A Falcon Flies

by Wilbur Smith

  Gandang inspected the smear of blood on the tip of his forefinger, and said ‘Hau!’ quietly but with force, which is an expression of deep amazement. For Gandang, himself, owned a musket, a Tower Musket manufactured in London in 1837. When he first acquired the weapon, Gandang had fired it at buffalo, elephant and Mashona, all of whom had fled headlong, but unscathed.

  Gandang understood that when firing it was necessary to close the eyes and the mouth firmly, to hold the breath and at the moment of discharge to shout a rebuke to the devil who lived in the gunpowder smoke, otherwise the devil could enter through the eyes or mouth and take possession of the marksman. In order to throw the musket ball to any distance, it was also necessary to pull the trigger with sudden and brutal force, as in hurling a spear. Furthermore, to minimize the recoil of the weapon, the butt should not touch the shoulder, but be held a hand’s span from it. Despite all these precautions, Gandang had never succeeded in hitting the target at which he aimed, and had long abandoned the weapon to rust away, while he kept his assegai polished brightly.

  Thus Gandang appreciated to the full the magnitude of the feat that Zouga performed with such apparent ease. So their mutual respect deepened with each day spent in each other’s company, and became almost friendship. Almost, but not quite, there were chasms of culture and training between them that could never be bridged, and always the knowledge that on any day a swift runner might come from the west with a message for Gandang from his father.

  ‘Bulala umbuna! Kill the white man!’ And both of them knew that Gandang would hesitate not an instant longer.

  Zouga had much time alone in camp, and he spent it planning his audience with the King. The longer he dwelt upon that the more ambitious became his plans. The memory of the ancient disused mine-shafts returned to plague these idle hours, and at first merely to amuse himself, and then with truly serious intent, Zouga began to draw up a document which he headed:

  ‘Exclusive Concession to mine gold and hunt ivory in the Sovereign territory of Matabeleland.’

  He worked on it each evening polishing and reshaping it in the gibberish that the layman takes for legal jargon and which he fondly believes will dignify his creation. ‘Whereas I, Mzilikazi, ruler of Matabeleland, hereinafter referred to as the party of the first part—’

  Zouga had completed this document to his entire satisfaction when a fatal flaw in his plans became evident. Mzilikazi could not sign his name. Zouga pondered this for a day and then the solution occurred to him. Mzilikazi should by this time have in hand the sealed package. The crimson wax seals must surely impress him, and in his writing-case Zouga had two full sticks of sealing wax.

  Zouga began to design a great seal for King Mzilikazi. He sketched the design on the back cover of his journal, and the inspiration came from the first of the King’s praise names.

  ‘Great Black Elephant who shakes the earth.’

  In Zouga’s design the centre of the field depicted a bull elephant, with long tusks raised and ears spread wide. The upper border bore the legend, ‘Mzilikazi Nkosi Nkulu’. And the lower border carried the translation, ‘Mzilikazi, King of the Matabele’.

  He started experimenting with various materials, clay and wood, but the results did not please him – and the following day he asked Gandang for permission to send a party of his porters under Jan Cheroot back to the ancient workings at the Harkness mine to retrieve the ivory buried there.

  It took two days of careful consideration for Gandang to agree, and when he did, he sent fifty of his men to accompany the caravan, with orders to kill them all at the first hint of flight or treachery. Jan Cheroot returned with the four huge tusks from the two bull elephants, and Zouga had not only the material from which to carve the King’s great seal, but a gift fitting the King’s importance.

  Ivory was a treasure of which the Matabele had long ago realized the value in trade. It was, however, a scarce commodity, for even the bravest of men cannot kill a bull elephant with a stabbing spear. They had to rely on pickups from animals that had died of natural causes, or the very occasional victim of the pitfall.

  Gandang’s amazement when he saw the span and weight of the four tusks decided Zouga. The largest and most pleasingly shaped tusk would be Zouga’s gift to Mzilikazi, if he were ever allowed to reach the great kraal at Thabas Indunas alive.

