Authors: Wilbur Smith
‘I will leave in the morning,’ Bazo decided.
‘And be back before the moon shows its horns
again.’
When the two white men moved on down the survey line, Bazo
watched them for a while, his face expressionless and his eyes
inscrutable, then he looked at his gang and nodded.
They spat on their palms, hefted their pick-axes and Bazo sang
out the opening chorus of the work chant.
‘
Ubunyonyo bu ginye entudhla
. The little black
ants can eat up the giraffe.’
Bazo had composed the line beside the corpse of a giraffe
struck down by the rinderpest, and untouched by all the gorged
scavengers of the veld except a colony of the black safari ants
which had cleaned the cadaver down to the bone. The significance
of it had stayed with Bazo; how, by persistence, even the
greatest are overcome, and the seemingly innocent line of
gibberish was now insidiously preparing the minds of the
amadoda
who laboured under him. At the invocation they
swung the picks on high, standing shoulder to shoulder, the
crescent-headed tools silhouetted against the flat blue of the
sky.
‘
Guga mzimba
!’ they replied in soaring
chorus. ‘
Sala nhliziyo
. Though our bodies are worn
out, our hearts are constant.’
And then together the humming ‘Jee!’ as the
pick-heads hissed downwards in unison, and with a crash buried
themselves in the iron earth.
Each man levered his pick-head free, took one step forward and
braced himself as Bazo sang: ‘The little black ants can eat
up the giraffe.’
And again the act was repeated, and again, and a hundred times
more, while the sweat was flung from their bodies and the red
dust flew.
B
azo loped
along at a deceptively easy gait that never varied, though the
hills were steep and the valleys abrupt. His spirits were joyous,
he had not truly realized how much the labours of the last weeks
had galled until he was released from them. Once long ago he had
worked with pick and shovel in the yellow diamond pit at
Kimberley. Henshaw had been his companion then, and the two of
them had made a game of the brutal endless labour. It had built
their muscles and made them strong, but had caged and cramped
their spirits, until neither of them could suffer it longer, and
they had escaped together.
Since those days Bazo had known the savage joy and the divine
madness of that terrible moment that the Matabele call the
‘closing in’. He had stood against the king’s
enemies and killed in the sunlight with his regimental plumes
flying. He had won honours and the respect of his peers. He had
sat on the king’s council with the induna’s headring
on his brow, and he had come to the brink of the black river and
briefly looked beyond it into the forbidden land that men call
death, and now he had learned a new truth. It was more painful
for a man to go backwards than it is for him to go forward. The
drudgery of menial labour rankled the more now for the glories
that had preceded it.
The path dropped away towards the river and disappeared into
the dense dark green vegetation like a serpent into its hole.
Bazo followed it down and stopped into the gloomy tunnel, and
then froze. Instinctively his right hand reached for the
non-existent assegai on its leather thong under the grip of the
long shield that also was not there – so hard do old habits
die. The shield had long ago been burned on the bonfires with ten
thousand other shields, and the steel snapped in half on the
anvils of the BSA Company blacksmiths.
Then he saw this was no enemy that came towards him down the
narrow tunnel of riverine bush, and his heart bounded almost
painfully against his ribs.
‘I see you, Lord,’ Tanase greeted him softly.
She was slim and upright as the young girl he had captured at
the stronghold of Pemba the wizard, the same long graceful legs
and clinched-in waist, the same heron’s neck like the stem
of a lovely black lily.
‘Why are you so far from the village?’ he
demanded, as she knelt dutifully before him, and clapped her
hands softly at the level of her waist.
‘I saw you on the road, Bazo, son of Gandang.’
And he opened his mouth to question her further, for he had
come swiftly, then he changed his mind and felt the little
superstitious prickle of insect feet along the nape of his neck.
Sometimes still there were things about this woman that
disquieted him, for she had not been stripped of all her occult
powers in the cave of the Umlimo.
‘I see you, Lord,’ Tanase repeated. ‘And my
body calls to yours the way a hungry infant fresh roused from
sleep frets for the breast.’
