Men of Men b-2

by Wilbur Smith

  Slowly the strict order of Matabele society began to break up, for the regent, Mzilikazi's senior wife, was unrestrained in her intercourses, and she rutted shamelessly with her lovers.

  Some of the lesser wives followed her example, and then the common people took sexual licence, the youths, unblooded and without the royal permission to go into the women, lay in wait for the young girls on the path to the water-hole, and dragged them giggling into the bushes.

  With the code of morality broken, other vices followed. The remaining cattle, the breeding herds, were slaughtered, and the feasting went on for months. Loose ess and drunkenness swept through the nation like a plague, and in the midst of this debauchery, one of the Matabele patrols captured a little yellow Bushman who had wandered in out of the west, and the Bushman had momentous tidings.

  Mzilikazi is dead" he told his captors. "I have thrust my own fingers into the stab wound in his heart, and watched the hyena wolfing down his flesh and cracking his bones."

  The senior wife had her guards boil clay pots of water, and pour them over the Bushman until his flesh fell off his bones and he died, which is fitting treatment for one who brings news of the death of a king. Then she called the indunas into council, and urged them to proclaim Nkulumane king in place of his dead father. However, none of the indunas were fools. One whispered to the other, "It would take more than a Tswana dog to kill Mzilikazi."

  While they procrastinated and talked, the senior wife grew wild with impatience and sent for the executioners, determined now that there would be no rival for her son.

  Saala was playing outside the queen's hut, moulding little clay oxen and figures of men and women for Ningi.

  Through the thatched wall she heard the queen giving her orders to the Black Ones. Frantic with terror for the safety of Lobengula, Saala ran to the other royal mothers.

  "The Black ones are coming for the royal sons. You must hide them., Then Saala left little Ningi, now weaned and strong, with one of the royal women who was barren and childless.

  "Look after her," she whispered, and ran out into the grasslands.

  Lobengula was by now ten years of age, and was tending what remained of the royal herds: the duty of every Matabele boy, the essential service through which he learned the secrets of the veld and the ways of cattle, the nation's treasure.

  Saala found him bringing in the herd to water. He was naked except for the little flap of leather over his loins, and armed only with two short fighting sticks with which he was expected to drive off any predator and to hold his owr. in competition with the other herd boys.

  Holding hands again, the Matabele princeling and the little white girl fled, and instinctively they turned southwards, back the way they had come.

  They lived on roots and berries, on the eggs of wild birds and the flesh of the iguana lizards. They competed with the jackals and vultures for the remains of the lion kill, and sometimes they went hungry, but at last they found themselves in the maze of the Matopos Hills where the Black Ones would not follow them. They slept under the single kaross that Saala had brought with her, and the nights crackled with frost so they slept in each other's arms, clinging together for warmth.

  Early one morning the old man found them thus. He was thin and mad-looking, with strange charms and magical objects about his neck, and the children were terrified of him.

  Saala pushed Lobengula behind her, and with a show of false courage faced the wizard.

  "This is Lobengula. Favourite son of Mzilikazi," she declared stoutly. "Who harms him, harms the king."

  The old man rolled his mad eyes, and drooled horribly as he grinned with toothless gums. Then suddenly the air was full of the sound of ghost voices, and Saala.

  screamed and Lobengula wailed with terror, and they clung to each other pitifully.

  The wizard led the children, chastened, shivering and weeping, through secret passages and over precipitous trails, deeper and deeper into the hills, until at last they came to the caves which honeycombed the rock.

  Here the old man began the instruction of the boy who would be king. He taught him many of the mysteries, but not how to control the ghost voices, nor how to throw fire by pointing his finger, nor how to see the future in a calabash of mountain water.

  Here in the caves of the Matopos, Lobengula learned the scope and power of the magical order. He learned how the little wizards, the witchdoctors, were spread across the land, performing the small rites, making rain and giving charms for fertility and childbirth, smelling out the evil-doers, and sending back their reports to the cave in the Matopos.

