The child-witch took Tanase's hand, for they were sisters of the dark spirits, and the two of them led the way up the steep path. The mouth of the cavern was a hundred paces wide, but the roof was barely high enough to clear a man's head. Once long ago the opening had been fortified with blocks of dressed stone, worked in the same fashion as the walls of Great Zimbabwe, but these had been tumbled into rough piles, leaving gaps like those in an old man's teeth.
The little party halted involuntarily. The four indunas hung back and drew closer together, as though to take comfort from each other.
Men who had wielded the assegai in a hundred bloody battles and run onto the guns of the white men's laager were fearful now as they faced the dark entrance.
In the silence a voice spoke suddenly from above them, emanating from the bare cliff-face of smooth lichen-streaked granite. "Let the indunas of royal Kumalo enter the sacred place!" They were the quavering discordant tones of an ancient bedlam, and the four warriors looked up fearfully, but there was no living thing to be seen, and none of them could summon the courage to reply.
Tanase had felt the child's hand quiver slightly in her grip at the ventriloquist effort of projection, and only Tanase was so attuned to the ways of the witches that she knew how the art of the voices was taught to the apprentices of the Umlimo. The child was already highly skilled, and Tanase shuddered involuntarily as she realized what other fearful skills she must have mastered, what other gruesome ordeals and terrible agonies she must already have endured. In a moment of empathy she squeezed the child's narrow cool hand, and together they stepped through the ruined portals.
Behind them the four noble warriors crowded with the temerity of children, peering around them anxiously and stumbling on the uneven footing. The throat of the cavern narrowed, and Tanase thought with a flash of grim humour that it was as well that the light was too bad for the indunas to make out clearly the walls on either hand, for even their warlike courage might have been unequal to the horror of the catacombs.
In a bygone age that the verbal history of the Rozwi and the Karanga tribes could no longer recount, generations before bold Mzilikazi led his tribe into these hills, another plundering marauder had passed this way. It might have been Manatassi, the legendary conquering queen, at the head of her merciless hordes, laying waste to the land and slaughtering everything in her path, sparing neither woman nor child nor even the domestic animals.
The threatened tribes had taken refuge in this valley, but the marauders had burst through the narrow pass- and the miserable host had fled into their final sanctuary in this cavern. The roof overhead was still coated with soot, for the marauders had not deemed it worthwhile to lay siege to the cavern. They had pulled down the protecting wall and blocked the entrance with piles of green brush and wood. Then they had put in fire. The entire tribe had perished, and smoke had mummified their remains. So they had lain down the years in banks and heaps, piled as high as the low roof.
As Tanase's party went forward, from somewhere ahead of them a faint bluish light grew in intensity, until Bazo exclaimed suddenly and pointed to the wall of human debris beside him. In places, the parchment-like flesh had peeled away so that the ivory skulls grinned at them, and the contorted skeletal arms seemed to wave a macabre salutation as they passed. The indunas were bathed in sweat, despite the cool gloom, and their expressions were awed and sickly.
Tanase and the child followed the twisting pathway with unerring familiarity, and came out at last" above a deep natural amphitheatre.
A single ray of sunlight burned down from a narrow crack in the domed cavern roof. On the floor of the amphitheatre was an open fireplace, and a tendril of pale blue smoke twisted slowly upwards towards the opening high above. Tanase and the child led them down the rock steps to the smooth sandy floor of the amphitheatre, and at her gesture the four indunas sank down gratefully and squatted facing the smouldering fire.
Tanase released the child's hand, and sat a little to one side and behind the men. The child crossed to the far wall and took a handful of herbs from one of the big round clay pots that stood there. She threw the handful upon the fire and immediately a great yellow cloud of acrid smoke billowed upwards, and as it slowly cleared, the indunas started and exclaimed with superstitious dread.
