Men of Men b-2

by Wilbur Smith

"I love you, Cousin Ralph," said Vicky, and had to be prised off him like a leach.

  "i love you, Cousin Ralph."

  Lizzie had counted the kisses that Vicky had bestowed on him, and she went for a new world record, a noble attempt, but frustrated by Cathy.

  "Now, scat," Cathy told them. "Go, both of you., "Cathy is crying," said Lizzie, and both twins were immediately entranced.

  "I am not," said Cathy furiously.

  "Oh yes, you are" said Vicky.

  "I have something in my eye."

  "Both eyes?" asked Lizzie sceptically.

  "I warn you," Cathy told them. They knew that expression of old, and reluctantly they retired just out of range. Cathy turned her back to them so they missed half of what followed.

  "They are right." Her whisper was blurred as her eyes. "I am crying, Ralph. I hate so to see you go."

  Ralph had not truly looked at her, not ever, his eyes had been for Salina alone, but now her frank admission touched him and he saw her for the first time.

  He had thought her a child, but he had been wrong, he realized suddenly. It was the thick dark eyebrows and the firm chin that gave strength to her face, so that he sensed that anything that made her cry was deeply felt.

  Surely she had not been so tall when first he met her almost a year before. Now the top of her head reached his chin.

  The freckles on her cheeks kept her young, but her nose was set in the shape of maturity and the gaze of her green eyes below the arched brows, though flooded now with tears, was too wise and steady for childhood.

  She still wore the muddy green dress of sewn flour sacks, but its fit had altered. Now it was baggy at the waist, while at the same time it was too tight across her chest. Yet it could not suppress the thrust of young firm breasts, and the seams strained across hips that he remembered being as narrow and bony as a boy's.

  "You will come back, Ralph? Unless you promise, I cannot let you go."

  "i promise," he said, and suddenly the pain of rejection by Salina, which he had thought might destroy him, was just supportable.

  "i will pray for you each day until you do," Cathy said, and came to kiss him. She no longer felt skinny and awkward in his arms, and Ralph was suddenly very aware of the softness of her against his chest, and lower.

  Her mouth had a taste like chewing a stalk of green spring grass. Her lips formed a pillow for his. He had no burning desire to break the embrace, and Cathy also seemed content to let it persist. The pain of unrequited love ebbed a little more to be replaced by a warm and comforting sensation, a most pleasant glow, until with a shock Ralph realized two things.

  Firstly, the twins were an avid audience, their eyes enormous and their grins impudent. Secondly, that the pleasant glow which had suffused him had its source considerably lower than his broken heart, and was accompanied by more tangible changes that must soon become apparent to the fresh young innocent in his arms.

  He almost shoved her away, and vaulted up onto Tom's back with unnecessary violence. However, when he looked down at Cathy again, the tide of green tears in her eyes had receded and been replaced by a look of satisfaction, a knowingness that proved beyond doubt what he had just come to realize, that she was no longer a child.

  "How long?" she asked.

  "Not before the end of the rains," he told her. "Six or seven months from now." And suddenly that seemed to Ralph to be a very long time indeed.

  "Anyway," she said. "I have your promise."

  On the far bank of the river he looked back. The twins had lost interest and started home. They were racing each other down the track, skirts and plaits flying, but Cathy still stood staring after him. Now she lifted her hand and waved. She kept waving until horse and rider disappeared amongst the trees.

  Then she sat down on a log beside the track. The sun made its noon and then sank into the misty smoke of the bush fires that blued the horizon and turned to a soft red orb that she could look at directly without paining her eyes.

  In the gloaming a leopard sawed and hacked harshly from the dense dark riverine forest nearby. Cathy shivered and stood up. She cast one last lingering glance across the wide river bed and then at last she turned for home.

  Bazo could not sleep; hours ago he had left his sleeping-mat and come to squat by the fire in the centre of the hut. The others had not even stirred when he moved, Zama and Kamuza and Mondane, those who would accompany him tomorrow.

  Their finery was piled beside their recumbent figures.

