by Peter Rimmer
All through that night not even the lions made a sound.
Like any young man in love, Isaac was driven by his passion to provide a good home. He had met Deborah Landau ten long years before and despite the miles he had travelled from Johannesburg to supply the outlying farms with everything from buckets to the new-fangled binoculars he had never made enough money to satisfy Deborah's father. Then the war had come along and driven him over the Limpopo in the hope that the new settlers in Rhodesia would make him rich. The problem with Isaac when it came to business was quite simple people said: he was just too nice. Instead of paying less than he should when he bought his wares he gave a fair price. When it came to the selling, the idea of cheating a man who most often had just given him dinner went against his way of life. To add to his problem, whenever he found a farmer really down and out on his luck he was oft inclined to lend the man money that he knew he would never see again.
Now, in his desperate need to satisfy old man Landau he was going to rob a man of his gold. Isaac had slept so well through the night that the sun had warmed the canvas of his wagon before he woke. When he climbed out in excitement and trepidation there was no sign of his quarry. Patiently he glassed the bush from his hilltop, concentrating on the path towards the great, bald hills. His hobbled horses had moved some distance from the wagon after finishing the water in the bucket he had put down for them before going to bed. After half an hour the sun was too hot for his jacket even under the shade of a tree. Showing thick braces holding up his baggy pants Isaac put his coat in the wagon. The alarm call of the grey lourie was quite distinctive and sounded like a man saying 'goaway' all in one word, the one word repeated as the bird hopped through the branches of the trees to get away from the danger. Lifting his head from the wagon, and with the smile of hope on his face, Isaac went back to his vantage point where he waited. When the bird call came three more times he was certain. The man on his horse and the mules were heading for a bald mountain that somehow looked like a buffalo.
The only thing Isaac Stein had not worked out since leaving Bulawayo was how to rob the man even if, after all, the man had anything to rob. Then Isaac remembered the rifle in the saddle holder and felt quite queasy.
Tatenda found the entrance to the cave behind the twisted tree that had somehow forced sustenance from a crack in the rock. Once through the small entrance the cave was wide. After waiting for his eyes to become accustomed to the semi-darkness he walked forward hunching his shoulders to stop hitting his head on the roof. Further on he could just stand up. The smell of old bat droppings made him hold his nose. With his eyes still unsure of the light, he skinned his left leg on something hard and smooth sticking up out of the ground. Running his hand along the obstruction he moved round and slowly on into the cave rubbing his fingers on the palm of the hand that had touched the smooth surface he thought was rock. Ten slow steps further in the dark the excitement hit. The smooth, curved rock that his hand had followed to the end was the thick smooth tusk of an elephant. Then his foot snagged on something lower down and when he bent to the ground his hands found an iron box. After waiting ten minutes sitting on the box his eyes finally grew accustomed to the dark. He counted three boxes next to a pile of ivory, some of the tusks as thick as his thighs. When he picked up the boxes they were small and heavy. One by one he humped them across to the light at the entrance to the cave.
By the time the sun had reached its zenith the gold coins had passed from the iron boxes into the saddlebags that hung over the mules. Checking the ground around the mules and empty boxes, Tatenda began what he knew was the most important journey of his life, the journey that would one day free his people from bondage.
Three hours later, having followed a devious path down the hill with the wagon, Isaac stood over the empty boxes, old, rusted and broken open. On the ground next to one of the boxes stood the clear impression of the President of the Transvaal republic, Oom Paul Kruger, who had taken himself and his own gold millions off to Switzerland soon after Lord Roberts had marched into Pretoria at the head of an army. Checking the prints made by the mules on their journey away from the boxes there was no doubt in Isaac's mind: the pack mules were carrying a new and heavy load that sunk their hooves that much further into the ground. It was also clear by the scuffles on the ground that the man he had followed for so many days had been forced to pull the mules to make them walk with the new load pressing heavily on their backs. Away from the scuffed footmarks showed where the boxes had been found and within a minute Isaac was bending behind the gnarled tree and hunching his shoulders to walk through the entrance to the cave. Overcoming his fear of the pitch-dark cavern and the terrible smell of the bat droppings Isaac waited for his eyes to become accustomed so he could see what was hidden in the cave. One of the bats having had enough of the disturbances flew past the top of his head the wind brushing his skull and making the hair on the back of his neck stand out straight. Only by thinking of Deborah could he stop himself bolting back into the light. Praying all the time to his God, Isaac moved deeper into the cave. Taking the box of red-tipped swan-vesta matches from his pocket he lit one of the long sticks and held it above his head. By the time the flame went out Isaac knew the only problem in his life was over. For sixty years, from the time of Mzilikazi to the time of Lobengula, each white hunter had brought back to Gu-Bulawayo and the king's kraal the best pair of tusks from their hunt as tribute. Lighting a second match, Isaac walked round the pile. He found the pit where the iron boxes had lain on the ground, with droppings clearly marking the squares.
"Well, there's no time like the present," he said loudly and pulled the largest elephant tusk from the pile and stumbled with it back towards the light at the exit to the cave.
