by Wilbur Smith
Gandang himself had engaged the grizzle-headed but powerfully built Bopa. He was a wily, scarred fighter and veteran of a thousand such conflicts. Their shields, the one dappled black and the other red, collided with a thud like charging bulls, and they wrestled for the advantage until Gandang, the younger and stronger, with a shift of weight and feet had hooked the point of his shield under the red shield of Bopa and prised it aside to open his enemy’s flank.
‘Ngidla – I have eaten!’ Gandang sang out as he sent the broad blade cleaving between Bopa’s ribs, and when it was withdrawn against the reluctant cling of flesh with a sucking noise like a man walking in thick ankle-deep mud, Bopa’s heart blood burst out behind it and splattered against Gandang’s shield, drenching the ox tail tassels on his arms and his legs.
Thus it was for good reason that Gandang had laughed when Robyn called him ‘Slaver’.
‘I am on the King’s business,’ he repeated. ‘But what do you do here, white woman?’ He knew very little of these strange people, for he had been a child when the impis of Mzilikazi had fought them in the land to the south, and had been driven by them northwards into what was now Matabeleland.
Gandang had met only one or two of them. They had been visitors to his father’s great kraal at Thabas Indunas, travellers and traders and missionaries who had been ‘given the road’ by the King and allowed to cross the strictly guarded frontiers.
Gandang was suspicious of them and their gaudy trade goods. He distrusted their habit of breaking pieces off the rocks along their path, he disliked their talk of a white man who lived in the sky and seemed to be in serious competition with the ‘Nkulu-kulu’, the great God of the Matabele.
Had he met this woman and her followers in the Burnt Land, he would have followed his orders without hesitation, and killed them all.
However, they were still ten days’ march from the frontier and his interest in them was casual; he was impatient to return to his father and report to him the success of his expedition. He would not waste much further time.
‘What is your business, woman?’
‘I come to tell you that the Great Queen will no longer allow human beings to be sold like cattle for a few beads. I come to put an end to this evil business.’
‘That is man’s work,’ Gandang smiled. ‘And besides, it has already been seen to.’
The woman amused him, at another time he might have enjoyed bantering with her.
He would have turned and strode from the camp when suddenly a small movement seen through a gap in the thin thatch of one of the temporary shelters caught his attention. With uncanny speed for such a big man, he ducked into the hut and pulled the girl out by her wrist; holding her at arm’s length he studied Juba gravely.
‘You are of the people, you are Matabele,’ he said flatly.
Juba hung her head and her face had a pale greyish sheen of terror. For a moment Robyn thought that Juba’s legs would no longer bear her weight.
‘Speak,’ Gandang commanded in that low but imperious voice. ‘You are Matabele!’
Juba looked up at him and her whisper was so soft that Robyn hardly caught it.
‘Matabele,’ she agreed, ‘of Zanzi blood.’
The warrior and the maid considered each other carefully. Juba lifted her chin, and the greyness vanished from her face.
‘Your father?’ Gandang asked at last.
‘I am Juba, daughter of Tembu Tebe.’
‘He is dead, and all his children, at the King’s orders.’
Juba shook her head. ‘My father is dead – but his wives and his children are in the land of the Sulumani beyond the sea. I alone escaped.’
‘Bopa!’ Gandang said the name as though it were a curse. He considered a moment. ‘It is possible that your father was wrongly sentenced, for Bopa sent false accusation to the King.’
Juba made no reply, but in the silence that followed, Robyn saw a subtle change coming over the girl, something altered in the carriage of her head, she shifted her weight, thrusting out one hip, a small but provocative movement.
Her eyes, when she looked up at the tall Induna, grew wider and softer, and her lips were held slightly apart so that the pink tip of her tongue just showed between them.
‘What is this white woman to you?’ Gandang asked, and there was just a trace of huskiness in his own voice. He held her wrist still, and she made no effort to pull away.
