Wilbur Smith - C09 Birds Of Prey

by C09 Birds Of Prey(Lit)

  Almost immediately they came upon signs of human habitation. It was a decaying stockade, built of heavy logs. Within its wooden walls were pens that Hal thought must have been for enclosing cattle or other beasts.

  "Slavers!" said Aboli bitterly. "This is where they have chained my people like animals. In one of these bomas, perhaps this very one, my mother died under the weight of her sorrow."

  The stockade had been long abandoned but Hal could not bring himself to camp on the site of so much human misery. They moved a league upstream and found a small island on which to bivouac. The next morning they went on along the river through forest and grassland innocent of any further evidence of man. "The slavers have swept the wilderness with their net," Aboli said sorrowfully. "That is why they have abandoned their factory and sailed away. It seems that there are no men or women of our tribe who have survived their ravages. We must abandon the search, Gundwane, and turn back."

  "No, Aboli. We go on."

  "All around us is the ancient memory of despair and death," Aboli pleaded. "These forests are inhabited only by the ghosts of my people."

  "I will decide when we turn back, and that time is not yet come," Hal told him, for in truth he was becoming fascinated by this strange new land and the plethora of wild creatures with which it abounded. He felt a powerful urge to travel on and on, to follow the great river to its source.

  The next day, from the bows, Hal spied a range of low hillocks a short distance north of the river. He ordered them to beach the boats and left Big Daniel and his seamen to repair the leaks in the hull of the first caused by the hippopotamus attack. He took Aboli with him and they set off to climb the hills for a better view of the country ahead. They were further off than they had appeared to be, for distances are deceptive in the clear air and under the bright light of the African sun. It was late afternoon when they stepped out onto the crest and gazed down upon the limitless distances where forests and hills replicated themselves, rank upon rank and range upon range, like images of infinity in mirrors of shaded blue.

  They sat in silence, awed by the immensity of this wild land. At last Hal stood up reluctantly. "You are right, Aboli. There are no men here. We must return to the ship."

  Yet he felt deep within him a strange reluctance to turn his back upon this tremendous land. More than ever, he felt drawn to its mystery and the romance of its vast spaces.

  "You will have many strong sons," Sukeena had prophesied. "Their descendants will flourish in this land of Africa and make it their own."

  He did not yet love this land. It was too strange and barbaric, too alien from all he had known in the gentler climes of the north, but deeply he felt the magic of it in his blood. The silence of dusk fell upon the hills, that moment when all creation held its breath before the insidious advance of the night. He took one last look, sweeping the horizon where, like monstrous chameleons, the hills changed colour.

  Before his eyes they turned sapphire, azure, and the blue of a kingfisher's back. Suddenly he stiffened.

  He grasped Aboli's arm and pointed. look!" he said softly. From the foot of the next range a single thin plume of smoke rose out of the forest and climbed up into the violet evening air.

  "Men!" Aboli whispered. "You were right not to turn back so soon, Gundwane."

  They went down the hill in darkness and moved through the forest like shadows. Hal AT guided them by the stars, fixing his eye upon the great shining Southern Cross that hung above the hill at the foot of which they had marked the column of smoke. After midnight, as they crept forward with increasing caution, Aboli stopped so abruptly that Hal almost ran into him in the darkness.

  "Listen!" he said. They stood in silence for minute after minute.

  Then Hal said, "I hear nothing."

  "Wait!" Aboli insisted, and then Hal heard it. It was a sound once so commonplace, but one that he had not heard since he had left Good Hope. It was the mournful lowing of a cow.

  "My people are herders," Aboli whispered. "Their cattle are their most treasured possessions." He led Hal forward cautiously until they could smell the woodsmoke and the familiar bovine odour of the cattle pen. Hal picked out the puddle of faintly glowing ash that marked the campfire.

  Silhouetted against it was the outline of a sitting man, wrapped in a kaross.

  They lay and waited for the dawn. However, long before first light the camp began to stir. The watchman stood up, stretched, coughed and spat in the dead coals. Then he threw fresh wood upon the fire, and knelt to blow it. The flames flared and, by their light, Hal saw that he was but a boy. Naked except for a loincloth, the lad left the fire and came close to where they were hidden. He lifted his loincloth and peed into the grass, playing games with his urine stream, aiming at fallen leaves and twigs and chuckling as he tried to drown a scurrying scarab beetle.

  Then he went back to the fire and called out towards the lean-to of branches and thatch, "The dawn comes. It is time to let out the herd."

  His voice was high and unbroken, but Hal was delighted to find that he understood every word the boy had said. It was the language of the forests that Aboli had taught him.

  Two other lads of the same age crawled out of the hut, shivering, muttering and scratching, and all three went to the cattle pen. They spoke to the beasts as though they, too, were children, rubbed their heads and patted their flanks.

  As the light strengthened Hal saw that these cattle were far different from those he had known on High Weald. They were taller and rangier, with huge humps over their shoulders, and the span of their horns was so wide as to appear grotesque, the weight almost too much for even their heavy frames to support.