He lifted her up, and held her face between his hands to
examine it as though he had picked a rare and beautiful flower in
the forest. It had taken much to accustom himself to the way she
spoke of their secret bodily desires. He had been taught that it
was unseemly for a Matabele wife to show pleasure in the act of
generation, and to speak of it the way a man does. Instead she
should be merely a pliant and unprotesting vessel for her
husband’s seed, ready whenever he was, and unobtrusive and
self-effacing when he was not.
Tanase was none of these things. At first she had shocked and
horrified him with some of the things she had learned in her
apprenticeship for the dark mysteries. However, shock had turned
to fascination as she had unfolded each skill before him.
She had potions and perfumes that could rouse a man even when
he was exhausted and wounded from the battlefield, she had tricks
of voice and eyes that bit like an arrowhead. Her fingers could
find unerringly the spots beneath his skin at places on his body
of which even he was unaware, upon which she played like the keys
of the marimba, making him more man than he had even dreamed was
possible. Her own body she could use more skilfully than he could
wield his shield and long bright steel and deal as telling blows.
She could make each separate muscle of her body move and tighten
in complete freedom from the muscles around it. At will she could
bring him to precipitous rushing release or keep him hovering
high as a black-shouldered kite when it hunts on sharply stabbing
pinions.
‘We have been too long apart,’ she whispered, with
that combination of voice and slant of wide Egyptian eyes that
tripped his breath and made his heart race. ‘I came to meet
you alone, so we could be free for a while of your son’s
clamorous adoration and the eyes of the villagers.’ And she
led him off the track, and unclasped her leather cloak to spread
it on the soft bed of fallen leaves.
Long after the storm had passed, and the aching tension had
left his body, when his breathing was deep and even again and his
eyelids drooped with the deeply contented lassitude that follows
the act of love, she raised herself on her elbow above him, and
with a kind of reverential wonder traced out the planes of his
face with the tip of one finger, and then said softly:
‘Bayete!’
It was the greeting that is made only to a king, and he
stirred uncomfortably and his eyes opened wide. He looked at her,
and knew that expression. Their loving had not softened her, and
made her sleepy, as it had done him. That royal greeting had not
been a jest.
‘Bayete!’ she said again. ‘The sound of it
troubles you, my fine sharp-bladed axe. But why should it do
so?’
Suddenly Bazo felt the insects of fear and superstition
crawling on his skin again, and he was angry and afraid.
‘Do not talk like this, woman. Do not offend the spirits
with your silly girlish prattlings.’
She smiled, but it was a cruel catlike smile, and she
repeated. ‘Oh Bazo, the bravest and the strongest, why do
you then start so at my girlish words? You in whose veins runs
the purest blood of Zanzi? Son of Gandang, the son of Mzilikazi,
do you dream perchance of the little redwood spear that Lobengula
carried in his hand? Son of Juba, whose great-grandfather was
mighty Diniswayo, who was nobler even than his
protégé Chaka, who became King of Zulu, do you not
feel the royal blood coursing in your veins, does it make you
itch for things you dare not even speak aloud?’
‘You are mad, woman, the mopani bees have entered your
head and driven you mad.’
But Tanase smiled still with her lips close to his ear, and
she touched his eyelids with her soft pink fingertip.
‘Do you not hear the widows of Shangani and Bembesi
crying aloud, “Our father Lobengula is gone, we are orphans
with no one to protect us.” Do you not see the men of
Matabeleland with empty hands entreat the spirits? “Give us
a king,” they cry. “We must have a
king.”’
‘Babiaan,’ whispered Bazo. ‘Somabula and
Gandang. They are Lobengula’s brothers.’
‘They are old men, and the stone has fallen out of their
bellies, the fire has gone out in their eyes.’
‘Tanase, do not speak so.’
‘Bazo, my husband, my king, do you not see to whom the
eyes of all the indunas turn when the nation is in
council?’
‘Madness,’ Bazo shook his head.
‘Do you not know whose word they wait upon now, do you
not see how even Babiaan and Somabula listen when Bazo
speaks?’
She laid the palm of her hand over his mouth to still his
protests, and then in one swift movement she had mounted and
straddled him again, and miraculously he was ready and more than
ready for her, and she cried out fiercely:
‘Bayete, son of kings! Bayete, father of kings, whose
seed will rule when the white men have been swallowed again by
the ocean which spewed them up.’