‘She is as my mother was,’ Juba replied, and as the Induna looked down from her face to her sweet young body the ostrich plumes fanned softly about his head, and Juba changed the angle of her shoulders slightly, offering up her breasts to his gaze.
‘You are with her by your own will?’ Gandang insisted, and Juba nodded.
‘So be it.’ It seemed to require an effort for the warrior to break his gaze, but he dropped Juba’s wrist and turned back to Robyn. His smile was mocking once more.
‘The slavers you seek are not far from here, white woman. You will find them at the next pass in the road.’
He went as swiftly and as silently as he had come, and his warriors followed him in a dense black column. Within minutes the last of them had disappeared along the winding narrow trail into the west.
Old Karanga was the first of the servants to return to the camp. He came in through the thorn scherm like a bashful stork on his thin legs.
‘Where were you when I needed you?’ Robyn demanded.
‘Nomusa, I could not trust my temper with those Matabele dogs,’ old Karanga quavered, but he could not meet her eyes.
Within the hour the other porters and bearers had crept down from the hills and out of the forest, all of them now endowed with amazing enthusiasm to continue the march in the opposite direction to that of the Inyati impi.
Robyn found the slavers where Gandang had promised her she would. They were scattered over the neck of the pass, they lay in knots and windrows, like leaves after the first storm of autumn. Nearly all of them had their death wounds in the chest or throat, proof that at the end they had fought like Matabele.
The victors had slit open the dead men’s bellies to allow their spirits to escape, a last courtesy to men who had fought gallantly, but the vultures had used the openings to enter the belly pouches.
The birds hopped and flapped and squabbled raucously over the cadavers, tugging and dragging at them so that their dead limbs kicked and twitched as though they were still alive, and dust and loose feathers flew around them. The croaking and squawking of the birds was deafening.
In the trees and on the cliffs above the pass, the birds that had already gorged crouched somnolently, puffing out their feathers and hunching their naked scaly heads and necks upon their shoulders, digesting the contents of their bulging crops before returning to the feast.
The little caravan passed slowly, in fascinated horror at the carnage, speechless in the raucous chorus of the scavengers, stepping carefully over the ragged, dust-covered remains of brave men, reminded by them of their own mortality.
Once they had crossed the pass they hurried down the far slope with fearful backward glances. There was a stream at the bottom of the slope, a tiny trickle of clear water springing from the slope and threading its way from pool to small shaded pool. Robyn went into camp upon the bank, and immediately called Juba to follow her.
She had to bathe herself, she felt as though death had touched her with its putrid fingertips and she needed to wash away the taint of it. She sat under the trickle of clear water, waist deep in the pool below the waterfall and let the stream flow over her head, her eyes closed trying to blank out the horrors of the battlefield. Juba was not so affected, she was no stranger to death in its most malevolent forms, and she splashed and played in the green water, completely absorbed in the moment.
At last Robyn waded to the bank, and pulled her shirt and breeches over her still-wet body. In that heat, her clothes would dry upon her within minutes, and while she twisted her wet hair into a rope on top of her head she called to Juba
to come out of the pool.
In a mischievous and rebellious mood the girl ignored her, and remained rapt in her own game, singing softly as she picked wild flowers from a creeper that hung over the pool and plaited them into a necklace over her shoulders. Robyn turned away and left her, climbing back along the bank towards the camp, and the first turn hid her from view.
Now Juba looked up and hesitated. She was not certain why she had refused to obey, and she felt a little chill of disquiet at being alone. She was not yet accustomed to this new mood of hers, this strange and formless excitement, this breathless expectancy for she knew not what. With a toss of her head she returned to her song and her play.
Standing above the bank, half screened by the trailing creeper and mottled like a leopard by the slanting dappled sunlight through the leaves of the forest, a tall figure leaned against the bole of a wild fig tree and watched the girl.