  Here the grand wizards, of which the old man was one, worked the great magics, called up the spirits of their ancestors, and looked into the mists of time to see what the future would bring. Above them all was the Umlimo.

  It was a name only for Lobengula, Umlimo, a name that even after he had lived five years in the cave could still make him shiver and sweat.

  Then when he was sixteen, the mad old wizard took him to the cave of the Umlimo. And the Umlimo was a woman, a beautiful woman.

  What Lobengula saw in the cave of the Umlimo he would never speak about, not even to Saala, but when he came back from the cave there was a sadness in his eyes, and the weight of knowledge seemed to bow his young shoulders.

  There was a furious thunderstorm the night of Lobengula's return, and the blue lightning clanged upon the anvil of the hills with strokes that tortured their eardrums as they lay together under the kaross. Then it was that the little orphan white girl made the boy into a man, the princeling into a king; and when her term was run she gave him a son who was the colour of the early morning sunlight on the yellow winter grass, and Lobengula knew happiness for the only time in his life.

  In their joy they paid little attention to tidings which the mad old wizard brought to their cave.

  He told them how Mzilikazi, great with plunder, fat with cattle, had come back to Thabas Indunas, arriving suddenly with the blood barely dried on the spears of his impi, and red rage in his art.

  At Mzilikazi's nod the Black Ones gathered all those who had acted as if the king were dead. Some they hurled from the cliff of execution, some they pegged down upon the sandbanks of the river where the crocodiles sunned themselves, others they skewered with bamboo spikes through the secret openings of their bodies.

  But when the mother of Nkulumane was led before the king, she wept so and tore her own flesh with her nails while she called on all the spirits of the dead to witness how faithful she had been to Mzilikazi in his absence, how constant had been her belief in his eventual safe return and how during his absence she had guarded the other royal sons from the Black Ones and even sent Lobengula into the wilderness to save him so that Mzilikazi, who at the bottom was only a man, believed her. However, the others died in their hundreds, victims of the king's wrath, and the nation rejoiced for the king had returned and the good old days were back.

  Through all this Lobengula and Saala and their little yellow son stayed on in the cave of the Matopos and knew happiness.

  Far away in the south below the Limpopo river, a Hottentot elephant hunter stopped to water his horse at the well beside a Boer homestead that stood not far from the battlefield where the Boer horsemen had long ago first defeated Mzilikazi before driving him out of this country.

  "I saw a curious thing" said the Hottentot to the big, solemn, bearded man who was his host. "In the southern hills of Matabeleland, I saw a white woman, full grown and naked. She was shy as a wild buck and ran into the rocky ground where I could not follow her."

  Two months later, when the Boer farmer took his family into the service of Nachtmaal in the new church at Rustenberg, he repeated the strange story which the Hottentot hunter had brought from the north. Someone recalled the story of the massacre of the Van Heerden family, and the two little girls, Sarah and Hannah, taken by the murderous plundering savages.

  Then Hendrik Potgieter, that doughty trekker and kaffir-fighter, stood up in the pul
pit, and thundered: "The heathen have a Christian woman as captive!" And the words offended much that the congregation held dear: God and their womankind.

  "Commando!" roared Hendrik Potgieter. "I call commando!"

  The women filled the powder-horns and Poured the lead into the bullet moulds, and the men picked out their best horses and elected Potgieter as their leader.

  Not all of it was for God and womankind; for one whispered to another, "Even if there is no white woman, I have heard that there are fine new herds in Matabeleland."

  Then the old wizard came to Lobengula's cave and rolled his eyes and cackled.

  The buni have crossed the river of crocodiles, riding on the backs of strange beasts. Many men, many men!"

  Instinctively Lobengula knew why the Boer commando was coming, and he knew also what to do about it. "Stay here, with the child," he ordered Saala. "I am going to my father's kraal, and I will lead his impis back here."

  But Saala was a woman, with a woman's curiosity, and blood called to blood. Vaguely she remembered that these strange white men had once been her kin.

