by Wilbur Smith
Huy stopped weeping. The artist in him aroused, his mind quickly assimilating the offer which he knew Lannon would not remember in the morning.
‘I am truly honoured, my lord.’ Huy went to kneel at the side of the bed. ‘Will you sign the treasury order now?’
‘Write it, Huy, write it now, this instant,’ Lannon commanded. ‘I will sign it.’
And Huy ran for his writing pallet.
The column moved on slowly in a great circle-to the south and east through the southern plains of grass. It was a land of such limitless dimensions that the fifteen-mile column was as significant as a file of safari ants. There were rivers and ranges of hills, forests and plains teeming with game. The only men they met were the garrisons of the king’s hunting camps. Their task was primarily to provide a steady supply of dried meat for the multitudes of slaves that were the foundation of the nation’s prosperity.
They crossed the river of the south* six months after departure from the city of Opet and 100 miles beyond they reached the range of thickly forested blue mountains** which marked the border of the southern kingdom.
* Limpopo River ** Zoutspansberg
They went into camp at the mouth of a dark rocky gorge that tore its way through the heart of the mountains, and Lannon and Huy with a cohort of infantry and archers took the precipitous path through the gorge. It was an eerie place of tall black stone cliffs hanging high above the roaring frothing torrent in the depths below. It was a cold dark place where the warmth of the sun seldom penetrated. Huy shivered, not from the cold, and clutched his axe firmly. He prayed almost continually during the three days that they marched through the mountains for it was most certainly a place frequented by demons.
They camped on the southern slopes of the mountains and built signal fires, sending the smoke aloft in tall columns that could be seen for fifty miles. To the southward stretched a land as vast as that to the north.
Looking out across its golden rolling grasslands and its dark green forests, Huy felt a sense of awe. ‘I would like to go down into that land,’ he told Lannon.
‘You would be the first,’ Lannon agreed. I wonder what it holds. What treasures, what mysteries?‘
‘We know there is a Cape to the far south with a flat-topped mountain where the fleet of Hycanus IX was destroyed, but that is all we know.’
‘I have a mind to defy the prophecy and lead an expedition southwards beyond these mountains - what say you, Huy?’
‘I would not counsel it, my lord,’ Huy answered formally. ‘No good ever comes of challenging the gods, they have damnably long memories.’
‘I expect you are right,’ Lannon conceded. ‘Yet I am sorely tempted.’
Huy changed a subject which was making him uncomfortable, he should never have broached it.
‘I wonder when they will come.’ He looked up at the smoke from the signal fires streaming up into the calm blue of the midday sky.
‘They will come when they are ready,’ Lannon shrugged. ‘But I wish they would make it soon. Whilst we wait, we will hunt the leopard.’
For ten days they hunted the big spotted cats which abounded in the misty cliffs and woody gorges of the mountains. They hunted with specially trained hounds and lion-spears. They would run the quarry with the pack, until it was cornered or bayed and they would then surround it and close in until the charge was provoked.
Then the man selected by the leopard would take the snarling, slashing animal on the point of his spear. Two of the hunters were killed in those ten days - and one of them was a grandson of Asmun. the old nobleman. He was a fine brave lad and they all mourned, although it was a good and honourable death. They cremated his body, tor he had died in the field, and Huy sacrificed for a safe passage of his soul to the sun.
On the eleventh day, in the dawn after Huy had greeted Baal, and they had breakfasted and were dressing and arming for the hunt, Huy noticed the agitation and restlessness of the little bushman huntmaster, Xhai.
‘What is it that troubles you, Xhai?’ he asked him in his own language, which he now spoke with authority.
‘My people are here,’ the bushman told him.
‘How do you know that?’ Huy demanded.
‘I know it!’ Xhai answered simply, and Huy hurried through the camp to Lannon’s tent.
‘They have come, my lord,’ he told him.
