Men of Men

by Wilbur Smith

  The blade was so cold that he gasped, and the mutton fat left a little greasy smear on his belly. He took a long breath to steel himself, and then slowly began to draw the blade downwards, to free himself for ever of that shameful wormlike growth.

  ‘Jordie, what are you doing?’ The voice from the doorway behind him startled him so that he cried out aloud. He threw the knife onto the table and at the same time dropped the shirt to cover himself.

  ‘Jordie!’

  He turned swiftly, breathing in sharp little gasps, and Ralph came towards him from the kitchen door. He wore only a pair of baggy shorts, and there were goose-bumps on the smooth bare skin of his chest from the pre-dawn chill.

  ‘What were you doing?’ he repeated.

  ‘Nothing. I wasn’t doing anything.’ Jordan shook his head wildly.

  ‘You were whacking your old winker, weren’t you?’ Ralph accused and grinned. ‘You dirty little bugger.’

  Jordan let out a choking sob and fled past him to the door, and Ralph chuckled and shook his head.

  Then he picked up the stag-handled knife and cut a thick slab of mutton off the joint, dipped the blade into the stone pot and smeared a gob of yellow mustard over the meat, and munched it as he went about building up the fire in the stove and setting the coffee water to boil.

  The following Sunday afternoon on the white sand of the fighting arena, Inkosikazi, the spider, died an agonizing death in the ghastly embrace of a smaller more agile adversary.

  Bazo mourned her as he would a lover, and Kamuza sang the dirge with him just as sadly, for the Matabele syndicate had lost twenty sovereigns with her passing.

  The return from Market Square to Zouga’s camp resembled Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow, headed by Ralph and Bazo bearing between them the basket and its sorry contents.

  Opposite Diamond Lil’s canteen, Ralph halted the cortege for a moment and wistfully contemplated the painted windows across the street, and listened for a moment to the sounds of laughter from beyond the green door – imagining that he could distinguish Lil’s tinkling chimes.

  When they reached the thatched beehive communal hut, Kamuza passed Ralph the clay pot of bubbling millet beer.

  ‘How much did you lose, Henshaw?’

  ‘Everything,’ Ralph replied tragically. The very reason for living.’ He took a long swallow of the thick gruel-like beer.

  ‘That is bad; only a foolish man keeps all his cows in the same kraal.’

  ‘Kamuza, your words are always a great solace,’ Ralph told him bitterly. ‘But I am unworthy of such wisdom. Keep those treasures for yourself alone.’

  Kamuza looked smug and turned to Bazo. ‘Now you know why I would not lay fifty gold queens, as you bid me.’

  Bazo shot a glance at Ralph, and they acted together.

  Ralph draped a seemingly brotherly arm over Kamuza’s shoulders, but it was a steely yoke that held him helpless, and with the other hand he pulled open the front of Kamuza’s loincloth – and Bazo scooped the soft furry carcass of the great spider out of the basket and dropped it into the opening.

  As Ralph released him, Kamuza went up into the air, rearing like an unbroken stallion feeling the saddle and spur for the first time, whinnying wildly with horror, beating at his own loins with both hands.

  If Ralph had not caught him, Bazo, in a shaking paralysis of mirth, might have fallen into the fire in the centre of the hut.

  Kamuza had been gone almost three years.

  When Bazo and the other Matabele had signed their contracts for a third period, Kamuza alone had asked Bakela to ‘Bala Isitupa’, to write off the contract as complete, and he had taken the road north back to Matabeleland.

  Bazo had missed him deeply. He had missed the spiked tongue and shrewd acerbic counsel. He had missed Kamuza’s intuitive understanding of the white man’s ways of thinking, ways which Bazo still found unfathomable.

  Even though Henshaw was his friend, had worked at Bazo’s shoulder for all those long years, though they had hawked and hunted together, dipped into the same baking of maize porridge and drunk from the lip of the same beer-pot – though Henshaw spoke his language so easily that sitting in the darkness when the fire had burned down to embers it might have been a young Matabele buck talking, so faithfully did Henshaw echo the deep cadence of the north, so complete was his command of the colloquial, so poetic the imagery he used – yet Henshaw would never be Matabele as Kamuza was Matabele, could never be brother as Kamuza was, had never shared the initiation rites with Bazo as Kamuza had, had never formed the ‘horns of the bull’ with him as the impi closed for the kill, and had never driven the assegai deep and seen the bright blood fly as Kamuza had.