A grotesque figure faced them from across the flames. It was an albino, with silver-white leprous skin. It was a woman, for the great pale breasts were massively pendulous, the nipples a painful boiled pink colour. She was stark naked and her dense public bush was white as frost-struck winter grass, and above it her belly hung in loose balconies of fat. Her forehead was low and sloped backwards, her mouth was wide and thin so that she appeared toadlike. Across her broad and flattened nose and her pale cheeks, the un pigmented skin had erupted in a tender raw rash. Her thickened forearms were folded across her belly and her thighs, splotched with large ginger-coloured freckles, were wide-spread as she knelt on a mat of zebra skin and regarded the men before her fixedly.
"I see you, oh Chosen One," Somabula greeted her. Despite an enormous effort of will, his voice trembled.
The Umlimo made no response, and Somabula. rocked back on his heels and was silent. The girl-child was busy amongst the pots, and now she came forward and knelt beside the gross albino, proffering the clay pipe she had prepared.
The Umlimo took the long reed stem between her thin silvery lips, and the girl lifted a live coal from the fire with her bare hands and placed it on the vegetable ball in the bowl of the pipe. It began to glow and splutter and the Umlimo drew a slow lungful and then let the aromatic smoke trickle out of her simian nostrils. Immediately the heavy sweetish odour of insanghu carried to the waiting men.
The oracle was induced in different ways. Before Tanase had lost the power, it had descended spontaneously upon her, throwing her into convulsive fits, while the spirit voices struggled to escape from her throat. However, this grotesque successor had to resort to the wild hemp pipe. The seeds and flowers of the Cannabis sativa plant, crushed in the green and moulded into sun-dried balls, were her key to the spirit world.
She smoked quietly, a dozen short inhalations without allowing the smoke to escape, holding it in until her pale face seemed to swell and the pink pupils of her eyes glazed over. Then she expelled the smoke with an explosive exhalation, and started again. The indunas watched her with such fascination that they did not at first notice the soft scratching sound on the cavern floor. It was Bazo who at last started and grunted with shock, and involuntarily grasped his father's forearm. Gandang exclaimed and began to rise in horror and alarm, but Tanase's voice arrested him.
"Do not move. It is dangerous," she whispered urgently, and Gandang sank back and froze into stillness.
From the dark recesses in the back of the cavern a lobster-like creature scuttled across the pale sandy floor towards where the Umlimo squatted. The firelight glinted on the glossy armoured carapace of the creature as it reached the Umlimo, and then, began to climb up her bloated silver white body. It paused in her lap, with the long segmented tail lifting and pulsing, its spiderlike legs hooked into the Umlimo's coarse white pubic curls, before it began climbing again, up over her bulging belly, hanging from one drooping pale breast like some evil fruit on the bough, upwards it climbed, onto her shoulder and then it reached the angle of her jaw below the, ear.
The Umlimo remained unperturbed, sipping little puffs of the narcotic smoke from the mouthpiece of her pipe, her pink eyes staring blindly at the indunas. The huge glittering insect crawled up her temple and then sideways until it stopped in the centre of her crusted and scabbed forehead, where it hung upside down, and the long scorpion tail, longer than a man's forefinger, arched up over its horny back.
The Umlimo began to mutter and mumble and a rime of white froth bubbled onto her raw lips. She said something in a strange language, and the scorpion on her forehead pulsed its long segmented tail, and from the point of the red fang at the tip a clear drop of venom welled and sparkled like
a jewel in the dim light.
The Umlimo spoke again, in a hoarse strained voice and an unintelligible language.
"What does she say?" Bazo whispered, turning his head towards Tanase. "What language does she use?" "She speaks in the secret tongue of the initiates," Tanase murmured. "She is inviting the spirits to enter and take control of her body." The albino reached up slowly and took the scorpion off her forehead. She held the head and body within her closed fist, only the long tail whipped furiously from side to side, and she brought it down slowly and held it to her own breast.