‘Good.’ Lannon laid aside his lion-spear and began stripping his hunting armour. ‘Call the stone-finders.’ And the royal geologists and metallurgists came hurrying to the summons.
The meeting place was at the foot of the mountains where thick forest ended abruptly at the edge of a wide glade.
Lannon led his party down amongst the rocks and at the edge of the glade they halted, and threw out a protective screen of archers. In the centre of the glade, well out of arrow-shot of the forest edge or the rocky slope, a pole had been driven into the soft earth and the tail of a reed buck dangled from it like a standard. It was the sign that the trade could begin.
Lannon nodded to his senior path-finder, Aziru, and Rib-Addi, master of the royal treasury. The two of them walked out into the glade unarmed and with two slaves following them. The slaves each carried a leather bag.
At the foot of the pole was a dried gourd which contained a handful of bright pebbles and stones of various colours ranging from glassy to fiery red.
The two officials examined each stone, rejecting some by dropping them in a neat pile on the earth, selecting others by returning them to the gourd. Then from the leather bags they doled out glass beads into a pottery jar which they placed beside the gourd. They withdrew to the rocky slope where Lannon and his archers stood.
The waited until a dozen tiny figures left the edge of the forest and approached the pole. The troop of little bushmen squatted beside the gourd and jar and there was a long heated debate before they withdrew to the forest once more. The two officials went out into the glade and found gourd and jar untouched. The offer had been refused. They added a dozen iron arrow-heads to the offering.
At the third attempt a bargain was struck when the bushmen accepted the beads and arrow-heads and copper bangles, leaving the stones to be collected.
Then another batch of stones was set out beside the pole and haggled over. It was a tedious business which occupied four whole days, and while they waited Huy added considerably to his knowledge of geology.
‘From where do these sun stones come?’ he asked Aziru, as he examined a yellow diamond the size of an acorn which had been traded for a pound’s weight of glass beads.
‘When sun and moon show together in the sky, then it may happen that their rays mingle and become hot and heavy. They fall to earth, and if they strike water then they are quenched and freeze into one of these sun stones.’ Huy found this explanation utterly convincing.
‘A love-drop of Baal and Astarte,’ he whispered with reverence. ‘No wonder then that they are so beautiful.’ He looked up at Aziru. ‘Where do the pygmies find them?’
‘It is said that they search in the gravel beds of the rivers, and also the edge of the lakes,’ Aziru explained. ‘But they are not adept at recognizing the true sun stone and their offerings contain many common stones.’
When the bushmen had traded their entire gathering of diamonds, they offered for sale the unwanted children of the tribe. These little yellow mites were left bound and shivering with terror beside the trading pole. The slave masters, experts in appraising human flesh, went out to examine them and offer payment. The pygmies were much in demand as slaves, for they were tractable, loyal and hardy. They made excellent hunters, guides, entertainers, and, strangely, children’s companions.
Xhai stood behind his tall yellow-haired king and watched the trade, exactly the bargaining which had been conducted over him as a child.
At the end of the fourth day the treasury of Opet had acquired five large pottery jars of fine diamonds. Trade in these stones was a jealously guarded monopoly of the ruling house of Barca. In addit
ion there were eighty-six bushman children between the ages of five and fifteen years. They were wild slaves, and had to be bound until tamed.
Huy devoted himself almost entirely to their welfare during the return across the mountains. With the help of Xhai and the other tame bushmen he was able to save most of them. Only a dozen of the tiny creatures died of terror and heartbreak before they could be handed over to the slave women of the main camp.
Lannon broke the camp under the southern mountains and they turned north and east, recrossing the river and picking up the mountains of Bar-Zeng* on the horizon. They began passing through the populous kingdom of the east, where the Yuye peasants farmed the corn lands along the Lion River**.