  The cloaks of feathers and furs and beads, the headdresses and kilts, the regalia reserved for only the most grave and momentous occasions, like the Festival of the First Fruits, or a personal report to the king, or, again, the ceremony for which they had gathered and which would start at the dawn of the morrow.

  Bazo looked at them now, and his chest felt congested with his joy, joy so intense that it sang in his ears and fizzed in his blood. joy even more intense in that these his companions of the years, with whom he had shared boyhood and youth and now manhood, would be there again at one of the most important days of his life.

  Now Bazo sat alone at the fire while his companions snored and muttered in sleep, and he took each coin of his good fortune and, like a miser counting his treasure, fondled it with his mind, turning each memory over and gloating upon it.

  He lived again every moment of his triumph when the lines of captive women had filed before Lobengula and piled the spoils in front of his wagon, the bars and coils of red copper, the axe heads, the leather bags of salt, the clay pots full of beads, for Pemba had been a famous wizard and had gathered his tribute from a host of fearful clients.

  Lobengula had smiled when he saw his treasure, for that was what had been at the root of his feud with Pemba. The king was not above the jealousies of common men. When Lobengula smiled, all his indunas smiled in sympathy and made those little clucking sounds of approval.

  Bazo remembered how the king had called him forward, and smiled again when Bazo emptied the bag he carried over his shoulder, and the wizard's head, which by then was in an advanced state of decomposition, had rolled to the forewheel of the wagon and grinned up at Lobengula with ruined lips drawn back from uneven teeth stained by the hemp pipe.

  A troop of the gaunt, mange-ridden pariah dogs that skulked about the king's kraal had come to snarl and abble over the morsel, and when one of the blacksqu cloaked executioners would have scattered them with blows of his knobkerrie, the king restrained him.

  "The poor beasts are hungry, let them be." And he turned back to Bazo. "Tell me how it was done."

  Bazo relived in his mind every word with which he had described the expedition, and while he told it he had begun to giya, to dance and sing the ode to Pemba which he had composed: "Like a mole in the earth's gut Bazo found the secret way He sang, and in the front row of the senior indunas, Gandang, his father, sat grave and proud.

  "Like the blind catfish that live in the caves of Sinoia Bazo swam through darkness.

  Then as the verses of the song mentioned them, Zama and his warriors sprang forward to whirl and dance at his side.

  "Like the black mamba from under a stone Zama milked death from his silver fang When the triumph dance was over, they threw themselves face down on the earth in front of the wagon.

  "Bazo, son of Gandang, go out and choose two hundred head from the royal herds," said Lobengula.

  "Bayete!" shouted Bazo, still panting from the dance.

  "Bazo, son of Gandang, you who commanded fifty so skilfully, now I give you one thousand to command."

  "Nkosi! Lord!"

  "You will command the levy of young men waiting now at the royal kraal on the Shangani river. I give you the insignia for your new regiment. Your shields will be red, your kilts the tails of the genet cat, your plumes the wing feathers of the marabou stork, and your headband the fur of the burrowing roole," Lobengula intoned, and then paused. "The name of your regiment will be Izimv-ukuzane Ezembintaba, the moles that burrow under a mountain."
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br />   "Nkosi kakhula! Great King!" Bazo roared.

  "Now Bazo, rise up and go into the women to choose yourself a wife. Be sure that she is virtuous and fruitful, and let her first duty be to set the headring of the induna on your brow., "Indh1ovu!

  Ngi ya bonga! Great Elephant, I praise you!"

  Sitting his solitary watch by the fire, Bazo remembered every word, every change of tone, every pause and emphasis that the king had used to heap his honours upon him. He sighed with contentment and placed another log upon the fire, carefully so as not to wake his companions, and the sparks floated up through the opening in the highest point of the domed roof.

  Then a distant sound interrupted his reverie; it was the single whoop of a hyena, not an unusual sound except that it was the first time that he had heard it since nightfall. On every other night the hideous cries of these loathsome animals began when they crept from their burrows at dusk and continued until sunrise.

