Those green hills are not granted to me. I lash the oxen to bleeding, but faster than their fastest they cannot go. Here behind me in the wagon my wife shudders with cold in the sweltering summer. Too weak to chase off the flies caking around her encrusted mouth. Next to her Maria and Nombini have fallen asleep. So many nights of caring and waking. How far away could the Portuguese be with their miraculous medicine? Arend said they were barely two days away from where he and Coenraad Wilhelm had to turn around. We should have been there by now. Where and when does this accursed continent end? Where are the boats and the breakers beyond all this dust? I must go on, forward through the red sand and thorn trees, to the trackless Portuguese, or at least the river. Any godforsaken puddle in which to bathe my wife.
6
The Limpopo flows wide; the hippopotami yawn. The crocodiles snap at one another with listless violence. We trek for five days along the bank and try to keep Elizabeth cool and to break the fever. She has a miscarriage. The wagon is covered in blood. I scrub the planks clean. I find clots of what could have been my child. Life drains from her through her womb. She is no longer yellow, but grey. Her scream freezes the blood of everyone except her own and then she is dead.
In the midst of the night noises of the veldt I lie on my back and look at the stars. I must have slept, because I wake up. All of creation staggers before the sun that scorches over the world. When I reach the camp Nombini offers me a bowl of water. I must have drunk it, because suddenly it is empty. I call the boys. We cover her, tamp down the soil, haul river stones and pile them on top of her.
How long have we been sitting here on our arses? Days? Weeks? The veldt is flat, the soil is red, the grass yellow, the bushes green, the trees bear thorns, the horizon is white, the sky blue and deep and so godfor-etcetera. Strange nests like plaited yellow whirlwinds hang from the branches. Thump the tree and you hear the Babel of twittering from the dark tunnels, but the residents never appear. Anthills clamber up the trunks. Nombini. Cracked clay of a watering hole. Maria. Children, all the children. Baobabs quiet as palaces. Eland. Buffalo. Snores. Herds. Stampedes. At dusk the distance flames up. I imagine mountains in the mist.
My people are asleep. I’m sitting on my own, stoke all the fires in the camp with new wood. I sit. The six fires surrounding me flare up high, the camp as bright as day. Above me the black velvet night, the white holes in the canvas flicker like stars. The undergrowth creaks. Then: a herd of eland charge through the camp, in between the fires, the sweat on their flanks, every fold and muscle illuminated. The sacred antelopes in the daylight here with me with above us the pitch-black night, as if they sheer outside time and season and reason and between worlds and through all reality and dream. Behind me the undergrowth creaks again to admit the eland.
On a morning like all the others Maria shakes me awake in the wagon. She wants to know what’s the story with Nombini and me.
How should I know, I say. Is she haranguing me again where I can’t hear?
Maria says Nombini disappeared in the night. Maria says she woke up to the sound of crying when Nombini said good bye to her children. Then she was off with a little bundle of food under her arm. I ask why Maria did not stop her. She says I know very well there’s no arguing with that Caffre woman:
You try to stop her once she’s got an idea into that head of stone.
Maria says Nombini mumbled something about a godalmighty nest she wanted to go and build, that she wanted to climb trees before her toes are blunt with walking. I fall back onto my bed. At the back of my head something rattles like a bead somebody is spinning at the bottom of a porcelain dish. I lie and wait till Maria takes umbrage and stalks out.
The ants march in a line to the grubs, pick them up and haul them to the shoulder-high anthill here next to me. I carefully pick up an ant, put it down some distance from its comrades. It scurries back at once to the file and falls in. I bend over to pick up another ant: my breeches tear. The arse-end of my mole-rat breeches in tatters. My beloved breeches, you stinking scoundrel! Oh godless traitor! I tear off the breeches and leave them to the ants to drag into their subterranean kingdom. To the devil also with breeches. I walk back to the camp to devise a loincloth for the ridiculous and crumpled bell clappering between my legs.
When the next morning I wander into the veldt with my bow and arrows and a kaross around my shoulders, hat on the head and a buckskin around my hips, Maria and the children grin at Buys the Bushman.
You must hope and pray you don’t bump into your pals today! Maria shouts after me. They’ll sell you to the nearest farmer!
I walk on, too angry to shout back. The sun scorches my lily-white legs. It’s only later that afternoon when I’m doing battle with a thorn in my ankle that I realise how long it’s been since I’ve thought of shoes. Then I think of Kemp, of spotted breeches and mad maps. And I wonder how the nest is progressing of the woman who never was mine.
A day, a week later. I walk to the wagon. Whence the headache? For months now not a drop of liquor over my lips. Something smells of burnt feathers. My heart thumps my chest to pieces. The world reels. I stand still, hands on knees. Puke. My legs give way under me. I try to get up. I fall and have a fit. An outcry:
What in godsname, Buys?
Somebody slaps me. An eye flutters, opens. Maria offers me water. The water tastes wrong; it spills on me. I bite my tongue and it bleeds.