follows the easiest and safest route in between the eleven smaller kraals, through the territory that slowly and relentlessly rises, this grassland bordered with forests. At five o’clock on the afternoon of 20 October the wagon draws up in front of my house. Kemp is quite taken with what he calls my oblong hut. He tells of the hyenas that at night sounded like the pleading of women and children and the laughter of men. He says one of the beasts two nights ago ripped apart one of the thongs on their wagon and ran off with a jukskei.