Authors: Wilbur Smith
‘I see you, Ruth,’ she said, nodding at the
Christian girl and her companion, ‘and you too, Imbali, my
little Flower. What is it that makes you look so sad?’
‘The men have gone into the hills,’ whispered
Ruth.
‘And your hearts have gone with them,’ Juba smiled
at the two young women. It was a fond yet sad smile, as though
she remembered her own youthful bodily passions and regretted
that the flames had burned so low.
‘I have dreamed of nothing but my beautiful man, every
lonely night we have been away,’ murmured Ruth.
‘And of the fine son he will make with you,’ Juba
chuckled. She knew the girl’s desperate need, and teased
her lovingly. ‘Lelesa, the lightning stroke, your man is
well named.’
Ruth hung her head. ‘Do not mock me,
Mamewethu
,’ she murmured pitifully, and Ruth turned
to Imbali.
‘And you, little Flower, is there no bee to tickle your
petals either?’
The girl giggled and covered her mouth and squirmed with
embarrassment.
‘If you need us,
Mamewethu
,’ Ruth said
earnestly, ‘then we will stay with you.’
Juba kept them in an agony of suspense for a few seconds
longer.
How firm and nubile was their young flesh, how sweetly shaped
their young bodies, how eager were their great dark eyes, how
vast their hunger for all that life had to offer. Juba smiled
again and clapped her hands.
‘Be gone,’ she said, ‘both of you. There are
those that need you more than I do. Away with you both, follow
your men into the hills.’
The girls squealed with delight, and throwing aside all
ceremony, they embraced Juba joyously.
‘You are the sunshine and the moon,’ they told
her, and then they fled to their huts to prepare for the journey,
and for a little while Juba’s own sorrow was lightened. But
at the fall of night when no young wife came to summon her to
Gandang’s hut, it returned in full strength, and she wept
alone on her sleeping-mat until at last sleep came over her, but
then there were dreams – dreams full of the glow of flames
and the smell of rotting flesh, and she cried out in her sleep,
but there was no one to hear and awaken her.
G
eneral Mungo
St John reined in and looked around him at the devastated
forests. There was no cover, the locusts had seen to that, and it
would make his task more difficult.
He lifted the slouch hat from his head and mopped his
forehead. This was the suicide month. The great cumulus cloud
banks heaved up heaven high along the horizon and the heat
shivered and wavered in mirage above the bare baked earth. Mungo
carefully readjusted the black patch over his empty eye-socket,
and turned in the saddle to look back at the file of men that
followed him.
There were fifty of them, all Matabele, but wearing a bizarre
motley of traditional and European dress. Some wore patched
moleskin breeches, and others tasselled fur aprons. Some were
barefoot, others wore rawhide sandals and a few even sported
hobnailed boots without socks or puttees. Most of them were
bare-chested, though a few wore cast-off tunics or tattered
shirts. There was, however, one single item of uniform that was
common to them all. It was worn on a chain around the left arm
above the elbow, a polished brass disc engraved with the words:
‘BSA Co. Police.’
They were each of them armed with a new repeating Winchester
rifle, and a bandolier of brass cartridges. Their legs were dusty
to the knees, for they had made a hard fast march southwards,
keeping up easily with Mungo St John’s trotting mount.
Mungo looked them over with grim satisfaction. Despite the lack
of cover, he believed that the speed of their advance must take
the kraals by surprise.
It was like one of his slaving expeditions on the west coast,
so long ago, before that damned Lincoln and the Royal bloody Navy
had cut off the multi-million-dollar trade. By God, those had
been the days. The swift approach march, the encirclement of the
village and the dawn rush with the slavers’ clubs cracking
against woolly black skulls. Mungo roused himself. Was it a sign
of age to hark back so often to the long-ago? he wondered.
‘Ezra,’ he called his sergeant to come up to him.
He was the only other mounted man in the column. He rode a
swaybacked grey with a rough coat.
Ezra was a hulking Matabele with a scarred cheek, memento of a
mining accident in the great diamond pit at Kimberley, six
hundred miles to the south. It was there that he had adopted his
new name and learned his English.
