by Wilbur Smith
"Wake up, pussy cat," he said. "It's time to talk." She sat up and stretched, and then groaned softly and touched herself cautiously.
"Ah!" she murmured huskily. "I ache all over, inside and out, and it feels good." "Light each of us a cigarette," he ordered, and she fitted one into his ivory holder with practised dexterity, lit it and placed it between his lips.
"When do you expect the next courier from Lusaka?" He blew a spinning smoke-ring that broke on her bosom like mist on a hilltop.
"Overdue," she said. "I told you about the Umlimo." "Oh, yes," Douglas nodded. "The spirit medium." "The arrangements to move her are all in hand, and Lusaka is sending a high party official, probably a commissar, to take charge of the transfer. He will arrive at any time." "It seems a lot of trouble to go to for a senile old witch, doctor." "She is the spiritual leader of the Matabele people," Leila told him fiercely, "her presence with the guerrilla army would be of incalculable value to their morale." "Yes, I understand, you explained the superstitions to me." Douglas stroked her cheek soothingly and she subsided gradually. "So they are sending a commissar. That's good, though it always puzzles me how they move back and forth across the border, in and out of the towns, and from one end of the country to the other, with so little trouble." "To the. average white man, one black face looks the same as every other," Leila explained. "There is no system of passes or passports, every village is a base, nearly every black person an ally. As long as they do not carry arms or explosives, they can use the buses and railways, and pass through the road-blocks with impunity." "All right," Douglas agreed. "Just as long as what I have for you gets back to Lusaka as soon as possible." "By next week at the latest," Leila promised.
"The Ballantyne Scouts are setting up a full-scale operation to cull Inkunzi and his staff at the safe house in Lusaka." "Oh my God, no! "Leila gasped with shock.
"Yes, I'm afraid so, unless we can warn him. Now here are the details. Memorize them, please." The rackety old bus came down the winding road through the hills, leaving behind it a long greasy black smear of diesel fumes which drifted sluggishly aside on the small breeze. The roof racks were piled with bundles tied with rope and pieces of string, with cardboard boxes and cheap suitcases, with squawking chickens in cages of plaited bark and bent green twigs, and with other less readily identifiable packages.
The driver slammed on his brakes when he saw the road-block ahead, and the chattering and laughter of his passengers died into an uneasy silence. As soon as the bus stopped, the black passengers poured out of the forward entrance, and under the direction of the waiting armed police separated into groups according to their sex, men to one side, women and their children to the other. In the meantime, two black constables climbed aboard to, search the empty bus for fugitives hiding under the seats or for hidden weapons.
Comrade Tungata Zebiwe was amongst the huddle of male passengers.
He was dressed in a floppy hat, a ragged shirt and short khaki trousers, on his feet were filthy tennis shoes, and his big toes protruded through the stained canvas uppers. He seemed typical of the unskilled itinerant labourers who made up the great bulk of the country's labour force, he was safe, just as long as the police check was cursory, but he had every reason to believe that this one would not be.
After crossing the Zambezi drifts in darkness, and negotiating the cordon sanitaire, he had made his way south through the abandoned strip and reached the main road near the collieries at Wankie. He was travelling alone, and carrying forged employment papers to show that he had been discharged two days previously from employment as a labourer at the collieries. It should have been enough to take him through any ordinary road-block.
However, two hours after he had boarded the crowded bus and when they were approaching the outskirts of Bulawayo, he realized suddenly that there was another ZIPRA courier amongst the passengers. She was a Matabele woman in her late twenties, who had been in the training camp with him in Zambia. She was also dressed like a peasant girl, and had an infant strapped upon her back in the traditional fashion. Tungata. studied her surreptitiously as the bus roared southwards, hoping that she might not be carrying incriminating material. If she was, and if she was picked up at a road-block, then every other passenger in the bus would be subjected to full security scrutiny, which included fingerprints, and as a former Rhodesian government employee, Tungata's fingerprints were on the files.
The woman, although his ally and comrade, was a deadly danger to him now. She was a totally unimportant pawn, a mere courier, and she was -expendable, but what was she carrying at the moment? He watched her surreptitiously, looking for any indication of her status, and then suddenly his attention focused on the infant strapped to the girl's back. With a swoop of dread in the pit of his stomach, Tungata realized the worst. The woman was active. If they took her, they would almost certainly take Tungata also.
Now, he lined up with the other male passengers for the body search by the black police members, on the far side of the bus the women passengers were forming a separate line. Women police would search them to the skin. The girl courier was in fifth place in the line, she was joggling the sleeping infant on her back, and its tiny head waggled from side to side. Tungata could wait no longer.
Abruptly he pushed his way to the front of the queue, and spoke "urgently but quietly to the black sergeant in charge of the search.
Then Tungata pointed deliberately at. the girl in the women's line.