  Thus Bazo was filled with joy when he heard the word.

  ‘Kamuza is amongst us again.’

  Bazo heard it first whispered by another Matabele as they formed a line at the gate of the security compound.

  ‘Kamuza comes as the king’s man,’ they whispered around the watch-fires, and there was respect, even fear, in their voices. ‘Kamuza wears the headring now.’

  Many young Matabele had come to work at Umgodi Kakulu, ‘The Big Hole’, these last few years, and each month more came down the long and weary road from the north, small bands of ten or twenty, sometimes only in pairs, or threes and occasionally even a man travelling alone.

  How many had reached Kimberley? There was nobody to keep a tally, a thousand certainly, two thousand perhaps, and each of them had been given the road southwards by the great black elephant, each of them had the king’s permission to journey beyond the borders of Matabeleland, for without it they would have been speared to death by the bright assegais of the impis that guarded every road to and from the king’s great kraal at Thabas Indunas – the Hills of the Chiefs.

  Even in exile these young Matabele formed a close-knit tribal association. Each newcomer from the north carried tidings, long messages from fathers and indunas, repeated verbatim with every nuance of the original. Just as every Matabele who left the diamond fields, whether he had worked out his three-year contract or was bored and homesick or had fallen foul of the white man’s complicated and senseless laws and was deserting, carried back with him messages and instructions that he had committed to the phenomenal memory of a people who did not have the written word.

  Now the word passed swiftly from Matabele to Matabele.

  ‘Kamuza is here.’

  Kamuza had never warranted such attention before. He had been one amongst a thousand; but now he had returned as the king’s man, and they lowered their voices when they spoke his name.

  Bazo looked for him each day, searching the faces on the high stagings and on the running skips. He lay sleepless on his mat beside the cooling watch-fire, listening for Kamuza’s whisper in the darkness.

  He waited for many days and many nights, and then suddenly Kamuza was there, stooping through the low entrance and greeting Bazo.

  ‘I see you, Bazo, son of Gandang.’

  Bazo stifled his joy and replied calmly.

  ‘I see you also, Kamuza.’

  And they made a place for Kamuza in the circle, not pressing him too closely, giving him space, for now Kamuza wore the simple black tiara upon his close-cropped pate, the badge of the Councillor, the induna of the king of Matabeleland.

  They called him ‘Baba’, a term of great respect, and even Bazo clapped his hands softly in greeting and passed him the beer pot.

  Only after Kamuza had refreshed himself could Bazo begin to ask the questions of home, disguising his eagerness behind measured tones and an expression of calm dignity.

  Kamuza was no longer a youth, neither of them were; the years had sped away and they were both in the full flowering of their manhood. Kamuza’s features were sharper than the true Matabele of Zanzi blood, the old blood from Zululand, for his was mixed with Tswana, the less warlike but shrewd and cunning peoples of King Khama. Kamuza’s grandmother had been captured as a maiden, still short of puberty, by one of King Mzil
ikazi’s raiding impis, and taken to wife by the induna who commanded her captors. From her Kamuza had inherited his mulberry black skin and the Egyptian slant of his eyes, the narrow nostrils and the thin and knowing twist of his lips.

  There were very few Matabele who could still trace their bloodline back to the pure Zanzi, to the line of Chaka and Dingaan, the Zulus, the Sons of Heaven, and Bazo was one of those. Yet it was Kamuza who wore the ring of the induna on his head now.

  In the time of Mzilikazi, a man would have the hoar frost of wisdom and age powdering his hair, and the cowtails bound about his elbows and knees would proclaim his deeds in battle to the world before the king ordered him to take the isicoco. Then his wives would plait and twist the headring into his own hair and cement it permanently into place with gum and clay and ox blood, a permanent halo of honour that entitled the wearer to his seat on the Council of the Matabele nation.