  They haunted the small woody copse beyond the cattle enclosure that all the inhabitants of Gandang's kraal used as a communal open-air latrine. The hyena cleansed the area of excrement during the hours of darkness. For this reason, Gandang's people tolerated the presence of an animal that they usually abhorred with a superstitious dread.

  So tonight the single whooping cry at midnight drew attention to the silence that had preceded it. Bazo listened a few seconds longer and then let his thoughts stray to the morrow.

  After the king, Gandang was one of the three most important personages in Matabeleland, only Somabula and Babiaan were his peers, so that a marriage at his kraal would have been a momentous event even if it were not his eldest son, himself a newly appointed induna of one thousand, who was to be the bridegroom.

  Juba, senior wife of Gandang, and mother of Bazo the bridegroom, had supervised the brew of beer, watching with an expert eye for the bloom of yeast on the germinating sorghum, testing with her own plump finger the temperature of the ground meal gruel as it was malted, udging the addition of the final booster of yeast and then standing over the matrons as they strained the brewing through woven bamboo sieves into the huge black clay beer-pots. Now there were a thousand pots each holding half a gallon of her famous brew, ready to greet the guests as they arrived at Gandang's kraal. There would be a thousand invited guests.

  Lobengula and his retinue were already on the road; they were sleeping tonight at the regimental kraal of the Intemba regiment, only five miles distant, and they would arrive before noon.

  Somabula was with the king, while Babiaan was coming in from his kraal in the east with a hundred warriors in his bodyguard. Nomusa and Hlopi were coming from the mission station at Khami as Juba's special guests, and they were bringing all their daughters with them.

  and Gandang had picked fifty fat bullocks from his herds, the bridegroom and his young companions would begin to slaughter and butcher them in the dawn, while the unmarried girls took the bride down to the river pool, bathed her and then anointed her with fat and clay until she glistened in the early sunlight. Then they would deck her with wild flowers.

  The hyena called again much closer this time, sounding as if it were right outside the stockade, and then a strange thing happened. The single cry was answered by a chorus, as though a great multitude of the huge shaggy spotted dog-like beasts had surrounded Gandang's kraal.

  Bazo started up from the fire in astonishment. He had never heard anything to equal this, there must be a hundred or more of the ungainly animals out there. He could imagine them, their high shoulders sloping down to meagre hindquarters, the flat snakelike heads held low as though the weight of massive underslung jaw and yellow carnassial teeth was too heavy for the neck.

  One hundred at least, he could almost smell their breath as they opened those iron jaws, capable of crunching the thigh bone of a bull buffalo to splinters. they would reek of long-dead carrion and excrement and other filth, but it was the sound of their voices that chilled Bazo's guts and started the march of ghost feet along his spine.

  it was as though all the souls of the dead had risen from their graves to clamour outside Gandang's stockade. They whooped and howled, beginning in a low moan and rising sharply in key.

  "Oooh, wee!" They shrieked like the ghost of a Mashona feeling again the steel cleave his breast, and the terrible cries woke the echoes amongst the kopjes along the river.

  Almost humanly, they giggled, and they laughed, that maniacal and mirthless laughter. The peals of fiendish laughter mingled with the tormented shrieks, and then with them were the cries of the kraal's watchmen, the screeches of the waking women in their huts, the shouts of the men, still haff-asleep, as they scrambled for their weapons.

  "Do not go out," Kamuza shouted across the hut as Bazo sprang to the door with his shield on his shoulder and his assegai in his right hand. "Do not go into the dark, this is a witchcraft. Those are not animals out there."

  His words stopped Bazo at the threshold. There was nothing of flesh and blood he would not face, but this The fiendish chorus reached a climax, and then abruptly ceased. The silence that followed was even more chilling, and Bazo shrank away from the door. His companions crouched on their sleeping-mats, weapons in their hands, their eyes wide and white in the firelight , but not one of them moved towards the door.

  All of Gandang's kraal was awake now, but silent, waiting, the women creeping away into the farthest recesses of their huts and covering their heads with their fur karosses, the men frozen with superstitious terror.

