Men of Men

by Wilbur Smith

  ‘It is from Sir Francis Good. He wishes—’ For almost an hour, whispering hoarsely so that no other could hear, Lobengula consulted Robyn on fifty different matters ranging from the British Commissioner’s letter to the menstrual problems of his youngest wife. Then at last he said, ‘Your coming is like the first sweet rain at the end of the long dry. Is there aught I can do for your happiness?’

  ‘You can let your people come to worship in my church.’

  This time the king’s chuckle was rueful. ‘Nomusa, you are as persistent as the termites that gnaw away the poles of my hut.’ He frowned with thought and then smiled again. ‘Very well, I will let you take one of my people – as long as it is a woman, the wife of an induna of royal blood, and the mother of twelve sons. If you can find one of my people who meets all those conditions, you may take her and splash water on her and make your sign on her forehead; and she may sing songs to your three white gods if she so wishes.’

  This time Robyn had to answer his sly and mischievous grin. ‘You are a cruel man, Lobengula, and you eat and drink too much. But I love you.’

  ‘And I love you also, Nomusa.’

  ‘Then I will ask one more favour.’

  ‘Ask it,’ he commanded.

  ‘There is a lad, son of my brother—’

  ‘Henshaw.’

  ‘The king knows all.’

  ‘What of this boy?’

  ‘Will the king listen to his petition?’

  ‘Send him to me.’

  Even from where he stood Bazo could see that the grain bins were overflowing with corn that had been sun-dried still on the cob. There was enough to feed an army, he decided bitterly. There was no chance of starving them out.

  The grain bins were cylindrical in shape, their walls of plaited green saplings plastered with clay and cow dung. They stood on stilts of mopani poles to allow the air to circulate below them, and to keep out bush rats and other vermin.

  They were perched on the very edge of the precipice.

  ‘The dog has brought good rains to his own fields,’ murmured Zama, Bazo’s lieutenant. ‘He is fat with corn. Perhaps he is a rain-doctor as he claims.’

  ‘Water,’ Bazo mused, staring up the sheer cliff. Beyond the grain bins he could make out the thatched roofs of the tribal huts. ‘Can we drive them out with thirst?’ he asked advice, for Zama had been a member of one of the previous abortive raids upon the stronghold.

  ‘The three other indunas tried that at first,’ Zama pointed out. ‘But then one of the Mashona that they captured told them that there is a running spring from which they draw all the water they wish.’

  The sun was beyond the summit of the hill, so Bazo squinted his eyes against it. ‘There is lush green growth there—’ He pointed to a narrow gulley that cleft the top of the cliff like an axe stroke but was choked with growth. ‘That would be it.’

  As if to confirm his words the tiny distant figure of a girl appeared suddenly out of the gulley. She was foreshortened by her height above them, and the ledge along which she climbed was not apparent from where they stood.

  She had a calabash gourd balanced on her head, with green leaves stuffed into its mouth to stop the water splashing out of it as she moved.

  She disappeared over the top of the cliff.

  ‘So,’ grunted Bazo. ‘We must climb up to them.’

  ‘It would be easier to fly,’ Zama grunted. ‘That rock would daunt a baboon – or a klipspringer.’

  The rock was pearly grey and marble smooth. There were streaks of lichen dashed across it, green and blue and red, like dry paint on an artist’s palette.

  ‘Come,’ Bazo ordered, and they began a slow measured circuit of the hill – and as they went so the armed guards on the clifftop above kept pace with them, watching every move they made, and if they approached too close to the foot of the cliff, a hail of rocks fell upon them, striking sparks from the scree slope and caroming viciously past their heads, forcing them to shelve their dignity as they retired in haste.

  ‘It is always the Mashona way,’ Zama grumbled. ‘Stones instead of spears.’

  In places the cliff was riven by vertical cracks, yet none of these reached from base to crest, none of them offered a route to the summit. Bazo looked for a place that had been polished by the paws of wild baboon or marked by the hooves of the tiny little chamois-like klipspringer which might reveal a way up the rock face, but there was none. The cliff girded the entire hill, and transformed it into a fortress.

