The covenant - James A. Michener [377]
'Does she speak specifically against us?' Saltwood asked. 'Never heard her say as much. She has only a generic enemy, but it's got to be us.'
'She's not preaching armed rebellion?'
'The spirits are going to handle that end of it. But of course, the living Xhosa must be prepared to follow them, so I suppose that in the end we must expect armed invasion.'
'Good God,' the new district officer said.
'Do you take it that seriously?' one of the officials asked Saltwood. 'I do. You must remember, gentlemen, that these men you're talking about have been fighting us for nearly half a century. They've learned all the tricks. They're brave, and when their prophets preach a holy war they can become quite fanatical. I think we're in for trouble.'
Saltwood's perceptive observation about blended heroism and fanaticism gained such wide circulation that the government asked him to see what he could do to minimize or even halt the cattle killing, and he left Grahamstown with two Xhosa men who worked for him at De Kraal to enter the regions where Nongqause's preachments were having their strongest effect.
He was not prepared for what he saw. Entire fields lay covered with dead animals, and anyone who knew the Xhosa had to be appalled at this wanton sacrifice. On two different occasions his Xhosa companions broke into tears at the sheer waste, but when Saltwood talked with the men who had done the killing, he found them in a state of euphoriasmiling, happy, marking time till the eighteenth of February when every dead animal would be returned a hundredfold.
'Tell them it cannot happen,' Saltwood urged his men, but when they endeavored to persuade the other Xhosa not to kill any more cattle, the tribesmen smiled benignly and said, 'You wouldn't understand,' and the slaughter continued.
At the end of five days Saltwood had seen more than twenty thousand dead animals, and he sent one of his companions running back to Grahamstown with this brief message: 'The rumors we heard were one-tenth of the story. I truly fear that all cattle may be slain and that thousands of people will face starvation. Begin to assemble foodstuffs immediately.'
Distraught, uncertain, he decided to seek out a village where one of his former workers lived, a man named Mpedi, fine and trustworthy, hoping to use him as a wedge into the heart of the problem. But when he reached Mpedi's hut he found the man, a sensible fellow in his sixties, mesmerized by the glorious thing that was about to happen: 'Baas, you cannot know what we shall be doing. All the great chiefs coming back to help us. A hundred ... a thousand warriors waiting in the rivers to rise up and lead us into our inheritance.'
'Mpedi, wake up!' Saltwood begged. 'Do you think your dead cattle will be replaced? Do you think food will come from the sky?'
'It will come, Baas.'
'Can't you see that you're about to starve?'
'There will be food for all, Baas.'
'Goddamnit!' Saltwood raged. 'Open your eyes!'
'They are open, Baas. And on the eighteenth of February yours will be opened, too.'
Saltwood shook his old herdsman, a man who loved cattle. 'Mpedi, if you kill the rest of your cattle, you're going to starve.'
'Baas,' the herdsman said with deep affection, 'I want you to leave this village and go back across the Great Fish, where you belong. Go to De Kraal and get your family. Hurry to Port Elizabeth and get aboard a ship and go away. Because the risen chiefs are going to march right to headquarters and kill all the white people who have stolen our land from us. I don't want you to die, Baas, because you've been a good man to us.'
Saltwood was so shaken by his inability to bring sense into the discussion that he tried a new tack: 'Mpedi, I'm not here as your friend. Remember how many times I went out on commando against you men.'
'Ah!' the herdsman said with a broad smile. 'That was war, Baas. I shoot you. You shoot