  The silence lasted the time it would take for a man to run the full circle of the stockade, and then was broken by the call of a single hyena, the same whooping cry, starting low and rising to a shriek. The head of every one of the warriors in Bazo's hut lifted, and they all stared upwards to the roof and the star-pticked sky above it, for that was from where the ghostly cry emanated from the very air high above Gandang's kraal.

  "Sorcery." Kamuza's voice shook, and Bazo choked down on the wail of terror that rose in his own throat.

  As the animal cry died in the night, there was only one other sound. The voice of a young girl, raised in terrible distress.

  "Bazo! Help me, Bazo!" It was the only thing that could have roused him. Bazo shook himself like a dog that leaps from water to land, throwing off the terror that paralysed him.

  "Do not go!" Kamuza yelled, after him.

  "It is not the girl, it is a witch voice."

  But Bazo tore the locking bar from the door.

  He saw her immediately. Tanase raced towards him from the women's quarters, from Juba's own great hut where she had been passing the last night before her nuptials.

  Her dark naked body was without substance, like a moon shadow as she sped to him. Bazo leaped towards her, and they met in front of the main gate of the stockade, and Tanase clung to him.

  No other person had left the huts; the kraal was deserted, the fearful silence oppressive. Bazo lifted his shield to cover both himself and the girl, and instinctively he turned to face the gateway.

  It was only then that he realized that the gate was open.

  He tried to retreat towards the hut, taking the girl with him, but she was rigid in his arms, rooted to the earth like the stump of a wild ebony tree, and his own strength was sapped by terror.

  "Bazo," Tanase whispered. "It is them, they have come., As she spoke the watch-fire beside the gate, which had long ago burned down to ash and charred logs, suddenly burst into flame once again. The flames sprang higher than a man's head, roaring like a waterfall, and the stockade and gateway were lit brightly by the yellow dancing light. Beyond the open gateway, at the very edge of the firelight stood a human figure. It was the figure of a very old man, with stick-like limbs and bowed back; his cap of hair was white as the salt from the Makarikari pan; his skin was grey and dusty with age. The whites of his eyes flashed as they squinted and rolled upwards into his skull, and glassy strings of spittle dribbled from his toothless mouth onto his chest, wetting the dry parchment skin through w
hich each skeletal rib stood out clearly.

  His voice was a quavering ancient squeal.

  "Tanase!" he called. "Tanase, daughter of the spirits."

  In the firelight all life went out of Tanase's eyes; they became blank.

  "Do not heed-" Bazo croaked, but a bluish sheen appeared over Tanase's eyeballs like the nictitating membrane that covers the eye of a shark or the cataract of tropical ophthalmia, and blindly her head turned towards the spectral figure beyond the gates.

  "Tanase, your destiny calls you!"

  She broke out of Bazo's arms. It seemed to require no effort. He could not hold her. Her strength was superhuman.

  She began to walk towards the gateway, and when Bazo tried to follow her, he found he could not lift a foot. He dropped his shield, and it clattered on the hard earth, but Tanase did not look back. She walked with a floating grace, light as river mist towards the ancient stooped figure.

  "Tanase!" Bazo's voice was a despairing cry, and he fell upon his knees, yearning after her.

  The old man held out one hand, and Tanase took it, and as she did so, the watch-fire died down as abruptly as it had flared, and the darkness beyond the gateway was instantly impenetrable.

  "Tanase!" whispered Bazo, his arms outstretched, and far away, down by the river the hyena called one last time.

  The twins came pelting into the church, tumbling over each other with eagerness to be the first to tell.

  "Mama! Mama!

  "Vicky, I saw first, let me!"

  Robyn Codrington looked up from the black body stretched on the table and quelled them with a frown.

  "Ladies don't push."

  They came up in a parody of demureness, but hopping with impatience.

  "Very well, Vicky. What is it?"

  They began together, and Robyn stopped them again.

  "I said Vicky."

  And Victoria puffed up importantly.

  "There is someone coming."

  "From Thabas Indunas?" Robyn asked.

  "No, Mama, from the south., "It's probably one of the king's messengers."

  "No, Mama, it's a white man on a horse."