Men of Men b-2

by Wilbur Smith

  "Kamuza is amongst us again."

  Bazo heard it first whispered by another Matabele as they formed a line at the gate of the security compound.

  "Kamuza comes as the king's man," they whispered around the watch-fires, and there was respect, even fear, in their voices. "Kamuza wears the headring now."

  Many young Matabele had come to work at Umgodi Kakulu, "The Big Hole", these last few years, and each month more came down the long and weary road from the north, small bands of ten or twenty, sometimes only in pairs, or threes and occasionally even a man travelling alone.

  How many had reached Kimberley? There was nobody to keep a tally, a thousand certainly, two thousand perhaps, and each of them had been given the road southwards by the great black elephant, each of them had the king's permission to journey beyond the borders of Matabeleland, for without it they would have been speared to death by the bright assegais of the impis that guarded every road to and from the king's great kraal at Thabas Indunas, the Hills of the Chiefs.

  Even in exile these young Matabele formed a closeknit tribal association. Each newcomer from the north carried tidings, long messages from fathers and indunas, repeated verbatim with every nuance of the original. just as every Matabele who left the diamond fields, whether he had worked out his three-year contract or was bored and homesick or had fallen foul of the white man's complicated and senseless laws and was deserting, carried back with him messages and instructions that he had committed to the phenomenal memory of a people who did not have the written word.

  Now the word passed swiftly from Matabele to Matabele.

  "Kamusa is here."

  Kamuza had never warranted such attention before. He had been one amongst a thousand; but now he had returned as the king's man, and they lowered their voices when they spoke his name.

  Bazo looked for him each day, searching the faces on the high stagings and on the running skips. He lay sleepless on his mat beside the cooling watch-fire, listening for Kamuza's whisper in the darkness.

  He waited for many days and many nights, and then suddenly Kamuza was there, stooping through the low entrance and greeting Bazo.

  "I see you, Bazo, son of Gandang., Bazo stifled his joy and replied calmly.

  "I see you also, Kamuza."

  And they made a place for Kamuza in the circle, not pressing him too closely, giving him space, for now Kamuza wore the simple black tiara upon his close-cropped pate, the badge of the Councillor, the induna of the king of Matabeleland.

  They called him "Baba", a term of great respect, and even Bazo clapped his hands softly in greeting and passed him the beer pot.

  only after Kamuza had refreshed himself could Bazo begin to ask the questions of home, disguising his eagerness behind measured tones and an expression of calm dignity.

  Kamuza was no longer a youth, neither of them were; the years had sped away and they were both in the full flowering of their manhood. Kamuza's features were sharper than the true Matabele of Zanzi blood, the old blood from Zululand, for his was mixed with Tswana, the less warlike but shrewd and cunning peoples of King Khama.

  Kamuza's grandmother had been captured as a maiden, still short of puberty, by one of King Mzilikazi's raiding impis, and taken to wife by the induna who commanded her captors. From her Kamuza had inherited his mulberry black skin and the Egyptian slant of his eyes, the row nostrils and the thin and knowing twist of his nar lips.

  There were very few Matabele who could still trace their bloodline back to the pure Zanzi, to the line of Chaka and Dingaan, the Zulus, the Sons of Heaven, and Bazo was one of those. Yet it was Kamuza who wore the ring of the induna on his head now.

  in the time of Mzilikazi, a man would have the hoar frost of wisdom and age powdering his hair, and the cowtails bound about his elbows and knees would proclaim his deeds in battle to the world before the king ordered him to take the isicoco. Then his wives would plait and twist the headring into his own hair and cement it permanently into place with gum and clay and ox blood, a permanent halo of honour that entitled the wearer to his seat on the Council of the Matabele nation.

  However, the old times were changing. More cunning than fierce, Lobengula, son of Mzilikazi, looked for cunning in those about him. Mzilikazi had been a warrior and lived by the white flash of the assegai. Lobengula, though he had blooded his spear, had never been a warrior, and he scorned the warriors" simpleness of thought and directness of action. As his father's greybeards faltered, he replaced them with men who thought as swiftly as the old ones had stabbed.

