by Wilbur Smith
For many minutes after waking she believed herself seriously stricken, and then with a rush of relief and joy that was far stronger than the pain she realized what was happening to her. She dragged herself across the cabin, doubled over with the pain, and bathed in the bucket of cold sea water. Then she knelt beside Juba on the pallet.
The girl’s fever had abated. The skin felt cooler to the touch. Her continued recovery added to Robyn’s sense of deep pleasure and relief. Now she would have to find the right moment to tell Clinton Codrington that she would not marry him, and the vision of the little house above the Portsmouth harbour receded. Despite the pain, she felt free, light of body, like a bird poised on the point of flight.
She filled the pannikin with water and lifted Juba’s head.
‘We will be all right now,’ she told the girl, and Juba opened her eyes.
‘We’ll both be all right now,’ she repeated, watching the girl drink thirstily, smiling happily to herself.
Juba’s recovery was swift. Soon she ate with a robust appetite. Her body filled almost before Robyn’s eyes, her skin took on the lustre of health and youth again, her eyes regained the sparkle of high spirits – and Robyn realized with proprietorial approval that she was a pretty girl, no, more than that, she had natural grace and poise, the voluptuous curve of bosom and buttock which ladies of high fashion tried to achieve with bustle and padded bodice. She possessed also a sweet moon-face, the big wide-set eyes and full sculptured lips that were exotic and strangely beautiful.
Juba could not understand Robyn’s concern with having her cover her breasts and legs, but Robyn had seen the seamen’s eyes when the girl followed her up on to the deck with only a scrap of canvas covering the most vital point of her anatomy and showing no concern at all when the wind lifted the canvas and fluttered it like a beckoning flag. Robyn commandeered one of Zouga’s oldest shirts. It hung to Juba’s knees and she belted it at the waist with a bright ribbon that had the child cooing with the eternal feminine delight in pretty things.
She followed Robyn about like a puppy, and Robyn’s ear tuned to the Nguni language. Her vocabulary expanded swiftly, and the two of them chatted late every night, sitting side by side on the straw pallet.
Clinton Codrington began showing acute signs of jealousy. He had become used to having more of her company, and Robyn was using the girl as an excuse to taper off their relationship, preparing him for the news that she must deliver before they reached Quelimane.
Zouga also disapproved of her growing intimacy with the girl.
‘Sissy, you must remember that she is a native. It never pays to let them get too familiar,’ Zouga told her gravely. ‘I’ve seen that happen too often in India. One has to keep one’s reserve. After all, you are an English woman.’
‘And she is a Matabele of Zanzi blood, which makes her an aristocrat, for her family came up with Mzilikazi from the south. Her father was a famous general and she can trace her bloodline back to Senzangakhona, the King of the Zulu, and the father of Chaka himself. We, on the other hand, can trace our family as far as great-grandfather, who was a cattle herd.’
Zouga’s expression stiffened. He did not enjoy discussing the family origins.
‘We are English. The greatest and most civilized people in the world’s history.’
‘Grandfather Moffat knows Mzilikazi,’ Robyn pointed out, ‘and thinks him a great gentleman.’
‘You are being foolish,’ Zouga snapped. ‘How can you compare the English race to these blood-thirsty savages.’ But he stooped out of the cabin for he did not wish to continue the discussion. As usual, Robyn had her facts correct and her logic was infuriating.
His own grandfather, Robert Moffat, had first met Mzilikazi back in ’29 and over the years the two men had become firm and trusted friends. The King relied on Moffat, whom he called Tshedi, for counsel in his dealings with the world beyond his borders and for medical treatment for the gout which plagued him as he grew older.
The route northwards to the land of the Matabele always passed through Robert Moffat’s mission station at Kuruman. A prudent traveller would ask for a safe conduct from the old missionary, and the Matabele impis guarding the Burnt Land along the border would honour that safe conduct.
