The Seafarers E-Book

Vivian Stuart

• Herausgeber: Skinnbok
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Serie: The Australians
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 393

Beschreibung

The nineteenth book in the dramatic and intriguing story about the colonisation of Australia: a country made of blood, passion, and dreams.   Jon Fisher and Harry Ryan take part in a bloody war between the British and the Zulu in South Africa.    Jon Fisher faces war in South Africa. The Zulus have proven themselves a surprisingly powerful enemy to the British Army. After losing his men during battle, Jon Fisher decides to go home to Australia. Harry Ryan has arranged passage for them on a merchant ship. And there starts their travels across the ocean to get back home.

Leseprobe

The Seafarers

The Australians 19 – The Seafarers

© Vivian Stuart, 1988

© eBook in English: Jentas ehf. 2023

Series: The Australians

Title: The Seafarers

Title number: 19

ISBN: 978-9979-64-244-2

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchase.

All contracts and agreements regarding the work, editing, and layout are owned by Jentas ehf.

The Australians

The ExilesThe PrisonersThe SettlersThe NewcomersThe TraitorsThe RebelsThe ExplorersThe TravellersThe AdventurersThe WarriorsThe ColonistsThe PioneersThe Gold SeekersThe OpportunistsThe PatriotsThe PartisansThe Empire BuildersThe Road BuildersThe SeafarersThe MarinersThe NationalistsThe LoyalistsThe ImperialistsThe Expansionists

AUTHOR’S NOTE

The Cutty Sark, one of the last tall ships of the extreme clipper design to be built, never had a mate named Samuel Gordon. In some instances, her well-documented voyages are moved about in time in order to fit within the framework of this fictional story. A few of the incidents herein depicted as having happened on Cutty Sark are based on happenings on other ships. The author claims fictional licence for his effort to reflect a way of life, clipper sailing, in this book. The Cutty Sark, having been the quintessential clipper ship, seemed to be an ideal vehicle to accomplish this purpose.

PROLOGUE

November 22, 1869

Although Jock Willis’s smile was hidden by his long white bushy beard and his full moustache, his satisfaction was evident in his eyes and his ruddy cheeks. The burly Scotsman was dressed in a dark swallow-tailed coat, a white vest, gleaming linen, and the pale beaver topper that had earned him the nickname “Old White Hat.” He stood in the ship’s bow—his ship’s bow—with the fingers of one hand thrust into his trousers pocket as he surveyed a goodly portion of the population of Dumbarton. Pressing with upturned faces all around the construction gangway now doubling as a christening platform, the crowd on the foreshore below had braved the Scottish winter to witness the time-honoured ceremony that had brought Jock up from London. He was the yard’s owner, and the ship about to be launched was, in his opinion, the best he had ever built.

Launching days always attracted a crowd, but not usually as large as this. Ships had been launched into the Leven River near its conjunction with the Clyde for centuries. The twin peaks of the Rock of Dumbarton had been witness to the comings and goings of Roman galleys, medieval carracks, stout East Indiamen, and, most recently, the sleek, low, twin-paddlewheelers that had been Clyde-built for speed and stealth to run the blockade of the United States Navy into the ports of the embattled Confederate States of America. The men of Dumbarton were carpenters, dubbers, joiners, caulkers, riggers, and fasteners. Shipbuilding was in their blood; and, of course, all those who had been involved in the building of this new ship were on hand, for this was not just another ship. She was slim and graceful, as sleek as a sea otter as she poised on her bed of keelblocks.

She was a clipper. She had risen slowly from the jumble of timber and iron, the remnants of which still littered the yard. She had been formed of oak and metal and teak—no softwood for her, as would be the case in America, where oak was scarce. Old Jock had insisted on the finest materials, oak from the Forest of Dean in Gloucestershire and the New Forest of Hampshire, where once a retired admiral had wandered, pockets filled with acorns, to plant oaks so that England would never be shy of that durable wood. Old Jock’s wishes—for pressing business now kept him in London—had been followed to the smallest detail by his building supervisor, Captain George Moodie, who would have the honour of taking the ship to sea.

Old Jock was a businessman, and a good one. He had known hardship, having been sent to sea as a boy. He had worked his way up to captain, and he had taken tall ships into the far ports of the world. His years at sea had hardened and wisened him, and he was a man who was careful with a pound—but a fair man, and a ship from John Willis & Son never left port without Old White Hat, Old Jock, on the wharf to raise his topper and call out, “Goodbye, my lads.” A true son of Scotland, he was a man of many seasons—sailor, businessman, family man, and, in his secret heart, a poet—or, at least, a lover of poetry. For every event, for every mood, there was a verse stored away under the beaver hat. Once, when his young designer, Hercules Linton, had been preparing a materials list for the clipper, Old Jock had quoted Longfellow:

Choose the timbers with greatest care;

Of all that is unsound beware;

For only what is sound and strong

To this vessel shall belong.