  Not only was the threat of the King’s wrath still hanging over him, but his supply of quinine powder was reduced to a few ounces. All around the camp steamed the swampy ground, fed each day by the interminable rains, and in the night he could even smell the evil fever-bearing vapours rising from the stagnant waters to waft over the camp. Yet he was forced to reduce his daily preventative dose of the bitter powder to perilously small quantities in an attempt to eke it out.

  The inactivity and the dual threat of spear and disease wore on Zouga’s nerves, until he found himself toying with suicidal plans to make an attempt to avoid the guarding impi and to escape on foot southwards. He thought of seizing Gandang and holding him as hostage, or using the remaining fifty pounds of black powder to manufacture a combustible with sufficient power to destroy the entire impi host at a blast. Reluctantly, one after another, he recognized these as plans of folly and abandoned them.

  Gandang’s impi came again in the dawn. Zouga was awakened by a stentorian voice calling him out of the thorn scherm. Zouga threw a fur kaross over his shoulders and went out into the grey and icy drizzle of rain, sloshing through the red mud to the gate, and he knew at a single glance that the King had at last sent his reply. The ranks of silent Matabele surrounded the camp, still as statues carved from the black wild ebony.

  Zouga judged how swiftly he could reach the loaded gun beside his cot in the little thatched hut behind him, and guessed that he would probably be cut down before he could fire a single shot, yet he knew he would still make the attempt.

  ‘I see you Bakela,’ Gandang stepped from the dark and silent ranks.

  ‘I see you Gandang.’

  ‘The King’s messenger has arrived—’ Gandang paused a moment, solemn and stern, and then his perfectly square white teeth gleamed in the grey of dawn as he smiled. ‘The King has given you the road, and bids you attend him at Thabas Indunas.’

  The two men grinned at each other with relief, for both of them it meant life. The King had determined that Gandang had done his duty and correctly interpreted his commands, while Zouga had been accepted as an emissary and not as an enemy.

  ‘We will march at once,’ Gandang smiled still. ‘Before the sun!’ The King’s summons brooked of no hesitations or delays.

  ‘Safari!’ Zouga roused his camp. ‘We march at once!’

  A natural delicacy and tact had made Gandang keep little Juba out of sight and hearing of Zouga’s camp, nor had he mentioned the girl’s name to Zouga while sentence of death still hung over the white man. However, that first night of the journey to Thabas Indunas after they had camped, he brought Juba to Zouga’s hut, and she knelt and greeted him as ‘Baba-father’ and then with Gandang seated between them and listening attentively, he allowed them to talk for a short while.

  Zouga was avid for news of his sister, and he listened in silence to the account of Fuller Ballantyne’s death and his burial. It was better this way, and Zouga was already preparing his own fulsome tributes to the memory of his father.

  While relieved also to hear that Robyn was safe, Zouga was less happy with the swift progress she seemed to be making. It must have been nearly three months since Juba last saw her, almost within sight of the eastern mountain range, and by this time Robyn must have surely reached the coast, and could be on board a Portuguese trade ship, well on her way to Good Hope and the Atlantic.

  He did not know how long he would be delayed by the Matabele King, and then how long the overland journey down half the length of Africa might take him. Robyn’s manuscript could be in London a year or even more before his own.

  Zouga had exchanged one worry for another, and on the following
day’s march he chivvied his porters, heavily laden though they were, to keep up with their captors. It was of little avail, and they struggled along behind the trotting impi until Zouga demanded of Gandang that his own bearers be ordered to help with the load of ivory and the even greater weightier package of bark and plaited grass which contained the granite bird which Zouga had plundered from the tomb of the Kings.

  With each day’s travel towards the west, so the land became drier, and the forests thinned out and gave way to level pasturage with sparsely dotted acacias, graceful, mushroom-shaped trees from whose branches hung the big protein-rich, bean-shaped pods so dearly loved by game and domestic animals alike.

