by Wilbur Smith
‘What do I do for a gang, then?’ Zouga demanded.
‘You do what we all do; you go out and find a gang, before another digger or a Boer commando grabs them.’
‘I might have to go as far north as the Shashi river,’ Zouga snapped sarcastically, and Pickering nodded in agreement.
‘Yes, you might.’
Zouga smiled thinly at the memory of his first lesson in digger labour relations, and now he settled his hat firmly and gathered up his reins.
‘All right,’ he muttered, ‘let’s go recruiting!’ And he put his heels into the gelding’s flanks and went lunging up the bank of the ravine onto the open plain.
The tribesmen were five hundred yards dead ahead, and he counted swiftly: sixteen of them. If he could take them all he could start back for New Rush in tomorrow’s dawn. Sixteen men were sufficient to work the Devil’s Own, and at that moment they had, for Zouga, the same value as a fifty-carat diamond. They were in single file, moving swiftly, the trotting gait of the fighting impis of Zulu, no women or children with them.
‘Good,’ grunted Zouga as the gelding stretched out under him, and he held him back in an easy canter as he glanced right.
Jan Cheroot was tearing across the plain, Jordan plugging along in his dust fifty strides behind. At this distance Jordan did not look like a child; they might have been a pair of armed riders, and Jan Cheroot was swinging wide, trying to get behind the little group of men, pinning them before they scattered, pinning them long enough for Zouga to get within hail.
Zouga glanced left and scowled as he saw that Ralph was at full gallop, leaning low over his horse’s neck, brandishing the Martini-Henry rifle – and Zouga hoped it was still unloaded, wished that he had specially ordered Ralph not to show the rifle, and yet even in that moment of anger he experienced a little prickle of pride as he watched his son ride; the boy was born to the saddle.
Zouga checked the gelding again, bringing him down to a trot, giving his flank men time to complete the circle, and at the same time trying to reduce the dramatic effect of his approach. He knew that they would appear to the tribesmen to be an armed commando, their intentions warlike, and he tried to soften this by lifting his hat and waving it over his head.
Then suddenly Jan Cheroot was reining in, gesturing to Jordan to do the same. They had got behind the band, and opposite them, facing them across the wide circle, Ralph was wheeling his filly and bringing her up sharply on her hind legs, rearing and shaking out her mane theatrically.
In the centre the tribesmen had moved swiftly, and with the concerted action of trained fighting men.
They had dropped the rolled bundles of sleeping-mat, cooking-pot and leather grain bag that they had been carrying on their heads, and they had bunched into a defensive circle shoulder to shoulder, war shield overlapping war shield, while above them the steel of their assegais flicked little pinpricks of sunlight.
They did not wear the full regalia of their fighting regiments, the kilts of monkey tails, the cloaks of desert fox furs, the tall headdress of ostrich and widow-bird feathers, they were travelling with weapons only; but the shields they presented to the approaching horseman and the glint of steel told Zouga all he wanted to know. The shields gave the tribe its name, the Matabele – the people of the long shields.
The little group of men who stood impassively in the sunlight and watched Zouga ride up were the finest warriors that Africa had ever spawned. Yet they were almost five hundred miles south of the borders of Matabeleland.
‘I set for a covey of partridge,’ Zouga smiled to himself, ‘and I have trapped a brood of eagles.’
A hundred yards from the ring of shields, Zouga reined in; but the gelding, infected by the tension, fidgeted under him.
The long shields were made of dappled black and white oxhide, every regiment of the Matabele carried a distinctive shield.
Zouga knew that black dappled with white was the regimental colour of the Inyati, the Buffaloes Regiment, and again he felt a twist of nostalgia.
Once the induna who commanded the Inyati had been a friend; they had travelled together across the mimosa-clad plains of Matabeleland; they had hunted together and shared the comfort of the same camp fires. It was all so long ago, on his first visit to the land below the Zambezi river, but Zouga was carried back so vividly that it required an effort of will to shake off the memory.
He lifted his right hand, fingers spread in the universal gesture of goodwill.