The girl saw the accuser's finger pointed at her, she looked about her, and then broke from the line and started to run.
"Stop her!" the sergeant bellowed, and the running girl loosed the strap of cloth that held the infant to her back and let the tiny black baby fall to the earth. Freed of her burden, she raced for the line of thick thorn bush along the verge of the road. However, the road-block had been laid to prevent just such an escape, and two police constables rose from concealment at the edge of the bush. The girl doubled back, but they had her trapped and a heavy blow with a gun-butt knocked her sprawling in the grass. They dragged her back, struggling and kicking, spitting and snarling, like a cat, and as she passed Tungata, she shrieked at him.
"Traitor, we will eat you! jackal, you will die-" Tungata stared at her with bovine indifference.
One of the constables picked up the naked infant from where the girl had abandoned it, and he exclaimed immediately.
"It's cold." He turned the body gingerly, and the tiny limbs sprawled lifelessly. "It's dead!" The constable's voice was shocked, and then he started again. "Look! Look at this!" The child's body had been gutted like that of a fish. The cut ran upwards from its groin, across its stomach, through the sternum of the chest to the base of the little throat and the wound had been closed with sacking twine and crude cobbled stitches. The white police captain, with a sickly expression on his face, snipped the stitches and the body cavity bulged open. It was packed with ropes of brown plastic explosive.
"All right." The captain stood up. "Hold them all. We will run a full check on every one of the bastards." Then the captain came to Tungata. "Well done, friend." He clapped Tungata's shoulder. "You can claim your reward from the main police station. Five thousand dollars that's good, hey! You just give them this." He scribbled on his notebook and tore off the sheet, "That's my name and rank. I will witness your claim. One of our Lan dRovers will be going into Bulawayo in a few minutes I'll see you get a lift into town." Tungata submitted docilely to the customary search by the guards at the gates to Khami Mission Hospital. He was still dressed in his labourer's rags, and carrying the forged discharge from the Wankie collieries.
One of the guards glanced at the work papers. "What is wrong with you?" "I have a snake in my stomach." Tungata clasped his hands over the offending organ. A snake in the stomach could mean anything from colic to duodenal ulcers.
The guard laughed. "The doctors will cut out your mamba for you, go to the out-patients department." He pointed out the side entrance, and Tungata went up the driveway
with an ungainly sloppy gait.
"The Matabele sister at the out-patient desk recognized him with a flicker of surprise, then her expression went dead-pan and she made out a card for him and waved him to one of the crowded benches. A minute or two later the black sister rose from the desk and crossed to the door marked "Duty Doctor." She went in and closed the door behind her.
When she came out again, she pointed at Tungata. "You next!" she said.
Tungata shambled across the hall and went in through the same door. Leila St. John came joyfully to meet him, as soon as he closed the door behind him.
"Comrade Commissar!" she whispered, and embraced him. "I was so worried!" She kissed him on each cheek, and as she stepped back, Tungata had changed character from dull-witted peasant to deadly warrior, tall and dangerously cold-faced.
"You have clothes for me?" Behind the movable screen, Tungata changed swiftly and stepped out again buttoning the white laboratory-coat. On his lapel he wore a plastic dog-tag that identified him as "DOCTOR G. J. KUMALO', which placed him immediately above idle suspicion.
"I would like to know what arrangements you have made," he said, and seated himself facing Leila St. John across her desk.
"I have had the Umlimo in our geriatric ward since she was brought in by her followers from the Matopos Reservation about six months ago."
"What is her physical condition?" "She is a very old lady ancient, is perhaps the better word. I see no reason to doubt her claim that she is 120 years old. She was already a young woman when Cecil Rhodes" freebooters rode into Bulawayo and hunted King Lobengula to his death."
"Her condition, please." "She was suffering from malnutrition, but I have had her on a nutritional drip and she is much stronger, though she cannot walk, nor is she in control of her bowels and bladder. She is an albino, and she suffers from a type of skin allergy, but I have been able to prescribe an antihistamine ointment which has given her a great deal of relief. Her hearing and eyesight are failing, but her heart and other vital organs are remarkably strong for her age. Moreover, her brain is sharp and clear. She appears to be totally lucid." "So she can travel?"Tungata insisted.
"She is eager to do so. It is her own prophecy that she must cross the great waters before the spears of the nation prevail."
Tungata made an impatient gesture, and Leila St. John interpreted it.
"You do not set any store by the Umlimo, and her predictions, do you, Comrade?" "Do you, Doctor?" he asked.
"There are areas which our sciences have not yet penetrated.
She is an extraordinary woman. I don't say I believe everything about her, but I am aware of a force within her." "It is our estimate that she will be extremely valuable as a propaganda weapon. The great majority of our people are still uneducated and superstitious. You still have not answered my question, Doctor. Can she travel?" "I think she can. I have prepared medications for her to take on the journey.