Of course, the American poet had been inspired by a clipper being built by the master craftsman of Boston, Donald McKay, whose Flying Cloud still held the record for a one-day run, an incredible 374 miles at an average speed of fifteen knots, and that had been a factor in Old Jock’s decision to build a composite clipper with strong iron ribs and mast mountings teamed with the finest English oak, for he had a long memory and more than his share of pride. The fact that Donald McKay, the American shipbuilding genius, was in truth a Scot—he had been born in Nova Scotia, after all—eased the pain somewhat, but he was still thought of as an American, and it was time to show the upstart ex-colonists who, after all, was mistress of the seas.

It was shame enough to have McKay’s Boston clippers holding all the speed and run records; worse still—despite the years that had passed—was the memory of the American Oriental, which had slipped out of Hong Kong harbour in August 1850, to arrive in London just ninety days later. Bringing tea from China was a British trade, and to have an American ship reach port with the first cargo of the season, and thus realize the highest profit, was gall to Old Jock’s thrifty, patriotic heart.

But Old Jock harboured other, fresher grudges. Of late, a rival British shipowner, George Thompson, had been showing too much cockiness about his newest clipper, the Thermopylae, launched the previous year. While it was perhaps true that the Thermopylae was the fastest ship afloat, she had not yet proved herself, and before she began to set records, she’d have competition. Still, her first homebound crossing from China had taken just ninety-one days.

Jock glanced down at the teak planking beneath his feet. This ship, this little love, would best that. Of that he was sure. His new ship, and her captain, George Moodie, would topple the gilded rooster from the Thermopylae’s mainmast, and then the world would see who was the cock of the walk.

There were those who questioned Jock’s decision to build a clipper instead of another steamship, but Jock did not have to be a visionary to know that steamers could not carry enough coal to reach Australia and the Far East, and he had no wish to be at the mercy of remote coaling stations run by God knew who. Tea from China and wool from Australia and New Zealand were still cargo for the tall ships, and Jock believed that his new ship would pay off and even show a tidy profit before the impending opening of the Suez Canal altered the current situation. Suez would make a difference in the long run, but for the foreseeable future the tea and wool clippers would carry their clouds of canvas around the Cape of Good Hope, into the area of storm and continuous wind known to all sailing men as the Roaring Forties, and thence, homeward bound, into that endless, heavy swell of the Southern Ocean where the Cape Horn greybeards rolled and surged and built crests of more than fifty feet. In such seas this ship would be in her element, and the winds that blew from the west with a reach that was global would be gathered in her three-quarters of an acre of canvas and converted to the driving force of three thousand horsepower. This ship would not foul God’s clean air with the stench of coal smoke; her 212-odd feet would be accompanied only by the murmur of the wind in the rigging and the hiss of the foam as she cut the waves, not going over, but through. No bruising, battering battle against the sea for her.

A shout attracted Jock’s attention. Young Hercules Linton, the ship’s designer, was standing further forward in the bow, waving his topper. Beside him the chief draftsmen, John Rennie, stood with one hand on the shoulder of Captain Moodie. Jock took his hand out of his pocket and waved back. Moodie, using a brass hailing trumpet, bellowed an order to the workers below. All along the ways, workmen with sledges readied themselves. At Moodie’s next shout the men lifted their tools, and then, with the final shouted order, the sledges thudded against the wooden dog shores that held the ship’s relatively light tonnage clear of the greased ways.

The sound of the heavy sledges echoed from the hills, became a staccato thunder. Scarcely heard above the hammers was the smash of a bottle of the finest wine against the jauntily raked cutwater of the ship. Jock’s eldest daughter had broken the bottle with the first swing, and as the ship creaked and began to move, she cried out, “I christen thee Cutty Sark.”

Stern-first, she slid smoothly, gaining momentum, until she ploughed into the waters of the Leven with a mighty splash. A cheer went up. Jock let out his breath as the hull was engulfed by water, bobbed briefly, then settled into a smooth drift, hiding all but the top few feet of her copper plating—copper was dreadfully expensive, but the only way to keep a ship from becoming quickly fouled with barnacles. Jock looked around at the smiling faces and waving dignitaries on the bow. One face was missing.

He had to shout over the sound of bagpipes on shore. “Where’s young Sam?”

The Cutty Sark was still drifting, waves generated by her launching racing outward. The man standing next to him pointed. Jock looked forward, at the stump of the bowsprit, to see his niece’s son, fourteen-year-old Samuel Gordon, dangling precariously from the chain shrouds and reaching with one hand toward the Junoesque figurehead that protruded at the extremity of the Cutty’s raked bow.

Sam Gordon had done a man’s work during the construction of the clipper. He was a bonny lad, large for his age, his still-growing body lean and smoothly muscled, his hair a wild mop of Scot’s straw. From the time he had reached the age of ten, Old Jock had had high hopes for the lad. John Willis & Son was a family firm—Jock himself had taken over from his father—and there would definitely be a responsible place for young Sam someday.

“What’s the lad doing?” someone asked.

Old Jock’s half-hidden smile crinkled his florid cheeks and squinted his eyes. Sam was being delicate, careful not to touch the figurehead’s bare breasts. He had hooked his legs on the chains and now was hanging upside-down, with one hand clutching the wrist of the figurehead’s outflung left arm.