Indeed, the ease with which Fuller Ballantyne had moved through the wild, untamed tribes along the Zambezi river as far west as Lake Ngami, unmolested and unharmed, was in great part due to his relationship with Robert ‘Tshedi’ Moffat. The mantle of protection which the Matabele King spread over his old friend extended to his immediate family, and was recognized by all the tribes within range of the Matabele’s long arm, an arm that wielded the assegai, the terrible stabbing spear which King Chaka of the Zulu had first conceived, and with which he had conquered his known world.
In his pique at Robyn’s comparison of the ancestry of his family and that of the pretty half-naked black girl, Zouga at first missed the significance of what she had told him. When it struck him, he hurried back to Robyn’s cabin.
‘Sissy,’ he burst out excitedly. ‘If she comes from Mzilikazi country – why! that’s almost a thousand miles due west of Quelimane. She must have passed through the land of Monomatapa to reach this coast. Get her to tell us about it.’
He regretted his childhood inattention to the language when his mother had taught them. He concentrated savagely now as the two girls chatted animatedly, and began recognizing some of the words, but it needed Robyn to translate the full sense for him.
Juba’s father was a famous Induna, a great warrior who had fought the Boers at Mosega, and a hundred other battles since then, his shield had been thick with the tassels of cow tails, black and white, each of which signified a heroic deed.
He had been granted the headring of the Induna when he was still a young man of less than thirty summers, and had become one of the highest elders in the council of the nation. He had fifty wives, many of them of pure Zanzi blood like his own, a hundred and twelve sons and uncounted daughters. Although all the cattle of the nation belonged to the King, yet over five thousand were put in the charge of Juba’s father, a mark of the King’s high favour.
He was a great man – perhaps too great for his own safety. Somebody whispered the word ‘treason’ in the King’s ear, and the King’s executioners had surrounded the kraal in the dawn, and called out Juba’s father.
He had stooped out through the low entrance of his thatched beehive hut, naked from the embrace of his favourite wife.
‘Who calls?’ he cried into the dawn, and then he saw the ring of black figures, tall in their feather headdresses, but standing motionless, silent and menacing.
‘In the King’s name,’ a voice answered him, and out of the ranks stepped a figure he recognized immediately. It was one of the King’s Indunas also, a man named Bopa a short powerful man, with a deep-muscled bare chest and a head so heavy that the broad features seemed to have been carved out of a chunk of granite from the kopjes across the Nyati River.
There was no appeal, no escape, not that either consideration even passed briefly through the old Induna’s mind.
‘In the King’s name.’ That was sufficient. Slowly he drew himself to his full height. Despite the grey cap of his hair, he was still a finely built warrior with broad rangy shoulders and the ridged battle scars which crawled across his chest and flanks like live serpents.
‘The Black Elephant,’ he began to recite the praise names of his King. ‘Bayete! The Thunder of the Heavens. The Shaker of the Earth. Bayete!’
Still calling the King’s names he went down on one knee, and the King’s executioner stepped up behind him.
The wives and elder children had crawled from their huts now and huddled together in dread, watching from the shadows, their voices blending in a single cry of horror and sorrow as the executioner drove his short thick-bladed assegai between the Induna’s shoulder blades, and two hands breadth out of his chest. As he withdrew the blade, there was the crude sucking sound of steel leaving flesh and the old I
nduna’s life blood spurted head high as he fell forward on to his face.
With his smeared red blade the King’s executioner commanded his warriors forward, for the sentence of death included the old man’s wives, every one of their sons and daughters, the household slaves and their children, every inhabitant of the large village, three hundred or more souls.
The executioners worked swiftly, but there was a change in the ancient ritual of death. The old women, the grey-headed slaves died swiftly, not honoured with the blade but clubbed to death with the heavy knobkerries that each warrior carried. The infants, and unweaned toddlers were snatched up by the ankles, and their brains were dashed from their skulls against the trunk of a tree, against the heavy poles of the cattle enclosure or against a convenient rock. It was very swift, for the warriors were highly trained and disciplined troops and this was something they had done many times before.
