by Wilbur Smith
The twins escaped from the daunting presence of their father and uncle with relief, but their mother was waiting for them in the yard beside the blue and crimson van, and with a sharp inclination of her head ordered them into her own parlour.
The room was a sorceress’s lair from which the twins were usually barred, and now they crept in with even more trepidation than they had entered their father’s house. Against the far wall stood their mother’s gods and goddesses carved in native woods and dressed in feathers and skins and beads, with eyes of ivory and mother-of-pearl, and bared teeth of dog and baboon. They were a terrifying assembly, and the twins shivered and dared not look directly upon them.
Before the family idols were arranged offerings of food and small coins, and from the other walls hung all the gruesome accoutrements of their mother’s craft, gourds and clay pots of ointments and medicines, bundles of dried herbs, snake skins and mummified iguana lizards, bones and baboon skulls, glass jars of hippopotamus and lion fat, musk of crocodile, and other nameless substances which festered and bubbled and stank so foully that it made the teeth ache in their jaws.
‘You wore the charms I gave you?’ Kuzawa, their mother, asked. She was incongruously handsome in the midst of her unholy and hideous tools and medicines, full-faced and glossy-skinned with very white teeth and liquid, gazelle eyes. Her limbs were long and gleamed with secret and magical ointments and her breasts under the necklaces of ivory beads and charms were big and firm as wild Kalahari melons.
In response to her question, the twins nodded vehemently, too overcome to speak, and unbuttoned their shirts. The charms were hung around their necks, each on a thin leather thong. They were the horns of the little grey duiker, the open ends sealed with gum arabic, and Kuzawa had taken all the twelve years of their lives to assemble the magical potion that was contained in each of them. It was made up of samples of all the bodily excretions of Hendrick Tabaka, the father of the twins, his faeces and urine, his spittle and nasal mucus, his sweat and his semen, the wax from his ears and the blood from his veins, his tears and his vomit. With these, Kuzawa had mixed the dried skin from the soles of his feet, the clippings of his nails, the shavings of his beard and his pate and pubes, the lashes of his eyes plucked in his sleep, and the crusted scabs and pus from his wounds. Then she had added herbs and fats of wonderful efficacy, and spoken the words of power over them and finally, to make the charm infallible, she had paid a vast sum to one of the grave-robbers who specialized in such procurements to bring her the liver of an infant drowned at birth by its own mother.
All these ingredients she had sealed in the two little duiker horns, and the twins were never allowed into their father’s presence except when they wore them hung around their necks. Now Kuzawa retrieved the two charms from her sons. They were far too precious to leave in the children’s possession. She smiled as she weighed them in the smooth pink palms of her delicately shaped hands. They had been worth all the expense and the patience and the meticulous application of her skills to create.
‘Did your father smile when he saw you?’ she asked.
‘He smiled like the rise of the sun,’ Raleigh replied, and Kuzawa nodded happily.
‘And were his words kind, did he make enquiry of you fondly?’ she insisted.
‘When he spoke to us he purred like a lion at meat,’ Wellington whispered, still intimidated by his surroundings. ‘And he asked us how we fared at school, and he commended us when we told him.’
‘It is the charms that have ensured his favour,’ Kuzawa smiled contentedly. ‘As long as you wear them, your father will prefer you over all his other children.’
She took the two little buckhoms and went to kneel before the central carved figure in the array of idols, a fearsome image with a headdress of lion’s mane that housed .the spirit of her dead grandfather.
‘Guard them well, O venerable ancestor,’ she whispered, as she hung them around the neck of the image. ‘Keep their powers strong until they are needed once again.’
They were safer there than in the deepest vault of the white man’s banks. No human being, and only the most powerful of the dark ones, would dare challenge her grandfather’s spirit for possession of the charms, for he was the ultimate guardian.
Now she turned back to the twins, took their hands and led them out of her lair into the family kitchen next door, putting aside the mantle of the witch and assuming that of the loving mother as she passed through the door and closed it behind her.