There was, of course, a verse for that, too. The good Scottish dialect rang in Old Jock’s head as he watched his great-nephew accomplish his objective. Scotland’s own Bobby Burns had taken an ancient legend and spun it into lilting verse—the story of Tam O’Shanter, a bit dazed by good Scotch whisky, watching a beautiful witch dancing, clad only in a short chemise, a “cutty sark.” Not everyone was aware that Old Jock had taken the name for his extreme clipper from the Burns poem—or at least they had not made the connection—and not everyone who saw young Sam Gordon dangling dangerously from the bowsprit shrouds knew the significance of the boy’s actions as he wedged a hank of rope, one end frayed, into the left hand of the voluptuous figurehead.

Old Jock roared, briefly frightening the men standing nearby. “Well done, lad!”

Sam Gordon heard him and, after pulling himself upright, waved and grinned as tugs began to gather in the Cutty and push her dockside, where, in the next few weeks, her towering spars would be mounted and her ten miles of standing and running rigging put in place.

Jock thought again of the poem, of how Tam O’Shanter, enchanted by the provocatively dressed witch, had cried out, and how, in the chase that ensued, the speeding young witch, fleet as the wind, had come close enough to grab Tam’s horse’s tail, pulling it free. The rope, frayed to resemble a horse’s tail, was a symbol of swiftness, of the speed of a racing witch, and by putting that symbol into the hands of the Cutty’s figurehead, Sam Gordon had endowed the ship with that witch’s swiftness.

Helping hands lifted Sam back to the deck, and Jock edged his way forward to congratulate the boy.

“Uncle Jock,” Sam said, his face flushed with excitement, “I must sail with her!”

Old Jock chuckled. He could see himself in the lad, as he had been long ago, more years past than he cared to count. He had been even younger than Sam when he first went to sea, and in those days conditions aboard ship had been far more primitive. He had worked for fifty shillings a month and had lived on biscuit, burgoo, biscuit hash, and salt meat. In his early days as a midshipman he had done his time on an ice-coated yard, his fingers frozen and his nails torn off, standing on a swaying footrope a hundred feet above a pitching, canted deck. That experience would, in all probability, come soon to his great-nephew, for it was still necessary for the tall ships to weather Cape Horn, still necessary for the men who served on them to work in white, frigid water swirling across the decks, to live in a fo’c’sle that was often awash with water sloshing around the bunks, to be never really dry, never really rested, always gaunt-eyed with the need for sleep.

For a few moments he envied the lad, for he would know the tramping thunder of sails, the feeling of speed as a good skipper drove a fair ship hard with her lee rails under.

“You’ll need gear,” Old Jock said.

“I’ve saved money from my wages,” Sam returned without a second thought.

Jock waved a hand dismissively. “I’ll ha’ none o’that,” he said. “Make it a wee gift from your uncle.” He cut off the boy’s stammered attempt at a reply. “Save your hard-earned money, lad.”

“You mean I really can join the ship, uncle?”

“You’ll ’prentice directly under Captain Moodie. If your ma and pa will not be objecting, mind. And don’t think it’s family favouritism, or that I’m doing you a favour, for Moodie is a hard man, and you’ll have to snap-to lively to please him.”

“I shall work ever so hard, uncle!” Sam said.

Old Jock’s smile faded. Fancy schools and the company of women had refined young Samuel’s speech and manners, perhaps too much. He was a handsome lad, clean-cut and personable, though perhaps, God forbid, just a bit too soft—not in body but in temperament—for the sea. Certainly he’d take guff from the other foremast hands, for a clipper’s crew had more than its share of drunks, criminals on the run, and shanghaied landsmen—a rough lot, with only a few true seamen mixed in. But, no, this lad would do fine.

Jock put his hand fondly atop the mop of straw-coloured hair. Yes, he thought, this boy would prove himself, just as his forebears had had to prove themselves in the past, and then, God willing, he’d be a man and would, perhaps someday, take over the helm of a John Willis & Son clipper.

***

January 22, 1879

Being a junior officer in the service of Her Majesty the Queen in Natal Colony was not, Lieutenant Jon Fisher had found, altogether unpleasant. True, the southeastern African sun was often unbearably hot, the climate dry, the dust churned up from Lord Chelmsford’s army at times a choking miasma, but there was a grandeur to the landscape that could fill the heart. Just a few weeks before, after having joined his regiment with a fresh draft of twenty recruits green from England, Jon had travelled inland from the shores of the Indian Ocean with one of the army’s supply trains, in the congenial company of two fellow Australians—sutlers in charge of the supplies. They had caught up to the army just before it crossed the Buffalo River at Rorke’s Drift, and Jon had been immediately assigned to the Second Battalion, 24th Regiment of Foot.