He had stood there, unseen and unmoving since he had been led to the pool by the sound of splashing and singing. He had watched the two women, comparing their nakedness – the bloodless white against the luscious dark skin, the skinny angular frame against sweet and abundant flesh, the small pointed breasts tipped in the obscene pink of raw meat against the full and perfect rounds with their raised bosses, dark and shiny as new-washed coal, the narrow hips of a boy against the proud wide basin which would cradle fine sons, the mean little buttocks against the fullness and glossiness that was unmistakably woman.
Gandang was aware that by returning along the trail he was for the first time in his life neglecting his duty. He should have been many hours’ march away from this place, trotting at the head of his impi into the west, yet there was this madness in his blood, that he had not been able to deny. So he had halted his impi and returned alone along the Hyena Road.
‘I am stealing the King’s time, just as surely as Bopa stole his cattle,’ he told himself. ‘But it is only a small part of a single day, and after all the years I have given to my father, he would not grudge me that.’ But Gandang knew that he would, favourite son or not, Mzilikazi had only one punishment for disobedience.
Gandang was risking his life to see the girl again, he was risking a traitor’s death to speak a few words to a stranger, daughter of one who had himself died a traitor’s death.
‘How many men have dug their graves with their own umthondo,’ he mused, as he waited for the white woman to leave the pool, and when she had covered her skinny boy’s body with those stiff and ugly garments and called to the lovely child in the pool to follow her, Gandang tried to reach out with his own will to hold Juba there.
The white woman, clearly piqued, turned and disappeared amongst the trees and Gandang relaxed slightly, giving himself once more to the pleasure of watching the girl in the water. The wild flowers were a pale yellow against her skin, and the waterdrops clung to her breasts and shoulders like stars against the midnight sky. Juba was singing one of the children’s songs that Gandang knew so well, and he found himself humming the chorus under his breath.
Below him the girl waded to the bank and standing in the sugar-white sand began to wipe the water from her body; still singing she bent forward to wipe her legs, encircling them with long slim pink-lined fingers and running her hands slowly down from thigh to ankle. Her back was to Gandang, and as she stooped he gasped aloud at what was revealed to him, and instantly the girl flew erect and spun to face him. She was trembling like a roused fawn, her eyes huge and dark with fright.
‘I see you, Juba, daughter of Tembu Tebe,’ he said, there was a husky catch to his voice as he came down the bank to her.
The expression in her eyes changed, they glowed with golden lights like sunshine in a bowl of honey.
‘I am a messenger of the King, and I demand the right of the road,’ he said, and touched her shoulder. She shivered under his fingers. He saw the little goose bumps rise upon her skin.
The ‘right of the road’ was a custom from the south, from the old country beside the sea. It was the same right which Senzangakhona had demanded of Nandi, ‘the sweet one’, but Senzangakhona had not respected the law, and he had penetrated the forbidden veil. From this transgression one had been born, the bastard ‘Chaka’, ‘the worm in the belly’, who had grown to become both the King and the scourge of Zululand, the same Chaka from whose tyranny Mzilikazi had flown with his tribe to the north.
‘I am a loyal maiden of the King,’ Juba answered him shyly, ‘and I cannot refuse to comfort one who follows the road on the King’s business.’ Then she smiled up at him. It was neither bold nor provocative, but a smile so sweet, so trusting and filled with admiration, that Gandang felt his heart squeezed afresh.
He was gentle with her, very gentle and calm and patient, so that she found herself impatient to render the service he desired, found herself desiring it as strongly as he so evidently did. When he showed her how to make a nest for him between her crossed thighs, she responded instantly to his word and touch, and there was something wrong with her throat and her breathing, for she was unable to answer him aloud.