* The Chimanimani Mountains **The Sabi River
At each settlement the freedmen turned out to welcome them, and make tribute to their new king. They were a cheerful throng, and the mud-walled villages were clean and prosperous-looking. Even the slaves in the fields were sleek and well cared for, only a fool would abuse a valuable possession. The slaves were mostly blacks, taken in the north, but amongst them were those of mixed blood, sired by their own masters, or by selected stud slaves. They were unbound, differing little in dress or ornament from their masters.
Along their way the legionaries who had completed their military service left their regiments and returned to their villages. Their places in the ranks were filled by the young recruits.
They camped each night at one of the walled and fortified garrisons that studded the road to the mountains of Zeng. They were passing now through the fringes of the wide gold belt that ran east and west across the middle kingdom. It was this belt on which the wealth of Opet was based, and the king’s stone-finders had developed an almost supernatural ability to find the enriched reefs in which the gold was hidden. The results of their efforts were numerous mines where the ore was prised from the earth by platoons of black slaves working naked in the narrow stifling stopes. At the surface it was crushed and the powdered rock washed from the grains of native gold in specially designed copper basins.
Lannon paused in his march to inspect many of these works, and Huy was impressed by the ingenuity of the engineers who overcame the problems that the extraction of the ore presented at each separate site.
Where the gold-bearing reef was narrow, they kept the headroom in the stopes as low as possible by using only women and children in the workings.
They employed elephants for hauling the ore baskets to the surface, and for carrying water to the mines situated in the drier areas.
They had developed a method of undermining massive ore bodies and collapsing them under their own weight. It was a dangerous procedure, and at one of the mines practising this method Lannon and Huy were kept from sleep the entire night by the mourning wailing from the slave compound. During the day an ore body had collapsed prematurely and over a hundred slaves with a few slave-masters had been crushed beneath it. Huy wondered how much of that hideous sound was on account of the dead slave-masters.
Driven by his insatiable curiosity, Huy had himself lowered in one of the ore baskets to the lower levels of one of the workings. It was a hellish place of foul air, and heat and sweat, lit by the flickering oil lamps. The naked slaves toiled in cramped and dangerous chambers hacked from the living rock. Huy watched an intrusive outcrop of harder rock demolished by the means Hannibal had used hundreds of years before to clear his passage across the alps. A slow fire was lit and kept burning upon the rock until it had heated to a dull glow. It was quenched then with buckets of liquid, a mixture of water and sour wine, that exploded in a swirling cloud of steam, and split the rock into chunks which were hacked out and dragged away by the slaves. Huy went to the face where he saw the native gold shine in the mother lode, rich and yellow, and he mused at the price that must be paid for its extraction.
When Huy was again hoisted to the surface he was soaked with sweat, and filthy with dirt from the stopes.
Lannon shook his head. ‘What did you want to do that for? Have the birds got your brain, that you must grovel around in the earth?’
At one of the mines the ore had been exhausted above the level of the subterranean water. It was impossible to go down below this level, for no method had yet been devised to clear the water from the workings. Bucket chains of slaves were seldom able to lower the level by more than a few inches. The mine must be returned to Astarte the mother of moon and earth. She had given of her bounty, and in return she must receive.
Lannon, as was his right, selected the messengers, conferring with his slave-masters to decide which fifteen slaves would be the least loss to the labour force. The gods were not particular about the quality of the sacrifice. To them a life was a life, and therefore acceptable.
Huy’s heart went out to them as they were led down into the workings for the last time. They wore the symbolic chains of the sacrifice, and they shuffled along, stooped and maimed and coughing with the lung disease of the miners.
Huy delegated one of his priests to supervise the sending, and when his emissary emerged from that evil pit Huy led the praise chant to Astarte, and the work of refilling the mine began. It would continue for many weeks because of the amount of rock that must be carefully repacked into the caverns.
This refilling was necessary to placate the earth mother further and also to allow new gold to grow.
Aziru explained the need for this. ‘This is benevolent ground, suitable for the growth of gold. We replace rock in the earth and the action of the sun upon it will, in time, engender a fresh growth of the precious metal.’