Now, on the morning of the twenty-second of January, five companies of the First Battalion and the company of the Second Battalion to which Jon belonged were camped almost casually on the slopes of a brown and grassy mountain called Isandhlwana. It was, truly, a day made by God, a morning of low mists on the plains, cobalt blue skies, a gentle breeze, a warming sun. The tin cup in Jon’s hands radiated warmth, the Chinese tea in it supplied by the Australian sutlers who provisioned the army from their long wagon train. Around him, his fellow officers were having a leisurely breakfast. The general, Lord Chelmsford, was not in camp, having ridden before sunrise with a small force in support of a scouting party. To Jon’s surprise, Chelmsford had divided his army of five thousand British troops and more than eight thousand native levies even before crossing the Buffalo, and into not two, but three, columns. That unorthodox decision, in fact, was the topic of a desultory conversation under the awning of the officers’ mess tent. The officers themselves, good soldiers all, were hesitant to question their superior, but the civilians, Andy Melgund and Harry Ryan, with the impudence that seemed to be the mark of colonials, were not so respectful of the good general’s character.

“Does he fancy himself to be General Robert E. Lee, splitting his forces in the face of the enemy?” Harry Ryan asked.

“And this encampment,” Andy Melgund said. “Look at it! I’m no military genius, but it seems to me it would be a good idea to at least laager the wagons, perhaps have the chaps do a bit of entrenching.”

“Really,” a somewhat dandified subaltern said. “What enemy? Black men with spears? I hardly think that this Cetshwayo will lead his fellows into a British square of fire. What can such savages do against a modern army armed with Martini-Henry carbines?”

Melgund cast an amused look at Ryan. “I’ve heard such remarks before,” he said, “about the Maoris of New Zealand. They, too, were called savages, and they spilled a good deal of blood before our so-called modern armies cooled them down a bit.”

Jon was listening with only part of his attention. He was a sturdily built young man of medium height, with well-turned legs and a thick chest. He was strong of face in a way that, even at his tender age of nineteen, had proved to be attractive to more than one young lady. In his neatly pressed uniform, he looked like a soldier on a recruiting poster. His red coat had stood the dust well. His webbing and belt gleamed whitely in the early morning sun, and his cork, coal-scuttle helmet was pushed back slightly, enough to reveal expressive blue eyes and a broad sweep of forehead.

Before him the parched, arid land swept down and across a swale to peak in a buttress of exposed stone at the end of a long, flat ridge. Behind, Isandhlwana rose smoothly upward to its crest from the campsite. There was a feeling of immensity in the view, a hint of the breadth and depth of the African continent, an indication of the barrenness that lay to the northward.

“They’re out there somewhere,” Harry Ryan was saying.

“The sons of old Shaka himself,” Melgund added. He lifted his cup and gazed over the rim into the face of the officer who had questioned the fighting ability of the Zulus. “They can fight, all right. They’ll come, when they come, in a black wave of death. You’ll hear them before you see them. Beating on their shields in unison, chanting, like low thunder, or a train in the distance getting up steam slowly as it climbs a grade.”

“This is an empty, hard land,” the officer said.

“Empty because of the Zulu, because of Shaka. When he conquered it he depopulated it,” Ryan said.

“We have here,” the officer said, “a colonial student of African native history.”

“Might pay,” Ryan said coldly. “It’s good to know what one is getting into, isn’t it? Fight? Ask those that Shaka drove out. If a man is known by his enemies, as they say, the Zulu has a certain standing. One of the Zulu chiefs that Shaka drove out was Mzilikazi. All he did was kill hundreds of thousands to establish a new kingdom in Matabeleland.”

“We are not dealing with some superhuman Zulu,” the officer said.

“No,” Ryan returned. “You’ll be facing Cetshwayo. He kills men who merely look at him. He’ll come at you with twenty impis, two thousand warriors to the impi, forty thousand men.”

“This cheerful conversation,” the officer said, putting aside his plate, “is giving me the gripe.”

A jangle of harness and a rumble of wheels caused Jon to look up as a caisson rolled past. Behind it, with a small group of mounted officers, rode Colonel A. W. Durnford, bush hat-brim cocked, non-regulation in uniform; he was the officer left in command of the encampment by Lord Chelmsford. He carried himself with a confidence that made Jon forget about Harry Ryan’s pessimistic appraisal. Jon, too, found it hard to believe that natives armed with shields and spears would dare face sixteen hundred British soldiers and twenty-five hundred Africans.

Down the slope, soldiers were filing slowly past steaming kettles, getting their morning porridge. John could recognize most of the men in his section, although he had been with the army for only a short time. He was proud of the way the men had accepted him, in spite of his lack of experience. Some of them were twice his age, men who had been hardened in battle in the Crimea and in India, men who had been “a-serving of the Queen” before the colonel, Jon’s grandfather, had arranged his entrance to Sandhurst, the military college that produced the majority of young officers for Britain’s far-flung colonial armies.

During Jon’s eight years in England, his often provincial thinking had been altered. He was in fact and in his heart still Australian but, without being overtly arrogant about it, was more cosmopolitan in his views than, for example, either Harry Ryan or Andy Melgund, and decidedly more so than his stepfather, Marcus Fisher, whose name never entered Jon’s mind without a hint of distaste. Although Marcus Fisher had had a brief military career, Jon had almost certainly not chosen military life because of his stepfather. Fisher’s military service was shadowed by shame, tainted with cowardice. Fisher had become a wealthy and politically powerful man, but he had never succeeded in gaining Jon’s admiration. In Australia, Jon could have lived a life of ease and comfort, but he would have been living on Marcus Fisher’s money. He wanted nothing from Fisher, and now he was content with the army. Here, in the service of the Queen, he would make his mark.

