My house in Thabeng is solid and secure and Elizabeth keeps it clean and neat. The vegetable garden cultivated by the women of the Buys nation is lush and fertile. But here I can stay only because and while I have guns. Every gun is worth a hundred warriors, as I persuade every chieftain. But without gunpowder a gun is just a blunt stick.
My Caffres and my Bushmen manage with their assegais and arrows and knobkerries. But my sons and Bastaards and deserters and Hottentots want powder for their guns. The Buys nation is nothing in this country without shooting materials. Every morning my sons and I teach ourselves to shoot with a bow and arrow. We improve, but a blind Bushman is still a better shot than we. Sefunelo must notice that the air is clear of powder fumes these days; he looks the other way when I approach. I get the cattle-herds to count my cattle every night. I could get a wagon going to the frontier farmers to beg gunpowder, but every Christian is nowadays wary of being seen with me. And life here also goes on. There is guarding to be done. There is hunting to be done. There is eating to be done.
One of the Scottish deserters, an uncouth fellow with the name of Buchanan, is on guard duty with me one evening. We sit by the fire and peer into the bushes for hyenas or Heathens. The Scotsman’s nose grows in all directions, apparently broke it every weekend in the pubs of Edinburgh.
Fuckin cold out tonight.
We sit. He pours the last powder from his horn and loads his gun.
Shit. I’m out. Fuck. Ye have some powder to spare?
No, I say. Nothing left to spare. But some left to shoot.
I pass him my powder horn.
We should make our own bloody powder.
Something scurries in the undergrowth.
An shoot the shit out of this fuckin country. Make a pile, a fuckin mountain of powder. We just leave it here with a few flints and bugger off, an the fuckin savages can blow each other up. We come back an take what’s fuckin left. Shit.
He spits. I let go of the thong I’ve been whittling.
Buchuman, I ask, where find you the recipe for powder?
Five pounds nitre, one part charcoal. Two fuckin thirds of a part brimstone.
Brimstone? From the Bible?
From fuckin volcanoes.
No volcanoes in this land.
Hot springs too. Same fuckin thing. Wherever the fuckin earth tears an boils an retches.
And where come you on this wisdom?
Our captain was a cunt about the military science shit. Had to learn everything by bloody heart. Had to be able to build a fuckin cannon from scratch. In the field. An with field he meant the fuckin jungle.
You can powder make? I ask.
Buys, I can fuckin powder make. Much as yer bloody black heart craves.
When, at the dawning of the day, we start enquiring, Sefunelo’s people talk of the waters that steam and heal, less than a week away on horseback. I saddle up after lunch with my sons Piet and Dirk, the four Hartenaars who still have strong horses, Buchanan and his friend Lusk, the other Scottish deserter. We get going, as they indicate, north and east. We ride the horses for all they’re worth and don’t sleep. On the fifth day we see a cloud of steam rising up from the earth in a boiling morass covered with bulrushes. The mountains are beautiful here, big and blue and all over. We hack away the bulrushes and find the source. The veldt is teeming with animals. It’s as if the elephants know we’re running out of powder. They taunt us, bathe right in front of our noses. The Scotsmen scratch with their knives at every stone in sight and curse and don’t find any sulphur.
The Ndebele Caffres who live here speak a language I don’t altogether master. The one walking in front explains that the place’s name is something like Boiling-Boiling or The Pot that Boils. They invite us to their kraal for the night. They are friendly and share their beer, a beer such as I’ve never drunk. Before bedtime fists are flying. At first we fight with each other and the people laugh. Then Lusk ups and punches a Caffre in the face and everything grows quiet. The Caffre gets up and dusts himself and everything grows more quiet. He must be some captain or other, and pride now badly hurt. In our hurry we forgot to bring along an interpreter on this journey. The conversation that ensues is short and nonsensical and we clear out.
We wake up in the veldt with Kortman the Hartenaar shouting that the Caffres are upon us. The leading Caffres are on horseback. Our own horses are exhausted and won’t last long ahead of them. We race a mile or four and then I gesture my men up a steep kopje. The hill lies stretched out in the veldt like a dozing lion. We scramble up the hindquarters, between the shoulders and then a steeper incline, through the lush mane of bush up to the sturdy crown.
The Caffres on horseback congregate at the foot of the kopje and wait for the others to catch up. When the entire kraal’s men have surrounded the kopje, they start slowly crawling up. Buchanan says Fuck the fuckin savages and lets fly. Piet and Dirk also fire and somebody hits a Caffre and he staggers and falls over backwards and rolls and disappears. The Caffres retreat and remain sitting at the foot of the hill. When night descends on us, they light fires around the kopje, with our single fire on the peak. We sit and laugh about the mess. Even though we don’t have enough gunpowder to shoot them away, their immense respect for the wonder-thunder of our fire-shooters keeps them at bay. We laugh and we smoke and we go to bed. The next morning the Caffres are still sitting there. We wander around. A bit further down the ruins of a former city, the red stone walls flattened by the baboons. Iron furnaces. Earthenware shards. Buchanan kicks over the last unbroken grain bin. By afternoon we realise that our water is not going to last long. Evidently the Caffres know this already. On a barren hill so close to the sun it won’t be long before we perish of thirst. All they need do is wait for their parching revenge.
By the second day we are no longer laughing. The Caffres are going nowhere. We are not sure how many of them there are. Most of them are sheltering on the lee side of the hill. Between the nine of us there are five leather water bags, not one of them full.
I ration the water. The bags don’t move out of my sight. In the mornings, afternoons, evenings and at bedtime I distribute small drinks of water to man and horse. On day four we are still besieged. The Caffres are still quite comfortably settled. Now and again they snarl some snide piece of shit at us in their incomprehensible language. I instruct the men no longer to irrigate the bushes on the hill; henceforth everybody has to piss in the empty water bags. When the bags are full, every single one of us empties his bladder into bowls or any hollow object that we’ve carted along. No drop of piss is wasted.
On the seventh day we rest like our Father, too tired and dehydrated to stand up straight, sunburnt and worn out. The last drop of water was drunk a day ago and of rain there is no sign. Lusk takes a sip of piss and spits it out and wipes his tongue clean with the flat of his hand.
Dead at fuckin thirty, Buchanan grumbles. Ye must be fucking kiddin. Since the day I crawled out of my ma’s pestiferous cunt an killed the bitch I haven’t done nothing worth a long warm shit. Nothing.