The Ballantyne Series - 03 - The Angels Weep by Wilbur Smith

Author:Wilbur Smith
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Historical Fiction
ISBN: 9780330472869
Published: 2008-09-03T23:00:00+00:00

General Mungo St John had been awakened in the middle of the night. In his nightshirt he had listened to the hysterical outpourings of a coloured servant who had escaped from the trading-store on the Ten-Mile Drift. It was a wild tale of slaughter and burning, and the man’s breath smelled of good Cape brandy.

‘He’s drunk,’ said Mungo St John flatly. ‘Take him away, and give him a good thrashing.’

The first white man got into town three hours before dawn. He had been stabbed through the thigh and his left arm was broken in two places by blows from a knobkerrie. He was clinging to his horse’s neck with his good arm.

‘The Matabele are out!’ he screamed. ‘They are burning the farms—’ and he slid out of the saddle in a dead faint.

By first light there were fifty wagons formed into a laager in the market square; without oxen to draw them, they had been manhandled into position. All the town’s women and children had been brought into the laager and put to work making bandages, reloading ammunition, and baking hard bread against a siege. The few able-bodied men that Doctor Jameson had not taken with him into captivity in the Transvaal were swiftly formed into troops, and horses and rifles were found for those who lacked them.

In the midst of the bustle and confusion, Mungo St John had commandeered a fast open coach with a coloured driver, picked out the most likely and best mounted troop of horsemen, and using his authority as acting Administrator given them the order.

‘Follow me!’

Now he reined in on the crest of the hills above Khami Mission, at the point where the track was narrowest and the tall yellow grass and the forest hemmed it in like a wall on each side, and he shaded his single eye.

‘Thank God!’ he whispered. The thatched roofs of the Mission that he expected to see billowing with smoke and flame stood serenely in the quiet green valley beyond.

The horses were sweating and blowing from the pull up the hills, and the coach had lagged two hundred paces behind Mungo. As soon as it came up, without giving a moment’s rest to the mules, Mungo shouted, ‘Troop, forward!’ and spurred away down the track, with his troopers clattering behind him.

Robyn St John came out of the thatched rondavel that was her laboratory, and as soon as she recognized the man that led the column, she placed her hands upon her boyish hips and lifted her chin angrily.

‘What is the meaning of this intrusion, sir?’ she demanded.

‘Madam, the Matabele tribe is in full rebellion. They are murdering women and children, burning the homesteads.’

Robyn took a step backwards protectively, for Robert had come pale-faced from the clinic to hang onto her skirts.

‘I have come to take you and your children to safety.’

‘The Matabele are my friends,’ said Robyn. ‘I have nothing to fear from them. This is my home. I do not intend leaving it.’

‘I do not have time to

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