He anticipated the coming of the Zulu with a mixture of apprehension and exhilaration. A young officer had to be seasoned by battle, had to inhale the fumes of the guns, had to fight bravely and, if possible—if the enemy offered the coveted opportunity—with distinction. As Harry Ryan had said, a warrior is judged not only by the men he has killed, but by the quality, the bravery, of his fallen enemies. Jon half prayed that the Zulu would be brave, that the warriors would come in their thousands, for then he would, God willing, be given the opportunity to distinguish himself, and from that beginning many doors would be opened to him.

At first no one in the camp noticed the sound. It came as a distant hint of thunder and faded. Men were still queueing for their breakfast. In the officer’s open mess men were still eating. When the sound came again, seeming to surge up from the rolling hills, directionless, Jon cocked his head and remembered Harry Ryan’s words. Indeed, the sound was like that of a distant train struggling uphill, rising and falling with distance. Others heard it now, and the low murmur of voices was hushed.

A closer sound drew Jon’s attention. A red-coated rider burst up over a rise, spurring hard. Dust flowered upward from the hooves of the labouring horse. The rider was waving one arm, shouting something unheard in the distance as men turned to watch.

Jon’s heart leaped as he first caught the meaning of the rider’s shouts.

“Well,” Harry Ryan said, calmly finishing off the last of his breakfast, “speak of the devil.”

The keen, silvery voice of a bugle galvanized the entire camp into frenzied motion. Men grabbed kit and weapons, jammed on helmets, saw to their neatness as they fell into their assigned positions in order of rank. Officers and sergeants bellowed orders.

“I say,” an officer touched his elbow, “Jon, old boy, will you please look up a private or two to guard the food until we get back? I haven’t finished my breakfast, you know.”

‘You might have to eat on the run for a while,” Andy Melgund put in.

“Not likely,” the officer said. “We’ve had these scurries of false alarm before.” The man was off, and after quickly rounding up a commissary private to guard the mess tent, Jon hurried to his own company, taking in the scene as he trotted down the slope.

It was, in addition to being his first battle alert, a magnificent show to behold, the Queen’s might on parade: rank on rank of red coats, crossed by gleaming white webbing and belts; lines of white helmets and shouldered rifles as orderly and as straight as a new picket fence. The distant sound, that slow moving, huffing train, had ceased.

Jon was in position and checking his own gear when the enemy showed himself, and with a suddenness that made his heart leap. Beyond the distant swale bodies sprang up as if from the ground itself, arrayed in a straight line of black just beyond the reach of the British front rank’s Martini-Henrys.

“Interesting beggars,” said Captain Harper Bell, Jon’s immediate superior and a seasoned India hand. He was old enough to be Jon’s father.

Interesting they were—fascinating. The Zulu warriors seemed to be of uniform size and carried shields made distinctive each from the other by various patterns. Leggings of feathers covered their black skin at the ankles.

“They’ll put on a show for us now,” Bell said. “They’ll posture a bit to show us how virile they are.”

Almost immediately the Zulus began to beat on their shields rhythmically. A sound of deep-voiced humming came across the parched grass that separated the ready and waiting redcoats from the black wave that had sprung up from a deep ravine. Black warriors leaped forward, brandishing their short, iron-tipped spears, the Zulu assegai, reported to have been developed by the mighty Shaka for hand to hand fighting.

“That will be the head of the buffalo,” Bell said. “They’re taunting us, trying to get us to move against the head so that the horns of the buffalo can then strike us on either flank. They’re quite predictable, you see. That small force to our front is the head of a fighting bull buffalo. There and there”—he pointed to either side of the encampment—“will be equal and larger forces—the horns—and behind the head there will be the main body, the loins of the beast. We’re supposed to charge the head, and then, with our attention engaged, the horns would sweep in from either side to engulf us, while the loins, the main body, move forward over the fallen bodies of the head.”

Although Colonel Durnford was not in sight at the moment, discipline was splendid. The rows of red-coated soldiers moved into position swiftly to form firing squares. Jon’s company was deployed at right angles to the ranks opposing the visible Zulus; somewhat to his disappointment, he was facing nothing more than sun-seared, dead grass on a descending slope.

With a deep-throated droning, a chant that sounded like a mispronounced, repetitive use of the name for the tribe, the head of the buffalo charged, with black warriors seeming to flow effortlessly across the distance separating the two armies. At one hundred yards, Martini-Henrys spoke en masse as the front rank of redcoats fired, then dropped to their knees to reload while the rank behind them fired over their heads.