Yet this time there was a difference, the younger women, the adolescent children, even those on the verge of puberty, were hustled forward and the King’s executioner glanced at them appraisingly, and with a gesture of the bloody spear sent them left or right.
On the left hand was swift death, while those who were sent right were forced into a trot and led away towards the east, towards the sunrise as the girl Juba explained it to Robyn.
‘Many days we travelled,’ her voice sinking, the horror of it still in the dark brown eyes. ‘I do not know how long it was. Those who fell were left where they lay, and we went on.’
‘Ask her what she remembers of the country,’ Zouga demanded.
‘There were rivers,’ the girl replied. ‘Many rivers and great mountains.’ Her memories were confused, she could make no estimates of distance, they had encountered no other people, no villages nor towns, they had seen no cattle nor standing crops. Juba shook her head to each of Zouga’s questions, and when he showed her the Harkness map in a forlorn hope that she might be able to point out features upon it, the child giggled in confusion. Drawn symbols on parchment were beyond her comprehension, she could not begin to relate them to features of landscape.
‘Tell her to go on,’ he ordered Robyn impatiently.
‘At the end we passed through deep gorges in high mountains where the slopes were covered with tall trees, and the rivers fell with white spray, until at last we came to where the bunu –the white men –waited.’
‘The white men?’ Robyn demanded.
‘Men of your people,’ the girl nodded. ‘With a pale skin and pale eyes. There were many men, some white and others brown or black men, but dressed as the white men were dressed, and armed with the isibamu,with guns.’ The Matabele people knew well the power and effect of firearms, they had encountered enemies armed with them at least thirty years before. Even some of the Matabele Indunas carried muskets, although they always handed these to a servant to carry when there was serious fighting in the offing.
‘These people had built kraals, such as we build for our cattle, but these were filled with people, a great multitude of people and with them we were bound with the insimbi, the links of iron.’ She rubbed her wrists instinctively at the memory, and the calluses raised by the slave cuffs still blemished the skin of her forearms.
‘Each day that we stayed at this place in the mountains, more people came. Sometimes only as many as the fingers on both your hands, on other days there were great numbers so we could hear their lamentations at a distance. And always there were warriors guarding them.
‘Then before the sun one morning, at the time of the horns,’ Robyn recalled the expression for the time of dawning when the horns of the cattle first show against the morning sky, ‘they led us from the kraals, wearing the insimbi, and we formed a great snake of people so long that the head was out of sight ahead of me in the forest while the tail was still up in the clouds of the mountains when we came down the Hyena Road.’
‘The Hyena Road, Ndlele umfisi.’ It was the first time that Robyn had heard the name spoken. It conjured up an image of a dark trail through the forests, beaten by tens of thousands of bare feet, with the loathsome eaters of dead flesh slinking along beside it, chuckling and shrieking their inane chorus.
‘Those that died, and those that fell and could not rise again were released from their chains and dragged to one side. The fisi have grown so bold along the road, that they rushed out of the bushes and devoured the bodies while we passed in full sight. It was worst when the body still lived.’
Juba broke off and stared unseeingly at the bulkhead across the cabin. Slowly her eyes filled with tears, and Robyn took her hand and held it in her lap.
‘I know not how long we followed the Hyena Road,’ Juba went on, ‘for each day became as the one before it, and as the one that followed it, until at last we came to the sea.’
Afterwards Zouga and Robyn discussed the girl’s story.
‘She must have gone through the kingdom of Monomatapa, and yet she says there were no towns nor signs of occupation.’
‘The slavers might have avoided contact with Monomatapa’s people.’
‘I wish she had seen and remembered more.’
‘She was in a slave caravan,’ Robyn pointed out. ‘Survival was her only concern.’
‘If only these damned people could even read a map.’
‘It’s a different culture, Zouga,’ and he saw the spark in her eye, and sensed the drift of the conversation and turned it aside swiftly.
‘Perhaps the legend of Monomatapa is only a myth, perhaps there are no gold mines.’
‘The important thing about Juba’s story is that the Matabele are dealing in slaves, they have never done so before.’