  ‘There!’ Zama pointed to a tiny irregularity in the face. ‘That is where two warriors of the swimmers’ impi tried to force a road to the top. They climbed as far as that little bush.’ It grew in a crack in the face a hundred feet from the base of the cliff. ‘And there the ledge narrowed and gave out. They could not go on, nor could they return. They hung there two days and three nights until their strength failed and they fell, one after the other, to be crushed like beetles on the rocks here where we stand.’

  They went on, and as the sun was setting they came back to where they had started – the bivouac below the ladderway. Pemba’s people had built a ladder of long straight mopani poles, bound together with bark rope, and they had used it to span the lowest point in the cliff – a place where a deep gully descended from the summit to within fifty feet of the surrounding plain. Like a drawbridge, the massive ladder was cunningly counter-weighted with round ironstone boulders, so that it had only to be drawn up on its ropes – as it was now – and the mountain stronghold was impregnable.

  When the sun set. Bazo was still leaning on his long shield staring up the cliff, seemingly oblivious to the faint shouted insults of the Mashona that just reached him in the evening silence.

  ‘Pustules on Lobengula’s fat buttocks.’

  ‘Puppies of the rabid dog Lobengula.’

  ‘Dried turds of the spavined Matabele elephant.’

  Only when it was too dark to make out the top of the cliff did Bazo turn away – but even then he sat late beside the watch-fire, and rolled into his kaross only after the rise of the big white star over the top of the kopje.

  Even then his sleep was troubled with dreams. He dreamed of water, of streams and lakes and waterfalls.

  He woke again before light and checked that his sentries were alert before he slipped from the camp and under cover of the darkness crept up to the base of the cliff – at the point directly below the gulley choked with green growth where they had seen the girl carry water the day before.

  Bazo heard the liquid chuckling, and his spirits soared. Guided by the sound he groped through the darkness, and found the spring in the base of the cliff. It filled a small natural basin of grey rock and then overflowed to waste itself again in the dry earth of the plain. Bazo scooped a handful and it was icy cold and sweet on his tongue. The fountain came splashing out of a dark rent in the rock face. Bazo explored it in the short time that was left before the strengthening light threatened to expose him to the sentries on the cliff above.

  ‘Up,’ Bazo shouted as he strode into the bivouac. ‘All of you, up!’ And his men came off their sleeping-mats, leopard swift and with the stabbing spears in their fists.

  ‘What is it?’ Zama hissed.

  ‘We are going to dance,’ Bazo told them, and they looked from one to the other in amazed disbelief.

  On the north side of the kopje, farthest from the spring in the rock cliff and from the long ladder drawbridge, they danced. While they danced, all Pemba’s people lined the clifftop to watch them, first in puzzled silence and then yelling with ribald laughter, hurling down taunts and stones.

  ‘I count four hundred – without the children,’ Zama panted, as he stamped and leaped and stabbed at the air.

  ‘There will be enough for each of us,’ Bazo agreed, and pirouetted with his shield high over his head.

  They danced until the sun was high and then Bazo led them back to the camp, and when he stretched out on his mat and fell instantly asleep, his warriors looked at Zama with
exasperation, but Zama could only shrug and turn his eyes to the sky.

  An hour before sunset Bazo woke. He ate a little maize cake and drank a small gourd of sour milk, then he called for Zama and spoke quietly with him until it was almost dark.

  Zama listened and nodded and his eyes shone, and while he talked, Bazo was honing the silver blade of his assegai until the light twinkled like tiny stars along its cutting edge.

  At dark Bazo rose to his feet, handed his long dappled war shield to Zama and, armed only with his assegai, strode out of the bivouac. At the spring in the base of the cliff, Bazo shed his kilt and cloak and headdress. He rolled them into a bundle and hid them in a rock crevice. Then stark naked with only his assegai tied to his back by a leather thong, he waded across the pool. The reflection of the stars on its surface exploded into chips of light.

  The water cascaded over him from the fountain in the cliff and he shuddered and gasped with the cold and then reached up into the dark rocky opening, found a fingerhold, drew a deep breath, and then pulled himself upwards.