The Zulu died by the score, great swaths of emptiness temporarily parting the black wave sweeping toward the camp. Still they came, pouring up from the concealing ravine in their hundreds, their white feather leggings flashing in the sun, contrasting with their gleaming black skin. Jon was beginning to fear that his company would not even have a chance to fire. The black horde swarmed onward to die, to pile body atop body as they came in range of the deadly marksmanship of the ranks. Then Zulus materialized to Jon’s front, and there were more targets than there were rifles; his ears were quickly numbed as the company’s weapons rang out in concerted volleys. The horns of the buffalo were closing on the flanks. There was a stench of sulphur, a roar of sound, the throaty humming of the swiftly gliding warriors who now numbered in the thousands and sped toward the British ranks from three sides.

Hearing the rattle of gear behind him, Jon turned his head to see an officer moving black troops into a supporting position to the rear of the ranks facing the charging head of the buffalo.

“Ammunition,” a voice bellowed over the din of the rifles. Men scuttled forward carrying containers of bullets. Jon walked behind the ranks, his pistol in hand, observing the marksmanship of his men. They were good, as cool as could be, firing and loading with a competency that was building a low mound of black bodies all along their front.

“Ammunition,” bellowed a sergeant. Captain Bell was standing near Jon.

“Where are the bloody ammo bearers?” Bell shouted.

Zulu warriors vaulted over their piles of dead, and now, before the withering fire of the company stopped the bravest of them, they were near enough for Jon to see that they wore shell or teeth necklaces and odd little crownlike circlets atop their heads. He could see the contorted, shouting mouths, the gleaming white teeth. An assegai flew, and just to his front a man shouted in surprised agony and crumpled, the wicked spear buried deep in his stomach. Jon raised his pistol, fired through the gap in the line, and saw a Zulu warrior fall. It occurred to him vaguely that he had actually killed a man.

“Where’s the bleedin’ ammo?” a sergeant bellowed.

The ammunition had not been wasted. By Jon’s judgment, a surprisingly large ratio of hits had been made. There were simply too many Zulus, Zulus by the thousands. How many had Harry Ryan said? Forty thousand? Twenty impis? It seemed to Jon that a full half of that number were pouring toward his company. He jumped when Captain Bell yelled in his ear.

“Fisher, to the rear! See what’s holding up the bloody ammunition.”

He ran through what seemed to be chaos but what was, actually, well-coordinated activity. Companies of men, black and white, were being moved to more advantageous firing positions. He caught a glimpse of Colonel Durnford on his fine horse, a pistol in hand. Behind him the head of the buffalo had swarmed through the intense fire to close on the red ranks, and he heard an agonized scream as a man died. Powder smoke obscured the scene. He ran full tilt into a bellowing sergeant and didn’t stop to apologize as the man cursed and went on his way. From a distance a bugler blew a call that was carried away in the tumult. He ran past a surgeon’s wagon. Wounded men were lying on the ground. His foot splashed into a puddle of blood, and he regained his balance to run on.

When he reached the ammunition wagons he skidded to a halt. A line of angry, cursing men was yelling to the quartermaster sergeant on the wagon to hurry, to forget the bleedin’ formality and toss down a box of ammo.

“This ammunition is crown property,” the quartermaster sergeant yelled back, as Jon looked on incredulously. “Only those authorized to draw ammunition will receive ammunition.”

Angry men closed in on the wagon. Jon saw, at a distance of perhaps a hundred yards, some of the Australian sutlers’ vehicles, recognized one as an ammunition wagon, and ran toward it. He would save time that way, instead of trying to fight his way to the quartermaster wagon through the crowd.

In the brief time it took for him to run the distance, the firing behind him had grown sporadic. He turned his head for a quick look and couldn’t believe his eyes. Zulus had overrun the forward positions and were pouring into the square. He ran on and reached the wagon to see that Harry Ryan was on the driver’s seat, urging the team of oxen into motion.

“Harry!” he yelled.

Ryan pulled back on the reins.

“Ammunition,” Jon gasped.

“Surely the quartermasters can’t be out,” Ryan said.

“Ammunition, damn you,” Jon yelled, ripping at the canvas flap at the rear of the wagon. Andy Melgund appeared at his side and helped him open the flap. The ammunition was packed for transport in sturdy boxes, each with a tightly fastened lid reinforced by steel bands. Jon half ripped off one of his fingernails as he struggled to open a crate.

“You’re a bit late,” Harry Ryan called back from his seat.

“Give me a hand,” Jon said. “Help me carry—”

“Look behind you, man,” Melgund said.

“So much for our noble black allies,” Ryan said.

A section of the square held by native troops had disintegrated. The Zulus were pouring in, using their short thrusting spears with deadly effectiveness. Jon looked quickly toward the position of his company and, to his despair, saw that only a few rifles were firing. They were out of ammunition. Bayonets parried assegais as the fight became hand to hand.

“Hurry, man,” Jon shouted, still wrestling to open a crate of ammunition.

The wave of black death rolled past the disintegrating ranks of British, and the entire encampment was a melee of struggling men. Dust and gun smoke obscured Jon’s vision.

“It is time, Lieutenant, that we exercised the better part of valour and got the hell out of here,” Harry Ryan said.

“How can you think of saving your precious merchandise at a time like this?” Jon yelled in desperation.

