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Brave and Scared

A Novel of Blood River, 1838

History Like You've Never Heard It

Andries J. Greyling

Brave and Scared

Copyright © 2026 Andries J. Greyling. All rights reserved.

This novel is an original retelling of documented history — the Great Trek, the killing of Piet Retief's party, the killings at Weenen, and the Battle of Blood River / Slag van Bloedrivier (the Ncome), 1838. These events are in the public record and belong to no one; every sentence here is the author's own. The story is told from all sides, and where the record forks it is rendered as honest divergence, never a verdict. Scene connective tissue, interior monologue, and dialogue are invented where the record is silent, kept true to the documented frame. This is an open draft (Movement I): one voice — the Zulu youth's — is a deliberately empty seat, to be co-created with a Zulu reader rather than imagined for him.

Published by the House of Greyling.

ISBN: _--_-_- (assigned at print)

Per Ardua ad Magnum.

Contents

  • An Open Draft — Please Read This First
  • Chapter 0 — The Frame: What the Record Holds
  • Chapter 1 — The Leaving
  • Chapter 2 — The Thornfield
  • Chapter 3 — The Bay

An Open Draft — Please Read This First

Brave and Scared is being published here as an open, unfinished draft, on purpose.

This is a novel about the year around the Battle of Blood River — 1838 — told from three sides at once: a Voortrekker girl, a Zulu youth, and an English boy, all of them about seventeen, all of them frightened, none of them the monster the others were told to expect. Its entire reason to exist is that it refuses to take a side. The villain is never one of the children. The villain is the machine — fear weaponised by power — that turns frightened children into enemies, on every side, under every flag.

A book that makes that claim has a duty it cannot dodge: all three voices must be equally true, and no voice may be the author's imagining of someone else's inner life. I am an Afrikaner. The Voortrekker girl and the narrated history are mine to write. The English boy is grounded in the documented record and is a working draft. But the Zulu youth's interiority — what it felt like to be made a weapon as a boy, his pride and fear and belonging and cost — is not mine to invent alone. To write it solo would be the exact colonial move this book exists to refuse: one people speaking for another and calling it truth.

So in this draft, that voice is deliberately left open. Where his chapter would stand, you will find an empty seat and an explanation, not a ventriloquist's act. It will be written — but it will be written with a Zulu reader and co-creator, not handed down. That work is underway.

This is where you come in. If you are a Zulu reader, a historian, a descendant of any side of this story, or simply someone who can tell me where this draft rings false — I am inviting you in. Tell me what I have gotten wrong. Tell me what the record forgot. Help me make the empty seat true. There is a way to reach the press on the book's page, and there will be a named acknowledgement for every hand that shapes it.

What you are holding is Movement I — the leaving, before the breaking. It is the beginning of the book, published in the open so that the people it is about can help finish it.

Read it as what it is: brave and scared, and not yet done.

— Andries J. Greyling, Arjuna Badger Press

Chapter 0 — The Frame: What the Record Holds

This is the narrated factual frame [F]. It is the wide shot the children cannot see. It tells what the record holds — and, where the record forks, it lays the forks side by side and refuses the verdict, per the Facts law.

Here is what can be checked.

In the years after 1834, several thousand people who called themselves Afrikaners — farmers, mostly, of the eastern districts of the Cape Colony, Dutch and Huguenot and German by blood and a hundred and fifty years South African by birth — loaded what they owned onto ox-wagons and drove north, away from the only government they had ever known. They had reasons, and the reasons depended on who you asked, which is the first thing to understand about all of this: that almost nothing in it has only one true account, and that the having of two accounts is not a failure of the record but the truest thing the record contains.

The British Crown had taken the Cape from the Dutch for good in 1806, and ruled it the way an empire rules a far place it does not love — by decree from London, in a language the farmers did not speak, through courts that did not always believe a Dutchman over an Englishman or a black man over either. In 1834 the Crown abolished slavery across the empire, and the farmers who had owned slaves were paid out in paper that could only be cashed in London, which for a man on the Winterberg was the same as not being paid at all. They had lost wars on the eastern frontier and been told the losing was their own fault. They felt, in the particular way of people who have stopped being heard, that they were governed by strangers who held them in contempt.

So they left. We go, one of them wrote, to a land where we shall govern ourselves. They called it later the Great Trek, and made of it a sacred thing, and built a granite monument to its women, and that is a problem for anyone trying to see it plainly — because a thing that has been made sacred has also been made simple, and this was not simple. They were not pilgrims walking into an empty land. The land was not empty. It had never once been empty.