She fed the twins, bowls piled with fluffy white maize meal and butter beans and stew swimming with delicious fat, food that befitted the family of a rich and powerful man. And while they ate, she tended them lovingly, questioning and chaffing them, pressing more food upon them, her dark eyes glowing with pride, and finally reluctantly letting them go.
They fled from her, delirious with excitement, into the narrow fetid lanes of the old quarter. Here they were entirely at their ease. The men and women smiled and called greetings and pleasantries as they passed and laughed delightedly at their repartee for they were the favourites of all, and their father was Hendrick Tabaka.
Old Mama Nginga, fat and silver-haired, sitting at the front door of the shebeen that she ran for Hendrick, shouted after them, ‘Where are you going, my little ones?’
‘On secret business we cannot discuss,’ Wellington shouted back, and Raleigh added:
‘But next year our secret business will be with you, old mama. We will drink all your skokiaan and stab all your girls.’
Mama Nginga wobbled with delight, and the girls sitting in the windows shrieked with laughter. ‘He is the cub of the lion, that one,’ they told each other.
As they scurried through the lanes, they called out and from the hovels and the shanties of the old quarter and from the new brick cottages that the white government had built, their comrades hurried out to join them, until there were fifty or more lads of their own age following them. Some of them carried long bundles, carefully wrapped and bound up with rawhide thongs.
At the far end of the township the high fence had been cut, the gap concealed from casual scrutiny by a clump of scrub. The boys climbed through the gap and in the plantation of bluegums beyond they gathered in an excited jabbering cluster and stripped off the shabby Western European clothing they wore. They were uncircumcised, their penises although beginning to develop were still surmounted by the little wrinkled caps of skin. In a few years’ time they would all of them go into the initiation class and endure the ordeal of the isolation and hardship, and the agony of the blade together. This, even more than their tribal blood, bound them together; all their lives they would be comrades of the circumcision knife.
They set aside their clothing carefully – any losses would have to be accounted for to angry parents – and then, naked, they gathered around the precious rolls and watched impatiently as they were opened by their acknowledged captains Wellington and Raleigh Tabaka, and each of them were issued with the uniform of the Xhosa warrior — not the true regalia, the cow-tails and rattles and headdress, those were for circumcised amadoda only. These were childish replicas, merely skins of dogs and cats, the strays and pariahs of the township, but they donned them as proudly as if they were genuine, and bound their upper arms and thighs and foreheads with strips of fur, and then took up their weapons.
Again these were not the warriors’ long-bladed assegais, but were merely the traditional fighting-sticks. However, even in the hands of these children the long limber staves were formidable weapons. With a stick in each hand they were immediately transformed into shrieking demons. They brandished and swung the staves, using a practised wrist action that made them hiss and sing and whistle, they rattled them together, crossing them to form a guard against which the blows of their peers clattered, and they leapt and cavorted and danced, aiming blows at each other, until Raleigh Tabaka blew a sharp fluting command on his buckhorn whistle, and they fell in behind him in a compact, disciplined column.
He led them away. In a
swaying stylized trot, fighting-sticks held high, singing and humming the battle chants of their tribe, they left the plantation and went out into the open undulating veld. The grass was knee-high and brown, and the chocolate-red earth showed through it in raw patches. The ground fell away gently to a narrow stream, its rocky bed enclosed by steep banks and then climbed again to meet the pale sapphire of the highveld sky.
Even as they started down the slope, the clean sweep of the far skyline was interrupted, a long line of waving headdresses showed above it, and then another band of lads appeared, clad like them in loincloths of skin, legs and arms and torsos bare. Carrying their fighting-sticks high, they paused along the crest, and as they saw each other, both bands gave tongue like hounds taking the scent.
‘Zulu jackals,’ howled Raleigh Tabaka, and his hatred was so intense that a fine sheen of sweat burst out upon his brow. For as long and as far back as his tribal memory reached, this had been the enemy; his hatred was in his blood, deep and atavistic. History did not record how often this scene had been repeated, how many thousands of times over the centuries armed impis of Xhosa and Zulu had faced each other thus; all that was remembered was the heat of the battle and the blood and the hatred.
Raleigh Tabaka leapt as high as the shoulder of his brother beside him, and screamed wildly, his treacherous voice breaking into a girlish squeak at the end.