  However, the old times were changing. More cunning than fierce, Lobengula, son of Mzilikazi, looked for cunning in those about him. Mzilikazi had been a warrior and lived by the white flash of the assegai. Lobengula, though he had blooded his spear, had never been a warrior, and he scorned the warriors’ simpleness of thought and directness of action. As his father’s greybeards faltered, he replaced them with men who thought as swiftly as the old ones had stabbed.

  He had no patience with the old men’s preoccupation with a world that was passing, and he sought out the young ones with clear fresh eyes, men who could see with him the dark clouds gathering on the southern borders like the soaring thunderheads of high summer.

  Men who could sense the change and terrible events which his wizards and his own divinations warned him would soon rush down upon him like the fires that sweep the papyrus beds of the Zambezi swamps at the end of the dry season.

  Lobengula, the great Black Elephant, whose very tread shakes the earth’s foundations, and whose voice splits the skies, was choosing young men with eyes to see and ears to hear.

  Thus Kamuza now wore the isicoco of the induna and, as he spoke over the fire in his dry whisper, his slanted eyes black and bright as those of a mamba in the firelight, men listened – and listened with great attention.

  It was a measure of the gravity of the news he carried from the north that Kamuza began the council – the indaba – with a recital of the history of the Matabele nation. Each of them had heard it first with their mother’s breast in their mouths, had drunk it in with her milk, but they listened now as avidly as then, reinforcing their memories so that when the time came they would be able to repeat it perfectly in each detail to their own children, that the story might never be lost.

  The history began with Mzilikazi, war chief of the impis of Zulu, warrior without peer, beloved comrade and trusted intimate of King Chaka himself. It told of the black sickness of King Chaka, driven mad with grief at the death of his mother Nandi, the Sweet One. Chaka ordering the year of mourning in which no man might sow seed, on pain of death; in which the milk from the cows must be thrown upon the earth, on pain of death; in which no man might lie with his woman, on pain of death.

  Mad Chaka brooded in his great hut and looked for cause to strike down all around him, even the most trusted, even the most beloved.

  So it was that Chaka’s messengers came to Mzilikazi, the young war chieftain. They found him in the field with his impis about him, five thousand of Zululand’s bravest and finest, all of them still hot from battle, driving before them the spoils they had taken – the captured herds, the young and comely girls roped neck to neck.

  The king’s messengers wore the long tail feathers of the stately blue cranes in their headdress, token of their solemn mission.

  ‘The king accuses the induna Mzilikazi,’ began the first messenger, and looking into his arrogant face Mzilikazi knew that he looked upon the face of death. ‘The king accuses Mzilikazi of stealing the king’s share of the spoils of war.’

  Then the second messenger spoke, and his words were an echo of the king’s black madness, so that the words of King Chaka stood in the air above Mzilikazi’s impis the way that the vultures circle above the battlefields on wide and motionless pinions.

  If the sentence of death had been upon him alone, Mzilikazi might have gone to his king and met it with courage and dignity. But his five thousand fighting men were doomed also, and Mzilikazi called them his children.

  So Mzilikazi reached out and seized the king’s messengers, and for a moment the earth seemed to lurch in its courses, for to touch those who wore the blue crane feathers was to touch the person of the king himself. With the razor edge of his assegai, Mzilikazi slashed the blue feathers from their heads, and threw them into the faces of the grovelling messengers.

  ‘That is my reply to Chaka – who is no longer my king.’

  Thus began the great exodus towards the north and, seated over the watch-fire, Kamuza, the king’s man, related it all again.

  He told the battle honours of Mzilikazi, the renegade. He told how Chaka sent his most famous impis after the fleeing five thousand, and how Mzilikazi met them in the classic battle tactics of the Nguni, how he waited for them in the bad ground.

  Kamuza told how Mzilikazi threw the ‘horns of the bull’ around the impis of Chaka, and how his young men shouted ‘Ngi dhla! I have eaten!’ as they drove in the steel; and the listeners in the dark hut murmured and moved restlessly, and their eyes shone and their spear hands twitched.