‘How far ahead is Gandang’s kraal?’ Mungo
asked him in that language.
‘That far,’ Ezra swept his arm through an arc of
the sky, indicating two hours or so of the sun’s
passage.
‘All right,’ Mungo nodded. ‘Send the scouts
out. But I want no mistakes. Explain to them again that they must
cross the Inyati river upstream of the kraal and circle out to
wait in the foothills.’
‘Nkosi,’ Ezra nodded.
‘Tell them they must seize anybody who runs from the
kraal, and bring them in.’
The business of translating every command irked Mungo, and for
the hundredth time since he had crossed the Limpopo, he resolved
to study the Sindebele language.
Ezra saluted Mungo with an exaggerated flourish, an imitation
of the British soldiers he had watched from the barred window of
his cell while he was serving his sentence for diamond theft, and
turned in the saddle to shout the orders to the men who followed
the two horsemen.
‘Warn them that they must be in position before dawn.
That is when we will ride in.’
Mungo unstrapped the felt-covered water-bottle from the pommel
of his saddle and unscrewed the stopper.
‘They are ready, Nkosi,’ the sergeant
reported.
‘Very well, Sergeant, send them away,’ said Mungo,
and raised the water-bottle to his lips.
F
or many
seconds after waking, Juba believed that the screams of the women
and the whimpering of the children were all part of her
nightmares, and she pulled the fur kaross over her head.
Then there was a crash as the door to the hut was broken open,
a rush of bodies into the dark interior, and Juba came fully
awake and threw off the kaross. Rough hands seized her and though
she screamed and struggled, she was dragged naked into the open.
The sky was paling with the dawn and the constables had piled
fresh logs on the fire, so that Juba recognized the white man
immediately, and she shrank back into the safety of the crowd of
sobbing, wailing women before he could notice her.
Mungo St John was in a fury, bellowing at his sergeant,
striding backwards and forwards beyond the fire, slapping his
riding-whip against his glossy boot. His face was flushed a dark
crimson like the wattles of the waddling black
singisi
,
the grotesque turkey buzzard of the veld, and his single eye
blazed in the firelight.
‘Where are the men? I want to know where the men have
gone!’
Sergeant Ezra came hurrying down the rank of cringing women,
peering into their faces. He stopped in front of Juba,
recognizing her instantly, one of the
grandes dames
of the
tribe; as she drew herself to her full height, even in her total
and massive nudity she was dignified and queenly. She expected
some mark of respect, some gesture of courtesy from him, but
instead the sergeant seized her wrist and twisted her arm up so
viciously that she was forced to her knees.
‘Where are the
amadoda
?’ he hissed at her.
‘Where have the men gone?’
Juba choked down the sob of agony in her throat, and croaked,
‘It is true there are no men here, for certainly the ones
who wear the little brass bangles of Lodzi on their arms are not
men—’
‘Cow,’ hissed the sergeant, ‘fat black
cow.’ And he jerked her arm upwards, forcing her face into
the dirt.
‘Enough,
kanka
!’ A voice cut through the
hubbub, and the tone and power of it commanded instant silence.
‘Let the woman be.’
Involuntarily the sergeant released Juba and stepped back, and
even Mungo St John halted his furious pacing.
Gandang stalked into the firelight, and though he wore only
his headring and a short loincloth, he was as menacing as a
prowling lion, and the sergeant fell back in front of him. Juba
struggled to her feet, rubbing her wrist, but Gandang did not
even glance at her. He strode to Mungo St John and asked:
‘What is it that you seek, white man, coming into my
kraal like a thief in the night?’
Mungo looked to the sergeant for a translation.
‘He says you are a thief,’ the sergeant told him,
and Mungo jerked up his chin and glared at Gandang.
‘Tell him he knows what I come for, tell him I want two
hundred strong young men.’
And Gandang retreated immediately into the studied defensive
obtuseness of Africa, which few Europeans know how to counter,
and which infuriated a man like St John who could not even
understand the language, and who had to submit to the laborious
process of translation. The sun was well up when Gandang repeated
the question he had first asked almost an hour before.
‘Why does he want my young men to come to him? They are
content here.’
And Mungo’s clenched fists shook with the effort of
restraint.