‘Warriors of Matabele, I see you,’ he called to them, speaking their language as fluently as one of them, the words returning to his tongue readily.
He saw the small stir behind the war-shields, the shift of heads with which they greeted his words.
‘Jordan!’ Zouga called, and the child circled out and reined in his pony at Zouga’s side. Now the difference in size between man and boy was apparent.
‘See, warriors of King Lobengula, my son rides with me.’ No man took his children to war. The ring of shields sank a few inches so Zouga could see the dark and watchful eyes of the men behind them; but as Zouga pushed the gelding a few paces forward, the shields were immediately lifted again defensively.
‘What news of Gandang, induna of the Inyati Regiment, Gandang who is as my brother?’ Zouga called again persuasively.
At the mention of the name one of the warriors could no longer contain himself, swept aside his shield and stepped from the ring of spears.
‘Who calls Gandang brother?’ he demanded in a clear firm voice, a young voice, yet with the timbre and inflection of one used to authority.
‘I am Bakela, the Fist,’ Zouga gave his Matabele name, and he realized that the warrior facing him was still a youth, barely older than Ralph. But he was lean and straight, narrow in the hips and with muscle in the shoulder and arms built up in the games of war. Zouga guessed he had probably already killed his man, washed his spear in blood.
Now he crossed the open ground towards Zouga, his stride lithe, his legs long and shapely beneath the short leather kilt.
‘Bakela,’ he said, as he stopped a dozen paces from the gelding’s head. ‘Bakela.’ He smiled, a brilliant show of white even teeth in the broad and handsome Nguni face. ‘That is a name I took with the first draught of my mother’s milk, for I am Bazo, the Axe, son of the same Gandang whom you call brother, and who remembers you as an old and trusted friend. I know you by the scar on your cheek and the gold in your beard. I greet you, Bakela.’
Zouga swung down off the gelding, leaving the rifle in the saddle scabbard, and, grinning broadly, went to clasp the youth’s upper arms in an affectionate salute.
Then, turning with his fists on his hips, still smiling, Zouga shouted to Ralph. ‘Go and see if you can shoot a springbuck, or better even, a wildebeest; we’ll need plenty of meat for tonight.’
Ralph let out a whoop at the command, and provoked the filly with his heels, forcing her to rear again and then come down in full run, mane flying, hooves pounding as she bore away. Without being ordered, Jan Cheroot shook his bony mare into a canter and followed the flying filly.
The two riders returned in the dusk, and the hunt had gone well. They had found rare quarry, a bull eland so old that his neck and shoulders had turned blue with age and the swinging dewlap almost swept the dusty earth between his stubby forelegs.
He was as big as a prize stud bull, with a chest round as a brandy cask of Limousine oak, and Zouga guessed he would weigh not much under a ton, for he was fat and sleek; there would be a tubful of rich white lard in the chest cavity, and thick layers of yellow fat beneath the glossy hide. He was a prize indeed, and the little band of Matabele drummed their assegai against the hide shields and shouted with delight when they saw him.
The bull snorted at the hubbub and broke into a lumbering gallop, trying to break away, but Ralph swung the filly to head him off and within a hundred yards the bull changed the gallop for a short-winded trot and allowed himself to be turned back towards the group of waiting men.
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Ralph reined in the filly, kicked his feet from the stirrups and jumped easily to the earth, throwing up the carbine as he landed cat-like on his toes and seeming to fire in the same instant.
The bull’s head flinched at the shot, blinking the huge shining eyes convulsively as the bullet slammed into his skull between them, and he collapsed with a meaty thud that seemed to tremble in the earth.
The Matabele streamed out like a pack of wild dogs, swarming over the mountainous carcass, using the razor edge of their war-assegai as butchers’ knives, going for the tidbits, the tripes and the liver, the heart and the sweet white fat.
The Matabele gorged on fat eland meat, grilling the tripes over the coals, threading garlands of liver and fat and succulent heart onto wet white mimosa twigs from which they had peeled the bark, so that the melting fat sizzled and bubbled over the layers of meat.
