Men of Men

by Wilbur Smith

  Two months later, when the Boer farmer took his family into the service of Nachtmaal in the new church at Rustenberg, he repeated the strange story which the Hottentot hunter had brought from the north. Someone recalled the story of the massacre of the Van Heerden family, and the two little girls, Sarah and Hannah, taken by the murderous plundering savages.

  Then Hendrik Potgieter, that doughty trekker and kaffir-fighter, stood up in the pulpit, and thundered:

  ‘The heathen have a Christian woman as captive!’ And the words offended much that the congregation held dear: God and their womankind.

  ‘Commando!’ roared Hendrik Potgieter. ‘I call commando!’

  The women filled the powder-horns and poured the lead into the bullet moulds, and the men picked out their best horses and elected Potgieter as their leader.

  Not all of it was for God and womankind; for one whispered to another, ‘Even if there is no white woman, I have heard that there are fine new herds in Matabeleland.’

  Then the old wizard came to Lobengula’s cave and rolled his eyes and cackled.

  ‘The buni have crossed the river of crocodiles, riding on the backs of strange beasts. Many men, many men!’

  Instinctively Lobengula knew why the Boer commando was coming, and he knew also what to do about it.

  ‘Stay here, with the child,’ he ordered Saala. ‘I am going to my father’s kraal, and I will lead his impis back here.’

  But Saala was a woman, with a woman’s curiosity, and blood called to blood. Vaguely she remembered that these strange white men had once been her kin.

  When Lobengula had gone north to Thabas Indunas, she slung the baby on her back and crept out of the cave. At first the distant sound of gunfire guided her, for the Boer commando was living off the abundant herds of wild game. Then later she heard the shout of voices, and the whicker of horses, sounds that awakened a terrible nostalgia in her breast.

  She crept closer and closer to the bivouac, with all the stealth of a wild animal, closer still until she could clearly see the tall sun-bronzed men, dressed to throat and wrists in brown homespun, the white-brimmed felt hats on their heads – closer still until she could hear their voices lifted in praise of their God as they sang their hymns around the camp fire.

  She recognized the words, and memories flooded back to her. She was no longer Saala but Sarah, and she rose from her place of hiding to go down to her people. Then she looked down at her body – and she saw that she was naked. She looked at the child on her hip – and saw that it was yellow, and its features were neither hers nor yet those of its Matabele father.

  The awareness of sin came upon her, as it had done to Eve in another Paradise, and Sarah was ashamed.

  She crept away, and in the dawn she stood on the top of one of those soaring granite precipices that rend the Matopos hills.

  She kissed her baby and then holding the little mite to her breast she stepped out into the void.

  Lobengula found them at the bottom of the cliff. He found them before the vultures did, and they were still together, Sarah’s grasp on the infant had not faltered during the long plunge from the top of the precipice.

  Strangely, both she and the child seemed to be merely sleeping – quiet and at peace.

  At the memory Lobengula sighed now, and returned his gaze to his half-brother, the Induna Gandang who still sat across him from the fire.

  If only he had been able to escape the prophecy of the Umlimo – for she had foreseen this destiny for him:

  Your name is Lobengula, the one who drives like the wind. Yet the winds will drive you, high as an eagle. Lobengula will hold the spear of Mzilikazi. Yet again the winds will drive you, down, down, down, and your nation with you.

  Those were the words of that strange and beautiful woman of the cave, and already the first part of the prophecy had held true.

  Mzilikazi, the mighty warrior, had died like an old woman – riddled with arthritis and dropsy and gout and liquor – in his royal hut.

  His widows had wrapped him in the skin of a freshly-killed bull, and sat mourning over him for twelve days: until his remains were almost liquid with putrefaction in the summer heat.

  After the mourning the regiments had carried his corpse into the Matopos Hills, the Sacred Hills, and they had seated Mzilikazi in the cave of the king. They placed all his possessions about him: his assegais, his guns, his ivory; even his wagon was taken down and the pieces piled in the crevices of the cave.

  Then masons closed the opening with blocks of granite, and after the feasting and dancing the indunas of Matabele met to decide who would succeed Mzilikazi as king.

  The argument and counter-argument lasted many weeks, until the indunas led by the princes of Kumalo returned into the Matopos bearing rich gifts to the cave of the Umlimo.

  ‘Give us a king!’ they pleaded.

  ‘The one who drives like the wind!’ replied the Umlimo, but Lobengula had fled, trying even at the last moment to escape his destiny.

  The border impis captured him, and led him back to Thabas Indunas like a criminal to judgement. The indunas came to him one by one, and swore their allegiance and loyalty unto death.

  ‘Black Bull of Matabele, The Thunderer! The Great Elephant. The one whose tread shakes the earth.’

  Nkulumane was the first of his brothers to crawl before him, and Nkulumane’s mother, the senior wife of Mzilikazi, followed her son on her knees.

  Lobengula turned to the Black Ones who stood behind him, like hounds on the leash.

