Company Of Spears

‘I can’t help it,’ said Fairbrother, dabbing away some of the dried blood about the wound, though fresh soon followed. ‘And it’s as well, since he’d now be screaming like a hyena.’ He turned. ‘Johnson, would you fetch me a small spoon, please.’

Johnson brought a silver teaspoon, which he had had since progging in Vitoria a dozen years before.

Hervey watched as Fairbrother began easing it into the wound, as carefully as he might spoon for the stone in a ripe plum.

‘I think I have it.’

Indeed, out came the one-ounce ball with not a great deal more trouble than the stone from the fruit, and clean with it.

‘I am all astonishment, Fairbrother. I never saw anything as neat!’

Fairbrother sighed. ‘I confess it has been some time, but it was a sight easier than anything I had to do with the Royal Africans.’

‘You were not their surgeon?’

‘I assisted the surgeon on many an occasion. He was in want of it, poor man. Johnson, do you have needle and thread?’

When, an hour later, they were stood down and attuning to the sounds of the night, just as their eyes had by degrees become accustomed to the black dark, Hervey and Fairbrother sat under the milkwood once more.

‘You did not say before, directly, if you thought the Xhosa would attack, only that they did not fear the night.’

Fairbrother replied extra softly, just as Hervey had spoken. ‘Be thankful they are not Zulu. They would now be bringing on reinforcements, scenting blood. The Xhosa are more likely to lie up, taking their ease. They chanced with us back at the Gwalana, and we beat them off. They still have their cattle, though; and we should not forget that it was cattle they came for. Neither do they guard their honour as jealously as the Zulu: they will not feel bound to avenge their defeat. In that they are most pragmatical.’

‘They’ll not feel bound to recover a fellow tribesman?’

‘Not obliged, no. Not unless he’s of some consequence; and I saw nothing about ours that marked him thus.’

The brandy was now filling their mess tins again, serving a therapeutic purpose as welcome as it would have been to the Xhosa had he woken. Hervey settled back against the gnarled trunk of the milkwood and pushed his legs out straight. ‘It occurs to me the Xhosa’s chief – Gaika – might ponder with advantage on the return of one of his tribesmen who has been tended well, especially one who has sought to steal cattle and shoot one of the King’s men. If he lives, it will only be because of your address.’

‘And your decision that he should not be abandoned, or summarily executed. You do intend that he stands trial for shooting a redcoat? That, surely, is the landdrost’s business.’

Hervey crossed his legs. ‘He must stand trial, well enough. But it were better that it were Gaika’s punishment and not ours. It would at least be the better seen to be done.’

‘You may be right, Hervey. But you know, the Xhosa call us omasiza mbulala: “the people who rescue, then kill”. It began when Somerset made demands on the Xhosa in return for our protection.’

Hervey had well understood the difference between Britain in India and Britain in the Cape Colony before leaving England; but perforce in the abstract. The purpose of the British in India, to be precise the ‘Honourable Company of Merchants of England trading to the East Indies’, was just that – trade. Its crab-like expansion from the coastal factories of Malabar, Coromandel and the mouth of the Ganges was not so much intentional as consequential. The directors of the company had no wish for the expense of campaigning and conquest, even where the territory acquired yielded riches more than enough to compensate: they had wanted the prosperity of what they understood best – commerce. They did not wish for war, but if native adventurists would challenge their right to their perfectly legal business, then the Court of Directors would not flinch from opposing them. They had not tried to settle India, however. On the contrary, outside the cantonments the Company had been strict in discouraging the activity of missionaries and others who would try to turn the native population from its own ways. Land was not given to white-faced immigrants; and those who had title to it, or even nomadic rights to range, were not displaced and forbidden to set foot on the land again. Not that Hervey had observed perfect peace in the one and nothing but war in the other; both places seemed to him just as hostile.