The scorpion struck, and the rigid thorn fang buried itself deeply in her obscene pink flesh. The Umlimo's face did not alter, and the scorpion struck again and again, leaving little red punctures in the soft breast.
"She will die! "gasped Bazo.
"Let her be," hissed Tanase. "She is not like other women. The poison will not harm her it serves only to open her soul to the spirits." The albino lifted the scorpion from her bosom, and dropped it into the flames of the fire where it writhed and withered into a little charred speck, and suddenly the Umlimo uttered an unearthly shriek.
"The spirits enter,"Tanase whispered.
The Umlimo's mouth gaped open, and little glassy strings of saliva drooled from her chin, while three or four wild voices seemed to issue from her throat simultaneously, each trying to drown out the others, voices of men and women and animals, until at last one rose above them, and silenced the others. It was a man's voice, and it spoke in the mystical tongue, even its modulation and cadence were totally alien, but Tanase quietly translated for them.
"When the noon sun goes dark with wings, and the trees are bare of leaves in the springtime, then, warriors of Matabele, put an edge to your steel." The four indunas nodded. They had heard this prophecy before, for the Umlimo was often repetitious and always she was obscure. They had puzzled over the same words before. It was this message that Bazo and Tanase had carried to the scattered peoples of the Matabele during their wandering from kraal to kraal.
The gross albino seer grunted and threshed her am-is, as though struggling with an invisible adversary. The pale pink eyes jerked in her skull, out of kilter with each other, so that she squinted and leered, and she ground her teeth together with a sound like a hound worrying a bone.
The girl-child rose quietly from where she squatted amongst the pots, and she leaned over the Umlimo and dashed a pinch of pungent red powder into her face. The Umlimo's paroxysm eased, the clenched jaw fell open and another voice spoke, a guttural, bluffed sound, barely human, using the same weird dialect, and Tanase strained forward to catch each syllable and then repeated calmly. "When the cattle lie with their heads twisted to touch their flank, and cannot rise, then warriors of Matabele take heart, for the time will be nigh." This time there was a slight difference in the wording of the prophecy from the one that they had heard before, and all of them pondered it silently as the Umlimo fell forward onto her face and flopped limply as a boneless. jellyfish. Slowly all movement of the albino's body ceased, and she lay like death.
Gandang made as if to rise, but Tanase hissed a warning, and he arrested the movement and they waited, the only sound in the cavern was the click and rustle of the fire and the flirt of bats" wings high against the domed roof.
Then another convulsion ran down the Umlimo's back, and her spine arched, her hideous face lifted, but this time her voice was childlike and sweet, and she spoke in the Matabele language for all of them to understand.
"When the hornless cattle are eaten up by the great cross, let the storm begin." Her head sagged forward, and the child covered her with a kaross of fluffy jackal furs.
"It is over," said Tanase. "There will be no more." Thankfully the four indunas rose, and crept back along the gloomy pathway through the catacombs, but as they saw the glimmer of sunlight through the entrance ahead, so their steps quickened, until they burst out in the valley with such indecent and undignified haste that they avoided each other's eyes.
That night, sitting in the open-sided setenghi on the floor of the valley, Somabula repeated the prophecies of the Umlimo to the assembled indunas. They nodded over the first two familiar riddles, and as they had a hundred times before, they delved inconclusively for the meaning, and then agreed. "We will find the meaning when the time is appointed it is always the way." Then Sornabula went on to relate the third prophecy of the Umlimo, the new and unfamiliar riddle. "When the hornless cattle are eaten up by the great cross." The indunas took snuff and passed the beer pots from hand to hand, as they talked and argued the hidden meaning, and only when they had all spoken did Somabula look beyond them to where Tanase sat holding the child under her leather cloak to protect him from the night chill. "What is the true meaning, woman? "he asked.
"Not even the Umlimo herself knows that," Tanase replied, "but when our ancestors first saw the white man riding up from the south, they believed that their mounts were hornless cattle." "Horses?"
Gandang asked thoughtfully.