‘We have killed no game since we left the forests,’ Bazo explained their ravenous appetites. Though the desert teemed with springbuck herds, they were not the type of game that a man on foot, armed only with a stabbing spear, could run down easily.
‘Without meat a man’s belly is like a war drum, full of nothing except noise and wind.’
‘You are far from the land of the Matabele,’ Zouga agreed. ‘No Matabele has been this far south since the old king took the tribe north across the Limpopo, and in that time even Gandang, your father, was a child.’
‘We are the first to make this journey,’ Bazo agreed proudly. ‘We are the point of the spear.’
In the firelight the warriors about him looked up and their expressions echoed his pride in their achievement. They were all youths, the eldest only a few years older than Bazo, not one of them over nineteen years of age.
‘Where does this long journey take you?’ Zouga asked.
‘To a wonderful place in the south from which a man returns with great treasures.’
‘What manner of treasures?’ Zouga asked again.
‘These.’ Bazo reached across the circle to where Ralph leaned against his saddle, using it as a pillow, and Bazo touched the polished wooden butt of the Martini-Henry that protruded from the gun bucket.
‘Isibamu – guns!’ said Bazo.
‘Guns?’ Zouga asked. ‘A Matabele indoda with a gun?’ His voice mildly derisive. ‘Is not the assegai the weapon of the true warrior?’
Bazo looked uncomfortable for a moment and then recovered his aplomb.
‘The old ways are not always the best,’ he said. ‘The old men tell us that they are, so that young men will consider them wise.’ And the Matabele in the circle about the fire nodded and made little sounds of agreement.
Although he was certainly the youngest of the group, Bazo was clearly their leader. Son of Gandang, he was therefore the nephew of King Lobengula, grandson of old King Mzilikazi himself. His noble birth assured him preference, but it was clear that he was quick and clever also.
‘To earn the guns you covet a man must work hard, in a deep pit in the earth,’ Zouga said. ‘He must milk himself of his sweat by the calabash-full every day for three years, before he is paid with a gun.’
‘We have heard these things,’ Bazo nodded.
‘Then you shall have your guns, each of you a fine gun, at the end of three years. I, Bakela, the Fist, give you my word on it.’
It was a custom of the diggings, a ceremony of initiation, that when a gang of raw tribesmen arrived at New Rush the established black labourers would rush to line each side of the track, most of them dressed in cast-off European finery as a badge of their sophistication.
They would jeer their newly arrived brethren:
‘Behold, the baboons have come down from the hills.’
‘Nay! Baboons are cunning; these cannot be baboons.’ And they pelted the newcomers with pieces of filth as well as insults.
Bazo’s group were the first Matabele to reach the diggings. The Matabele language is almost identical to that of Zululand, and very closely associated to the Southern Xhosa. Bazo understood every word of the banter, and he gave a quiet but grim order to his little group.
His men dropped their sleeping-mats and the long shields rattled one against the other, the broad bright assegais whispered in the sunlight as they were bared, and the taunts and derisive laughter dried on the instant, to be replaced with expressions of astonishment and real dismay.
‘Manje! Now!’ hissed Bazo. The ring of shields exploded outwards, and the crowd fled before it in disordered panic.
From the back of the gelding, Zouga had a grandstand view of the charge, and he had no illusions as to the danger of the moment. Even such a tiny war party of Matabele amadoda on the rampage through the camp could cause chaos and frightful slaughter amongst the unarmed black labourers.
‘Bazo! Kawulisa! Stop them!’ he roared, spurring across the front of the murderous rank of rawhide shields and steel.
The erstwhile tormentors ran with their heads twisted backwards, yelling with terror and eyes popping. They knocked each other down and the fallen grovelled in the dust. A portly black man, dressed in grubby duck breeches many sizes too small and a frock coat many sizes too large, ran into the side of one of the shacks lining the track, the home of one of the less affluent diggers, and the canvas wall burst open before the power of his run, the thatch roof collapsed on top of the fugitive, covering him completely with a haystack of dried grass and probably saving his life – for the point of a Matabele assegai had been inches from the straining seam of his bulging breeches at the moment the shack collapsed.