‘Nonsense!’ grunted Zouga. ‘They are the greatest predators since Genghis Khan! They and all the Zulu splinter tribes – the Shangaan, the Angoni and the Matabele. War is their way of life, and plunder is their main crop. Their whole nation was built on a system of slave-taking.’
‘But they have never sold them before,’ said Robyn mildly. ‘At least as far as we know from all that grandfather and Harris and the others have written.’
‘The Matabele never found a market before,’ Zouga replied reasonably. ‘Now they have at last made contact with the slavemasters, and found an opening to the coast. That was all it lacked before.’
‘We must witness this, Zouga,’ Robyn spoke with quiet determination. ‘We have to bear witness to this terrible crime against humanity and carry word back to London.’
‘If only the child had seen evidence of the Monomatapa, or the gold mines,’ muttered Zouga. ‘You must ask her if there were elephant.’ He pored over the Harkness map, lamenting the blank spaces. ‘I cannot believe that it does not exist. There is too much evidence.’ Zouga looked up at his sister. ‘One other thing – I seem to have forgotten almost every word of the language that mother taught us, except some of the nursery rhymes and lullabies.
‘Munya, mabili zinthatu, Yolala umdade wethu,’* he
* ‘One, two, three,
Go to sleep my little sister,’ recited, and then chuckled and shook his head. ‘I shall have to study it again, you and Juba will have to help me.’
The Zambezi comes to the sea through a delta of vast swampland, and a hundred confused shallow channels spread out for thirty miles down the low featureless coastline.
Floating islands of papyrus grass break free from the main pastures which blanket the waters of the delta and are carried out to sea on the dirty brown water. Some of these islands are many acres in extent and the roots of the plants so entangled that they can support the weight of a heavy animal. On occasions small herds of buffalo are trapped and carried twenty miles out to sea before the action of the waves smashes up the islands and plunges the great bovine animals into the water, prey for the big sharks which cruise the tainted estuary waters for just such a prize.
The muddy smell of the swamps carries far from the land when the wind is right, and the same wind carries strange insects with it. There is a tiny spider no bigge
r than the head of a wax Vesta which lives in the papyrus banks of the delta. It spins a gossamer web on which it launches itself into the breeze in such numbers that the gossamer fills the sky in clouds, like the smoke from a raging bushfire, rising many hundreds of feet and eddying and swirling in misty columns that are touched by the sunset into shades of pink and lovely pale mauve.
The river pours a muddy brown effluent into the sea, silt enriched with the bodies of drowned animals and birds, and the huge Zambezi crocodiles join the shark packs at the feast.
Black Joke found the first of these hideous creatures ten miles from land, wallowing in the low swells like a log, the rough scales glittering wetly in the sunlight until the gunboat approached too closely and the reptile dived with a lash and swirl of its powerful ridged tail.
Black Joke steamed obliquely across the multiple mouths of the river, none of which offered passage for a vessel of her size. She was headed further north for the Congone channel which was the only passage upriver to the town of Quelimane.
Clinton Codrington planned to enter it the following morning, after having lain hove-to during the night off the mouth. Robyn knew that she must remove the stitches from the wound under his armpit, though she would have liked to leave them a few days longer. They must come out before she left the gunboat at Quelimane.
She decided to use the same opportunity to give him the answer for which he had waited so patiently. She knew it was going to be painful for him to hear that she would not marry him, and she felt guilty that she had so encouraged him. It was alien to her nature to inflict suffering on another, and she would try to tell him as gently as possible.
She ordered him to her cabin for the removal of the horsehair stitches, seating him on the narrow bunk naked to the waist, with his arm raised. She was delighted with the way the wound had healed, and proud of the neatness of her work. She cooed over each knot as she snipped it with the pointed scissors, then seized it with the forceps and gently tugged and worried it free of his flesh. The stitches left twin punctures, one on each side of the raised purple welt of the scar and they were clean and dry. Only one of them leaked a single drop of blood which she swabbed away gently.