To the northeast, beyond the Drakensberg, in the green well-watered country that ran down to the warm sea, lay the kingdom of the Zulu. It was perhaps fifty years old as a single kingdom and it was the most formidable power in the southern half of the continent — a state built, like every state, partly by genius and partly by blood, with a standing army organised into regiments, the amabutho, that could put many thousands of disciplined men into the field faster than any European force on the subcontinent could dream of. Its king in 1837 was Dingane, who had come to the throne by killing his brother Shaka, and who watched the wagons gathering on his western marches the way any king watches armed strangers arrive at his border: as a question that would have to be answered, and answered hard.

Both of these peoples were afraid. That is the second thing to understand, and the record supports it on every side. The trekkers were afraid of a power they could not measure and did not understand. The king was afraid of a thing he understood entirely too well, because he had heard what had happened elsewhere when the wagons came and did not stop coming — had heard of the Cape itself, and what sixty years of arriving had done to the people who were there first. Fear is not an excuse for what either of them did. But it is the engine under all of it, and a history that leaves the fear out is not telling you the truth; it is selling you a side.

And at the edge of all of it, almost too small to see, there was a third presence: the Crown the trekkers were fleeing, in the form of a ragged little settlement of English hunters and traders down at the bay they called Port Natal, squatting on the king's tolerance, trading ivory, taking Zulu wives, signing their names to whatever piece of paper seemed likely to keep them alive that season — and behind them, far over the sea, the largest empire the world had yet made, which did not yet care about any of this and would, in time, come to care a great deal, and bring with it sixty years on a kind of wire and a kind of camp that even Dingane could not have imagined.

In February of 1838, a trekker leader named Piet Retief rode to the king's great place with a party of some seventy men to collect, he believed, a signed grant of land. What happened there is the hinge of everything that follows, and it is exactly the kind of event this book exists to hold honestly, because there are two accounts and both of them have evidence and the gap between them is where the whole tragedy lives. One account — the trekker account, the one carved in granite — says treachery: that the king feasted them and disarmed them and then, on a word, had them seized and dragged to the killing-hill and clubbed to death, women and servants and a child among them later, in cold blood, for no reason but a king's bad faith. The other account says something harder to carve: that a king who had watched armed strangers take land everywhere they went, who had already caught these particular strangers in what looked to him like a lie or a theft of cattle, did what a frightened sovereign does to an armed embassy he has decided is the leading edge of an invasion — struck first, and struck to the root, because he believed, perhaps rightly, that if he did not, his kingdom would go the way of the Cape.

The record does not let you choose. The record only lets you stand in the gap.

What is not in dispute is what came after. The impi went west in the weeks that followed and fell on the trekker camps strung out along the rivers below the mountains — at the place the trekkers would afterward call Weenen, which is the Dutch word for weeping — and killed several hundred people: men, and the women who could shoot as well as the men, and a great many children and servants who could not. It was a catastrophe and it was meant to be one. And it did the thing that catastrophes do: it took a journey and made it a war, and took grief and made it into a reason, and hardened something in the survivors that would have its answer, ten months later, at a river.

That river ran, before the sixteenth of December 1838, under a Zulu name: the Ncome. After that day the trekkers called it Bloedrivier — Blood River — and the name is a verdict, which is why this book will not use it as its own, because the book is not on a side. On that day a trekker commando of fewer than five hundred, drawn up behind a ring of wagons lashed together on a tongue of land between the river and a deep donga, met the charge of a Zulu army many times their number, and broke it, hour after hour, with massed gunfire against men who had only the weapons of the body and the spear. By evening the commando had lost three men wounded and none dead. The impi had lost, by the commando's own count, perhaps three thousand. The river ran red. The trekkers said God had given them the victory in answer to a vow, and built their faith on it for a century and a half. The Zulu remembered it as the day a generation of their young men was spent into rifle-fire, and built a grief on it that has no monument.

That is the frame. It is fixed, and it is documented, and where it forks this book will show you both forks and trust you to bear the weight of them.

But a frame is not a story, and a count of the dead is not the dead. Inside that fixed frame there were people, and most of them were young, and a great many of them were afraid in the particular, total way that only the young can be afraid — for whom the world ending is not a figure of speech but the literal news of the morning. This book is about three of them. It does not know their real names, because the record did not think the young worth naming unless they led or died notably. So it has given them names, and lives, and the fear they certainly had, and set them down inside the true frame to see what the count of the dead leaves out.

