Goddammit, the missionary won’t let up blathering.
I once knew one of the savages. He told me stories of how his people used to paint before they were tamed. A Bushman is a pest, but he can draw an eland to life.
And the blood?
I see the Bushman throat gape open under my knife.
That apparently helps everything to blend together.
What about eggs? In Holland the painters mix pigment with egg yolk.
They say that if you’re painting an eland, the eland’s vitality must be in the paint. So the creatures mix eland blood with the paint. Otherwise you’re painting a dead thing, they believe.
I see Windvogel running for his life. Kemp puts down the brandy and takes the bowl from my hands.
We’re not painting an eland, Buys. The sun is starting to show.
I grab the bowl from him again, the stinking slush splashes onto Kemp. I start mixing again. Kemp steps back a pace.
I only wanted to show you the press. We must get some sleep.
You get out, I say. Go to bed. You have to start saving souls again soon. If I go home in this condition, I’ll never hear the end of it. Believe me, it’s better that I hang around here a while longer.
I stop mixing, look around me in the front room.
This concoction as true as hell needs blood. It flows, but it doesn’t really cling. They say the blood wakes up the paint.
Kemp comes closer once again, takes a long swig at the brandy. My hand carries on mixing, my eyes searching for something that can be bled. Next to me Kemp points his feet so that he gradually rises onto his toes, slightly swaying. Then he swings both his arms, gracefully, slowly, backwards. The arms shoot forward with all the speed and strength in his sinews. He knocks me off the chair. The reed-and-rush wall collapses.
But you little rapscallion…!
I leap up and stay down low and my shoulder finds Kemp’s ribs and we fall against the opposite wall and Kemp hits me full in the face and I hit back. We wallop each other right through the wall. The wood and reed and rushes give way. They fall into the house and out of the house. We lie entangled across the boundary of the house and pummel each other as hard as we can in the face. Neither of us fends off any blows. Kemp seizes me with his tendril-like arms, long enough to make eye contact for a moment.
Buys. Mijnheer Buys, he says softly.
I get up and dust the bits of clay from my breeches. I mumble something, quite what I don’t know myself. I walk into the house through the newly bashed-in door. By some miracle the table is still standing, the bowl of precious paint undisturbed. I pick up the chair, sit down and carry on mixing. Kemp remains seated among the rushes, just on the other side of the new threshold, and fingers his forehead, the open eyebrow ridge, the closed eye underneath. I don’t look up. Kemp staggers to his feet and comes to stand behind me. He bends over me and presses both hands to the right eyebrow ridge so that blood splashes into the dish.
Blood, he says.
I can’t help smiling.
You bastard.
I also bend over the bowl. A thick splatter of blood and a molar drop from my mouth into the printer’s ink.
I watch over Kemp’s shoulder while he slides the packed and framed letters into the press and clamps it in place.
Buys, it is your privilege to ink our text.
I press my hands into the brew, as thick as Maria’s bean soup, and spread it methodically over the cold letters while I read:
And I took the little book out of the angel’s hand, and ate it up; and it was in my mouth sweet as honey: and as soon as I had eaten it, my belly was bitter.
Kemp wheels the plate with the painted letters in under the screw. He places a sheet of paper into another frame in which a cloth is tentered. He places the second frame on top of the painted letters. He lowers the screw with a lever. He lifts it. He takes out the printed page. I grab the page from his hand and examine it. I touch a finger to the wet ink. I close my eyes and feel the weight of the letters pressed into the paper; the letters are impressed deep into the paper and on the reverse side they bulge out, as if wanting to break out. I let go of the sheet. The draught blows it in under the cot. I walk out to wash the Bushman paint from my hands. The printing press remains standing in the corner; the blood, piss and charcoal congeal on the letters.
5
The fat is in the fire. We’re scarcely halfway through February 1800, when One-hand Botha’s wife, Martie, is sitting with me, weeping. I pour her shots that she knocks back one after the other in between the sobs. She chokes when she starts talking.
On the twelfth Botha went to ask Ngqika for permission to move back to the Colony. The king is reluctant at first, but eventually consents, after Botha has given him forty oxen, four cows and a gun. Ngqika sends a Caffre with him to conduct him and his people safely through Caffraria. Botha’s wagons had already been laden before he went to speak to Ngqika, and on the same day he sets off with Martie and their child, Hannes Knoetze and the wife and child of Frans Krieger – who was off somewhere hunting elephants.
By the next morning a few of Ndlambe’s Caffres catch up with them and order them to return to Ngqika. They turn back meekly. When they reach one of Ngqika’s former kraals, the Caffres tell them to outspan there among the abandoned huts for the night. A Caffre asks Botha to lend him his knife, and as soon as the creature has the knife in his hand, a bunch of Heathens charge out of the bushes and Botha finds an assegai in his side. He staggers into Martie’s arms, where she supports him and pulls out the assegai. The Caffres are surrounding them. Another assegai is stuck into him. This one he pulls out himself with his single hand. Then they tear him off her and fling him down on the ground in front of her, from which he does not arise again.
Martie sits with me and relives every moment of that day. Do you see the bit of snot falling from her nose onto her breast? While talking, she rubs it from her dress. Do you see the left nipple perking up willy-nilly?
He looked like a big pincushion, she says. He looked at her and sighed and died, she says. They plundered and torched the wagon and drove the cattle back to Ngqika. According to report the king was upset when he received the cattle. He says he informed Ndlambe of Botha’s departure and gave his uncle the choice of letting him go or bringing him back unharmed to the Great Place. Martie says Ngqika says none of this was according to his wishes. Apparently Knoetze had been warned in advance by the Caffres that they were going to slaughter someone and the two-arsed ratbag could sneak off in time.
Ngqika claims damages from Ndlambe and receives from his uncle two female slaves, a gun and two sick horses that give up the ghost two days later. He sends the slaves and gun to Martie and decrees that she and Krieger and Bezuidenhout will move in with me and Kemp. Whether this is in the interests of our safety or to have us all in a bundle so as to mow us down more conveniently, remains to be seen. Kemp offers his tent to the red-haired widow. My wives and children stayed with these people. How kind Martie was to them. I help Martie lift her belongings from her wagon. When I touch her shoulder a bit too compassionately, she says:
I’m not one of your Caffre women.
By the end of the month old Ndlambe flees across the Fish along with Siko and a horde of renegade Caffres. The Rharhabe kingdom has been torn in two. Ngqika has long been his own worst enemy. He punishes his people more cruelly than any king before him. Sometimes he claims the whole herd of the deceased, instead of the single head of cattle a king normally demands. Kings who enrich themselves at the cost of their people do not survive long. He threatens and kills his advisers and keeps them on a very short leash. Then there is Ndlambe, the old bull with the real power. Every day the people witness this mighty and proven leader and warrior. Every day they witness an alternative possibility: a king who has no need of Christians, who, if he does cooperate with them, does it from a high throne built of knobkerries and blades – do you remember how we took to our heels the first time we saw Ndlambe’s army? The people say Ndlambe will chase the Christians back into the sea. Long sob story short: Ngqika is insecure and people smell insecurity on a king, as dogs smell fear. And then they bite.