  When it was over, the survivors of Chaka’s shattered impi came to Mzilikazi and, on their knees, swore allegiance to him, to Mzilikazi who was no longer a renegade, but a little king.

  Kamuza told how the little king marched north with his swollen impi, and how he defeated other little kings and became a great king.

  Kamuza told how after Chaka was murdered by his brothers, Dingaan, the new leader of the Zulu nation, did not dare to send out more impis to pursue Mzilikazi. So Mzilikazi flourished, and like a ravaging lion he ate up the tribes. Their warriors swelled his fighting impis, and his Zanzi, the pure-blooded Zulu, bred upon the bellies of the captured maidens and the Matabele became a nation and Mzilikazi became a black emperor whose domain overshadowed even that of Chaka.

  The men about the fire listened and felt their hearts swell with pride.

  Then Kamuza told how the buni, the strange white men, crossed the river in their little wagons and outspanned upon the land that Mzilikazi had won with the assegai. Then Mzilikazi paraded his impis, and they danced with their war plumes aflutter, and their long shields clashing as they passed before him.

  After he had reviewed the might of his nation, Mzilikazi took the little ceremonial spear of his kingship, and he poised before his impis and then hurled the toy-like weapon towards the banks of the Gariep river on which the white men had outspanned their wagons.

  They took them in the hour before dawn, at the time of the horns, when the horns of the cattle can first be seen against the lightening sky. The front ranks of racing black warriors received the first volley of the long muzzle-loading guns, absorbing it as though it were a handful of pebbles thrown into a stormy black sea.

  Then they stabbed the bearded men as they worked frantically with powderhorn and ramrod. They stabbed the white women as they ran from the wagons in their nightdresses, trying to carry the second gun to their men. They snatched the infants from their cradles on the wagonbed, and dashed out their brains against the tall iron-shod wheels of the wagons.

  Oh, it was a rare feast that they set for Mzilikazi’s chickens, the grotesque naked-headed vultures. They believed it was an ending – but it was only a beginning, for the Matabele were about to learn of the persistence and the dour courage of these strange pale people.

  The next wave of white men came out of the south, and when they found the abandoned wagons and the jackal-chewed bones on the banks of the Gariep, theirs was a fury such as the Matabele had never encountered in all their wars.

  So the buni met the impis on the open ground, refusing to be d
rawn into the ravines and thorn scrub. They came in pitifully small squadrons on shaggy ponies to dismount and discharge their volleys in a thunder of blue powder smoke. Then they went up into the saddle to wheel away from under the wall of charging rawhide shields, and reload and circle back to let loose the thunder again into the mass of half-naked bodies glistening with oil and sweat.

  The buni built fortresses on the open plain, fortresses with their wagons’ bodies which they lashed wheel to wheel; and they let the impis come to die upon the wooden walls of the fortress, while their womenfolk stood close behind them to take the gun while the barrel was still hot and pass up the second gun, charged and primed.

  Then when the impis drew back, mauled and shaken, the wagons uncoiled from their circle, like a slow but deadly puffadder, and crawled forward towards the kraal of Mzilikazi. And the dreadful horsemen galloped ahead of them, firing and circling, firing and circling.

  Sadly Mzilikazi counted his dead and the price was too high, the red mud through which the iron-shod wheels churned was puddled with the blood of Zanzi, the blood of Heaven.

  So he called his nation, and the herd boys brought in the herds, and the women rolled the sleeping-mats, and the little girls balanced the clay cooking-pots upon their heads, and Mzilikazi put fire into his kraals and led the Matabele nation away. A vast throng of people and animals were guarded by the depleted impis, while the white men on their sturdy ponies drove them and pointed them the way the sheepdog works the flock. Mzilikazi led them northwards until they crossed the great river into a new land.

  ‘Now the white birds are gathering again,’ Kamuza told the young men about the watch fire. ‘Each day they come up the road to Thabas Indunas, and they bring their tawdry gifts and the little green bottles of madness. Their words are sweet as honey on the tongue, but they catch in the throat of those who try to swallow them as though they were the green bile of the crocodile.’