My captain said ye piss on it, it airs it out, he sayd. Make it stick together like cookie dough, he sayd. Didn’t fuckin question the captain, the man spoke true in all else. An so, Buys, yer piss be the secret ingredient.
I open my breeches and stand with my pizzle in my hand. I think of printing presses.
Break the seal, Buys!
Buchuman crawls on all fours in front of me into the pile of precious, stinking gunpowder meal.
Lusk, bring forth yer staff an piss, my friend!
Lusk is at hand immediately, and his prick has no problem. The torrent next to me calls forth my own water as well. At our feet Buchanan is kneading like a demented baker with the piss splashing on him and the meal turning into dough. He hollers for more. Presently there are other streams next to ours until the baker shouts For fuck sakes rein in yer cocks. The filthy black meal stinks like a hell of unmentionables and overripe eggs.
The crowd is as silent as a single congregation. Buchanan arises from the dough. He glistens and he stretches himself and every muscle tenses, with the sun a halo behind him. Then he kneels next to his brew and watches it drying and every now and again pokes around in it with his knife. Nobody leaves. When the dough has been baked dry and become gunpowder, the Scotsman gets up and takes a pinch of it between his fingers. He walks over to a little fire where a few Caffres are sitting cooking something and he tosses it into the coals and new flames explode. He throws his head back and screams something wordless or Scottish and the congregation gasps for breath; then all rejoice. Buchanan walks into the crowd and somebody hands him a kaross to cover his shame. In passing he touches my shoulder.
Thanks be to ye, Buys, I fuckin needed this day.
He disappears into the background, never again to emerge from it.
Bring your horns, men! I shout.
My men file up and hold out their empty horns and receive from us the life-giving powder, like crazed communicants.
5
All year long Sefunelo has been sitting on his posterior blunting his assegai with looking at it, but as soon as my gun can shoot again, I have to shoot where he aims. We go to plunder the Bakwena on the Harts River, but don’t come away with very many cattle. The locusts have already stripped their lands bare. Believe me, the Bakwena round up the ravenous pestilences, pound them fine and then make flour of them. The Bakwena are tall, with hawk-shaped faces. They see us coming from far away. The warriors are hard and hungry and fight like men who have nothing to lose. The people’s stone walls collapse. Sefunelo loses his best warriors.
The defeat is of course my fault. When I get home and bash open my head against the door and yank the thing out of the doorframes and decide to move on, I must accept as my portion that I will forfeit my cattle. So that’s said and done: once again I possess nothing on this earth. There isn’t much that I want to take with me. Accordingly I leave my host, apart from my flocks of almost one-and-a-half thousand, a wagon to temper his temperament. See, another house ablaze. I leave Thabeng behind me. This place that I am leaving, that I totally renounce, perdures absolutely in my absence, absolutely itself.
We trek past people who are spreading themselves wide over the open veldt. They drive game to a vast plain full of pitfalls. Buck and zebras and wildebeest tumble in and disappear and break their bones at the bottom of the pits, where they lie bellowing and waiting for the death blow. We ride past people who build their huts in underground caves to escape the eternal warfare on the surface. We gape at people who live in huts on stilts, since the surface has been usurped by lions and desolation. We trek past the horizon. In March 1820 my family and I are once again settled in the kloofs next to Karechuenya. I introduce the baby born in the meantime and her mother, the young Hurutshe woman from last spring, to the rest of the family. We trek past all sense of family and connections. I am told that Campbell is on his way to subjugate the Hurutshe and their majestic city to the power of quill and ink. I greet the people who have been good to me. I load the Hurutshe woman and the baby into the wagon with us and in April make shallow tracks from there and am gone.
Sweet thorn, rooibos, the tallest giraffes these eyes have ever beheld, the spots darker than those in the south; blue wildebeest, red rocks. A black bird-creature that spreads its wings around itself like an umbrella, the deep and bright blue under the wings flashing forth a lure to the fish. Monkeys, red buck, tambotie everywhere. See, a young giraffe with the umbilical cord still dangling like a second, unnatural pizzle. Warthogs. The vulture toying with its food. The sighing and groaning and huffing of hippopotami. Zebras, the fish eagle’s plaintive call. Black and brown stones. Whirligig beetles. Long after dark still the copper glow between the undulating kopjes. Even the sun is sometimes scared of following its fate to the bitter end.
Makaba, the dreaded warrior chief of the Ngwaketse, invites me and my nation to come and stay with him. He shuttles constantly between Kanye, when peace reigns, and the hills a few miles to the north, when things get heated. The hills are barricaded, like his eyes under his beetling brow, and from there he wages war against the surrounding world. He gathers splinter groups of other tribes like the spoils of war, the Buys nation merely the latest addition to this assembly. He offers his friendship to the Briquas and the Hurutshe, and when they distrust his smile, he attacks them anew and with renewed vigour. He loots women and prisoners of war and these, too, are inducted into the community. When Makaba doesn’t seize what he wants, he barters with his neighbours. Tobacco, hides, feathers, ornaments and tools of copper, iron and tin. And ivory, always ivory.
Like everybody else in this desert, the Ngwaketse barter women for cattle and cattle for labour and loyalty. The more cattle and women you have, the richer you are. Once I, too, was rich like he. With Makaba I eat and drink myself to ruination. My gut grows and my muscles shrink. I don’t walk around if I don’t have to. In these days I have a seizure. The cramps take over, one of these days very soon I’m going to crumple and shrivel up like a dried-up chameleon. I lie down for a few days and when I get up, my left leg is stiff. For a few days my left hand refuses to obey me. Elizabeth swears she won’t tell anyone how I struggle in bed.
Buchuman’s home-made gunpowder in my horn gives me fresh marrow in my bones. As long as I’m seated in my saddle, nobody can see how stiff my leg is. My sons and I and my army melt bullets and we are at Makaba’s side when he goes to plunder the Bakwena and Malete all along the brown waters of the Madikwe.
The first shot cracks. See, that one feels with both hands where his lower jaw used to be till a moment ago. We’re massacring them; from all sides we descend on them. A first flight of arrows and spears. People fall and lie pinioned to the ground like impaled insects. Then the horsemen charge. See, here right in front of me: blood pours from the nose and ears of the naked Caffre; he rocks on his feet, brandishes his knobkerrie at the sky and at the flies. Then I am on top of him and over him with four horseshoes. Throats gape; blood vomits from these new laughing mouths. To one side a wounded Caffre is rammed by two warriors and then beaten to a pulp with knobkerries. Lusk and Buchanan anoint a cow with lamp oil and set light to it and drive it shrieking through the straw huts. The cow drops down and lows and her eyes roll and somebody kills her with a cleaver. Son-in-law Jan stands on the edge of the kraal with a few guns. A Hottentot next to him reloads while he takes the weapons from the loader one by one and takes aim and shoots a distant person. Two assegais meet and sheer past each other in Buchanan’s belly and he pirouettes and dances for a moment, comically and unconvincingly, before he drops and dies. Shots, smoke; people perish as well as a child or two who get in the way. My horse stumbles and dies under me. I’m on my third gun already and have to reload. I stoop into a hut and sit crouched up in the dusk and ram in the bullet while the woman and her children cower wailing in the corner. I take aim through the door opening and flatten a Caffre and load the other two guns and once again walk out to face the blood-stained daylight.