Bazo gave a single blast on the buckhorn whistle that hung on a thong at his throat, and the spearmen froze. The charge stopped dead on the instant, and the Matabele trotted back to where they had dropped their baggage, all of them grinning with delight; as they formed up again, Bazo sang the first line of the Inyati regimental war chant in a high ringing voice:
‘See the war shields black as midnight, white as the high storm clouds at noon—’
And the men behind him came crashing in with the chorus:
‘Black as the Inyati bull, white as the egrets that he carries upon his back—’
The entry of the little band of warriors to the New Rush diggings became a triumphal procession. Riding at their head Zouga felt like a Roman emperor.
Yet not one of the young warriors had ever swung a pick or hefted a shovel. Jan Cheroot had to place the tools in their hands, positioning their fingers correctly on the handles, all the while muttering his disdain of such ignorance. However, they had the knack of it within minutes, and the velvety black muscles, forged in war and the training for war, changed the mundane tools into lethal weapons; they attacked the yellow earth as though it were a mortal adversary.
Confronted with a wheelbarrow for the first time, two of them lifted it bodily and walked away with it and its contents. When Ralph demonstrated the correct use of the vehicle, their wonder and delight was childlike, and Bazo told them smugly: ‘I promised you many wonders, did I not?’
They were a highly disciplined group of young men, accustomed since childhood firstly to the strict structure of family life in the kraals and then from puberty to the communal training and teamwork of the fighting regiments.
They were also fiercely competitive, delighting in any challenge to pit their strength or skill against one another.
Zouga, knowing all these things, organized them in four teams of four men, each named after a bird – the Cranes, the Hawks, the Shrikes and the Khorhaans – and each week the team with the best performance in lashing the gravel was entitled to wear the feathers of their adopted bird in their hair and to a double ration of meat and mealie-meal and twala, the African beer fermented from millet grain. They turned the work into a game.
There were some small adjustments to be made. The Matabele were cattle-men, their whole lives devoted to raising, protecting and enlarging their herds, even if these expansions were often at the expense of their less warlike neighbours. Their staple diet was
beef and maas, the calabash-soured milk of the Nguni.
Beef was an expensive item on the diggings, and it was with patent distaste that they sampled the greasy stringy mutton that Zouga provided. However, hard physical labour builds appetites, and within days they were eating this new diet if not with relish at least without complaint.
Within those same few days the labour was apportioned and each man learned his task.
Jan Cheroot could not be inveigled down into the workings.
‘Ek is nie ’n meerkat nie,’ he told Zouga loftily, reverting to the bastard Dutch of Cape Colony. ‘I am not a mongoose; I do not live in a hole in the ground.’
Zouga needed a trusted man on the sorting-tables, and that was where Jan Cheroot presided. Squatting like a yellow idol over the glittering piles of washed gravel, the triangular shape of his face was emphasized by the scraggy little beard on the point of his chin – by the high oriental cheekbones and slanted eyes, each in their spider-web of wrinkles.
He was quick to pick out the soapy sheen of the noble stones in the piles of dross, but there was another pair of eyes sharper and quicker. Traditionally the women made the best sorters, but little Jordan proved immediately to have an uncanny talent at picking out diamonds, no matter what their size or colour.
The child picked the very first stone from the very first sieveful. It was a minute stone, twenty points, a fifth part of a carat, and the colour was a dark cognac brown, so that Zouga doubted its integrity. But when be showed it to one of the kopje-wallopers, it was a veritable diamond and the buyer offered him three shillings for it.
After that nobody questioned Jordan, instead a doubtful stone was passed to him for judgement. Within a week he was the Devil’s Own chief sorter.
He sat opposite Jan Cheroot at the low metal table, almost the same size as the Hottentot. He wore a huge sombrero of plaited maize stalks to protect his delicate peachlike skin from the sun, and he sorted the gravel as though it were a game of which he never tired. Competing with Jan Cheroot avidly, a high-pitched shriek of excitement signalled each discovery, and his neat little hands flew over the gravel like those of a pianist over the ivory keyboard.