  He had no patience with the old men's preoccupation with a world that was passing, and he sought out the young ones with clear fresh eyes, men who could see with him the dark clouds gathering on the southern borders like the soaring thunderheads of high summer.

  Men who could sense the change and terrible events which his wizards and his own divinations warned him would soon rush down upon him like the fires that sweep the papyrus beds of the Zambezi swamps at the end of the dry season.

  Lobengula, the great Black Elephant, whose very tread shakes the earth's foundations, and whose voice splits the skies, was choosing young men with eyes to see and ears to hear.

  Thus Kamuza now wore the isicoco of the induna and, as he spoke over the fire in his dry whisper, his slanted eyes black and bright as those of a mamba in the firelight, men listened, and listened with great attention.

  It was a measure of the gravity of the news he carried from the north that Kamusa began the council, the indaba, with a recital of the history of the Matabele nation. Each of them had heard it first with their mother's breast in their mouths, had drunk it in with her milk, but they listened now as avidly as then, reinforcing their memories so that when the time came they would be able to repeat it perfectly in each detail to their own children, that the story might never be lost.

  The history began with Mzilikazi, war chief of the impis of Zulu, warrior without peer, beloved comrade and trusted intimate of King Chaka himself. it told of the black sickness of King Chaka, driven mad with grief at the death of his mother Nandi, the Sweet One. Chaka ordering the year of mourning in which no man might sow seed, on pain of death; in which the milk from the cows must be thrown upon the earth, on pain of death; in which no man might lie with his woman, on pain of death.

  Mad Chaka brooded in his great hut and looked for cause to strike down all around him, even the most trusted, even the most beloved.

  So it was that Chaka's messengers came to Mzilikazi, the young war chieftain. They found him in the field with. his impis about him, five thousand of Zululand's bravest and finest, all of them still hot from battle, driving before them the spoils they had taken, the captured herds, the young and comely girls roped neck to neck.

  The king's messengers wore the long tail feathers of the stately blue cranes in their headdress, token of their solemn mission.

  "The king accuses the induna Mzilikazi," began the first messenger, and looking into his arrogant face Mzilikazi knew that he looked upon the face of death. "The king accuses Mzilikazi of stealing the king's share of the spoils of war."

  Then the second messenger spoke, and his words were an echo of the king's black madness, so that the words of King Chaka stood in the air above Mzilikazi's impis the way that the vultures circle above the battlefields on wide and motionless pinions.

  if the sentence of death had been upon him alone, Mzilikazi might have gone to his king and met it with courage and dignity. But his five thousand fighting men were doomed also, and Mzilikazi called them his children.

  So Mzilikazi reached out and seized the king's messengers, and for a moment the earth seemed to lurch in its courses, for to touch these who wore the blue crane feathers was to touch the person of the king himself. With the razor edge of his assegai, Mzilikazi slashed the blue feathers from their heads, and threw them into the faces of the grovelling messengers.

  "That is my reply to Chaka., who is no longer my king.

  Thus began the great exodus toward
s the north and, seated over the watch-fire, Kamuza, the king's man, related it all again.

  He told the battle honours of Mzilikazi, the renegade.

  He told how Chaka sent his most famous impis after the fleeing five thousand, and how Mzilikazi met them in the classic battle tactics of the Nguni, how he waited for them in the bad ground.

  Kamuza told how Mzilikazi threw the "horns of the bull" around the impis of Chaka, and how his young men shouted "Ngi Ala! I have eaten!"

  as they drove in the steel; and the listeners in the dark hut murmured and moved restlessly, and their eyes shone and their spear hands twitched.

  When it was over, the survivors of Chaka's shattered impi came to Mzilikazi and, on their knees, swore allegiance to him, to Mzilikazi who was no longer a renegade, but a little king.

  Kamusa told how the little king marched north with his swollen impi, and how he defeated other little kings and became a great king.

  Kamusa told how after Chaka was murdered by his brothers, Dingaan, the new leader of the Zulu nation, did not dare to send out more impis to pursue Mzilikazi.