While she held him in this nest she felt herself gradually overwhelmed by a strange wildness of heart and body. She tried to alter the angle of her pelvis, she tried to unlock her tightly crossed thighs and spread them for him, she strove to engulf him for she could no longer bear that dry and tantalizing friction against the inside of her upper legs. She wanted to feel him breast the warm and welcoming flood that she sent down for him and she wanted to feel him gliding upon it deeply up inside her. But his resolve, his respect for custom and law, was as powerful as that muscular body that drove above her, and he held her captive until the moment when she felt his grip break and his seed spring strongly from him to waste itself in the white sand beneath them. At that moment she felt such a sense of loss that she could have wept aloud.
Gandang held her still, his chest heaving and the sweat forming little shiny runnels across that smooth dark back and down the corded neck. Juba clung to him with both arms wrapped tightly about him, her face pressed into the hollow between his shoulder and his neck, and for a long time neither of them spoke.
‘You are as soft and as beautiful as the first night of the new moon,’ Gandang whispered at last.
‘And you are as black and as strong as the bull of the Chawala festival,’ she instinctively chose the simile that would mean most to a Matabele, the bull as the symbol of wealth and virility and the Chawala bull the most perfect specimen of all the King’s herds.
‘You will be only one of many wives,’ Robyn was horrified at the thought.
‘Yes.’ agreed Juba. ‘First of all of them, and the others will honour me.’ ‘I would have taken you with me to teach you many things and show you great wonders.’
‘I have already seen the greatest wonder.’
‘You will do nothing but bear children.’
Juba nodded happily. ‘If I am truly lucky, I will bear him a hundred sons.’
‘I will miss you.’
‘I would never leave you, Nomusa, my mother, not for any person nor reason in the world, except this one.’
‘He wants to give me cattle.’
‘Since the death of my family, you are my mother,’ explained Juba, ‘and it is the marriage price.’
‘I cannot accept payment – as though you were a slave.’
‘Then you demean me. I am of Zanzi blood and he tells me that I am the most beautiful woman in Matabeleland. You should set the lobola as one hundred head of cattle.’
So Robyn called the Induna to her.
‘The marriage price is one hundred head of cattle,’ Robyn told him sternly.
‘You make a poor bargain,’ Gandang answered loftily. ‘She is worth many times that amount.’
‘You will keep the cattle at your kraal, against my coming. You will tend them carefully and see that they multiply.’
‘It will be as you say, amekazi, my mother.’ And this time Robyn had to return his smile, for it was no longer mocking a
nd his teeth were so white and he was, as Juba had said, truly beautiful.
‘Look after her well, Gandang.’
Robyn embraced the young woman and their tears mingled and smeared both their cheeks. Yet when she left Juba did not look back once, but trotted behind Gandang’s tall erect figure carrying her rolled sleeping-mat balanced upon her head, and her buttocks jiggled merrily under the short beaded apron.
Man and woman reached the saddle of the pass and disappeared abruptly from view.
The Hyena Road led Robyn and her little party into the mountains, into the mist and the strangely desolate valleys of heather and fantastically shaped grey stone. It led her to the slave stockades which Juba had described to her, the meeting place where the white man and black man made their trade for human life, where the slaves exchanged their carved yokes for cuff and chains. But now the stockades were deserted, the thatch already sagging and falling in untidy clumps, only the sour smell of captivity lingered, and the swarming vermin that infected the empty buildings. In a futile gesture, Robyn put fire to the buildings.
From the misty mountains the road led on, down through dark gorges and at last to the low littoral where once more the heat clamped down upon them from a sullen overcast sky and the grotesque baobab trees lifted their twisted arthritic branches to it like crippled worshippers at a healing shrine.
The rains caught them here upon the coastal plain. The flood swept three men away at a ford, four more, including one of the Hottentots, died of fever and Robyn herself was smitten with the first onslaught of the disease. Shivering, half demented by the phantoms of malaria, she toiled on along the rapidly overgrown trail, slipping and stumbling in the mud, and cursing the fever miasma that rose from the brimming swamps and hung like a silver wraith in the sickly green glades of fever trees through which they hurried.