The Angels Weep (11 page)

In a bygone age that the verbal history of the Rozwi and the
Karanga tribes could no longer recount, generations before bold
Mzilikazi led his tribe into these hills, another plundering
marauder had passed this way. It might have been Manatassi, the
legendary conquering queen, at the head of her merciless hordes,
laying waste to the land and slaughtering everything in her path,
sparing neither woman nor child nor even the domestic
animals.

The threatened tribes had taken refuge in this valley, but the
marauders had burst through the narrow pass and the miserable
host had fled into their final sanctuary in this cavern. The roof
overhead was still coated with soot, for the marauders had not
deemed it worthwhile to lay siege to the cavern. They had pulled
down the protecting wall and blocked the entrance with piles of
green brush and wood. Then they had put in fire. The entire tribe
had perished, and smoke had mummified their remains. So they had
lain down the years in banks and heaps, piled as high as the low
roof.

As Tanase’s party went forward, from somewhere ahead of
them a faint bluish light grew in intensity, until Bazo exclaimed
suddenly and pointed to the wall of human debris beside him. In
places, the parchment-like flesh had peeled away so that the
ivory skulls grinned at them, and the contorted skeletal arms
seemed to wave a macabre salutation as they passed. The indunas
were bathed in sweat, despite the cool gloom, and their
expressions were awed and sickly.

Tanase and the child followed the twisting pathway with
unerring familiarity, and came out at last above a deep natural
amphitheatre. A single ray of sunlight burned down from a narrow
crack in the domed cavern roof. On the floor of the amphitheatre
was an open fireplace, and a tendril of pale blue smoke twisted
slowly upwards towards the opening high above. Tanase and the
child led them down the rock steps to the smooth sandy floor of
the amphitheatre, and at her gesture the four indunas sank down
gratefully and squatted facing the smouldering fire.

Tanase released the child’s hand, and sat a little to
one side and behind the men. The child crossed to the far wall
and took a handful of herbs from one of the big round clay pots
that stood there. She threw the handful upon the fire and
immediately a great yellow cloud of acrid smoke billowed upwards,
and as it slowly cleared, the indunas started and exclaimed with
superstitious dread.

A grotesque figure faced them from across the flames. It was
an albino, with silver-white leprous skin. It was a woman, for
the great pale breasts were massively pendulous, the nipples a
painful boiled pink colour. She was stark naked and her dense
public bush was white as frost-struck winter grass, and above it
her belly hung in loose balconies of fat. Her forehead was low
and sloped backwards, her mouth was wide and thin so that she
appeared toadlike. Across her broad and flattened nose and her
pale cheeks, the unpigmented skin had erupted in a tender raw
rash. Her thickened forearms were folded across her belly and her
thighs, splotched with large ginger-coloured freckles, were
wide-spread as she knelt on a mat of zebra skin and regarded the
men before her fixedly.

‘I see you, oh Chosen One,’ Somabula greeted her.
Despite an enormous effort of will, his voice trembled.

The Umlimo made no response, and Somabula rocked back on his
heels and was silent. The girl-child was busy amongst the pots,
and now she came forward and knelt beside the gross albino,
proffering the clay pipe she had prepared.

The Umlimo took the long reed stem between her thin silvery
lips, and the girl lifted a live coal from the fire with her bare
hands and placed it on the vegetable ball in the bowl of the
pipe. It began to glow and splutter and the Umlimo drew a slow
lungful and then let the aromatic smoke trickle out of her simian
nostrils. Immediately the heavy sweetish odour of
insanghu
carried to the waiting men.

The oracle was induced in different ways. Before Tanase had
lost the power, it had descended spontaneously upon her, throwing
her into convulsive fits, while the spirit voices struggled to
escape from her throat. However, this grotesque successor had to
resort to the wild hemp pipe. The seeds and flowers of the
Cannabis sativa
plant, crushed in the green and moulded
into sun-dried balls, were her key to the spirit world.