  So Mzilikazi flourished, and like a ravaging lion he ate up the tribes. Their warriors swelled his fighting impis, and his Zanzi, the pure-blooded Zulu, bred upon the bellies of the captured maidens and the Matabele became a nation and Mzilikazi became a black emperor whose domain overshadowed even that of Chaka.

  The men about the fire listened and felt their hearts swell with pride.

  Then Kamusa told how the buni, the strange white men, crossed the river in their little wagons and outspanned upon the land that Mzilikazi had won with the assegai. Then Mzilikazi paraded his impis, and they danced with their war plumes aflutter, and their long shields clashing as they passed before him.

  After he had reviewed the might of his nation, Mzilikazi took the little ceremonial spear of his kingship, and he poised before his impis and then hurled the toy-like weapon towards the banks of the Gariep river on which the white men had outspanned their wagons.

  They took them in the hour before dawn, at the time of the horns, when the horns of the cattle can first be seen against the lightening sky. The front ranks of racing black warriors received the first volley of the long muzzle-loading guns, absorbing it as though it were a handful of pebbles thrown into a stormy black sea.

  Then they stabbed the bearded men as they worked frantically with powderhom and ramrod. They stabbed the white women as they ran from the wagons in their rughtdresses, trying to carry the second gun to their men.

  They snatched the infants from their cradles on the wagonbed, and dashed out their brains against the tall steel-shod wheels of the wagons.

  Oh, it was a rare feast that they set for Mzilikazi's chickens, the grotesque naked-headed vultures. They believed it was an ending, but it was only a beginning, for the Matabele were about to learn of the persistence and the dour courage of these strange pale people.

  The next wave of white men came out of the south, and when they found the abandoned wagons and the jackal-chewed bones on the banks of the Gariep, theirs was a fury such as the Matabele had never encountered in all their wars.

  So the buni met the impis on the open ground, refusing to be drawn into the ravines and thorn scrub. They came in pitifully small squadrons on shaggy ponies to dismount and discharge their volleys in a thunder of blue powder smoke. Then they went up into the saddle to wheel away from under the wall of charging rawhide shields and reload and circle back to let loose the thunder again into the mass of half-naked bodies glistening with oil and sweat.

  The buni built fortresses on the open plain, fortresses with their wagons" bodies which they lashed wheel to wheel; and they let the impis come to die upon the wooden walls of the fortress, while their womenfolk stood close behind them to take the gun while the barrel was still hot and pass up the second gun, charged and primed.

  Then when the impis drew back, mauled and shaken, the wagons uncoiled from their circle, like a slow but deadly puffadder, and crawled forward towards the kraal of Mzilikazi. And the dreadful horsemen galloped ahead of them, firing and circling, firing and circling.

  Sadly Mzilikazi counted his dead and the price was too high, the red mud through which the iron-shod wheels churned was puddled with the blood of Zanzi, the blood of Heaven.

  So he called his nation, and the herd boys brought in the herds, and the women rolled the sleeping-mats, and the little girls balanced the clay cooking-pots upon their heads, and Mzilikazi put fire into his kraals and led the Matabele nation away. A vast throng of people and animals were guarded by the depleted impis, while the white men on their sturdy ponies drove them and pointed them the way the sheepdog works the flock.

  Mzilikazi led them northwards until they crossed the great river into a new land.

  "Now the white birds are gathering again," Kamuza told the young men about the watch fire. "Each day they come up the road to Thabas Indunas, and they bring their dry gifts and the little green bottles of madness.

  Their words are sweet as honey on the tongue, but they catch in the throat of those who try to swallow them as though they were the green bile of the crocodile."

  "What is it they seek from the king?" Bazo asked the question for all those who listened, and Kamuza shrugged.

