by Wilbur Smith
The young man rose from his lowly position in the rear-most rank.
"Bayete, Nkosi,"
"Bazo, you have pleased me. I grant you a boon. What shall it be. Speak!"
"i crave only that the king should know the depth of my duty and love for him. Set me a task, I pray you, and if it should be fierce and hard and bloody, my heart and my mouth will sing the king's praises for ever."
On Chaka's royal buttocks, your pup is hungry for glory."
Lobengula looked to Gandang in the front rank of indunas. "And he shames all those who ask for trinkets and cattle and women., He thought a moment, and then chuckled.
"In the direction of the sunrise, two days" march beyond the forests of Somabula, on a high hilltop lives a Mashona dog who deems himself such a great magician and rainmaker that he is beyond the king's arm. His name is Pemba." And there was a hiss of indrawn breath from the squatting ranks of elders. Three times in the past season the king had sent impis to Pemba's hilltop, and three times they had returned empty-handed. The name Pemba mocked them all. "Take fifty men from your old regiment, Little Axe, and fetch Pemba's head so that I can see his insolent smile with my own eyes."
"Bayete!" Bazo's joy carried him in a single bound over the grey heads of the indunas. He landed lightly in the space before the fire and he whirled into the giya, the challenge dance: "Thus will I stab the traitor dog and thus will I rip out the bellies of his sons The indunas grinned and nodded indulgently, but their smiles were tinged with regret for the fury and passion of their youth which had long ago cooled in their own breasts.
Lobengula. sat on the bench of his wagon. It was a big twenty-four-foot four-wheeler built in Cape Town from good English oak, but it still showed all the marks of punishment from its long trek up from the south.
it had not moved in many years, so the grass had grown up through the wheel spokes and around the axle shafts. The canvas of the tent was bleached bone white and crusted with the dung of the hens which roosted on the hoops of the tent framework, but the canvas protected Lobengula from the sun and the seat on the box elevated his head above the level of his courtiers and guards and children and wives and supplicants who crowded the enclosed stockade.
The wagon was Lobengula's throne, and the open stockade his audience chamber. Because there would be white men and women in his audience, he had donned his European finery for this occasion. The long coat encrusted with gold lace had once belonged to a Portuguese diplomat. The lace was tarnished and one epaulette was missing, and the front could not be buttoned over the King's noble belly not by twelve inches, and the sleeves reached only halfway down his forearms. With the toy spear of kingship, the shaft of red wild mahogany and the blade of brightest silver, in his right hand, he used it to summon a boy from out of the crush.
The child was shaking with terror, and his voice so tremulous that Lobengula had to lean forward to hear him.
"i waited until the leopard entered the goat house; then I crept up and closed the door and I barricaded it with stones."
"How did you kill the beast?" Lobengula demanded.
"i stabbed him through the chinks in the wall with my father's assegai." and The boy crept forward and laid the lustrous gold dappled skin at Lobengula's feet.
"Take your choice of three cows from my black royal herds, little one, and drive them to your father's kraal and tell him that the king has given you a praise name. From this day you will be known as "The one who stares into the eyes of the leopard"."
The boy's voice cracked in an adolescent squeak as he backed away gabbling the praises.
Next was a Hollander, a big arrogant white man with a querulous voice.
"I have waited three weeks for the king to decide This was translated for Lobengula, and he mused aloud.
"See how red the man's face becomes when he is angry, like the wattles on the head of the black vulture. Tell him that the king does not count days, perhaps he will have to wait as long again, who knows?"
And he dismissed him with a flirt of the spear.
He took a pull from the bottle of champagne that stood on the wagon seat beside him. The wine fizzed and spilled onto the front of his gold-frogged jacket. Then suddenly his face lit into a beatific smile, but his voice was carping and querulous.
"I sent for you yesterday, Nomusa, Girlchild of Mercy.
I am in great pain; why did you not come sooner?"
