the shock of an icy plunge. But the lore of nature had taught him that there is no enduring courage without fear and its conquest. As he mounted the dappled horse, a last low-pitched humming was lost in the rustling of grass. The mighty army crouched together and quietly murmured its battle-cry.
“u-Suthu! u-Suthu!”
Putting spurs to the grey mare, its rider came jauntily down the slope like a returning scout, recrossed the plain, and passed through the outer picket-line into the 24th Foot’s quiet camp. No one barred his way. It was enough that he wore the dark serge patrol-jacket and cord breeches of the Volunteers, a wide-awake hat, broad-brimmed with a silk band. No Volunteer would choose to ride the veldt by darkness. Where else could a man in such clothes come from but a night patrol? The picket captain had checked the horsemen of a patrol out from the camp before dusk. Many a rider now passed through the forward line of the 24th Regiment of Foot with less notice taken of him than if he had been a stray dog from a deserted kraal.
For a moment more, the plain was silent. The first chant from the tribes had been too deep in the ravine to carry this far. The returning horseman dismounted, walked his horse past the headquarters tents, and tethered the mare to its rail. So far as the smartly uniformed imperial riflemen were concerned, he might not exist. Yet the plan he had proposed to his confederates was now unfolding as effortlessly as a flag in the wind.
He let his loitering footsteps carry him past the tent of Colonel Henry Pulleine of the 24th Foot. Pulleine was the only man with the rank to be camp-commander in Lord Chelmsford’s absence. His Natal Volunteers supplementing the regular infantry consisted of mercenaries, freebooters, and bounty-hunters. They were apt to be known for indiscipline and brutality. Their commanders despised a gentleman like Pulleine as instinctively as he deplored them. With a facetious irony, they called themselves “Pulleine’s Lambs.”
The flap of the colonel’s tent was open by this hour of the morning, revealing his stocky, moustached figure as he turned from a long mirror. He had been standing before it while his batman adjusted the scarlet tunic with its gold-fringed epaulettes. The servant executed a running backward bow and retrieved Henry Pulleine’s white pith helmet from its place on a chest of drawers. A sword hilt glittered like new silver as the colonel buckled on his white belt. Equipped for duty, he turned to the opening of the canvas.
Before walking forward, he had picked up several company reports laid on a trestle table by his adjutant. Now he put them down again. A blond giant in the regular scarlet and blue of the 24th Foot, his peaked cap clasped under his arm, had pushed before him.
“Sar’ Major Tindal, sir. Permission to report loss of mess equipment, sir!”
“Loss?” Pulleine glanced at him, not understanding. He turned back and looked down at the company commanders’ reports on his desk again but appeared to find no explanation there.
The anonymous horseman kept his inconspicuous distance from the conversation. He made a convincing play of piercing a further hole in his belt with an awl from his knapsack, maintaining a frown of concentration. It surprised him that they had noticed their loss already. Not a syllable of the words between the two men escaped him. Pulleine shook his head.
“Very well, sergeant-major. Loss of what?”
Tindal was quiet and confidential. Like many of his regiment, his voice retained the low lilt of his Welsh valley.
“Owain Glyndwr, sir. Missing from the mess-tent, sir.”
“Nonsense. What the devil would anyone want with him?”
As even the Natal Volunteers knew by now, Owain Glyndwr was a piece of regimental mythology, the mummified head of an Abyssinian sharpshooter, brought back as a trophy after the storming of Magdala in 1867. Pickled by the surgeon-major, it had become an object of veneration to younger officers in the boisterous aftermath of regimental guest-nights.
“Not nonsense, sir,” said Tindal quickly. “He’s gone. And Dai Morgan do say someone was creeping about last night when Mr. Pope’s dogs did bark. Perhaps a native spy was out in the hills, sir.”
Pulleine looked up and scrutinised the sergeant-major a moment longer before replying.
“Sar’ Major! Inform Private Morgan and anyone else to whom it may apply that the purpose of this expedition is to repulse a Zulu invasion of the province of Natal. I will not have any officer or batman