I have also made out medical certificates, which should'e sufficient to see her safely through any security checks as far as the border with Zambia. I will provide one of my best medical orderlies, a black male nurse, to travel with her. I would go myself, but it would attract too much attention." Tungata was silent for a long time, his hard handsome features rapt in thought. He had such a presence of command and authority that Leila found herself waiting almost timidly for his next words, eager to respond whether they were command or question.
However, when he spoke, it was to muse softly. "The woman is as valuable dead as alive, and dead she would be easier to handle, I presume you could preserve her body in formaldehyde or something of that nature." Despite herself, Leila was shocked, and yet strangely awed by the ruthlessness, excited by the man's deadly resolve.
"I pray that won't be necessary," she whispered, staring at him.
She had never met a man like this.
"I will see her first, then I will decide," Tungata said quietly.
"I wish to do so immediately." There were three weird crones squatting outside the door of the private, ward on the top floor in the south wing of the hospital. They were dressed in the dried skins of wild cat and jackal and python, and hung about the neck and waist with bottles and gourds and stoppered buckhoms, with dried goat-bladders and bone rattles, with phials and the leather bags that contained their divining bones.
"These are the old woman's followers," Leila St. John explained, "they will not leave her." "They will," said Tungata softly, "when I decide that they will One of them hopped towards him, whining and snivelling, reaching out to touch his leg with filth-encrusted fingers, and Tungata spurned her aside with his foot, and opened the door to the private ward. He went in, and Leila followed him and closed the door behind them. It was a small room with bare tiled floor and the walls were painted with a white gloss paint. There was a bedside locker with a stainlm-steel tiny of medicines and instruments upon it. The bed was on castors with an adjustable handle and screw at the foot. The head of the bed-frame was raised and the frail figure under the single sheet seemed no larger than a child. There was the glass bowl of a drip suspended above the bed, and a transparent plastic tube snaked down from it.
The Umlimo was asleep. Her un pigmented skin was a dusty pinkish grey, crusted with dark scabs that extended up over the pale bald scalp. The skin that covered her skull was so thin and fragile that the bone seemed to shine through it like a water-worn pebble beneath the surface of a mountain stream, but from her brow down to the edge of the white sheet beneath her chin, the skin was impossibly wrinkled and folded, like that of some prehistoric relic from the age of the great reptiles. Her mouth was open, the scabbed lips trembled with each breath, and there was a single yellow worn tooth left in the desiccated grey gums. She opened her eyes. They were pink as those of a white rabbit, sunk deeply in folds of grey skin, swimming in their own gummy mucus.
"Greetings, old Mother." Leila went to her and touched the age-ravaged cheek. "I have a visitor for you," she said in perfect Sindebele.
The old woman made a small keening sound in her throat, and she began to shake, her entire body taken by convulsions, as she stared at Tungata.
"Calm yourself, old Mother." Leila was concerned. "He will not harm you." The old woman lifted one arm from under the sheet. it was skeletal, the elbow-joint enlarged "and distorted by arthritic processes, the hand was a claw, with lumpy knuckles and twisted fingers. She pointed them at Tungata.
"Son of kings," she wailed her voice surprisingly clear and strong, "father of kings. king that will be, when the falcons return.
Bayete, he that will be king, Bayete!" It was a royal salute, and Tungata went rigid with shock. His own skin-tone changed to dark grey, and little blisters of sweat burst out upon his brow. Leila St. John fell back until she was against the wall. She stared at the frail old woman in the high steel bed. Spittle frothed on the thin scabbed lips, and the pink eyes rolled back into the ancient skull, yet the wailing voice rose higher.
"The falcons have flown afar. There will be no peace in the kingdoms of the Mambos or the Monomatopas until they return. He who brings the stone falcons back to roost shall rule the kingdoms." Her voice rose to a shriek. "Bayete, Nkosi nkulu. Hail, Mambo. Live for ever, Monomatopa." The Umlimo greeted Tungata with all the titles of the ancient rulers, and then collapsed against the soft white pillows.
Leila hurried back to her side, and placed her fingers over the sticklike wrist.
"She's all right," she said after a moment, and looked up at Tungata. "What do you want me to do?" He shook himself like a man awakening from deep sleep, and with the sleeve of his white coat, wiped the icy sweat of superstitious dread from his forehead.
"Look after her well. Make sure she is ready to leave by morning. We will take her north across the great river," he said.
Leila St. John backed up her small Fiat into the ambulance bay beside the casualty department, and screened from curious eyes, Tungata slipped through the back door and crouched down between the seats.
Leila spread a mohair travelling-rug over him and drove down to the main gates. She spoke briefly to one of the guards, and then swung the Fiat onto the branch road that led to the superintendent's residence.
She spoke without looking back or moving her lips.