  When Lobengula had gone north to Thabas Indunas, she slung the baby on her back and crept out of the cave.

  At first the distant sound of gunfire guided her, for the Boer commando was living off the abundant herds of wild game. Then later she heard the shout of voices, and the whicker of horses, sounds that awakened a terrible nostalgia in her breast.

  She crept closer and closer to the bivouac, with all the stealth of a wild animal, closer still until she could clearly see the tall sun-bronzed men, dressed to throat and wrists in brown homespun, the white-brimmed felt hats on their heads, closer still until she could hear their voices lifted in praise of their God as they sang their hymns around the camp fire.

  She recognized the words, and memories flooded back to her. She was no longer Saala but Sarah, and she rose from her place of hiding to go down to her people. Then she looked down at her body, and she saw that she was naked. She looked at the child on her hip, and saw that it was yellow, and its features were neither hers nor yet those of its Matabele father.

  The awareness of sin came upon her, as it had done to Eve in another Paradise, and Sarah was ashamed.

  She crept away, and in the dawn she stood on the top of one of those soaring granite precipices that rend the Matopos hills.

  She kissed her baby and then holding the little mite to her breast she stepped out into the void.

  Lobengula found them at the bottom of the cliff. He found them before the vultures did, and they were still together, Sarah's grasp on the infant had not faltered during the long plunge from the top of the precipice.

  Strangely, both she and the child seemed to be merely sleeping, quiet and at peace.

  At the memory Lobengula sighed now, and returned his gaze to his half-brother, the Induna Gandang who still sat across him from the fire.

  If only he had been able to escape the prophecy of the Umlimo, for she had foreseen this destiny for him: Your name is Lobengula, the one who drives like the wind. Yet the winds will drive you, high as an eagle.

  "Lobengula will hold the spear of Mzilikazi. Yet again the winds will drive you, down, down, down, and your nation with you.

  Those were the words of that strange and beautiful woman of the cave, and already the first part of the prophecy had held true.

  Mzilikazi, the mighty warrior, had died like an old woman, riddled with arthritis and dropsy and gout and liquor, in his royal hut.

  His widows had wrapped him in the skin of a freshlykilled bull, and sat mourning over him for twelve days: until his remains were almost liquid with putrefaction in the summer heat.

  After the mourning the regiments had carried his corpse into the Matopos Hills, the Sacred Hills, and they had seated Mzilikazi in the cave of the king. They placed all his possessions about him: his assegais, his guns, his ivory; even his wagon was taken down and the pieces piled in the crevices of the cave.

  Then masons closed the opening with blocks of granite, and after the feasting and dancing the indunas of Matabele met to decide who would succeed Mzilikazi as king.

  The argument and counter-argument lasted many weeks, until the indunas led by the princes of Kumalo returned into the Matopos bearing rich gifts to the cave of the Umlimo.

  "Give us a king!" they pleaded.

  "The one who drives like the wind!" replied the Umlimo, but Lobengula had fled, trying even at the last moment to escape his destiny.

  The border impis captured him, and led him back to Thabas Indunas like a criminal to judgement. The indunas came to him one by one, and swore their allegiance and loyalty unto death.

  "Black Bull of Matabele, The Thunderer, The Great Elephant. The one whose tread shakes the earth., Nkulumane was the first of his brothers to crawl before him, and Nkulumane's mother, the senior wife of Mzilikazi, followed her son on her knees.

  Lobengula turned to the Black Ones who stood behind him, like hounds on the leash.

  "I do not wish to look upon their faces again."

  It was Lobengula's first command, spoken like a true king, and the Black Ones took mother and son into the cattle stockade and twisted their necks, quickly and mercifully.

  "He will be a great king," the people told one another delightedly. "Like his father."

  But Lobengula had never known happiness again. Now with a shudder he threw off the terrible burden of the past, and his voice was a deep but melodious bass. "Rise up, Gandang my brother. Your countenance warms me like a watch-fire in the frosty night."

