The next morning lightning strikes all around us. We stay inside with Kemp who leads devotions in my house. I give him to understand that it’s a novelty – as long as he believes he’s saving a soul, the old chap is happy. After a day or so the weather clears somewhat. Kemp and I reconnoitre the piece of land and he chooses a spot where he wants his house to be. By afternoon I find him turfing out grass to establish a vegetable garden. I go and look for something to shoot for supper and leave Kemp among the tussocks he’s digging up, where every so often he leans on his spade and gazes out over the green fields and icy Mgqakhwebe River at the foot of the hill, the giant trees in the mighty mountains. I leave him where he’s singing psalms about harts panting after water brooks and whatever. When I dismount from Glider to stalk a buck, my hands are clamped around the reins, frozen in cramp. My horse is still faithful, but in my body already the first betrayal.
The warm arum lily leaves tickle my hands. See, the once slender fingers are now claws criss-crossed with lesions.
When I woke up this morning under Yese, my front paws were crumpled up like dead spiders. She stroked them, picked them up and held them to her breast.
We are growing old, Buys.
I wanted to get away from the pity. She got up and left the hut. Perhaps she could see I’m not yet poor enough for alms. My beloved witch, if you start pitying me, it’s all over.
I stretch out on the oxhide, try to open and close my hands, and drop off to sleep again. I wake up with my hands in a bowl of warm water. The bowl is full of arum lily leaves. She washes my hands carefully. She has never yet felt so soft. Here on her knees, with my hands in her lap, she’s never been so submissive. See, there’s nothing the matter with my loins. She smiles when she sees my yard tensing up in my pants, strokes over it. Yese folds the claws across my breast and drapes arum lily leaves over them.
Keep still, she says.
I don’t move. She boils an arum lily’s rootstock in the bowl, mashes the thing fine and pours honey over it.
Eat, she says.
The stuff is poisonous, I say.
The poison has been boiled out. Eat.
I eat.
Chew the root and spit it out when you no longer taste anything. Chew until your hands relax.
Where do you learn all these things?
I know old men.
People say that when Mlawu, Ngqika’s father, went to fetch Yese from the Tambookies as a young woman, she appeared to him in a cloud of mist on a mountaintop. You know as well as I that she screwed the old dunderhead so silly that he couldn’t see straight. People say that she paid lobola for her next husband and that they called him her wife.
I like arum lilies. When the water dries up, they die back to nothing and when the rains return, they erupt again from the rootstock. For months they can lie slumbering underground and then one day there they are once again. If you don’t dig up the stubborn roots, you’ll never get rid of them. People think themselves different from plants, because they don’t look for long enough. Life is a series of eruptions. Like these flowers that get eaten by the pigs, I, too, come and go, I, too, lie in wait, I, too, erupt. Even here in the first heat of summer, in the late morning, lazy in the hut of my queen with my useless hands, my bud is un-nippable. She laughs at me where I’m lying with my pulsating frustration and my hands chastely on my chest under the pigfeed. She unlaces my breeches. My mouth crammed with leaves all chompingly adjusts to the rhythm of her hand’s pumping. Soon it is as if I’m watching myself, the outsized farmer and the outsized Caffre queen.
I, Omni-Buys, have read all the writings concerning me. I know the world thinks Yese and I lusted after power and shared also the other lusts. We were reputedly as ruttish for each other as for the power that we shared here with Ngqika. You might not say it now, when you see me heave up my hips to bump against her hand, but it was something much less and much sadder that drew us to each other for that while.
On this morning in her hut we are both around forty, veterans of the flesh. My blond hair is going grey and straw-like, my hands are scrunching up. Her body expands as her power over the Rharhabe shrinks. When we’re together, we do not age; here there are no young bodies to mock us with our own dying; here we don’t have to promise anything.
It’s barely light, the sky is open and bleak. The two Bothas and I and Faber and Steenberg and Krieger and of course Bezuidenhout ride out with a group of Caffre hunters. A bevy of Caffre women wave at us as we ride out of the Great Place. Ngqika wants me to show his warriors how Christians hunt. We do his bidding. We are more dependent by the day on the king’s good graces. The crowd from Graaffe Rijnet are guests here and I, too, nowadays feel more like a guest than like the father of the king. After I left Yese, I sat for a long time last night with my musket, oiling it thoroughly, making sure that the gun didn’t malfunction like my hands. Our horses and our guns are the only things that the Caffres value about us. I’ve told Ngqika on occasion that one armed horseman is worth at least one hundred warriors. If I want to stay here on my own terms, I can’t afford to prove myself wrong today.
The veldt is dry, the sun filling the whole of the white sky. My dogs are nowhere to be seen. I shoot a kudu that slumps down more than a hundred paces away. The Caffres seem impressed. Glider remains calm after the shot and that surprises them even more. I ride out in front of the group, the horse’s hooves lifted in a practised trot that few onlookers have witnessed. Tonight they’re going to tell their wives about this. We stop for lunch under a few thorn trees, drink water and whey. The Christians gnaw at strips of biltong. When we first arrived here, we would all have eaten together, but with minds more troubled by the day, the two groups sit apart looking at each other, the jaws chomping.
When the sun shifts past the midday line, we move on over the plain. Botha and Faber each shoot a springbok and the Caffres pot three themselves. As soon as the hunt gets under way, the bunch get more at ease with one another. Every Christian on the frontier is fluent in Xhosa and the Caffres with Ngqika have also picked up a few Dutch words, especially the dirty ones. Do you see the camaraderie among the hunters? A bond beyond smooth talk that is found only among men in the open veldt sharing in the slaughter of animals. We are boys playing in the veldt and we are men caring for our wives and we are gods with the power of life and death over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.
In the course of the day we move in a lazy circle, a trajectory not one member of the hunting party has ever followed before. On the return, the sun low behind us, one of the scouts signals to us to stop. He runs back: Over the next ridge is a Bushman camp. The wretches will certainly have spotted us already. They’re lying low hoping we’ll move on, past them, contented with the carcases we’re carrying with us. Everybody glances around, suddenly tensed up; nobody spots anything in the ridges. Bushmen decide when they want to be seen. Sometimes they’re human when they have to make haste, but for the most part they’re nothing more than bushes with shallow roots.