She smoked quietly, a dozen short inhalations without allowing
the smoke to escape, holding it in until her pale face seemed to
swell and the pink pupils of her eyes glazed over. Then she
expelled the smoke with an explosive exhalation, and started
again. The indunas watched her with such fascination that they
did not at first notice the soft scratching sound on the cavern
floor. It was Bazo who at last started and grunted with shock,
and involuntarily grasped his father’s forearm. Gandang
exclaimed and began to rise in horror and alarm, but
Tanase’s voice arrested him.

‘Do not move. It is dangerous,’ she whispered
urgently, and Gandang sank back and froze into stillness.

From the dark recesses in the back of the cavern a
lobster-like creature scuttled across the pale sandy floor
towards where the Umlimo squatted. The firelight glinted on the
glossy armoured carapace of the creature as it reached the
Umlimo, and then began to climb up her bloated silver-white body.
It paused in her lap, with the long segmented tail lifting and
pulsing, its spiderlike legs hooked into the Umlimo’s
coarse white pubic curls, before it began climbing again, up over
her bulging belly, hanging from one drooping pale breast like
some evil fruit on the bough, upwards it climbed, onto her
shoulder and then it reached the angle of her jaw below the
ear.

The Umlimo remained unperturbed, sipping little puffs of the
narcotic smoke from the mouthpiece of her pipe, her pink eyes
staring blindly at the indunas. The huge glittering insect
crawled up her temple and then sideways until it stopped in the
centre of her crusted and scabbed forehead, where it hung upside
down, and the long scorpion tail, longer than a man’s
forefinger, arched up over its horny back.

The Umlimo began to mutter and mumble and a rime of white
froth bubbled onto her raw lips. She said something in a strange
language, and the scorpion on her forehead pulsed its long
segmented tail, and from the point of the red fang at the tip a
clear drop of venom welled and sparkled like a jewel in the dim
light.

The Umlimo spoke again, in a hoarse strained voice and an
unintelligible language.

‘What does she say?’ Bazo whispered, turning his
head towards Tanase. ‘What language does she
use?’

‘She speaks in the secret tongue of the
initiates,’ Tanase murmured. ‘She is inviting the
spirits to enter and take control of her body.’

The albino reached up slowly and took the scorpion off her
forehead. She held the head and body within her closed fist, only
the long tail whipped furiously from side to side, and she
brought it down slowly and held it to her own breast. The
scorpion struck, and the rigid thorn fang buried itself deeply in
her obscene pink flesh. The Umlimo’s face did not alter,
and the scorpion struck again and again, leaving little red
punctures in the soft breast.

‘She will die!’ gasped Bazo.

‘Let her be,’ hissed Tanase. ‘She is not
like other women. The poison will not harm her – it serves
only to open her soul to the spirits.’

The albino lifted the scorpion from her bosom, and dropped it
into the flames of the fire where it writhed and withered into a
little charred speck, and suddenly the Umlimo uttered an
unearthly shriek.

‘The spirits enter,’ Tanase whispered.

The Umlimo’s mouth gaped open, and little glassy strings
of saliva drooled from her chin, while three or four wild voices
seemed to issue from her throat simultaneously, each trying to
drown out the others, voices of men and women and animals, until
at last one rose above them, and silenced the others. It was a
man’s voice, and it spoke in the mystical tongue; even its
modulation and cadence were totally alien, but Tanase quietly
translated for them.

‘When the noon sun goes dark with wings, and the trees
are bare of leaves in the springtime, then, warriors of Matabele,
put an edge to your steel.’

The four indunas nodded. They had heard this prophecy before,
for the Umlimo was often repetitious and always she was obscure.
They had puzzled over the same words before. It was this message
that Bazo and Tanase had carried to the scattered peoples of the
Matabele during their wandering from kraal to kraal.

The gross albino seer grunted and threshed her arms, as though
struggling with an invisible adversary. The pale pink eyes jerked
in her skull, out of kilter with each other, so that she squinted
and leered, and she ground her teeth together with a sound like a
hound worrying a bone.

The girl-child rose quietly from where she squatted amongst
the pots, and she leaned over the Umlimo and dashed a pinch of
pungent red powder into her face. The Umlimo’s paroxysm
eased, the clenched jaw fell open and another voice spoke, a
guttural, blurred sound, barely human, using the same weird
dialect, and Tanase strained forward to catch each syllable and
then repeated calmly:

‘When the cattle lie with their heads twisted to touch
their flank, and cannot rise, then warriors of Matabele take
heart, for the time will be nigh.’