  The boys picked out a cow and pushed her calf away from the udder.

  Then one knelt under her belly and milked her, sending purring jets into a calabash gourd. Meanwhile, the other two seized a young bullock and passed a leather thong around its neck. They drew this tight and when the restricted blood vessels stood proud beneath the black skin, one pricked a vein with the sharp point of an arrow head.

  The first child came running with the gourd half-filled with milk and held the mouth of it under the stream of bright red blood that spurted from the punctured vein.

  When the gourd was full, one staunched the small wound in the bullock's neck with a handful of dust, and turned it loose. The beast wandered away, none the worse for the bleeding. The boys shook the gourd vigorously, then passed it from one to the other, each drinking deeply from the mixture of milk and blood as his turn came, smacking his lips and sighing with pleasure.

  So engrossed were they with their breakfast that none noticed Aboli or Hal until they were grabbed from behind and hoisted kicking and shrieking in the air.

  "Be quiet, you little baboon, Aboli ordered.

  "Slavers!" wailed the eldest child, as he saw Hal's white face. "We are taken by slavers!"

  "They will eat us," squeaked the youngest.

  "We are not slavers!" Hal told them. "And we will not harm you."

  This assurance merely sent' the the trio into fresh paroxysms of terror. "He is a devil who can speak the language of heaven."

  "He understands all we say. He is an albino devil." "He will surely eat us as my mother warned me."

  Aboli held the eldest at arm's length and glared at him. "What is your name, little monkey?"

  "See his tattoos." The boy howled in dread and confusion. "He is tattooed like the Monomatapa, the chosen of heaven."

  "He is a great Mambo!"

  "Or the ghost of the Monomatapa who died long ago."

  "I am indeed a great chief," Aboli agreed. "And you will tell me your name."

  "My name is Tweti oh, Monomatapa, spare me for I am but little. I will be only a single mouthful for your mighty jaws."

  "Take me to your village, Tweti, and I will spare you and your brothers."

  After a while the children began to believe that they would neither be eaten nor turned into slaves, and they started to smile shyly at Hal's overture
s. From there it was not long before they were giggling delightedly to have been chosen by the great tattooed chief and the strange albino to lead them to the village.

  Driving the cattle herd before them, they took a track through the hills and came out suddenly in a small village surrounded by rudimentary fields of cultivation, in which a few straggling millet plants grew. The huts were shaped like bee-hives and beautifully thatched, but they were deserted. Clay pots stood on the cooking fires before each hut and there were calves in the pens and woven baskets, weapons and accoutrements scattered where they had been dropped when the villagers fled.

  The three boys squeaked reassurances into the surrounding bush. "Come out! Come. and see! It is a great Mambo of our tribe come back from death to visit us!"

  An old crone was the first to emerge timidly from a thicket of elephant grass. She wore only a greasy leather skirt, and her one eye socket was empty. She had but a single yellow tooth in the front of her mouth. Her dangling dugs flapped against her wrinkled belly, which was scarified with ritual tattoos.

  She took one look at Aboli's face, then ran to prostrate herself before him. She lifted one of his feet and placed it on her head. "Mighty Monomatapa," she keened, "you are the chosen of heaven. I am a useless insect, a dung beetle, before your glory."

  In singles and pairs, and then in greater numbers, the other villagers emerged from their hiding places and gathered before Aboli to kneel in obeisance and pour dust and ashes on their heads in reverence.

  "Do not let this adulation turn your head, oh Chosen One," Hal told him sourly in English.

  "I give you royal dispensation," Aboli replied, without smiling. "You need not kneel in my presence, nor pour dust on your head."

  The villagers brought Aboli and Hal carved wooden stools to sit upon, and offered them gourds of soured milk mixed with fresh blood, porridge of millet, grilled wild birds, roasted termites and caterpillars seared on the coals so that their hairy coverings were burnt off.

  "You must eat a little of everything they offer you," Aboli warned Hal, "or else you will give great offence."

  Hal gagged down a few mouthfuls of the blood and milk mixture, while Aboli swigged back a full gourd. Hal found the other delicacies a little more palatable, the caterpillars tasted like fresh grass juice and the termites were crisp and delicious as roasted chestnuts.

  When they had eaten, the village headman came forward on hands and knees to answer Aboli's questions. "Where is the town of the Monomatapa?"

  It is two days" march in the direction of the setting sun.

  "I need ten good men to guide me." "As you command, O Mambo."

  The ten men were ready within the hour, and little Tweti and his companions wept bitterly that they were not chosen for this honour but were instead sent back to the lowly task of cattle-herding.

  The trail they followed towards the west led through open forests of tall, graceful trees interspersed with wide expanses of savannah grasslands. They began to encounter more herds of the humped cattle herded by small naked boys. The cattle grazed in close and unlikely truce with herds of wild antelope. Some of the game were almost equine, but with coats of strawberry roan or midnight sable, and horns that swept back like Oriental scimitars to touch their flanks.