  The relief from the driving and endless rain storms lifted their spirits, and the impi sang on the march, winding like a thick black serpent through the lovely park-like lands below the bald and rounded kopjes of granite.

  Soon they came across the first of the King’s herds. The small humpbacked cattle whose origins lay far back beyond the veils of history, perhaps it had taken them and their drovers four thousand years to travel down from the valley of the Nile or from the fertile plains enclosed by the twin rivers of the Euphrates and the Tigris.

  The cattle were sleek, for the grass was dense and sweet, even here in the drier lands the rains had been good. The animals were of every colour and pattern, chocolate, red and black and white and yellow, piebald and skewbald, solid black or pure snowy white. They watched with a blank bovine stare as the column of men trotted past, and the small herd boys, naked except for the tiny apron of the beshu, came scampering to stare in silent wide-eyed awe at the fighting men in plume and tassel, for they were already pining for the day that they would be called into their own regiments and in turn follow the warriors’ road.

  They reached the first of the Matabele towns. It was situated on the banks of the Inyati river. Gandang explained that it was the headquarters of his own impi, the Inyati impi, and that it was not the largest of the regimental towns. The settlement was laid out around the central cattle-pen, a vast enclosure large enough to hold ten thousand head of the King’s herds. The dwellings were of identical thatched beehive construction in the tradition that the wandering tribe had preserved since leaving their native Zululand. The outer stockade was of cut mopani poles, set deep in the earth and forming a stout defensive wall. The villagers streamed out to welcome the returning impi, lining both sides of the route, a singing, clapping and laughing throng, mostly of women and children.

  ‘Most of the men and the marriageable maidens have left already for Thabas Indunas. In the full of this moon, the Chawala dance begins, and all the nation will assemble at the King’s kraal. We will rest here only one night and then take the road again to reach Thabas Indunas before the moon.’

  The road from the Inyati westwards was now a populous highway, as the nation went in towards the King’s capital city to celebrate the festival of the first fruits. The men marched in their regiments, their distinctive dress and ornaments, the colour of their war shields identifying each from afar, from the scarred and silver-headed veterans who had fought the Basuto, the Griquas and the Boer in the south, to the young bloods eager for their first kill, eager to learn in which direction the King would hurl his war-spear at the conclusion of the Chawala – for that was the direction in which they would find their reputation, their manhood, their glory and possibly their deaths.

  The regiments of young unmarried women interspersed those of the warriors, and as they passed each other on the road, the girls preened and giggled, casting languorous sloe-eyes at the unmarried men, and the men pranced and leapt in the pantomine of battle, the Giya, showing how they would wash their spears in blood and earn the privilege to ‘go in to the women’ and take wives.

  With each day’s march towards Thabas Indunas the roads became more congested, and their pace was reduced by the throng. They might wait half a morning to take their turn across a ford of the river, for the regiments drove the cattle which were their food supply ahead of them and dragged their baggage train behind. Each warrior’s finery, his tassels and plumes and feathers, were carefully packed and carried by the young apprentice who was his personal bearer.

  At last in the sweltering noon of high summer, Zouga’s little party, still borne along on the river of humanity, came over a crest of ground and saw laid out ahead of them the great kraal and capital city of the Matabele.

  It was spread out over many square miles of open plain below the bald-headed granite hills that gave it its name ‘The Hills of the Chieftains’. The furthest hill was the ‘Place of Killing’, Bulawayo, and from its sheer cliffs those condemned to die were cast down.

  The stockades formed concentric circles, dividing the city into its separate parts. Always the huge open cattle-pens were the centre of Matabele life, their cattle the source and store of their wealth, and now that the outlying herds had been brought in for the festival, every pen was filled with the multi-coloured herds of fat beasts.

  Standing at Zouga’s shoulder, Gandang used his stabbing-spear to point out with pride the city’s features. There were sections for the unmarried girls, and the unblooded regiments, and another huge area for the married quarters; the huts were uniform in size and laid out in orderly patterns, the thatched roofs shining golden yellow in the sunlight. The earth between them was swept clean and beaten hard by the passage of bare feet.