And with a shuddering cry he felt as though she had drawn the
very life force from his guts, and left in its place a dreadful
haunting longing, a fire in his blood, that would not be assuaged
until he held in his hand the little redwood spear that was the
symbol of the Nguni monarch.
T
hey went side
by side, hand in hand, which was a curious thing, for a Matabele
wife always walks behind her husband with the roll of the
sleeping-mat balanced upon her head. But they were like children
caught up in a kind of delirious dream, and when they reached the
crest of the pass, Bazo took her in his arms and held her to his
breast in an embrace that he had never used before.
‘If I am the axe, then you are the cutting edge, for you
are a part of me, but the sharpest part.’
‘Together, Lord, we will hack through anything that
stands in our way,’ she answered fiercely, and then she
pulled out from the circle of his arms and lifted the flap of the
beaded pouch upon her belt.
‘I have a gift to make your brave heart braver and your
will as hard as your steel.’ She took something soft and
grey and fluffy from her pouch, and stood before him on tiptoe,
reaching high with both arms to bind the strip of fur around his
forehead. ‘Wear this moleskin for the glory that was and
that shall be again, induna of the
Moles-who-burrowed-under-a-hill. One day soon, we will change it
for a headband of spotted gold leopard skin, with royal blue
heron feathers set upon it.’
She took his hand and they started down from the hilltop, but
they did not reach the grassy plain before Bazo stopped again and
inclined his head to listen. There was a faint popping sound on
the small dry breeze, like the bubbles bursting in a pot of
boiling porridge.
‘Guns,’ he said. ‘Still far away, but many
of them.’
‘It is so, Lord,’ Tanase replied. ‘Since you
left, the guns of One-Bright-Eye’s
kanka
have been
busy as the tongues of the old women at a beer-drink.’
‘T
here is
a terrible pestilence sweeping through the land.’ General
Mungo St John had selected a clay anthill as a rostrum from which
to address his audience. ‘It passes from one animal to the
next, as a bush-fire jumps from tree to tree. Unless we can
contain it, all the cattle will die.’
Below the anthill, Sergeant Ezra was translating loudly, while
the listening tribesmen squatted silently facing them. There were
almost two thousand of them, the occupants of all the villages
that had been built along both banks of the Inyati river to
replace the regimental kraals of Lobengula’s impi.
The men were in the foremost ranks, their faces expressionless
but their eyes watchful; behind them were the youths and boys not
yet admitted to the rank of warrior. These were the
mujiba
, the herdboys, whose daily life was intimately
interwoven with the herds of the tribe. The present
indaba
concerned them as much as it did the elders. There were no women
present, for it was a matter of cattle, of the nation’s
wealth.
‘It is a great sin to try to hide your cattle, as you
have done. To drive them into the hills or the thick forest.
These cattle carry with them the seeds of the pestilence,’
Mungo St John explained, and waited for his sergeant to
translate, before going on. ‘Lodzi and I are very angry
with these deceptions. There will be heavy fines for those
villages which hide their cattle, and as further punishment, I
will double the work quotas for the men, so that you will work
like
amaholi
, like slaves you will toil, if you attempt to
defy the word of Lodzi.’ Mungo St John paused again, and
lifted the black eye-patch to wipe away the sweat that trickled
down from under the wide-brimmed slouch hat. Drawn by the lowing
herds in the thornbush kraal, the big shiny green flies swarmed,
and the place stank of cow dung and unwashed humanity. Mungo
found himself impatient with the necessity of trying to explain
his actions to this silent unresponsive throng of half-naked
savages, for he had already repeated this same warning at thirty
other
indabas
across Matabeleland. His sergeant finished
the translation and glanced up at him expectantly.
Mungo St John pointed to the mass of cattle penned in the
thorn kraal behind him. ‘As you have seen, it is of no
avail to try to hide the herds. The native police track them
down.’ Mungo stopped again, and frowned in annoyance. In
the second row, a Matabele buck had risen and was facing him
quietly.