"An eagle flies, a cheetah runs, but I am limited to the pace of a mule, oh King," said Robyn Codrington, as she picked her way through the offal that littered the earthen floor of the stockade, and with the, fly switch in her hand cleared a path through the crowd towards the wagon, even dealing a stinging cut to one of the king's black-cloaked executioners.
"Out of my way, eater of human flesh," she told him primly. "Be gone, child stabber." And the man leaped aside nimbly and scowled after her.
"What is it, Lobengula?" she asked as she reached the wagon. "What ails you this time?"
"My feet are filled with burning coals., "Gout," Robyn said as she touched the grotesquely swollen appendages. "You drink too much beer, oh King, you drink too much brandy and champagne., She opened her bag.
"You would have me die of thirst. You are not well named, Nomusa; there is no pity in your heart."
"Nor yours, Lobengula," Robyn snapped. "They tell me you have sent another impi to murder the people of Pemba."
"He is only a Mashona," Lobengula chuckled. "Save your sympathy for a king whose stomach feels as though it is filled with sharp stones."
"Indigestion," Robyn scolded. "Gluttony killed your father, and it is killing you."
"Now you would starve me also. You want me to be a skinny little man of no consequence."
"A thin live one or a fat dead one," Robyn told him.
"Open your mouth."
Lobengula choked on the draught, and rolled his eyes theatrically.
"The pain is better than the taste of your medicine."
"i will leave you five of these pills. Eat one when your feet swell and the pain becomes fierce."
"Twenty," said Lobengula. "A box full. I, Lobengula, King of Matabele, command it. Leave me a box of these little white pills."
"Five," said Robyn firmly. "Or you will eat them all at one time, as you did before."
The king rocked with gargantuan laughter, and almost fell from the wagon seat.
"I think I will command you to leave those little white huts of yours at Khami, and come to live closer to me."
"I should not obey."
"That's why I do not command it," Lobengula agreed, with another shout of laughter.
"This kraal is a disgrace, the dirt, the flies-' "A few old bones and a little dog shit never killed a Matabele," the king told her, and then was serious and motioned her closer, dropping his voice-so that only she could hear.
"The Dutchman with the red face, you know he wishes to build a trade post at the ford of the Hunyani river "The man is a cheat. The goods he brings are shoddy, and he will deceive your people."
"A runner has brought this book." He handed the folded and wafered sheet to Robyn. "Read it for me."
"It is from Sir Francis Good. He wishes--! For almost an hour, whispering hoarsely so that no other could hear, Lobengula consulted Robyn on fifty different matters ranging from the British Commissioner's letter to the menstrual problems of his youngest wife. Then at last he said, "Your coming is like the first sweet rain at the end of the long dry. Is there aught I can do for your happiness?"
"You can let your people come to worship in my church."
This time the king's chuckle was rueful. "Nomusa, you are as persistent as the termites that gnaw away the poles of my hut." He frowned with thought and then smiled again. "Very well, I will let you take one of my people, as long as it is a woman, the wife of an induna of royal blood, and the mother of twelve sons. If you can find one of my people who meets all those conditions, you may take her and splash water on her and make your sign on her forehead;
and she may sing songs to your three white gods if she so wishes."
This time Robyn had to answer his sly and mischievous grin. "You are a cruel man, Lobengula, and you eat and drink too much. But I love you."
"And I love you also, Nomusa."
"Then I will ask one more favour."
"Ask it,"he commanded.
"There is a lad, son of my brother "Henshaw."
"The king knows all."
"What of this boy?"
,"will the king listen to his petition?"
"Send him to me."
Even from where he stood Bazo could see that the grain bins were overflowing with corn that had been sundried still on the cob. There was enough to feed an army, he decided bitterly. There was no chance of starving them out.
The grain bins were cylindrical in shape, their walls of plaited green saplings plastered with clay and cow dung. They stood on stilts of mopani poles to allow the air to circulate below them, and to keep out bush rats and other vermin.
They were perched on the very edge of the precipice.
