The Induna's Wife

I looked at her strangely in the firelight, for well I knew whose was the hand that directed “the stroke of Sopuza.” She went on:

“Ah, ah, Untúswa! The greatness I had destined for thee can never be thine. Thou art too faithful. I would have had thee do it – yet my heart went forth to thee, thou great, brave, honest fighter, whose spear refused to strike the sleeping one – who chose to serve a King in his downfall rather than be served as King thyself. Thou wilt never be greater than an induna thyself, and I – well, I think I shall never be greater than an induna’s wife.”

And with these words she began to spread the mats in the hut, and heaped more wood upon the fire, and saw that things were in their places. Then she came and sat beside me.

Well, what mattered further greatness? I was great enough, being high in the councils of those who, under the King, ruled the nation, and for long I sat thus in a high place, and the favour of Mpande was always over me. But I had indeed passed through strange things, even as old Gasitye had predicted I should when speaking from the ghost-cliff in the Valley of the Red Death. Yes, and even more was I destined to see, for soon the Amabuna were driven out in their turn, and the land they had seized from us was reft from them by the English. Howbeit on these we made no war, for they entered into a treaty with Mpande that the Zulu people should dwell on this side of the Tugela, and the English on the other; and this agreement they kept faithfully for a long space of time until they began to fear Cetywayo, and then – but, Nkose, about that you know, and I have already told far too long a tale for one night. Yet, it is strange that the sight of the horns of your oxen, branching through the mist, should have drawn forth not only the tale of the ghost-bull and the Valley of the Red Death, but a greater one still – even that of the downfall and death of Dingane, and the dividing of the great Zulu nation; but so it ever is with the lives of men, one thing leads on to another. And now, Nkose, I think the time has come for sleep. Sleep well, Nkose. Whau! I know not whether you will return to this country again to hear tales of its old doings of battle and of blood, of warrior-kings and sorcerers, and beasts that have the life of the ghosts of magicians within them, for I am old now, and my time is at hand for a longer sleep than that which now awaits me underneath your waggon. Nkose! Hlala gahle!

But though old Untúswa could thus turn in, and with his blanket over his head could snooze away snugly beneath the shelter of the waggon, to me slumber refused to come. The graphic tale I had just heard, the tale of the first downfall of the Zulu power told in the dead of night on the very spot whereon had been contested the fierce and determined struggle which had in effect decided the second – for it was the British success at Kambúla that rendered that at Ulundi assured – this tale, told, too, by a living actor in those stirring events of the bygone annals of a martial race, seemed to people all the surrounding waste; and looking forth, it needed no great tax on the imagination to conjure up the shades of slain warriors rising in hundreds from their common grave down yonder on the slope; and, shield and spear-armed, re-forming in wild and fantastic array of war.

And over and above such fanciful flights it was a tale to set one thinking – if one had never thought before – of the senselessness of deciding offhand the morality of this or that deed which helpeth to make history from one hard-and-fast point of view, and that point of view the British; or of stigmatising even a savage potentate as a treacherous and cruel monster, because he is not particular as to his methods when it becomes a question of preserving his nation’s rights and his nation’s greatness, what time such are threatened and invaded by Christians, whom subsequent events show to be the reverse of models of uprightness or fair dealing themselves. And it was even as old Untúswa had said: “You white people and ourselves see things differently, and I suppose it will always be so.”

Yes, it was a fitting episode in the annals of a warrior nation, that tale of fierce wars, and intrigue, and sturdy loyalty, and even of a chivalry, not exactly describable by the term “rude”; most of all, too, was it a tale essentially human, showing how the same desires and motives enkindle the same actions and their results in the heart that beats beneath a brown skin as in that which beats beneath a white one. And therein, perhaps, lay its greatest charm.