The covenant - James A. Michener [366]
'Shoot them,' Pretorius barked, turning away from the scene of execution.
Bronk and his men assumed position. Their gunfire splattered, and the two blacks fell. Then the miracle happened. Councillor Dambuza, only slightly wounded, rose to his feet.
'He is spared,' someone shouted. 'God has saved him for his courage.'
'Reload,' Bronk shouted.
Tjaart van Doorn said not a word as Dambuza faced the firing squad for a second time, but he did think of a grim day long ago at a place called Slagter's Nek, and in his mind he saw a scrawny English missionary, brother to his friend in Grahamstown, pleading for mercy for men whom God had reprieved when the ropes at their necks broke.
'Fire!' Bronk shouted, and this time the aim of the executioners was sure.
Within months Dingane himself was dead, assassinated perhaps at the instigation of his brother Mpande, who ascended the throne with the help of his Boer allies. It had been Dingane's fate to wrest the kingdom from his half brother Shaka at the time in history when confrontation with a new and powerful force was inescapable, and he had never had a glimmer as to how adjustments should be made. He was an evil, pitiful man; he was also a powerful, wise and cunning manipulator; and the best that can be said of him is that his errors did not destroy the Zulu people. On the ashes of Dingane's Kraal a mighty nation would arise, powerful enough within a few decades to challenge the British Empire, and within a century to contest with the Boer nation for the leadership of southern Africa.
When victory was complete, Tjaart studied the situation carefully; desperately he wished that Lukas de Groot were still alive so that he might compare assessments with that sage farmer, for he needed help. He also missed Jakoba, whose stubborn advice had always been so sensible; she would have been a good one to talk with, but her successor, Aletta, was quite hopeless. Whatever Tjaart elected to do suited her; her principal concern was finding enough cloth and stiffeners to make a sunbonnet large enough to keep the sun's rays from her face, which she hoped to keep as fair as possible.
Once, in dismay, Tjaart said, 'Aletta, I think we ought to go back over the mountains to land we know. I don't like it here. Sooner or later the English are going to come at us . . .'
'That's a good idea,' Aletta agreed, but when he took the first steps to effectuate the plan, she whimpered, 'I wouldn't want to carry our wagon back up those cliffs.' He did not remind her that she had carried precious little down, but he was confused by her vacillations, and one day he asked, 'Aletta, where would you like to spend the rest of your life?'
The bluntness of this question startled her, for she had not reached the age when the phrase 'the rest of your life' had any meaning; it was then that she awakened fully to the fact that she was married to a man over fifty years old and that he had only a limited number of years remaining. But where would she like to live? 'Cape Town,' she said honestly, whereupon he ended the discussion.
He had about decided to stay in Natal with General Pretorius, whom he admired immensely, when two trivial things intervened: an English merchant came up from Port Natal with news that an English force would soon be arriving to take the port under their command; and young Paulus, now a tall and vigorous lad, said casually, 'I would like to go hunting lions.' And the vision of an untrammeled veld came back to haunt Tjaart. He appreciated Natal, especially these good fields along the Tugela River, but like many Voortrekkers, once he had seen the vast open sweep of the Transvaal, all other land seemed puny. He, too, longed to see lions and rhinoceroses and perhaps the sable antelope. He was homesick for loneliness, and the presence of so many Boers erecting villages and towns oppressed him.
Even so, Aletta's obvious preference for the maturing life of Natal might have kept him there had not a ridiculous situation developed: one morning he was awakened by a clatter outside his tent, and