  ‘There is the King’s hut.’ Gandang pointed out a single huge conical structure in its own separate enclosure. ‘And that is the compound of the King’s wives,’ a hundred other huts, within a high guarding stockade, ‘and it is death to any man who enters that gate.’

  Gandang led Zouga down to a small grove of acacia trees outside the main stockade. There was a stream within a few yards of it, and for the first time in days they were free of the close press of humanity. Although the plain without the city walls was thick with the temporary dwellings of the visiting impis, the area around the grove was empty, as if it had been placed out of bounds to the common people.

  ‘When will I see the King?’ Zouga asked.

  ‘Not until after the festival,’ Gandang answered. ‘There is ritual and cleansing that the King must undergo but he has sent you gifts, you are much honoured.’ And he pointed with his blade at the line of young maidens that left a gate in the stockade. Each girl carried a large earthenware pot balanced easily upon her head, and she did not use a hand to maintain that balance.

  The girls moved with that peculiar straight-backed grace, hips swinging in lazy rhythm, the hard unripe fruits of their breasts bouncing and jostling at each pace. They came in to Zouga’s little camp in the grove and knelt to offer the gifts they bore.

  Some pots contained thick millet beer, tart and effervescent, others the clotted and soured cow’s milk, imaas, that was so much a staple of the Nguni diet, and others again, big chunks of fatty beef, roasted on the open coals.

  ‘You are much honoured by these gifts,’ Gandang repeated, apparently himself surprised by the King’s generosity. ‘Yet Tshedi, your grandfather, was always his good and trusted friend.’

  Once the camp was set up, Zouga found himself again the victim of idleness, with long days of waiting to fill. Here, however, he was free to roam about the city and its surrounds, save only the forbidden areas of the royal enclosure and women’s quarters. He sketched the fascinating bustle of preparation for the festival. During the heat of the day the banks of the rivers were lined with men and women, their velvety black skins shimmering with water as they bathed and cleansed themselves for the dances. Every tree for miles about was hung with the kilts and furs, the feathers and plaited ornaments that were airing, the creases and rumples of travel and packing were being allowed to drop out of them as they billowed and flapped in the light breeze.

  He passed groups of young girls plaiting each other’s hair, smearing and rubbing each other’s bodies with oil and coloured clays, and they giggled and waved at Zouga as he passed.

  At
first the problem of hygiene that this huge assembly presented puzzled Zouga, until he realized that there was an area of thick undergrowth beyond the city walls where both men and women went at dawn and in the short twilight. This area had its own population of crows and kites, of jackal and hyena that served as the city’s cleansing service.

  Interested further in the running of the city, he found that all bathing and washing of clothing was allowed only below a certain spot on the riverbanks marked by a distinctively large tree or other feature, and that the women filled the water pots for drinking and cooking above this point.

  Even the huge cattle-pen in its very heart helped to keep the city clean. It acted as a vast fly-trap. The insects laid their eggs on the fresh cattle dung, but before they could hatch most of them were deeply trampled by the hooves of the milling herds. The brilliant sunlight and the untainted wind completed the process of keeping the area relatively clean and the smells interesting but not unbearable.

  Zouga should have been content to have reached this haven, instead of leaving his assegai-riven corpse for a hyena’s feast in the wilderness, but he was not.

  He set himself tasks to fill the waiting days. He drew sketches and maps of the city, noting weaknesses in the fortifications, and where an attack would have the best chance of penetrating these and reaching the King’s private quarters. He sketched the uniforms of the various impis. He noted the colours of their shields and other means of identifying them in the field. Asking innocent-seeming questions of Gandang, he was able to estimate the number of warriors each regiment contained, the ages and battle experience of the warriors, the names and personal idiosyncrasies of their Indunas, and the location of their regimental towns.