  "This one asks for the right to hunt elephant and take the teeth, this one asks for the young girls to be sent to his wagon, another wants to tell the nation of a strange white god that has three heads, another wishes to dig a hole and look for the yellow iron, yet another wishes to buy cattle. One says he wants only this, and another only that, but they want it all. These people are consumed by a hunger that can never be appeased, they burn with a thirst that can never be assuaged. They want thing they see, and even that is never enough for them. They take the very earth, but that is not enough, so they tear it open like a man tearing a child from the mother's womb. They take the rivers, and that is not enough, so they build walls across them and turn them into lakes. They ride after the elephant herds and shoot them down, not just one or two, not just the big bulls, but all of them, the breeding cows and the calves with ivory no longer than your finger. Everything they see they take; and they see everything, for they are always moving and searching and looking."

  "Lobengula must eat them up,"Bazo said. "He must eat them up as Mzilikazi his father would have eaten them."

  "Hau!"Kamuza smiled his thin twisted smile. "Such wisdom from my brother. He recalls how Mzilikazi ate the white men on the banks of the Gariep, and lost a land. Listen to Bazo, my children. He counsels the King Lobengula to throw the war spear and loose his impis as Cetewayo the King of Zulu did at the Hill of the Little Hand. How many Englishmen did Cetewayo slay? There was no counting, for their red jackets lay one upon the other like the snows of the Dragon Mountains when the sunset turns them to fire, and their blood fed the land so that the grass still grows greener and thicker and sweeter upon the slopes of the Little Hand to this day. Oh a fine killing, my children, a great and beautiful stabbing , and afterwards Cetewayo paid for it with the spear of his kingship. He paid for it with his royal herds, he paid for it with the liver and heart of his young men, with the grassy hills of Zululand. For after the avengers had made the great slaughter at Ulundi they took it all, and they placed chains of iron upon Cetewayo's wrists and ankles and they chained his indunas and his war captains and led them away. Now Bazo, the wise, would have you know what a good bargain King Cetewayo made, and he urges Lobengula to make the same bargain with these white men."

  Bazo's expression remained grave and dignified while Kamuza chided and mocked him but he twisted the snuff-horn between his fingers and once he glanced to the dark corner of the thatched hut where the long war shields and the broad assegai were stacked.

  But when Kamuza finished, Bazo shook his head. "No one here dares counsel the king; we are his dogs only.

  No one here doubts the might and resolve of the white men, we who live each day with their strange and wonderful ways. All we ask is
this: what is the king's word?

  Tell us what Lobengula wishes, for to hear is to obey."

  Kamusa nodded. "Hear then the king's voice, for the king has travelled with all his senior indunas, Babiaan and Somabula and Gandang, all the indunas of the house of Kurnalo, they have gone into the hills of "Matopos to the place of the Umlimo A superstitious tremor shook the group, a little shiver as though the name of the wizard of the Matopos had crawled upon their skins like the sickle-winged tsetse fly.

  "The Umlimo has given the oracle," Kamuza told them, and then was silent, the pause theatrical, to pique their attention, to dramatize the effect of his next words.

  "On the first day the Umlimo repeated the ancient prophecy, the words that have come down from the time of Monomatapa. On the first day the Umlimo spoke thus: "The. stone falcons will fly afar. There shall be no peace in the kingdoms of the Marnbos or the Monornatapas until they return. For the white eagle will war with the black bull until the stone falcons return to roost.

  They had all of them heard the prophecy before, but now it had a new and sinister impact.

  "The king has pondered the ancient prophecy, and he says thus: "The white birds are gathering. Eagle and vulture, all of them white, they roost already upon the roof of my kraal."

  " rwhat is the meaning of the stone falcons?" one of his listeners asked.

  "The stone falcons are the bird gods that the ancient ones left at the burial place of the old kings, Zimbabwe."

  "How will stone birds fly?"

  "One has flown already,"Bazo answered this time. "One of the stone falcons stands close by us now. It stands under the roof of Bakela, the Fist. It was he who took the falcon, and carried it away."

  "When the other birds fly, then war will sweep over Matabeleland," Kamuza -affirmed. "But listen now to the oracle of the Umlimo." And their questions were stilled.

  "On the second day the Umlimo prophesied thus: "When the midnight sky turns to noon, and the stars shine on the hills, then the fist will hold the blade to the throat of the black bull."