‘I am thirsty. Give me Zulu blood to drink!’ and his warriors leapt and screamed.
‘Give us Zulu blood!’
The threats and insults and challenges were flung back at them from the opposite ridge, carried to them on the wind. Then spontaneously both impis started down, singing and prancing into the shallow valley, until from the steep red banks they faced each other across the narrow streambed, and their captains strode forward to exchange more insults.
The Zulu induna was a lad the same age as the twins. He attended the same class as they did in the government secondary school in the township. His name was Joseph Dinizulu, and he was as tall as Wellington and as broad across the chest as Raleigh. His name and his strutting arrogance reminding the world that he was a princeling of the royal house of Zulu.
‘Hey, you eaters of hyena dung,’ he called. ‘We smelt you from a thousand paces against the wind. The smell of Xhosa makes even the vultures puke.’
Raleigh leapt high, turning in the air and lifting the skirts of his loincloth to expose his buttocks. ‘I cleanse the air of the Zulu stench with a good clean fart!’ he shouted. ‘Sniff that, you jackal-lovers,’ and he blew a raspberry. so loud and long that the Zulus facing him hissed murderously and rattled their fighting-sticks.
‘Your fathers were women, your mothers were monkeys,’ Joseph Dinizulu cried, scratching his own armpits. ‘Your grandfathers were baboons,’ he imitated a simian lollop, ‘and your grandmothers were—’ Raleigh interrupted this recital of his ancestral line with a blast on the buckhorn whistle and leapt from the bank into the streambed. He landed on his feet, light as a cat, and with a bound was across. He went up the far bank so fast that Joseph Dinizulu, who had expected the exchange of pleasantries to last a little longer, fell back before his onslaught.
A dozen of the other Xhosa lads had responded to his whistle and followed him across, and Raleigh’s furious attack had won a bridgehead for them on the far bank. They bunched up behind him with sticks hissing and singing, and drove into the centre of the opposing impi. The battle lust was on Raleigh Tabaka. He was invincible, his arms tireless, his hands and wrists so cunning that his sticks seemed to have separate life, finding the weak places in the guards of the Zulus who opposed him, thudding on flesh, cracking on bone, cutting open skin so that soon their sticks shone wet with blood and little droplets of it flew in the sunlight.
It seemed nothing could touch him, until abruptly something crashed into his ribs just below his raised right arm, and he gasped with pain and the sudden awareness of his own humanity. For a minute there he had been a warrior god, but suddenly he was a small boy, almost at the end of his strength, hurting very badly, and so tired that he could not mouth another challenge while before him danced Joseph Dinizulu, who seemed to have grown six inches in as many seconds. Again his fighting-stick whistled in, aimed at Raleigh’s head, and only with a desperate defence he deflected it. Raleigh fell back a pace and looked around him.
He should have known better than to attack a Zulu so boldly. They were the most treacherous and sly of all adversaries, and the stratagem of encirclement was always their master-stroke. Chaka Zulu, the mad dog who had founded this tribe of wolves, had called the manœvre the Horns of the Bull’. The horns surrounded the enemy while the chest crushed him to death.
Joseph Dinizulu had not fallen back out of fear or surprise, it was his instinctive cunning, and Raleigh had led his dozen stalwarts into the Zulu trap. They were alone, none of the others had followed them across the stream. Over the heads of the encircling Zulus he could see them on the far bank, and Wellington Tabaka, his twin brother, stood at their head, silent and immobile.
‘Wellington!’ he screamed, his voice breaking with exhaustion and terror. ‘Help us! We have the Zulu dog by the testicles. Come across and stab him in the chest!’
That was all he had time for. Joseph Dinizulu was on him again and each stroke of his seemed more powerful than the last. Raleigh’s chest was agony, and then another blow crashed through his guard and caught him across the shoulder, paralysing his right arm to the fingertips, and the stick flew from his grasp.
‘Wellington!’ he screamed again. ‘Help us!’ and all around him his men were going down, some of them beaten to their knees, others simply dropping their sticks and cowering in the dust, screaming for mercy while the Zulu boys crowded in with their sticks rising and falling, the blows flogging .into soft flesh, the Zulu war cries rising in jubilant chorus like hounds crowding in to rend the hares.