  Several times in the forests they saw elephants, small breeding herds of cows and calves. Once they passed within a cable's length of a gaunt bull standing under a flat-topped Thorn tree in the middle of the open savannah. This patriarch showed little fear of them but spread his tattered ears like battle standards and raised his curved tusks high to peer at them with small eyes.

  "It would take two strong men to carry one of those tusks," Aboli said, "and in the markets of Zanzibar they would fetch thirty English pounds apiece."

  They passed many small villages of thatched bee-hive huts, similar to the one in which Tweti lived. Obviously, the news of their arrival had gone ahead of them for the inhabitants came out to stare in awe at Aboli's tattoos and then to prostrate themselves before him and cover themselves with dust.

  Each of the local chieftains pleaded with Aboli to honour his village by spending the night in the new hut his people had built especially for him as soon as they had heard of his coming. They offered food and drink, calabashes of the blood and milk mixture and bubbling clay pots of millet beer.

  They presented gifts, iron spear- and axe-heads, a small elephant tusk, tanned leather cloaks and bags. Aboli touched each of these to signal his acceptance then returned them to the giver.

  They brought him girls to choose from, pretty little nymphs with copper-wire bangles on their wrists and ankles, and tiny aprons of coloured trade beads that barely concealed their pudenda. The girls giggled and covered their mouths with dainty pink-palmed hands and ogled Aboli with huge dark eyes, liquid with awe. Their plump pubescent breasts were shining with cow fat and red clay, and their buttocks were bare and round and joggled with each disappointed pace as Aboli sent them away. They looked back at him over a bare shoulder with longing and reverence. What prestige they would have enjoyed if they had been chosen by the Monomatapa.

  On the second day they approached another range of hills, but these were more rugged and their sides were sheer granite. As they drew closer they saw that the summit of each hill was fortified with stone walls.

  "Yonder is the great town of the Monomatapa. It is built upon the hill tops to resist the attacks of the slavers, and his regiments of warriors are always at the ready to repel them."

  A throng of people came down to welcome them, hundreds of men and women wearing all their finery of beads and carved ivory jewellery. The elders wore headdresses of ostrich feathers and skirts of cow tails. All the men were armed with spears, and war bows were slung upon their backs. They groaned with awe as they saw Aboli's face and flung themselves down before him so that he could tread upon their quivering bodies.

  Borne along by this throng, they slowly ascended the pathway to the summit of the highest hill, passing through a series of gateways. At each gate part of the crowd about them fell back until, as they approached the final glacis before the fortress that crowned the summit, they were accompanied only by a handful of chieftains, warriors and councillors of the highest rank, wearing all the regalia and finery of their office.

  Even these paused at the final gateway, and one noble ancient with silver hair and aquiline eye took Aboli by the hand and led him into the inner courtyard. Hal shrugged off the councillors who sought to restrain him and strode into the inner courtyard at Aboli's side.

  The floor was of clay that had been mixed with blood and cow dung and then screeded until it dried like polished red marble. Huts surrounded this courtyard, but many times larger than Hal had seen before, and the thatching was of new golden grass, intricate and splendid. the doorway of each hut was decorated by what seemed, at first glance, to be orbs of ivory, and it was only when they were half-way across the courtyard that Hal realized they were human skulls, and that tall pyramids formed of hundreds stood at spaced intervals around the perimeter.

  Beside each skull pyramid was planted a tall pole and on the sharpened point of these stakes a man or woman had been impaled through the anus. Most of these victims were long dead and stank, but one or two still twitched or groaned pitifully.

  The old man stopped them in the centre of the courtyard. Hal and Aboli stood in silence for a while, until a weird cacophony of primitive musical instruments and discordant human voices issued from the largest and most imposing hut facing them. A procession of creatures came forth into the sunlight. They crawled and wriggled like insects on the polished clay surface, and their bodies and faces were daubed with coloured clay and painted in fantastic patterns. They were hung with charms, amulets and magical fetishes, skins of reptiles, bones and skulls of man and animal, and all the gruesome paraphernalia of the wizard and the witch. They whined and howled and gibbered, and rolled their eyes and chattered their teeth, and beat on drums and twanged single-stringed harps.

>   Two women followed them. Both were stark naked, the first a mature female with full and bountiful breast, her belly marked with the stria of childbearing. The other was a girl, slim and graceful with a sweet moon face and startlingly white teeth behind full lips. She was the loveliest of any that Hal had laid eyes upon since they had entered the land of the Monomatapa. Her waist was narrow and her hips full and her skin was like black satin. She knelt on hands and knees with her buttocks turned towards them. Hal shifted uneasily as the deepest folds of her privy parts were exposed to his gaze. Even in these circumstances of danger and uncertainty he found himself aroused by her nubility.

  "Show no emotion," Aboli warned him softly, without moving his lips. "As you love life, remain unmoved."

  The wizards fell silent and for a space everyone was still. Then, out of the hut stooped a massively corpulent figure clad in a leopards king cloak. Upon his head was a tall Hat of the same dappled fur, which exaggerated his already magisterial height.