All this meant much to François at the moment, because it brought back vividly the time when, after his return from his journey to uLangalibalela and that strange encounter he and ’Bamuthi had had with the Men of the Spear, he had been greatly tempted to break out of his secrecy and tell Mopani about the incident. It happened when Mopani had spoken to him about this very Mokho, telling him how Mokho had returned from a visit to her people with a story about the great Tree of Life which they worshipped and which stood in the heart of the remote swamp where only the most dedicated of witchdoctors penetrated in order to acquire a gift of prophecy on behalf of their people. This was the tree, according to Mopani, that figured in one of the greatest myths of Africa and was an article of unquestioned faith to millions among the great tribes to the west and up north in the bush of Angola, the jungles of North-Western Zambia and the Congo. Once it was a singing tree and spoke direct in song to the peoples who worshipped it. But it was said to have been silent for centuries and would remain silent until it could announce again that the moment had come at last when all the tribes of Africa could unite and drive back into the sea the white men who had come from the sea to subdue them. It was almost as if François, thinking of all this, could hear the gravity in Mopani’s tone when he told him that Kghometsu’s wife had just brought back word that this tree had started its dread singing again.
Of course, all this too came to him far more quickly than it takes in the telling and the moment he recognised Kghometsu, he stood up to step out from behind the boulder and call out his greeting:
“Old father Kghometsu, I, Little Feather, I see you.”
He heard with a delight that almost unmanned him Kghometsu’s measured but warm response in that deep bass voice of his that always came from the pit of his stomach, “Little Feather, I too, I see you there. Yes, I see you!”
Kghometsu was following up his grin with a wide smile of welcome. But the smile vanished when François quickly stepped from stone to stone across the shallow shining water and stood before him. A look of anxiety, if not horror, came over him, for it was not the François he had last seen, looking so fresh, upright, fastidious and unusually composed for his age, his blue eyes always wide and bright and his tanned skin with its urgent state of health, which had never known physical sickness, like the sheen on a new-born calf. He saw instead eyes so deep in the shadow of fatigue that their blue was lost, the young face lined and drawn and streaks of sweat and dirt like the pattern of utter exhaustion itself tatooed on his skin. His bush shirt was creased, slack and wet with sweat and his whole expression as of some steel of keen sorrow newly forged in fire.
In a voice tender as a woman’s with concern, he asked, “Oh Little Feather and Son of our hope, what lion have you had by the tail this day?”—this was a Sutho proverb for someone who has had to wrestle with great misfortune—“and what trouble has set fire to your house that you should stand before Kghometsu thus?”
Although the use of the word “fire” was purely symbolic, it nonetheless was so close to the literal truth that François almost felt as if the worthy, solid, respectable, dependable Kghometsu had acquired the gift of second sight.
He replied slowly, a slur on his tongue, “Oh father Kghometsu, I have had more than a lion by the tail, more than fire in my house. Come quickly, you all, and sit hidden behind this boulder with me because Umkulunkulu alone knows how long we can stay here safe and unobserved. A world of evil men are coming up fast in the track behind me and many of them might already be spread out in the bush coming from the Punda-Ma-Tenka and covering the roads back to your father Mopani’s camp.”
Kghometsu was so overcome and concerned by François’s tone that he paused only to summon the rest of his men to him, saying obliquely, “It was indeed as I thought then, the shooting we heard was no shooting of an innocent kind.”
When they were all seated in a close half circle in the shelter of the boulder round François and a panting Hintza by his side, all five pairs of eyes wide with the fevered curiosity of fear and concern on him, François began by asking, “My old father, tell me, is our father Mopani back yet from the country over the great water?”
Kghometsu shook his head gravely and answered that not only was he not back but that according to the Major, a message had come the evening before to say that Mopani would not be back for another five or six days. The Major was a very experienced old Matabele sub-chieftain who had been a sergeant-major in the British army and had for many years now been in charge of Mopani’s African rangers. He was known just as “Major” to everyone.
François was aware that the news filled him with dismay, although he had no real time for such subjective reactions, and so forced himself quickly to ask, “But old father, is the Major himself there, and would he be able to speak to the Government on the telephone?”
Kghometsu nodded and said he reported to the Government at least twice a day, at sunrise and sunset. “Then, old father,” François went on, as Kghometsu, more and more perturbed, was about to resume his questioning, “with your agreement, this is what we must do, without delay. You, father Kghometsu, will please stay with me here so that I can talk to you at great length and you can advise me what we are to do in the future. But before then, each one of your brothers here please must go by a different way now, as fast as they can, back to the camp. But they must also go carefully, looking well around them because by now the bush in front might be full of evil men. I will only tell you, so that you can judge the evil for yourselves, that at dawn yesterday morning they came out in their thousands from the banks of the Amanzim-tetse and the bush all round and killed everyone whom you know at Hunter’s Drift.”
The look of disbelief matched the horror on all the faces, except perhaps Kghometsu’s. Indeed so great and vivid was the emotion that from all the throats, even Kghometsu’s, there broke out a deep exclamation of “Aikona!” which is their most emphatic and irrevocable “no” to things they cannot accept in their everyday awareness of the order of things.