‘Wellington!’ He had one last glimpse of his brother across the stream and then a blow caught him on the forehead just above his eye, and he felt the skin split as warm blood poured down his face. Just before it blinded him he caught a last glimpse of Joseph Dinizulu’s face, crazy with blood lust, and then his legs collapsed under him and he flopped face-first into the dirt, while the blows still thudded across his back and shoulders.
He must have lost consciousness for a moment, for when he rolled onto his side and wiped the blood from his eyes with the back of his hand he saw that the Zulus had crossed the stream in a phalanx and that the remnants of his impi were racing away in wild panic towards the bluegum plantation pursued by Dinizulu’s men.
He tried to push himself upright, but his senses reeled and darkness filled his head, as he toppled once again. When next he came to he was surrounded by Zulus, jeering and mocking, covering him with insults. This time he managed to sit up, but then the tumult around him quieted and was replaced by an expectant hush. He looked up and Joseph Dinizulu pushed his way through the ranks and sneered down at him.
‘Bark, Xhosa dog,’ he ordered. ‘Let us hear you bark and whine for mercy.’
Groggy, but defiant, Raleigh shook his head, and pain flared under his skull at the movement.
Joseph Dinizulu placed a bare foot on his chest and shoved hard. He was too weak to resist and he toppled over on his back. Joseph Dinizulu stood over him, and lifted the front of his loincloth. With his other hand he drew back his foreskin exposing the pink glans, and he directed a hissing stream of urine into Raleigh’s face.
‘Drink that, you Xhosa dog,’ he laughed. It was hot and ammoniacal and burned like acid in the open wound on his scalp – and Raleigh’s rage and humiliation and hatred filled all his soul.
My brother, it is only very seldom that I try to dissuade you from something on which you have set your mind. Hendrick Tabaka sat on the leopard-skin covering of his chair, leaning forward earnestly with his elbows on his knees. ‘It is not the marriage in itself, you know how I have always urged you to take a wife, many wives, and get yourse
lf sons — it is not the idea of a wife I disapprove of, it is this Zulu baggage that makes me lie awake at night. There are ten million other nubile young women in this land — why must you choose a Zulu? I would rather you took a black mamba into your bed.’
Moses Gama chuckled softly. ‘Your concern for me proves your love.’ Then he became serious. ‘Zulu is the largest tribe in Southern Africa. Numbers alone would make them important, but add to that their aggressive and warlike spirit, and you will see that nothing will change in this land without Zulu. If I can form an alliance with that tribe, then all the dreams I have dreamed need not be in vain.’
Hendrick sighed, and grunted and shook his head.
‘Come, Hendrick, you have spoken with them. Have you not?’ Moses insisted, and reluctantly Hendrick nodded.
‘I sat four days at the kraal of Sangane Dinizulu, son of Mbejane who was the son of Gubi, who was the son of Dingaan, who was the brother of Chaka Zulu himself. He deems himself a prince of Zulu, which he is at pains to point out means “The Heavens”, and he lives in grand style on the land that his old master, General Sean Courtney, left him on the hills above Ladyburg, where he keeps many wives and three hundred head of fat cattle.’
‘All this I know, my brother,’ Moses interrupted. ‘Tell me about the girl.’
Hendrick frowned. He liked to begin a story at the beginning and work through it, sparing no detail, until he reached the end.
‘The girl,’ he repeated. ‘That old Zulu rogue whines that she is the moon of his night and the sun of his day, no daughter has ever been loved as he loves her – and he could never allow her to marry any man but a Zulu chief.’ Hendrick sighed. ‘Day after day I heard the virtues of this Zulu she-jackal recounted, how beautiful she is, how talented, how she is a nurse at the government hospital, how she comes from a long line of son-bearing wives—’ Hendrick broke off and spat with disgust. ‘It took three days before he mentioned what had been on his mind from the first minute – the lobola, the bride price,’ and Hendrick threw up his hands in a gesture of exasperation. ‘All Zulus are thieves and dung-eaters.’