  ‘I do not wish to look upon their faces again.’

  It was Lobengula’s first command, spoken like a true king, and the Black Ones took mother and son into the cattle stockade and twisted their necks, quickly and mercifully.

  ‘He will be a great king,’ the people told one another delightedly. ‘Like his father.’

  But Lobengula had never known happiness again. Now with a shudder he threw off the terrible burden of the past, and his voice was a deep but melodious bass.

  ‘Rise up, Gandang my brother. Your countenance warms me like a watch-fire in the frosty night.’

  They spoke then, easily and intimately, trusted companions of a lifetime, until at last Gandang passed the Martini-Henry rifle to his king and Lobengula held it in his lap and rubbed the cold blued metal of the block with one forefinger and then held the finger to his nose to smell the fresh grease.

  ‘Sting the mamba with his own venom,’ he murmured. ‘This is the fang of the mamba.’

  ‘The lad, Henshaw, son of Bakela, has a wagon filled with these.’

  ‘Then he will be welcome,’ Lobengula nodded. ‘But now let me hear all this from the mouth of your own son. Bring him to me.’

  Bazo lay face down on the hard clay floor of the king’s hut, and he chanted the ritual praises with a catch in his throat, and brave as he was, he sweated with fear in the king’s presence.

  ‘Rise up. Bazo the Axe,’ Lobengula broke in impatiently. ‘Come closer.’

  Bazo crept forward on all fours, and he offered the beaded kilt. Lobengula spilled the diamonds from it into a glowing puddle and he stirred them with his finger.

  ‘There are prettier stones than these in every river bed of my land,’ he said. ‘These are ugly.’

  ‘The buni are mad for them. No other stone will satisfy them, but for these their hunger is so great that they will kill any who stand in their way.’

  ‘Tear the lion with his own claws.’ Lobengula repeated the prophecy of the Umlimo and then went on, ‘Are these ugly little stones the claws of the lion? Then, if they are, let all men see how Lobengula is ready with claws.’

  And he clapped his hands for his wives to come to him.

  The royal hut was crowded now, rank upon rank of squatting men faced the low platform on which Lobengula lay. Every man of them except Bazo wore the headring of the induna, and their names were the rolls of glory of the Matabele nation.

  There was Somabula, the lion-hearted old warrior, and beside
him Babiaan, royal prince of Kumalo, and all the others. Their ranks were silent and attentive, their faces grave in the light of the fire which had been built up and whose flames leapt almost to the high-domed roof of the king’s hut.

  They were watching the king.

  Lobengula lay on his back on the built-up platform beyond the fire. There was a low carved headrest under the nape of his neck. Only the tip of his penis was covered by the dried and hollowed-out gourd, otherwise he was stark naked. His great belly was mountainous and his limbs were like tree trunks.

  Four of his wives squatted about him in a circle, each of them with a calabash of rendered white beef fat beside her. They anointed the king, smearing the fat thickly over his body from his throat to his ankles. Then when it was done they rose silently, and stooped out through the opening in the back of the hut which led to the women’s quarters.

  Singing softly, shuffling and swaying to the song, another file of younger wives began to wind into the hut; each of them carried upon her head a beer pot of fired clay; but these pots were not filled with the bubbling millet beer.

  The wives knelt on each side of the king, and at a word from the senior wife they dipped into the clay pots and each of them came out with a large uncut diamond in her fingers. They began sticking the stones on the king’s skin, and the thick coating of grease held them in the patterns that they built up to ornament Lobengula’s gleaming limbs. They worked swiftly, for they had done this before, and under their fingers Lobengula was transformed. He became a creature of mythology: half man, half glittering scaled fish.

  The diamonds caught the beam of the fire, and sent it spinning against the thatched walls and high roof, darting insects of golden light that flashed in the eyes of the watchers and dazzled them so that they grunted with amazement, and their voices went up like a choir in praise of their king.

  At last the work was done and the wives crept away and left Lobengula lying on the thick soft furs, covered from throat to wrist to ankle in a silver burning coat of mail, each link of which was a priceless diamond; and as the king’s chest and belly rose and subsided to the tide of his breathing, so this immense treasure burned and flamed.

  ‘Indunas of Matabele, Princes of Kumalo, hail your King.’

  ‘Bayete! Bayete!’ The royal salute burst from their throats. ‘Bayete!’

  Then the silence was complete but expectant, for it had become the king’s custom that after this ritual display of the contents of the nation’s treasury, he would dispense honours and rewards.

  ‘Bazo,’ Lobengula’s voice was sonorous. ‘Stand forward!’

  The young man rose from his lowly position in the rearmost 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 cuffs reached only halfway down his forearms.

  The toy spear of kingship, the haft of red wild mahogany and the blade of brightest silver, was in his right hand, and he used it to summon a young 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.’

  The boy crept forward and laid the lustrous gold and black dappled skin at Lobengula’s feet.

  ‘Take your choice of three cows from my 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.

  Lobengula 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.’