“Actually, I’m thinking more of saving my precious skin,” Ryan called back. “It happens that we can move faster and further by wagon than by foot. Are you coming?”

“I have to get back,” Jon said, seizing a heavy crate and starting to stagger off. Melgund pushed the crate off Jon’s shoulder. It smashed to the ground intact.

“Be sensible, man,” Ryan called. “Chelmsford did this. It’s not your doing. Chelmsford did it when he split his forces in the face of a forty-thousand-man army.”

“My company—” Jon was frantic.

“They’re dead, or dying,” Melgund said. “There’ll be another chance for you to face old Cetshwayo.”

Jon bent and tried to pick up the crate of ammunition. The cries of dying men rang in his ears. The shouts of Zulu triumph were bitter, harsh music. He didn’t see Melgund bring his fist up from the height of his thigh, didn’t even feel the impact as the fist contacted his chin. He felt only a ringing sensation and then blackness.

There was a muted rumbling in his ears. He tried to move and his head pounded. He opened one eye. He was being bounced around atop a layer of ammunition crates inside a wagon. He clasped his aching head and jaw and crawled forward. The wagon was moving over rough ground, the team of a half dozen yoked oxen trotting heavily. Harry Ryan and Andy Melgund were on the driver’s seat, Melgund clutching a rifle.

“Welcome back, old boy,” Ryan said.

“If you have a slight headache,” Melgund said, “consider yourself fortunate to have a head to ache.”

“Where are we?” Jon asked.

“Three hours on the way to the Buffalo River,” Ryan said, “where, God willing, there’ll be a few redcoats to hold back the Zulu who are, quite surely, following our tracks.”

“My men—”

“Jon,” Melgund said, ‘they’re gone.”

“All of them, my God?”

“All of them. We had one last look back from the top of a rise. The Zulu were looting. They’ll have quite a few rifles next time you meet them.”

“All of them?” Jon repeated the question hollowly, unable to believe the answer.

“There they are,” Melgund said. He was standing up, looking back over the covered top. “Just coming over that ridge. At least a hundred and moving fast.”

“I’d trade the whole dozen of these damn cows for one fast horse,” Ryan said.

“Three fast horses, if you please,” Melgund returned. “Perhaps, if you ask these cows sweetly, they’ll actually break into a run.”

“Not likely,” Ryan said.

“If my memory serves me correctly,” Melgund said, “the river is just beyond that next rise. Perhaps if we run for it?”

“A Zulu warrior can run fifty miles in a day and fight an engagement at the end of the run,” Ryan said, tight-lipped.

Melgund had no reply.

“The quartermaster wouldn’t release ammunition,” Jon said, remembering.

“They’ll send a salvage team to Isandhlwana to pick up the brass casings,” Ryan said. “And someone will be held to account for every round, for every casing.”

“They could have held,” Jon said. “They could have held if they’d had ammunition.”

“Cetshwayo didn’t commit his main forces,” Ryan said. “The loins of the buffalo, the main body, was not even in action. If Chelmsford hadn’t split his forces, perhaps his entire thirteen thousand could have held—if the natives hadn’t broken as they did back there.”

“There it is!” Melgund said, as the wagon breasted the ridge and the waters of the Buffalo River became visible down the slope.

“Bloody hell,” Ryan said. “Cetshwayo split his forces as well.”

Across the river, on the far side of the drift, a stockaded house was being besieged by a horde of Zulu warriors. An outbuilding was burning. The sound of scattered gunfire came to their ears.

“We can get across the drift and sneak past them,” Melgund said.

“Sneak? With a dozen oxen and a wagon with squeaking wheels?”

“It’s something to talk about,” Melgund said.

“There!” Jon pointed.

A small force of horsemen was riding hard up the far bank of the Buffalo. As they came near the stockaded buildings, their guns began to make white puffs, and the sound of the concussions came a second or so later.

“No worries, mate,” Ryan said. “Her Majesty’s brave bluejackets have come to our rescue. Looks like some of the naval brigade.”

The heavily laden wagon was bounding down the rough track to the river. “That lot to our rear is gaining,” Melgund said.

“Could you just clamber back in the wagon and pot a few of them?” Ryan asked.

“I’m not much of a shot.” Melgund grabbed a rifle from behind the seat. “But I’ll try.”

“Here—let me.” Jon took the rifle and quickly crawled back. He opened the rear flap. The Zulus were running smoothly and seemingly tirelessly, overtaking the wagon. He targeted the leader, a tall, well-muscled warrior, and saw the man’s life go out of him in an instant as he ran nose-on into a bullet. He dropped four more in short order, reloading smoothly and quickly, and then the oxen were splashing into the shallow drift. The pursuers fell back out of range of his rifle. The wagon splashed through the water, but as the oxen struggled up the far bank, a rear wheel dropped into a rocky hole with a jar. Jon heard a crack of splintering wood as spokes gave way. He had to catch himself to keep from falling against the canvas side of the wagon.

“Perhaps we can talk Her Majesty’s lads out of some horses,” Ryan was saying as Jon jumped out of the rear of the wagon and checked to be sure the Zulus were not crossing. He walked through the last few feet of shallow water to the bank.