They were the same age. They were forged by three different machines. And not one of them, when you finally see them, will be the enemy you were promised.

Begin with the girl.

Chapter 1 — The Leaving

The horse had to be shot before breakfast, and they gave it to Marretjie because she was the one who could be trusted to do it on the first try.

She did not want it. That was the thing nobody said out loud and everybody understood: that wanting had nothing to do with it, the way wanting had nothing to do with most of what the trek asked of you. The grey gelding had gone down in the night with its foreleg folded the wrong way in an antbear hole it could not have seen in the dark, and it lay now in the grey-blue light before the sun with its neck stretched along the cold ground and its eye rolling white at her, and it had been her father's second-best horse for six years and had carried her brother Hendrik to his confirmation, and she loved it, and it had to die, and she was seventeen.

"You'll do it clean," her father said. It was not a question and it was not unkind. He had loaded the roer himself and he handed it to her with the powder already seated, and he put his hand once on the back of her neck, briefly, the nearest thing to tenderness the morning would allow, and then he went to see to the oxen because the oxen were what kept them all alive and a horse that could not stand was not. She understood the arithmetic. She had been doing the arithmetic of the trek since she was eleven and they rolled out of the Tarka with everything they owned creaking behind a span of sixteen and her mother singing a psalm to keep the small ones from crying. Poor shots went hungry. Her grandmother said it the way other grandmothers said grace. A girl who could shoot ate, and a girl who could shoot kept the others eating, and so a girl learned to shoot the way she learned to pray and to knead and to deliver a calf with her sleeves rolled to the shoulder, because the veld did not care that she was a girl, and the lion did not care, and the dawn that brought the impi — though no impi had yet come, then, in the high clean country before the mountains — the dawn would not care either.

She knelt by the grey's head. She did not let herself hurry, because hurrying was how you flinched, and a flinch was how you made a clean thing into a cruel one. She put her hand flat on the long bone of its face and felt the warmth still coming off it, the breath going in and out fast and shallow through the wide soft nostrils, and she said its name once, low, the foolish private name she had given it at nine and never told anyone, and the ear came round toward her voice. Then she set the muzzle where her father had taught her, on the cross of an imaginary line from ear to opposite eye, and she breathed out the way you breathed out to be still, and she shot it, and it was clean, and the sound rolled away flat across the veld and came back off nothing, because there was nothing out here to come back off, only grass to the round edge of the world.

She was crying before the echo died. She let herself, for exactly as long as it took to stand up, because she had learned that too — that you could have the feeling or you could fight the feeling but you could not do both and also reload, and reloading was the thing that kept you alive, so you had the feeling fast and whole and then you put it down and picked up the powder horn. By the time Hendrik came at a run, fourteen and white-faced, having heard the shot and feared it was people, she had her face back and the roer broken open over her arm and she was able to say, in a voice that only shook a little, "It was the grey. The leg. Go and help Pa with the disselboom, the wood's split again," and watch the fear go out of him and something worse and quieter come into its place, which was the understanding, arriving in him as it had arrived in her, that this was simply how it was going to be now. That things you loved would lie down in the dark and have to be shot before breakfast, and that you would be the one to do it, and that the day would go on afterward and want its work from you regardless.

This was the part the men who would later write it all down would leave out. They would write the journey and the battles and the names of the leaders and the text of the vows. They would carve the women into granite, tall and grieving and brave, a monument you could walk around. What they would not put in, because they did not know how and because it did not flatter anyone, was the way Marretjie Pretorius stood in the wet grass at fifteen past five in the morning with her dead favourite cooling at her feet and her little brother's life her responsibility and the whole impossible day ahead of her, and felt — under the grief, under the competence, under everything the trek had made her — a single clear thread of something she would never have said aloud and barely had a word for, which was that she was afraid all the time now, and had been for two years, and that the being-afraid had stopped feeling like a thing that would end.

They were going north because the grown-ups were afraid, though the grown-ups called it other things.

They called it the will of God, and they called it the search for land where a man could be his own master, and her father called it, on the bad nights, getting away from the English — said it the way you'd say the name of an illness, the English, the smous-government down in the Colony that had freed the slaves and not paid for them, that ran its courts in a tongue he could not follow and gave the verdict to the rooinek every time, that had lost his cousin's farm to the Xhosa in the war and then told him the war was his own fault for being where he was. Marretjie had been small for most of that and remembered it the way you remember weather: a long pressure in the house, her father coming back from the drostdy with his hat in his hands and his jaw set, the word Engelse spoken low after the children were supposed to be asleep, the way you'd speak of a thing in the rafters.