‘All men must work,’ the sergeant translated,
‘it is the law of the white men.’
‘Tell him,’ Gandang retorted, ‘that it is
not the way of Matabele. The
amadoda
see no dignity nor
great virtue in digging in the dirt. That is for women and
amaholi
.’
‘The induna says that his men will not work,’ the
sergeant translated maliciously, and Mungo St John could endure
no more of it. He took a swift pace forward and slashed the
riding whip into the induna’s face.
Gandang blinked, but he neither flinched nor raised his hand
to touch the shining tumescent welt that rose swiftly across his
cheek. He made no effort to staunch the thin trickle of blood
from his crushed lip that snaked down his chin, but he let it
drip onto his naked chest.
‘My hands are empty now, white man,’ he said, in a
whisper that was more penetrating than a bellow, ‘but they
will not always be so.’ And he turned towards his hut.
‘Gandang,’ Mungo St John shouted after him.
‘Your men will work if I have to hunt them down and chain
them like animals.’
T
he two girls
followed the path at a smooth swinging trot that did not disturb
the balance of the large bundles they carried upon their heads.
In the bundles there were special gifts for their men, salt and
stamped corn, snuff and beads and lengths of trade calico for
loincloths that they had wheedled out of Nomusa’s store at
Khami Mission. They were both in high spirits, for they had
passed out of the swathe of destruction left by the locust
swarms, and the acacia forests were a golden yellow haze of
spring bloom murmurous with bees.
Ahead of them rose the first pearly granite domes, and amongst
them they would find the men, so they called gaily to each other,
silly girlish banter, and their laughter was sweet as the tinkle
of bells. It carried far ahead of them. They skirted the base of
a tall cliff, and without pausing to rest started up the natural
steps of grey stone. It led them upwards into a steep ravine
which would eventually take them to the summit.
Imbali was leading, her round hard haunches swaying under the
short skirt as she skipped over the uneven footing, and Ruth who
was every bit as eager followed her closely into the angle where
the path turned sharply between two huge round boulders that had
rolled down from above.
Imbali stopped so abruptly that Ruth almost ran into her, and
then she hissed with alarm.
A man stood in the centre of the path. Although he was
unmistakably a Matabele, the girls had never seen him before. The
stranger wore a blue shirt, and on his upper arm sparkled a round
brass disc. In his hand he carried a rifle. Quickly Ruth glanced
behind her and hissed again. Another armed man had stepped out
from the shaded angle of the boulder and cut off their retreat.
He was smiling, but there was nothing in that smile to reassure
the girls. They lowered the bundles from their heads and shrank
closer to each other.
‘Where are you going, pretty little kittens?’
asked the smiling
kanka
. ‘Are you going to search
for a tomcat?’
Neither of the girls answered. They stared at him with big
frightened eyes.
‘We will go with you.’ The smiling
kanka
was so broad across the chest, his legs so muscular, that he
appeared to be deformed. His teeth were very white and big as
those of a horse, but the smile never reached his eyes. His eyes
were small and cold and dead-looking.
‘Lift your bundles, kittens, and lead us to the
cats.’
Ruth shook her head. ‘We go only to search for medicine
roots, we do not understand what you want of us.’
The
kanka
came closer. His thick legs were bowed, and
they gave him a peculiar rolling gait. Suddenly he kicked over
Ruth’s bundle, and it burst open.
‘Ah!’ he smiled coldly. ‘Why do you carry
such gifts, if you go to search for
muti
?’
Ruth dropped to her knees, and scrabbled amongst the rocks to
retrieve the spilled corn and scattered beads. The
kanka
dropped his hand onto her back and stroked her lustrous black
skin.
‘Purr, little kitten,’ he grinned, and Ruth froze,
crouched at his feet with her hands filled with spilled
grain.
The
kanka
ran his fingers lightly up and placed his
hand upon the nape of her neck. His hand was huge, the knuckles
enlarged, the fingers thick and powerful. Ruth began to tremble
as the fingers encircled her neck.
The
kanka
looked up at his companion, who still guarded
the pathway, and the two of them exchanged a glance. Imbali saw
and understood.