He’s been busy in my absence. With the aid of four or five Caffres he’s dug up a plot of ground overlooking the mountains and the seedlings are sprouting all over. He shows me the carrots and potatoes and lettuce. He tells me about the letters Maynier has given him. How Dundas wants him gone from here for his own safety’s sake, that he should rather go and preach in Graaffe Rijnet and to Chungwa’s Caffres. And see, over there the red and black berries, the gooseberries and raspberries. He asks me to speak to the king regarding their departure. Apparently Ngqika refused point blank and was not exactly well mannered to Maynier. Here lie the calabashes, cucumbers and pumpkins. When the king heard that Khula refused to see the arsehole he apparently was all for wiping out the prick there and then. Evidently Ndlambe and Yese had to sweet-talk to save Maynier’s worthless life. Kemp points the ragged nail of a big toe at where the peach and apricot trees will flourish.
Trees don’t flourish overnight, Kemp, I say. It looks as if you’re planning a long stay.
I go where the Lord seeks me.
Dundas is not the Lord.
He drops the subject, shows me where the seeds are planted that an English captain brought from an island called Tahiti. He shows me the oven he built. I say I’ll speak to Ngqika. For Edmonds I don’t care a fig, but I’m not that taken with the fact that my only friend is planning to leave me here among the Caffres and a few rockspider farmers who can think no further than their foreskins. For a moment we stand still looking at each other, then he takes off.
Come, Mijnheer Buys, I must show you! he shouts when he’s just about made it to the thorn trees.
When I catch up with him, he’s on his knees and scrabbling in the soil. He asks me for my knife and slices open the root that he’s dug up. A turbid sap oozes into his hand. He holds up the hand for me to see. When he gets no reaction, he jumps up, stains my shirt with the black muck while shaking my shoulders:
Ink, Mijnheer! Ink!
You have to extend your garden, I say. The stuff can’t grow all squashed up together like that.
Maria and I are having a barney when, a few days later, a tall thin fellow comes hammering at my door. He introduces himself as Tjaart van der Walt. I trust nobody who calls himself Tjaart. He says he’s from Tarka where Dundas pitches his tent these days. He says he’s come to take me back to the Colony. He’s come with a full pardon. My outlaw days are over, I can move into civilised society once again.
I’m pleased at first and then filled with wrath. I shoulder him away from the door, grab hold of a loaded gun, and when our Tjaart finds the barrel under his nose, he turns tail and takes off across my yard.
What initially inflamed my wrath was my immediate thought that the arse-wipe wanted to lure me back to the Colony only to lock me up in the Castle along with the other rebels. But when later that afternoon I went out to take potshots at the congress of baboons making pests of themselves again, I started rethinking the whole business of my freedom: Here in Caffraria life is easy. And who’s to say I’m not free here? Here it’s only Maria and Nombini messing about with my freedom. Here I’m the leader of the other outlaws and deserters. Here I am father to the king, his counsellor, spouse to Yese, the most powerful woman since that Caffre queen from Sheba who screwed Solomon. For the time being. The noose is tightening all the time around this mode of survival, this migration between Christian world and Caffre world. These shifting alliances are getting ever more dangerous, ever more distrusted by both factions. But on this day at the end of the eighteenth century I can still survive in the interregnum. Here I can hunt and have all the powder and lead and coffee and brandy and what have you that my crooked heart desires, smuggled from the Colony for a bit of ivory and a few hides. Back in the Colony I’m just another failed farmer. A miserable cattle farmer without a friend on this earth, all because I’m not interested in puffy pasty white women. Women who can’t wiggle their behinds under all those layers of dresses. The meek and mousy little women who are forever at prayer and yes-my-lord no-my-lord in front of the congregation, but behind the scenes stealthily and exceedingly slowly nag you into the grave because you can’t and damnwell won’t give them a vineyard in Stellenbosch. The bitches with their lips piously pursed and their legs chastely crossed that you have to skewer through a hole in the sheet.
The sun flares scarlet before it’s extinguished. I walk home with the warm gun over my shoulder. A straggling of Caffres greet me and we share a joke that none of the dumb white shits around here would get – except of course Kemp, but you don’t make jokes like that with him. I laugh with the warriors and walk up the grass slope to my home. It’s too late to return to the Colony. I’ve got nothing left to lose on the Cape side of the border. But it’s only when I look down upon the Great Place in the distance that I realise: The bunch of bureaucrats feel little for my earthly happiness and my troubles with whatever neighbours. The pest-plagued windbags are scared! Drop dead in ditches! Shit in your britches! Die! They want to destroy my connection with Ngqika. We are too dangerous; Khula is more dangerous than Coenraad.
There’s no word from Ngqika. My son has not come to greet me since my return. Nor has Yese. I say to Kemp I hope they don’t think we’re abusing their hospitality. He is the king and she reigns. I am her husband, and yet I’ve now dragged my other wives here and I don’t sleep with her any more.
Our queen is highly sensitive for such a thick-set person, I mutter to Kemp. A hippopotamus doesn’t even feel a knife.
Kemp suggests that she’s not in fact a hippopotamus but a woman. I say So what?
Ngqika sends a few Caffres to fetch the elephant tusks that I brought with me. It seems they belong to him. I don’t say a word and I walk to the wagon that’s still groaning under my booty and return with one cracked tusk and fling it in the face of the nearest Caffre and kick the nates of the second nearest and chase them away.
On Christmas morning my son the king comes to visit with the broadest smile his dial can handle. He rattles off his apologies. He didn’t give Jank’hanna and his crowd permission to clear out, because Maynier’s presumption had irritated him. Furthermore, he didn’t want to send them with Maynier. He could see, after all, that this man was just going to get into trouble with other captains and chiefs who are not as merciful as he. I ask him straight out whether he’d be prepared to let the missionaries go now. Then he turns all sullen again. He says he’ll give his answer tomorrow. What is it about this forlorn fellow Kemp that everyone wants to keep him for themselves?
It’s good to see Ngqika again. I ask him about the game in the area, but from the new rolls around his midriff I can see it’s been a while since he’s been hunting himself. In the course of the afternoon we stroll across to where Kemp is teaching the children. Ngqika doesn’t even greet Jank’hanna when he sees the children. One moment the little ones are sitting still listening to the master, then the king is down on all fours among them, roaring all the while. He chases them around and flings them up in the air till they crow with delight. I have to laugh myself when the king follows Faber’s little bastard up the tree and sits up there with the little brat taunting us with monkey gibber.
I watch them closely, my son and my friend. Ngqika is as much younger than I as I am younger than Kemp. Do you see the powerful Ngqika scrambling up the tree? For how long can we carry on living like this? For me and Ngqika it’s a world fading and vanishing, for Kemp with his alphabet and science and morality a world that can’t change fast enough. See, the shiny-eyed Ngqika in the tree with the children, already a figment of the past. See there the old man Kemp, with his rod and his chalk and his stooped shoulders, the man of the future. And do you see me going to squat on a rock, between the two?