She did not hate the English the way her father did, because she had never really met one, and you could not properly hate weather. But she had learned that the fear of them was the great fact of the grown-up world, the thing under all the other things, and that the trek itself — this whole creaking nation on wheels, the wagons strung out for half a day's ride along the wagon-road they were cutting into country no wagon had crossed — was fear with oxen in front of it. They were not, whatever the psalms said, riding toward something. They were riding away. The land ahead was a rumour. The fear behind was the only solid thing, and her father had loaded the whole family onto it and driven it north into a country he did not know, where there were peoples he had never seen, ruled by a king whose name the men said carefully, the way you said the name of a thing in the rafters.

She thought about that more than she let on. She thought about it while she rode — and she rode well, better than Hendrik, nearly as well as the men, sitting the new bay her father had given her to replace the grey with her roer slung and her eyes doing without being told the constant slow sweep of the veld that you learned or you died, the reading of the grass for movement, the donga-lines, the kopje that could hide a hundred men or a herd of eland or nothing at all. The men underestimated her. She knew they did and she let them, because there was a use in it: an underestimated person sees more, is asked fewer questions, can think her own thoughts behind a face the others have decided is simple. Her uncle Gerrit called her ons skerpskutter, our sharpshooter, and meant it as the kind of praise you give a clever dog, and she smiled and said nothing and out-shot him at the next skiet-kompetisie by a clear two birds and watched him decide it was luck.

And what she thought, behind the simple face, riding north into the rumour, was this: that everyone had told her who to be afraid of, and that everyone was very sure, and that the very sureness had begun, lately, to frighten her more than the thing they were sure about. The men spoke of the Zulu the way they spoke of the English — a weather, a darkness, a thing in the rafters — and she had never met one of those either, not really, not to speak to, and she noticed that the not-having-met did not make anyone less sure. It made them more sure. The less you knew a thing, the easier it was to be certain of it, and the whole grown-up world seemed to run on exactly that fuel, and they were burning it now to drive a thousand wagons into the unknown.

She did not have the words for it as an idea. She had it as a feeling, the way she had everything that mattered — fast and whole, under the competence. It would be years, if she lived years, before she could have said: I think the being-sure is the dangerous thing. I think we are most willing to kill the people we have most carefully refused to see. At seventeen she only had the discomfort of it, a small wrongness she carried the way you carry a stone in your boot you have not yet stopped to shake out, riding north under a sky that went on forever, toward a king's country, with a dead horse behind her and her little brother's life slung beside her own roer, brave because she had to be and scared because she was not a fool — both at once, all the time, which was simply, she was beginning to understand, what it was going to mean to be alive in the years that were coming.

The mountains came up out of the haze on the third day: the Drakensberg, blue and enormous and toothed along the top like something that bit. Beyond them was the king's country, and the green, and the warm sea the men talked about, and the land that was going to be theirs because God and a rumour said so.

Her father reined in beside her and looked at the mountains for a long time without saying anything, and she watched the side of his face, the fear and the hope sitting on it together the way they sat on everything now, and she did not tell him about the stone in her boot. There was no use in it. They were going over. Everyone was going over. The only question the veld ever really asked was whether you could do the thing that had to be done when the morning came and asked it of you, and she could, she had proven she could, before breakfast, with a horse she loved.

"It's beautiful," she said instead, because it was, and because it was true, and because saying the true small thing was sometimes the only mercy on offer.

"It's a wall," her father said. "God put a wall there. And He gave us oxen to climb it." He believed it. She could hear that he believed it, all the way down, and she envied him it the way you envy someone a country you can't get a passport to. Then he clicked his tongue and rode on toward the front of the train, where the men were, to talk about the passes, and she sat her bay a moment longer and looked at the wall God had put there, and felt the whole weight of the unknown country on the other side of it settle onto her like a coming weather, and was, as she had been for two years and would be for one more terrible one, brave and scared in exactly equal measure, and entirely alone in the only way that mattered, which was that nobody — not her father, not Hendrik, not God as far as she could yet tell — was going to take the roer out of her hands and do the hard thing for her when the morning finally came.

She checked her powder, because checking your powder was a prayer you could be sure was heard, and she rode on toward the wall.

Chapter 2 — The Thornfield

This chapter is deliberately empty.