‘All life is in Baal,’ Huy intoned formally.
‘Our children’s children will one day thank us for this seeding of the earth,’ Aziru predicted smugly, and Huy was impressed with this forethought - and he recorded every detail of it all in his neatly flowing script.
Three hundred days after leaving the city of Opet, the column climbed the foothills of the Zeng Mountains.* The air was cool and fresh after the heat of the lowlands, and at night the mist hung heavily along the slopes and woke the fever in men’s bones so that they shivered and huddled in their cloaks about the campfires.
* Inyanga Mountains
Those hills were the gardens of Opet, where tens of thousands of acres of land had been terraced and cultivated, and where tens of thousands of slaves tended the olive groves and vineyards. The centre and citadel of these gardens was a fortified hilltop town named after the twelfth Gry-Lion of Opet, Zeng-Hanno. Here there were temples to both Baal and Astarte, the religious strongholds of the eastern kingdom, and Huy spent twenty days in synod with his priests and priestesses. Huy also exercised and inspected his own personal legion, the sixth Ben-Amon, which was the only one of the eight legions of Opet composed entirely of warriors of the blood. Their standard was a golden vulture set on a shaft of polished ebony.
These religious activities were interrupted when Lannon summoned Huy to accompany him on a short journey to the east, from whence word had come that the Dravs awaited Lannon to renew the five-year treaty.
Three sheikhs of the Drav met them when they descended the mountains of Zeng towards the eastern sea. They were tall, brown-skinned men with fierce eagle features and dark glittering eyes. They wore head-dresses of white over their long black hair, and they dressed in full-length robes belted with sashes of filigree and semi-precious stones. Each carried a magnificent broad curved dagger at his waist, and wore slippers with long pointed toes.
Their warriors dressed differently, wearing baggy pantaloons, on their heads onion-shaped helmets, body armour of silver breastplates; and they were armed with round iron shields and long curved scimitars, spears and short oriental bows. Most of them were Negroes, but they had clearly adopted the Drav manner of speech and dress. Two hundred years of relentless warfare had preceded the treaty between the Drav and the kings of Opet.
The two armies bivouacked on each side of a wide valley, with a stream of clear water overhung with shady green trees sep
arating the camps.
Under these trees the council tents were pitched, and here for five days the two delegations feasted and bargained and manoeuvred diplomatically.
Huy spoke the language of the Dravs and he translated tor Lannon the negotiations towards a treaty of unrestricted trade and mutual military aid.
‘My lord, Prince Hassan is concerned to know how many warriors Opet could put into the field in the event of a threat to the security of the two nations.’
They sat on piles of silken cushions and lovely woven woollen rugs of vivid design and colour, drinking sherbet, for the Drav would not touch even the finest wines, eating a dish of mutton and fish spiced with herbs, smiling at each other and not trusting each other farther than the range of the eye.
‘Prince Hassan,’ replied Lannon, nodding and smiling at him, ‘is concerned to know with what force we would oppose an attempt to seize the gardens of Zeng and the gold mines of the middle kingdom.’
‘Of course,’ Huy agreed. ‘What shall I tell him?’
‘Tell him I can field fourteen regular legions, as many auxiliaries, and 400 elephants.’
‘He will not believe those figures, my lord.’
‘Of course not, no more do I believe his. Tell him anyway.’ And so the bargaining proceeded in an atmosphere of mutual trust.
They agreed to secure each other’s flanks, combine to hold the line of the great river in the north against invasion by the migrant black tribes, and to come to each other’s assistance if that border was violated.
‘The prince would like to revolve the unit of trade, my lord. He suggests that 500 mikthals should equal one Opet finger of gold.’
‘Tell him politely to swing on his own testicles,’ Lannon replied, smiling at the prince, and the prince nodded and smiled back at him, the gem stones sparkling and glittering on his fingers.