  They spoke then, easily and intimately, trusted companions of a lifetime, until at last Gandang passed the Martini-Henry rifle to his king and Lobengula held it in his lap and rubbed the cold blued metal of the block with one forefinger and then held the finger to his nose to smell the fresh grease.

  "Sting the mamba with his own venom,"he murmured "This is the fang of the mamba."

  "The lad, Henshaw, son of Bakela, has a wagon filled with these."

  "Then he will be welcome," Lobengula nodded. "But now let me hear all this from the mouth of your own son. Bring him to me."

  Bazo lay face down on the hard clay floor of the king' hut, and he chanted the ritual praises with a catch in his throat, and brave as he was, he sweated with fear in the king's presence.

  "Rise up, Bazo the Axe," Lobengula broke impatiently. Come closer."

  Bazo crept forward on all fours, and he offered the beaded kilt. Lobengula spilled the diamonds from it in a glowing puddle and he stirred them with his finger.

  "There are prettier stones than these in every river of my land," he said. "These are ugly., "The buni are mad for them. No other stone satisfy them, but for these their hunger is so great that they will kill any who stand in their way."

  "Tear the lion with his own claws." Lobengula repeat the prophecy of the Umlimo and then went on, !" these ugly little stones the claws of the lion? Then, they are, let all men see how Lobengula is ready with claws."

  And he clapped his hands for his wives to come to him.

  The royal hut was crowded now, rank upon rank of squatting men faced the low platform on which Lobengula lay. Every man of them except Bazo wore the headring of the induna, and their names were the rolls of glory of the Matabele nation.

  There was Somabula, the lion-hearted old warrior, and beside him Babiaan, royal prince of Kumalo, and all the others. Their ranks were silent and attentive, their faces grave in the light of the fire which had been built up and whose flames leapt almost to the high-domed roof of the king's hut.

  They were watching the king.

  Lobengula lay on his back on the built-up platform beyond the fire. There was a low carved headrest under the nape of his neck. Only the tip of his penis was covered by the dried and hollowed-out gourd, otherwise he was stark naked. His great belly was mountainous and his limbs were like tree trunks.

  Four of his wives squatted about him in a circle, each of them with a calabash of rendered white beef f
at beside her. They anointed the king smearing the fat thickly over his body from his throat to his ankles. Then when it was done they rose silently, and stooped out through the opening in the back of the hut which led to the women's quarters.

  Singing softly, shuffling and swaying to the song, another ffle of younger wives began to wind into the hut; each of them carried upon her head a beer pot of fired clay; but these pots were not filled with the bubbling millet beer.

  The wives knelt on each side of the king, and at a word from the senior wife they dipped into the clay pots and each of them came out with a large uncut diamond in her fingers. They began sticking the stones on the king's skin, and the thick coating of grease held them in the patterns that they built up to ornament Lobengula's gleaming limbs.

  They worked swiftly, for they had done this before, and under their fingers Lobengula was transformed. He became a creature of mythology: half man, half glittering scaled fish.

  The diamonds caught the beam of the fire, and sent it spinning against the thatched walls and high roof, darting insects of golden light that flashed in the eyes of the watchers and dazzled them so that they grunted with amazement, and their voices went up like a choir in praise of their king.

  At last the work was done and the wives crept away and left Lobengula lying on the thick soft furs, covered from throat to wrist to ankle in a silver burning coat of scail, each link of which was a priceless diamond; and as the king's chest and belly rose and subsided to the tide of his breathing, so this immense treasure burned and flamed.

  "Indunas of Matabele, Princes of Kurnalo, hail your King."

  "Bayete! Bayete!" The royal salute burst from their throats. "Bayete!" Then the silence was complete but expectant, for it had become the king's custom that after this ritual display of the contents of the nation's treasury, he would dispense honours and rewards.

  "Bazo," Lobengula's voice was sonorous. "Stand forward!"