This is the Zulu youth's chapter — the boy of seventeen made into a weapon in the king's regiments, whose fear and pride and cost belong here, beside the Voortrekker girl's and the English boy's. In the finished book his voice will carry equal weight with theirs; the whole moral claim of Brave and Scared depends on it.

It is empty here because it is not yet written, and will not be written by me alone. To imagine my way into a Zulu boy's heart and publish it as truth would be the precise thing this book stands against — the outsider speaking for the other. His chapter is being co-created with a Zulu reader and co-author. Until that work is done, this seat stays open, in plain sight, rather than filled with a guess.

If you can help write it true — see the note at the front of this book, and the book's page at the press. The empty seat is an invitation.

Chapter 3 — The Bay

George Biggar was eighteen and a long way from anything, and the thing he could not get used to, after two years at the bottom of the world, was how little the bottom of the world cared who you were.

At the bay they called Port Natal there was no church to be confirmed in and no magistrate to be afraid of and no England to speak of beyond the few dozen souls who carried it around in their heads like a coin gone smooth in the pocket — hunters, mostly, and a trader or two, and his father, who had brought them all out here to make a fortune in ivory and had so far made instead a reputation, a fever, and a great many friends among the Zulu, which George had come to understand was the only currency the bottom of the world actually honoured. You could not eat a flag here. He had watched men try. The land took your English politeness and your English certainty the way the surf took a thrown stone, without comment, and gave you back exactly what you could carry and shoot and trade, and nothing else, and George — who had been a poor-enough boy in England and was a poorer one here — had decided he did not mind it as much as he was supposed to. There was an honesty in a place that would not pretend to love you.

He was not a soldier. His father had raised a little militia the year before, the Port Natal Volunteers, a dozen men with hunting guns and grand ideas, and it had fallen apart inside a season, which George thought was the most English thing that had happened since they arrived: the idea of an army, the uniform of an idea, and then the South African afternoon simply dissolving it because there was nothing here for it to be an army against that an army was any use for. The real powers of the bay were the king inland, whose tolerance they squatted on, and the weather, and the slow fevers off the lagoon. Against none of those did a dozen men with muskets and a flag mean anything at all.

What George understood — and he understood it the way the girl two hundred miles to the southwest understood her stone-in-the-boot, as a feeling under the competence rather than an idea he could have spoken — was that he belonged to nobody's story. The Boers coming over the mountains had their God and their grievance and their wagons; the king had his kingdom and his fear; the great Empire that had stamped its coin into George's head before he could read had its flag, somewhere, far away, not yet caring about this bay at all and one day caring far too much. And George stood at the edge of all of it, an English boy on a beach at the bottom of Africa, carrying an England no bigger than a coin, useful to the machine for precisely what he could carry and shoot — which was the same value the machine put on a Boer girl and a Zulu boy his own age, though none of the three of them knew yet that they shared it.

In February, his father would send him inland to the trekker camps along the rivers, because the Biggars had thrown in with the Boers and a man looked after his allies. George would go because his father told him to, the way the girl shot the horse because her father told her to, the way the boy in the thornfield ran because the machine told him to — three children, three machines, each doing the hard thing the morning asked because saying no to your own machine was not yet a thing any of them knew how to do.

He did not know any of that, that early. He knew the bay, and the smell of low tide, and that he was a long way from anything, and that the bottom of the world did not care who he was — which was, he was beginning to think, the truest and almost the kindest thing anyone had ever told him.

Acknowledgements

These books exist because other people made things that lived in my head long after I'd finished them. My thanks:

To Dennis E. Taylor, who wrote software for thirty-five years — front-line grunt to upper management, always in IT — before he ever wrote a Bob, and then proved that a career programmer can write gripping, genuinely entertaining stories. As one software engineer to another: it would be my great honour to talk shop with you over a pint, in "real" (sic). The Court thanks the Bobs.

To Ray Porter, for giving me the voices of the Court in my head. May I be so lucky as to have you narrate the US release.

To Scott Sigler, for EarthCore and Mount Fitz Roy.

To Michael Crichton, for — honestly — everything.

To Dan Brown, for teaching me a new kind of storytelling.

To Andy Weir, for showing how to write fiction on the back of real science that isn't science fiction.

To Neill Blomkamp, for District 9, Elysium, and Chappie (Die Antwoord and all). Your films kept the characters and the scenes grounded in my head. May you be the one who puts this on the big screen.

And to Patrick Rothfuss, for getting me into a genre I never knew I'd fall in love with. As my small way of giving back: you have free use of Arjuna Badger Press, always.

— Andries J. Greyling