“I’m afraid there’s no aikona about it,” François continued. “All . . . your great chief and father ’Bamuthi, your brother Mtunwya; all their wives, children and grandchildren and smallest babies; our Princess of the Pots, the Lammie of my house and others you know not of, yesterday morning before the sun showed itself above the hills of the Amanzim-tetse, were all killed by these evil men who are on their way now to kill you all. So hasten and tell all this to the Major. Tell him to let the Government know at once that a great army of destruction has invaded the land far and wide and then to collect all rangers and make ready in the way he as an old soldier will know best, to prepare to be attacked and outnumbered. Go, in the name of Umkulunkulu, while I tell Kghometsu more and he and perhaps I too will presently come and join the Major and you all.”
For a moment they all looked as if the horror of it all would keep them motionless there under the sheer weight of it, pressing on their warm, instinctive hearts. But Kghometsu, who had reasons of his own of which François had a suspicion did not doubt the news.
At once he looked at his four companions and in his most authoritative manner called them out each by name, saying, “You go by this track, you by that!” and so on and on until they all had their directions clear, before ending with the inevitable military command of urgency so full of associations for François, and so strange in English among those sonorous African syllables, “And see that you go at the double.”
For a moment after they had gone François did not speak. His thirst quenched, he suddenly realised how long it was since he and Hintza had last eaten. He unslung his haversack, took out some biltong, began slicing it up with his sharp hunting knife and fed himself and Hintza alternatively, as he spoke. But first he apologised to Kghometsu for not offering him any of the pink and pomegranate-red meat. He explained how he had not eaten since early the night before and that his supply of food was small and there were others with whom all he possessed would have to be shared. The apo
logy was unnecessary except in so far as manners, always meticulous in the world of the primitive, demanded, for Kghometsu at once spread out his hands wide in a gesture, stressing that Franshould not even have explained. Besides, his attention had immediately fastened, to the exclusion of all else, to the word “others”.
“But, Little Feather,” he exclaimed, “what others can there be except you and your dog? Did you not say that all our brothers and friends are dead?”
Putting the fact for the first time into words himself, only now, perhaps, because his senses for months had been partially prepared for disaster, the full impact of what had happened penetrated Kghometsu’s composure and his eyes became blurred with tears. Unashamedly in the natural, uninhibited fashion of his people, when confronted with real cause for grief, great tears ran down his cheeks and he began to sob like a child. So much so that François, who felt as if he had lived with this black tragedy already for years and had his own dark night of tears behind him, found the strength in himself to take Kghometsu’s hand in his own and try to comfort him as he had longed to be comforted before, saying, “Oh thank you, my father, for weeping for them. Your tears will not fall unnoticed to those who watch us from the mountains where the shadows of the evening gather. Be glad, my father, that thanks to your Umkulunkulu and mine, there are three others left alive; the young daughter of him whom you knew as Isi-Vubu, the Great Kingfisher, and two others of whom I have no time to tell you now and whom you do not know. They are, I think, safely hidden far back near my burned-out home. Soon I must hasten to rejoin them. But before I go, listen please, my father, listen carefully, to what I have to say, so that not one word of it will be forgotten when you come to tell it all to our father Mopani.”
François then gave Kghometsu a full account of what had happened and why he was there, omitting only the fact that the other two of whom he had spoken were Bushmen; an omission in his description Kghometsu would not notice among so many other facts of obviously greater importance.
His only comment at the end was one of a kind of dismay mixed with outrage. “Little Feather, I warned our father Mopani of all this months ago. I told him how Mokho had just come from her people and said that the tree of life had started to sing again and what was more, had started to sing with a voice of the people who came out of the sea.”
François recognised this phrase, “the people who came out of the sea” as the description which the Makoba and all the millions of Africans who worshipped the tree had given to the Portuguese, who some four hundred years before had indeed come out of the sea to invade their great land. The significance of this was not lost on him as he begged Kghometsu to go on.
“When I told our father Mopani about the singing of the tree in this voice of the people of the sea, I told him how important that manner of singing was, because from the moment the tree first went silent and refused to sing to its own people, the greatest prophets foretold that it would only sing again when it could sing in the voice of the people who came out of the sea. It would sing thus according to the prophets as a token that the power of the spirits, which, for far back in time had gone over to the white man had now returned to the men of the tree and grown so great that the peoples who came out of the sea and all the many red strangers who had followed in their tracks, could now be driven back into the sea. Our father Mopani told me then, when I had finished, that ‘he had heard’. But if he had heard indeed, Little Feather, why did he not foresee and forestall all this? Why, Little Feather, why did he not do anything when Kghometsu for many moons now could not sleep because of it?”
François, who as one knows was already obsessed with his own crime of omission in this very regard, could only say quickly, “Oh my father, if you had seen the thousands, armed with guns, travelling with trucks and led by red strangers and other kinds of strangers who have also come out of the sea and never been seen here before, you will know that not even our father Mopani and the Government in the capital could have prevented what happened at dawn yesterday, and is about to happen around us now.”
