The Angels Weep - Smith Wilbur (бесплатные онлайн книги читаем полные версии txt) 📗
Sergeant Ezra had brought the kilts and spears and knob-kierries, and Jan Cheroot had the big black three-legged pot of beef fat and lampblack boiled to a paste. Ralph and Harry and the Hottentots stripped naked and "smeared each other with the rancid mixture, taking care to work it in around the back of the ears, the knees and elbows, and below the eyes where pale skin might show.
By the time the curfew bell in the Anglican church began to toll, they were all dressed in the kilts of Matabele amadoda. Ralph and Harry covered their hair, which would have betrayed them, with headdresses of black widow-bird feathers. Isazi and Jan Cheroot strapped the rawhide bootees over the hooves of the horses, while Ralph gave his final orders, speaking in Sindebele, the only language they would use during the entire raid.
They left the town in the sudden darkness between sunset and moonrise, the hoofbeats of the horses deadened by the rawhides, and Ezra's Matabele running at the stirrups on silent bare feet. After the first hour, Ralph muttered a curt order to the Matabele and they took a stirrup-leather and hung from it, a man on each side of the horses. The pace of the march never slackened below a canter. They swept south and eastwards, until the crenellated crests of the Matopos Hills were outlined against the moon-pale sky.
A little after midnight Ezra grunted. "This is the place!" Ralph rose in the stirrups and raised his right arm. The column bunched up and dismounted. Jan Cheroot's reputed bastard, Taos, came to take the horses, while Jan Cheroot himself checked his men's weapons.
"I will put them against the firelight for you," Ralph whispered to him. "Watch for my signal." Then Ralph smiled at Isazi, his teeth glinting in the shiny black mask of his daubed face. "There will be no prisoners. Lie close, but beware of Jan Cheroot's bullets." "Henshaw, I want to go in with you." Harry Mellow spoke in Sindebele, and Ralph answered him in the same language.
"You shoot better than you talk. Go. with Jan Cheroot." At another order from Ralph, every one of them reached into the leather pouch on his hip and brought out a white cow-tail tassel necklace.
They were the recognition insignia, that might prevent them killing each other in the press of the fighting. Only Ralph added another ornament to his dress. From his hip pouch he brought the strip of mole-skin and bound it around his upper arm, then he hefted the heavy assegai and lead wood knobkerrie and nodded at Ezra. "Lead!" The line of Matabele, with Ralph running in second place, trotted at a traverse across the slope of the hill. As they turned the southern buttress, they saw the red glow of a watch-fire in the valley below.
Ralph sprinted past Ezra to the front of the line. He filled his lungs and began to sing.
"Lift the rock under which sleeps the serpent. Lift the rock and let the Mamba loose.
The Mamba of Mashobane has silver fangs of steel." It was one of the fighting songs of the Insukamini impi, and behind him the line of Matabele picked, up the refrain in their deep melodious voices. It resounded from the hills and woke the camp in the valley. Naked figures, risen from the sleeping-mats, threw wood on the fires, and the red glow lit the underside of the acacia trees so they formed a canopy like a circus tent overhead.
Ezra had estimated there were forty amadoda guarding the horses, but there were more than that already gathered around the fires and every second more flocked into the bivouac, the outposts coming in to see what was causing the commotion. Ralph had planned for that. He wanted no stragglers. They must be concentrated, so that his riflemen could fire into the bunch, making one bullet do the work of three or four. Ralph trotted into the Matabele encampment.
"Who commands here?" Ralph broke off the battle-song, and demanded in a bellow. "Let the commander stand forth to hear the word I bring from Gandang." He knew from the account that Robyn had given him of the massacre on the Khami Hills that the old and una was one of the leaders of the uprising. His choice of name had the effect he had hoped for.
"I am Mazui." A warrior stepped forward respectfully. "I wait for the word of Gandang, son of Mzilikazi." "The horses are no longer safe in this place. The white men have learned where they are. At the rise of the sun we will take them deeper into the hills," Ralph told him.
"To a place that I shall show you." "It shall be done." "Where are the horses?" "They are in the kraal, guarded by my aniadoda, safe from the lions." "Bring in all your pickets Ralph ordered, and the commander shouted an order and then turned back to Ralph eagerly.
"What news is there of the fighting?" "There has been a great battle," Ralph launched into a fanciful account, miming the fighting in the traditional way, leaping and shouting and stabbing in the air with his assegai.
"Thus we came upon the rear of the horsemen, and thus and thus we stabbed them-" His own Matabele gave him a chorus of long drawn-out "Jee" and leaped and postured with him.
The audience was enraptured, beginning to stamp and sway in sympathy with Ralph and his Matabele. The sentries and pickets had come in from the periphery of the camp. No more hurrying black figures emerged from the shadows. They were all here a hundred, perhaps a hundred and twenty, not more, Ralph estimated, against his forty men.
Not unfair odds, Jan Cheroot's Cape boys were all first-rate marksmen, and Harty Mellow with a rifle was worth five ordinary men.
From close at hand, on the first slope of the hill, a nightjar called. It was a musical quavering-cry, that sounded like "Good Lord, deliver us', this pious sentiment gave the bird its popular name, the Litany bird. It was the signal which Ralph had been listening for. He felt a bleak satisfaction that Jan Cheroot had followed his orders so strictly. From the position on the slope, Jan Cheroot would have the crowd of amadoda silhouetted against the firelight.
Making it all part of the dance, Ralph whirled away, still prancing and stamping, opening a distance of twenty paces between himself and the nearest Matabele. Here Ralph ended his dance abruptly with his arms spread like a crucifix. He stood deathly still staring at his audience with wild eyes, and a silence fell upon them all.