The dog has brought good rains to his own fields," murmured Zama, Bazo's lieutenant. "He is fat with corn.
Rain-doctor as he claims."
Perhaps he is "Water," Bazo mused, staring up the sheer cliff.
Beyond the grain bins he could make out. the thatched roofs of the tribal huts. "Can we drive them out with thirst?" he asked advice, for Zama had been a member of one of the previous abortive raids upon the stronghold. "The three other indunas tried that at first," Zama pointed out. "But then one of the Mashona. that they captured told them that there is a running spring from which they draw all the water they wish."
The sun was beyond the summit of the hill, so Bazo squinted his eyes against it. "There is lush green growth there He pointed to a narrow gulley that cleft the top of the cliff like an axe stroke but was choked with growth. "That would be it."
As if to confirm his words the tiny distant figure of a girl appeared suddenly out of the gulley. She was foreshortened by her height above them, and the ledge along which she climbed was not apparent from where they stood.
She had a calabash gourd balanced on her head, with green leaves stuffed into its mouth to stop the water splashing out of it as she moved.
She disappeared over the top of the cliff.
"So," grunted Bazo. "We must climb up to them., "It would be easier to fly," Zama grunted. "That rock would daunt a baboon, or a klipspringer."
The rock was pearly grey and marble smooth. There were streaks of lichen dashed across it, green and blue and red, like dry paint on an artist's palette.
"Come," Bazo ordered, and they began a slow measured circuit of the hill, and as they went so the armed guards on the clifftop above kept pace with them, watching every move they made, and if they approached too close to the foot of the cliff, a hail of rocks fell upon them, striking sparks from the scree slope and caroming viciously past their heads, forcing them to shelve their dignity as they retired in haste.
"It is always the Mashona. way," Zama grumbled, "Stones instead of spears."
In places the cliff was riven by vertical cracks, yet none of these reached from base to crest, none of them offered a route to the summit. Bazo looked for a place that had been polished by the paws of wild baboon or marked by the hooves of the tiny little chamois-like klipspringer which might reveal a way up the rock face, but there was none. The cliff girded the entire hill, and transformed it into a fortress.
"There!"Zama pointed to a tiny irregularity in the face.
"That is where two warriors of the swimmers" impi tried to force a road to the top. They climbed as far as that little bush." It grew in a crack in the face a hundred feet from the base of the cliff. "And there the ledge narrowed and gave out. They could not go on, nor could they return. They hung there two days and three nights until their strength failed and they fell, one after the other, to be crushed like beetles on the rocks here where we stand."
They went on, and as the sun was setting they came back to where they had started, the bivouac below the ladderway. Pemba's people had built a ladder of long straight mopani poles, bound together with bark rope, and they had used it to span the lowest point in the cliff a place where a deep gully descended from the summit to within fifty feet of the surrounding plain. Like a drawbridge, the massive ladder was cunningly counter-weighted with round ironstone boulders, so that it had only to be drawn up on its ropes, as it was now, and the mountain stronghold was impregnable.
When the sun set, Bazo was still leaning on his long shield staring up the cliff, seemingly oblivious to the faint shouted insults of the Mashona that just reached him in the evening silence.
"Pustules on Lobengula's fat buttocks."
"Puppies of the rabid dog Lobengula."
"Dried turds of the spavined Matabele elephant."
only when it was too dark to make out the top of the cliff did Bazo turn away, but even then he sat late beside the watch-fire, and rolled into his kaross only after the rise of the big white star over the top of the kopje.
Even then his sleep was troubled with dreams. He dreamed of water, of streams and lakes and waterfalls.
He woke again before light and checked that his sentries were alert before he slipped from the camp and under cover of the darkness crept up to the base of the cliff, at the point directly below the gulley choked with green growth where they had seen the girl carry water the day before.
Bazo heard the liquid chuckling, and his spirits soared.