Taking the oil lamp from the roof of his wagon he began unloading the picks and shovels he had intended selling to the gold prospectors still scattered across the country, lost in their own search for wealth. In a large pile on the far side of the wagon from the entrance to the cave was a pile of ironmongery all of it carrying the mark of 'Made in Manchester.' By the time the sun turned blood red behind the great bald mountain of a rock the wagon was as full as it ever could be and Isaac was back on the box, the leather reins in his practised hands. With more creaks than ever before he got the horses moving and drove them down his own trail on the long ride back to Johannesburg.
He turned back once. With the sun behind the rock the shape of the buffalo was quite plain to see.
"Good luck, whoever you are," he called behind to where the mules and horse had gone east. "And thank you."
Shortly afterwards, when he could no longer see his own trail he stopped for the night making a grand fire. With the horses once more watered and hobbled he knelt down next to his wagonload of ivory and prayed his thanks to the Lord.
Just before he dropped off to sleep beside his roaring fire he smiled to himself: he still had had no idea how he was going to rob the man of his gold. That night and for the first time since seeing the Portuguese gold coin, Isaac dreamed of Deborah Landau and all was well in their world of dreams.
Four hundred miles to the east, in the direction Tatenda was riding with the mules, the witch was preparing her revenge. Having spent all her life breeding fear out of superstition everyone who lived in the sprawling cluster of snake and insect-infested grass huts feared the old hag they had once, for a brief moment, called the Prophet. Others controlled their people with soldiers and the threat of physical harm; the witch controlled her people with fear of the dark spirits, fear she had instilled in each of them and it never went away.
The smelling out had been rumoured for months, small signs spread by the witch. Now, when she knew no one would challenge the fear that lived in each of them she disappeared for a week into the heart of her cave. When she reappeared to the full moon, carrying the skull of the predecessor she had poisoned, covered in old and filthy skins with necklaces of bones, some animal, some human, draped round her neck and falling to her skinny, naked knee
s with the leopard at her side, everyone in the village, including the chief, shook with fear. All night long the cackles came from the tops of different trees and no one slept, cowering in their windowless huts consumed by fear of the spirits. Even the small babies cried all through the night. When the sun rose over the mountains that dropped down a great escarpment into the Zambezi Valley, the witch announced her smelling out to find the man or woman or child who had cast a spell over the chief to stop his seventh wife from falling pregnant after twelve new moons. With a flywhisk made from the tail hair of a long dead buffalo she went from hut to squalid hut, sometimes striking the door until the occupants came out into the light, trembling and petrified with fear, all the doors of the village shut in the hope of reprieve.
After two long hours of her slow, erratic searching many villagers cowered under the big tree around which the dust-blown village sprawled each one waiting with dread for the whisk to slash their face. The leopard, bored with her antics, had gone back into the cool comfort of the cave and gone to sleep. When the sun rose to its zenith, everyone but one in the village, including the chief, had been summoned under the big tree. The witch, at the height of her power, plunged a torch into the cooking fire that never went out and handed the flaming faggot to the chief.
"Burn down his hut," she commanded.
"He is my son."
"He has cast into you the evil spirit. Burn the hut with all his family or the whole village will die. I have spoken with the spirits. Do as I say or die, all of you." The cackles, as she projected her voice, came from tree after tree, darting back and forward while the torch flew round in circles flying sparks among the nearest huts.
"Kill him," she screamed. "Kill the chief and burn his son. KILL HIM."
In the dry heat of the new summer, the hut, torched by eager hands exploded in flame. The door wrenched open and a small boy ran from the flames to be picked up by the screaming mob and thrown back into the fire. Under the big tree, the boy's grandfather was being torn to pieces, cut and chopped with small headed axes, the nearest of the mob screaming out their fear in the blood lust and joy of not being killed.
When the frenzy died down with the flames the witch had gone back to her cave. Stroking the leopard's sleeping head she smiled with satisfaction. Not for a long time would anyone else challenge her power.
Tatenda saw the plume of smoke rise to the noonday sky and wondered what it was. The clouds, white-topped and grey below were motionless in the blueness of the sky and the smoke rose straight up before bending with the wind. After watching the smoke and discounting a bush fire, the wood-smoke touched his nostrils.
Before riding into the Kalanga village that evening he slipped the heavy saddlebags from the mules and hid them deep in a thorn thicket cutting his legs and arms on the thorns. Taking precise directions from trees and rocks he rode on into the village he had left to fight the war of liberation four years earlier that had ended with him running away to Bulawayo. The ally, the one that would guard the treasure deep in the leopard cave, was the witch.
The hut of the chief's son was still burning slowly sending small curls of smoke from the ruins. The smell of cooked meat came from the embers and charred black humps showed in the ashes where the family had burnt to death. No one even looked at the smouldering pile and when he asked for the witch they ran away. Pieces of a bloody corpse lay in the dust, covered in thousands of buzzing flies and no one took any notice. Some of his old friends gave him a half smile but no one looked him in the eyes and Tatenda knew better than to ask what had happened in the village.