“Speaking of which,” Melgund said, as horsemen pounded toward them from the direction of the smoking stockade.

“Ahoy, there!” Ryan called out, then turned to his friend. “Limejuicers it is.”

A surprisingly neat-looking naval officer wearing the insignia of an ensign pulled his horse up at the head of the panting team of oxen. “Have you come from Lord Chelmsford?” he asked, with a distinctive Scottish accent.

“By now Lord Chelmsford is probably dead,” Ryan said, “along with those he sacrificed at Isandhlwana.”

“What’s that?” the young ensign demanded.

“If it’s all the same to you, young sir,” Ryan said, “I’ll answer your questions later.” He nodded toward the far side of the river. Zulu warriors were streaming into the shallows in silence, shields hiding all but their faces, assegais at the ready.

The young ensign began to shout orders. His force dismounted and took firing positions. Soon the Buffalo River was running red, as Zulu warriors fell before the expert marksmanship of the naval detachment. Jon positioned himself with a supply of ammunition close at hand and fired from a kneeling position. The Zulus in the river were being reinforced by others who had come leaping down the slope. They were dying by the dozen in the shallow water, but their numbers were being continuously replenished.

“Admiral,” Harry Ryan said, tapping the young ensign on the shoulder, “perhaps we might consider making a run for it. Three of your horses could carry double.”

“There’s only one problem with that approach,” the ensign replied. “When we rode in here we were being chased by, I’d say, roughly three hundred of those fellows.”

“And now they’re between us and the east?” Ryan asked.

“I’d say not more than ten minutes behind us.”

“Not any longer, sir,” a sailor said, pointing.

From the sparse greenery that bordered the river a line of Zulu warriors burst forth in silence, running toward the group on the riverbank. A shout came from the warriors who were still trying to ford the river.

“Alternate men, reverse your field of fire,” the ensign ordered.

Half the sailors turned and began to fire on the Zulu force that had them trapped now, on the river’s bank. The rifle fire took a toll, but the Zulus came on. Half a dozen of them reached the group, assegais protruding from behind the shields. Without orders the sailors leaped to meet the attack with bayonets. The young ensign was in the lead, wielding a cutlass with practised skill and a great deal of power. Already three Zulu warriors lay dead from the ensign’s curved blade, but a half dozen others were closing on him as Jon raised his rifle, ignoring the Zulus approaching from across the water, and lowered the odds against the ensign.

“Well, gentlemen, we’re in for it,” Ryan said. There was no time left to reload. Jon emptied his service revolver, then threw it down and leaped to his feet, bayonet outthrust, to sneak the cold steel past a shield and feel it enter human flesh. He jerked the weapon back just in time to parry an assegai thrust. At his side Andy Melgund grunted, as if in effort, and out of the corner of his eyes Jon saw him fall, saw blood springing up from a gaping wound to the stomach. With a wild swing of his rifle butt he killed the assegai-wielding warrior.

The young ensign was backing toward Jon. They were surrounded by Zulus. They turned back to back, the ensign with his cutlass, Jon with his bayoneted rifle. At least five of the sailors and Melgund were down. Harry Ryan had formed a small square with the remaining sailors.

“Who is it I am about to die with?” Jon asked, as he jerked his bayonet from a Zulu’s chest.

“Samuel Gordon, at your service, sir,” the ensign said.

“Pleasure, Mr. Gordon,” Jon said. He settled into the grim reality of taking as many Zulus as possible with him. He had never liked the bayonet; he thought it was a fiendish weapon, knew in his heart that it was not all that different from a Zulu assegai, and his flesh crawled at the thought of the penetration of that pointed steel blade into his own body. His vision was clouded with effort and with the sweat that ran into his eyes. An assegai bounced off his helmet and sent it flying, leaving him bareheaded. He had a brief impression of sun, glaring, hot, pitiless. He thrust and then slashed, the blade of his bayonet opening the throat of a Zulu with a handsome, young face. Blood spurted onto the front of his coat, a different shade of red. He knew that he was near death, and he began to imagine that he heard the guns of his company, the reassuring, deadly, sharp reports of rifles. A powerful Zulu in full manhood threw himself toward him, ran head on into the bayonet, and the blade stuck, embedded in bone. He tugged, put his foot on the fallen man’s ribs and kicked. He was helpless, weaponless. He could hear the rifle fire, closer now, and looked up to see the remaining Zulus running for the river as a full company of Natal Light Horse, a Boer unit, came riding down the riverbank spreading swift death before them.

Andy Melgund was dead. Harry Ryan had a deep assegai slash across his chest. Jon removed his jacket, which was soaked with Zulu blood, and threw it in the river. It floated for a long time as he watched it drift away.

Benjamin Disraeli, first minister of Her Majesty’s cabinet, stood before the Parliament, his head bowed. The news from Natal Colony had been the last straw to topple his uneasy government.

“Who are these Zulus?” he asked, his usually vibrant voice muted so that the back benchers had difficulty in hearing him. “Who are these remarkable people who convert our bishops and who, on this day, have put an end to a great dynasty?”