This time there was a slight difference in the wording of the
prophecy from the one that they had heard before, and all of them
pondered it silently as the Umlimo fell forward onto her face and
flopped limply as a boneless jellyfish. Slowly all movement of
the albino’s body ceased, and she lay like death.

Gandang made as if to rise, but Tanase hissed a warning, and
he arrested the movement and they waited, the only sound in the
cavern was the click and rustle of the fire and the flirt of
bats’ wings high against the domed roof.

Then another convulsion ran down the Umlimo’s back, and
her spine arched, her hideous face lifted, but this time her
voice was childlike and sweet, and she spoke in the Matabele
language for all of them to understand.

‘When the hornless cattle are eaten up by the great
cross, let the storm begin.’

Her head sagged forward, and the child covered her with a
kaross of fluffy jackal furs.

‘It is over,’ said Tanase. ‘There will be no
more.’

Thankfully the four indunas rose, and crept back along the
gloomy pathway through the catacombs, but as they saw the glimmer
of sunlight through the entrance ahead, so their steps quickened,
until they burst out in the valley with such indecent and
undignified haste that they avoided each other’s eyes.

That night, sitting in the open-sided
setenghi
on the
floor of the valley, Somabula repeated the prophecies of the
Umlimo to the assembled indunas. They nodded over the first two
familiar riddles, and as they had a hundred times before, they
delved inconclusively for the meaning, and then agreed: ‘We
will find the meaning when the time is appointed – it is
always the way.’

Then Somabula went on to relate the third prophecy of the
Umlimo, the new and unfamiliar riddle: ‘When the hornless
cattle are eaten up by the great cross.’

The indunas took snuff and passed the beerpots from hand to
hand, as they talked and argued the hidden meaning, and only when
they had all spoken did Somabula look beyond them to where Tanase
sat holding the child under her leather cloak to protect him from
the night chill.

‘What is the true meaning, woman?’ he asked.

‘Not even the Umlimo herself knows that,’ Tanase
replied, ‘but when our ancestors first saw the white man
riding up from the south, they believed that their mounts were
hornless cattle.’

‘Horses?’ Gandang asked thoughtfully.

‘It may be so,’ Tanase agreed. ‘Yet a single
word of the Umlimo may have as many meanings as there are
crocodiles in the Limpopo river.’

‘What is the cross, the great cross, of the
prophecy?’ Bazo asked.

‘The cross is the sign of the white men’s
three-headed god,’ Gandang answered. ‘My senior wife,
Juba, the little Dove, wears that sign about her neck, given to
her by the missionary at Khami when she poured water on her
head.’

‘Is it possible that the white men’s god will eat
up the white men’s horses?’ doubted Babiaan.
‘Surely he is their protector, not their
destroyer.’

And the discussion passed from elder to elder, while the
watchfire burned low and over the valley the vast shining
firmament of the heavens turned with weighty dignity.

To the south of the valley, amongst the other heavenly bodies,
burned a group of four great white stars that the Matabele called
the ‘Sons of Manatassi’. They told how Manatassi,
that terrible queen, had birth-strangled her offspring with her
own hands, so that none of them might ever challenge her
monarchy. According to the legend, the souls of the little ones
had ascended to shine on high, eternal witness to the cruelty of
their dam.

Not one of the indunas knew that the name by which the white
men knew these same stars was the Southern Cross.

R
alph
Ballantyne was wrong when he predicted to Harry Mellow that by
the time they returned to the base camp Mr Rhodes and his
entourage would have moved on to Bulawayo. For as they rode in
through the gates of the stockade, he saw the magnificent mule
coach still parked where he had last seen it, and beside it were
a dozen other decrepit and travel-worn vehicles: Cape carts and
surreys, even a bicycle with worn tyres replaced by strips of
buffalo-hide.

‘Mr Rhodes has set up court here,’ Cathy explained
furiously, as soon as she and Ralph were alone in the bath tent.
‘I have made the camp too comfortable by half, and he has
taken it over from me.’