Leading his animals away from the squalid huts and smell of death, he walked them to where he had first found an entrance to the leopard cave where he made his camp and waited for the morning. The moon almost full was bright and the dotted clouds shone silver in the night sky. All night hyena prowled the village smelling the blood of the fly blown corpse under the tree, their cackling laughter echoing the cackles of the witch. For the first time since finding the gold of Lobengula, Tatenda slept fitfully, dreaming the fire was going out and the hyenas were ripping his arms and legs from his body.
When he woke in the morning the hut in the village was still smouldering. When he walked along to the village the corpse had gone in the night, the only leftover being black clots of dried blood mingling with the dirt that not even the flies were interested in. All day and alone, he waited for the witch and then he went back to the cave entrance and spent a second tangled night.
On the third night when he woke the fire had died down so low he had to blow on the embers to bring back the flame and comfort. Feeding the fire he felt safe as the flames leaped and showed him the trees and surrounding rocks. Just before dawn he smelt the fetid smell of leopard and drew his coat closer round his chest. Only when the first dove called to him in the morning did he walk away from the fire. Gently he stroked the muzzle of his horse and then the long, donkey-like ears of the mules. When he went to the village the blackened and charred humps still stayed in the circle of the ruined hut, the putrid smell pervading everything in the village. Again all day, he waited for the witch in vain and still the villagers were loath to speak to him as if, after arriving so soon after what he saw as a tragedy he was part of the omen, of their evil.
The fourth night and next to the biggest fire of his journey, Tatenda slept from physical and mental exhaustion and woke to find the only light in the sky given by the layers of the stars. The moon had been down for some time and the fire was low the only light pervading from the red-hot coals. At first he could only smell the old hag but when he moved up from the ground on one elbow the witch cackled and stepped forward from the black darkness of a tree. As the coin spun towards him, the soft gold caught the glow of the red-hot embers before the metal hit him in the chest. Standing next to the witch, the yellow eyes of the leopard glowed from the fire. When it opened its mouth he could smell the fetid breath from eating the rotten corpse of the chief.
"Why did you hide the gold?" she asked.
"To bring it safely to you. It is gold for the guns and the second Chimerenga."
"That is good. Go now in the night with your mules and bring me the rest of the gold."
"Who found the bags in the thorn thicket?"
"The ancestors told me in a dream."
The fear of the spirits stopped him thinking clearly and questioning how the spirits had brought the one gold coin that lay in the dust next to the fire. The mules and horse caught the smell of the leopard and tried to break their tether while Tatenda was calming his animals the witch and leopard vanished. When the saddle was back on his horse and the mules on the long rein and with the first touch of morning light he rode from his camp.
At the thorn thicket he searched all morning, checking his rocks and tree markers time and again until he finally understood. Whoever had given the witch the one coin was not an ancestor.
Riding back as fast as possible he pushed behind the covering of bush and tree at the entrance to the cave, waited for his eyes to pierce the gloom and walked deep into the cavern. With the sun in the wrong position he could only see a pinprick of light high in the cavern of the roof where once a year a beam of light fell directly to the cavern floor. Again he smelt the leopard and called out to the witch. The sharp single click of her tongue on the roof of her mouth echoed in the cavern. As the witch's cackle ricocheted round the cave the back legs of the leopard ripped open Tatenda's belly spilling his entrails on the floor among the long dead bones. Then the incisor teeth ripped out his throat and the world was gone to him.
Chapter 4: June 1901
Billy Clifford could not make up his mind whether to write the book as fact or fiction. To further his career as a journalist he needed the prestige of a well-received book. A history of the conflict in Africa from a writer who had lived through the war would give him the stature among his peers that would last months and be forgotten when the next crisis sent the writers of the world scurrying somewhere else. Fact stayed where
it was, a reference for future historians, Billy a footnote in someone else's book. Fiction, good fiction lived forever.
For months, Billy had been secretly studying the people involved in the conflict so that when he sat down at his desk back in Ireland the replay of the pictures from his mind would be as real as they had been in the flesh. Home in Dublin he would carve in stone the war that had raged around him for so long.
The long bar at the Criterion Hotel in Johannesburg's Jeppe Street was a lonely place for men away from home. The barman had retreated to a stool in his corner and the only other man on the same elbow of the bar was easy to study without making it obvious. The man looked like a defeated Boer with the old slouch hat on the bar unclipped to its side. Billy could see the sweat stains where the hat had touched the owner’s head, the wide brim cleaner, a lighter brown.
Every time the man wanted a drink he lifted a finger. The man had neither spoken nor moved from his stool.
Mentally stealing the man's features, Billy put his age at nearer forty than thirty; the face had a tough, leathery texture from too many years in the African sun, the hair bleached white, the hands rough from manual work, the part of the eyes that Billy could see a pale blue; the man's shoulders were powerful. The trousers had leather patches home sewn to protect the insides of the thighs; the leather waistcoat was mottled and coloured grey and unbuttoned, the skin soft and pliable; on the man's feet were high leather riding boots such as the Boers wore on commando.