"It may be so," Tanase agreed. "Yet a single word of the Umlimo may have as many meanings as there are crocodiles in the Limpopo river." "What is the cross, the great cross, of the prophecy?" Bazo asked.
"The cross is the sign of the white men's three-headed god," Gandang answered. "My senior wife, Juba, the little Dove, wears that sign about her neck, given to her by the missionary at Khami when she poured water on her head." "Is it possible that the white men's god will eat up the white men's horses?" doubted Babiaan. "Surely he is their protector, not their destroyer." And the discussion passed from elder to elder, while the watch fire burned low and over the valley the vast shining firmament of the heavens turned with weighty dignity.
To the south of the valley, amongst the other heavenly bodies, burned a group of four great white stars that the Matabele called the "Sons of Manatassi'. They told how Manatassi, that terrible queen, had strangled her offspring with her own hands, so that none of them might ever challenge her monarchy. According to the legend, the souls of the little ones had ascended to shine on high, eternal witness to the cruelty of their dam.
Not one of the indunas knew that the name by which the white men knew these same stars was the Southern Cross.
Ralph Ballantyne was wrong when he predicted to Harry Mellow that by the time they returned to the Rbase camp Mr. Rhodes and his entourage would have moved on to Bulawayo. For as they rode in through the gates of the stockade, he saw the magnificent mule coach still parked where he had last seen it, and beside it were a dozen other decrepit and travel-worn vehicles. Cape carts and surreys, even a bicycle with worn tyres replaced by strips of buffalo-hide.
"Mr. Rhodes has set up court here," Cathy explained furiously, as soon as she and Ralph were alone in the bath tent. "I have made the camp too comfortable by half, and he has taken it over from me." "As he does everything else," Ralph remarked philosophically, as he stripped off his stinking shirt, and flung it into the far corner. "I've slept in that for five nights, by God, the laundry boy will have to beat it to death with a club before he gets it into the tub." "Ralph, you aren't taking it seriously," Cathy stamped her foot in frustration.
"This is my home. The only home I have, and now do you know what that what Mr. Rhodes told me?" "Have we got any more soap?" Ralph demanded as he hopped on one leg to free his breeches. "One bar will not be enough." "He said, "Jordan will be in charge of the kitchens while we are here, Mrs. Ballantyne, he knows my tastes." What do you think of that?" "Jordan is a damned fine cook." Ralph lowered himself gingerly into the bath, and grunted as his naked buttocks touched the nearly boiling surface.
"I have been forbidden my own kitchen." "Get in!" Ralph ordered, and she broke off and stared at him incredulously. "What did you say?" she demanded, but in reply he seized her ankle and toppled Cathy shrieking her protests on top of himself.
Steaming water and suds splattered the canvas walls of the tent, and when he released her at last, she was sodden to the waist.
"Your dres
s is soaked," he pointed out complacently, "now you have no choice take it off!" Naked, she sat with her back to -him in the galvanized bath with her knees drawn up under her chin, and her damp hair piled on top of her head, but still she continued her protest.
"Even Louise could bear the man's arrogance and misogyny no longer. She made your father take her back to King's Lynn, so now I have to bear him on my own!" "You always were a brave girl," Ralph told her and ran the soapy flannel cares singly down her smooth back.
"And now the word has gone out to every dead-beat and drifter in Matabeleland that he is here and they are riding in from every direction for the free whisky." "Mr. Rhodes is a generous man," Ralph agreed, and tenderly slid the soapy flannel over her shoulder and down the front.
"It is your whisky," said Cathy, and caught his wrist before the flannel could reach its obvious destination.
"The man has an infernal nerve." For the first time Ralph showed some emotion. "We will have to get rid of him. That whisky is worth 10 pounds a bottle in Bulawayo." Ralph managed to slip the flannel a little further south.
"Ralph, that tickles." Cathy wriggled.
Wilbur Smith - B3 The Angels Weep Page 8