Kghometsu was not convinced and the agony of it all clearly hurt as much as ever, which was not surprising as François himself was not entirely convinced by his own words, believing that even he could have done something to prevent it. So he hastened to concentrate for both their sakes on the immediate and overwhelming practical significance of his news.
“I know, my father, I know,” he answered. “I too could have helped our father Mopani to hear as he should have heard you, but all that is a river run dry behind us now. What matters, please believe me, is that we have no time to lose. I will sit down and write a letter which I want you to give to our father Mopani. You can tell him that I must go back to the three I have left behind in hiding. Tell him I think we can stay there safely for some three to four weeks but no longer. If in that time he cannot come to us, I shall somehow try to come to him or make my way to safety where I can best find it. I can’t do so before, I’m certain, because from now on every track in the bush will be watched. You all may even be forced out of your own camp and made to run for your lives towards the capital, until the help that will be organised there can be rushed to meet you, for you are only a handful and the enemy a host of many impis. Just make certain that you tell all to our father as I have told you of the enemy’s plans, and give him this letter I will now write, to tell him how he can try to come to us and find our place of hiding. Then hasten, hasten please to help the Major.”
Kghometsu protested vehemently at this. He argued that François should come with him and leave his friends well hidden as François had told him they were. François might have been tempted to give way for the sake of talking to Mopani himself, but with Mopani away the clear call within him was to hurry back, because he knew how his absence would add to the terrible anxieties and difficulties of Nonnie and Xhabbo.
When he could not be persuaded, Kghometsu stood up, and with a clenched fist on his broad chest he announced that in that case, he would accompany François, because every child knew that two guns were better than one and that his grey hairs were not grey for nothing, and the experience that had made them so, would be like an ox-hide shield before François. Deeply moved though he was, François refused resolutely, arguing that one had less danger of being seen by the enemy than two and that Kghometsu was needed more as the only letter-bearer, guide and counsellor to Mopani.
So, his ration of biltong finished, he pulled out his dispatch book and wrote a note. He wrote it deliberately in Afrikaans in case the letter fell into enemy hands. He described carefully how Mopani could find the hill where they were hidden, without mentioning the cave or the manner of their hiding. He merely directed that if Mopani got to this hill unobserved and uttered in daylight three times the call of the fox followed by the piping of a night-plover he, François, would appear and guide him to their refuge. His heart was full of many complex emotions and things he would have liked to have uttered, but he knew that in Mopani’s case these were unnecessary. All that Mopani would expect from him and would have time for were facts. Facts would be more welcome to his experienced old heart than dreams to a deprived soul, and all that he needed for instant action.
His factual note accomplished, therefore, he stood up and handed it to Kghometsu saying, “There, old father, go and go in haste, I thank you, I see you and I praise you.”
For a moment it looked as if Kghometsu would once more argue but in the end he just gave François a long, steady and caring look, the same sort of look which Xhabbo and Nuin-Tara had given him in the cave, as if he too were looking on a son of his own for the last time. Then as if it were almost too much for his worthy, manly and disciplined self, he quickly raised his hand high above his head in that Roman salute of farewell of his people, and turned smartly about, to go off swiftly in the direction of the camp.
François saw him vanish without a backward glance. As Kghometsu went, he felt for the first time a certain relief that now he had cause for definite hop
e of the future, provided he and Hintza played their part in what was to come. Making his slight preparations to go, he whispered in Bushman to Hintza, who was always the best of listeners, “Hin, we can’t go back the way we came. We can’t go back by day either. We’ll have to travel by night. So you and I must quickly go and find a place where we can hide and sleep and rest till it’s dark. When it’s dark, dear Hin, you must go ahead and lead me safely back to Nonnie as you have brought me safely here.”
With that, François was ready for the trail. Knowing the bush as he did, it was already obvious what he had to do. He had to make for an obscure track, rarely used, except by game, and so unlikely to have been discovered by any of his enemies. The track had only one possible disadvantage. It was perhaps too close for comfort to the point where the road to Mopani’s camp forked out from the Punda-Ma-Tenka, but was that, he asked himself, quite the disadvantage it appeared? Could it not be perhaps that the last course of action the enemy would expect of him would be to choose a way so close to their own main route of advance? He thought yes, and so retreated back just far enough into the bush on the banks of the shallow stream to have some cover to travel towards it unobserved. More important, he kept close to the banks so that he could walk on the outcrop of stone—there was, thank God, no need for running any more—ensuring that neither he nor Hintza left any spoor of any kind behind them. Half an hour later he found the track at a point only a quarter of a mile from the great Punda-Ma-Tenka and once in it he scouted round and soon came to a deep, dark dense circle of thorn bushes, like a wreath around a huge boulder. Promptly he and Hintza crawled underneath it and in a bare patch by the stone stretched themselves out on the ground. It seemed that even in the stretching they both fell asleep.
A Far Off Place Page 14