Guided by the sound he groped through the darkness, and found the spring in the base of the cliff. It filled a small natural basin of grey rock and then overflowed to waste itself again in the dry earth of the plain. Bazo scooped a handful and it was icy cold and sweet on his tongue. The fountain came splashing out of a dark rent in the rock face. Bazo explored it in the short time that was left before the strengthening light threatened to expose him to the sentries on the cliff above.
"Up," Bazo shouted as he strode into the bivouac. "All of you, up!" And his men came off their sleeping-mats, leopard swift and with the stabbing spears in their fists.
"What is it?" Zama hissed.
"We are going to dance," Bazo told them, and they looked from one to the other in amazed disbelief.
On the north side of the kopje, farthest from the spring in the rock cliff and from the long ladder drawbridge, they danced. While they danced, all Pemba's people lined the clifftop to watch them, first in puzzled silence and then yelling with ribald laughter, hurling down taunts and stones.
"I count four hundred, without the children," Zama panted, as he stamped and leaped and stabbed at the air.
"There will be enough for each of us," Bazo agreed, and pirouetted with his shield high over his head, They danced until the sun was high and then Bazo led them back to the camp, and when he stretched out on his mat and fell instantly asleep, his warriors looked at Zama with exasperation, but Zama could only shrug and turn his eyes to the sky.
An hour before sunset Bazo woke. He ate a little maize cake and drank a small gourd of sour milk, then he called for Zama and spoke quietly with him until it was almost dark.
Zama listened and nodded and his eyes shone, and while he talked, Bazo was honing the silver blade of his assegai until the light twinkled like tiny stars along its cutting edge.
At dark Bazo rose to his feet, handed his long dappled war shield to Zama and, armed only with his assegai, strode out of the bivouac. At the spring in the base of the cliff, Bazo shed his kilt and cloak and headdress. He rolled them into a bundle and hid them in a rock crevice.
Then stark naked with only his assegai tied to his back by a leather thong, he waded across the pool. The reflection of the stars on its surface exploded into chips of light.
The water cascaded over him from the fountain in the cliff and he shuddered and gasped with the cold and then reached up into the dark rocky opening, found a fingerhold, drew a deep breatht and pulled himself upwards.
>
With a solid black jet of water racing over his head, he held his breath and wriggled frantically up into the hole in the cliff. The force of water opposed him, and it required all his strength to go against it. Inch by inch, his chest throbbing for air, he fought his way upwards and then just when he knew he would have to let himself be washed back into the pool, his head broke out and he could breathe.
He sucked air desperately, wedging shoulders and knees against the smooth water-polished rock to hold himself in the torrent. It was utterly dark, not the faintest glimmering of starlight, and the darkness seemed to have physical weight that threatened to crush him.
He reached as high as he could and found another smoo the fingerhold, and with all the strength of his arms gained another few feet, rested a moment, and then reached up again. The rock was like glass, and in places coated with a thick beard of algae, slippery as an eel's skin. The cold was a terrible living thing that invaded his body. His bones ached and his fingers were so numbed that he could barely take his holds.
The water tore at him, battering his shoulders, forcing its way into his nose and mouth and ears, filling his head with its angry animal roaring. Still he went up in the irregular twisting tunnel, sometimes horizontal, wriggling forward on his belly, the roof cracking his skull if he lifted his head too quickly to find the few precious inches of air trapped beneath it. Mostly the tunnel climbed vertically, and he wedged with knees and elbows to hold himself against the cascade, while his skin, softened with water, was smeared and torn away in slabs against the stone; but the inches became yards, and the minutes became hours, and still he went up.
Then the tunnel narrowed so sharply that he was trapped, cold slippery rock at each shoulder and hard heavy rock cramming down between his shoulderblades. He could not go on, nor could he go back. He was trapped in the rocky maw of the mountain, and he screamed with terror, but his voice was lost in the thunder of water and the water gushed into his throat.
He fought with the last of his drowning, desperate strength, and suddenly he kicked himself forward into a narrow cavern where he could breathe again, and where the water swirled into little back-eddies so that he could rest a few moments from its drag.