  With a solid black jet of water racing over his head, he held his breath and wriggled frantically up into the hole in the cliff. The force of water opposed him, and it required all his strength to go against it. Inch by inch, his chest throbbing for air, he fought his way upwards – and then just when he knew he would have to let himself be washed back into the pool, his head broke out – and he could breathe.

  He sucked air desperately, wedging shoulders and knees against the smooth water-polished rock to hold himself in the torrent. It was utterly dark, not the faintest glimmering of starlight, and the darkness seemed to have physical weight that threatened to crush him.

  He reached as high as he could and found another smooth fingerhold, and with all the strength of his arms gained another few feet, rested a moment, and then reached up again. The rock was like glass, and in places coated with a thick beard of algae, slippery as an eel’s skin. The cold was a terrible living thing that invaded his body. His bones ached and his fingers were so numbed that he could barely take his holds.

  The water tore at him, battering his shoulders, forcing its way into his nose and mouth and ears, filling his head with its angry animal roaring. Still he went up in the irregular twisting tunnel, sometimes horizontal, wriggling forward on his belly, the roof cracking his skull if he lifted his head too quickly to find the few precious inches of air trapped beneath it. Mostly the tunnel climbed vertically, and he wedged with knees and elbows to hold himself against the cascade, while his skin, softened with water, was smeared and torn away in slabs against the stone; but the inches became yards, and the minutes became hours, and still he went up.

  Then the tunnel narrowed so sharply that he was trapped, cold slippery rock at each shoulder and hard heavy rock cramming down between his shoulderblades. He could not go on, nor could he go back. He was trapped in the rocky maw of the mountain, and he screamed with terror, but his voice was lost in the thunder of water and the water gushed into his throat.

  He fought with the last of his drowning, desperate strength, and suddenly he kicked himself forward into a narrow cavern where he could breathe again, and where the water swirled into little back-eddies so that he could rest a few moments from its drag.

  Even while he coughed and choked on his flooded lungs, he realized that he had lost his assegai, and he groped for it until he felt the tug of the thong on his shoulder; there was still something tied to the other end. Hand over hand he drew in the thong and then his fingers closed on the familiar shaft and he sobbed with relief and pressed his lips to the beloved steel.

  It took time for him to realize that the air in the tiny cavern was sweet, and he felt it moving like a lover’s fingers on his skin, warm and soft – warmth, that was what made his heart soar. Warmth from the outside world, beyond this icy roaring tomb of water. He found the shaft down which the torrent was sucking air from the surface, and from somewhere came the strength to attempt it. He climbed slowly, agonizingly, and suddenly there was a white prick of light ahead of him, distorted by racing black water.

  He thrust his head forward, and the night wind struck his cheek, and he smelled woodsmoke and grass and earth redolent of the lingering warmth of the sun, and the great white star stood in the night sky high above his head. That dreadful passage had connected the fountain at the base of the cliff to the one high above.

  He did not have the strength to drag himself more than a few feet from the fountainhead, and there under a bush on the soft bed of leaf mould he lay and panted like a dog.

  He must have drifted into an exhausted and cold-drugged sleep, for he woke with a start. The sky had paled. He could just see the branches of the bush above his head outlined against it. He dragged himself out, and he found that he ached down to the bones of his spine and his skinned elbows and knees burned even at the touch of the dawn wind.

  There was a narrow path, well marked by many feet from the fountainhead up the last few feet of the cliff, and as he stepped out onto it he looked down and saw far below him the moonsilver forest and the tiny sparks that were the watch-fires of his own bivouac. As he moved, he felt his muscles easing and unknotting, felt the blood recharging his limbs.

  Although he was ready for one, there was no sentry at the top of the path, and he peered out cautiously from behind the stone portals of the gully onto the tranquil village.

  ‘By Chaka’s teeth, they sleep like fat and lazy dogs,’ Bazo thought grimly. The doors were all tightly closed, and smoke oozed from every chink in the walls. They were half suffocating themselves to keep out the mosquitoes. He could hear a man coughing hoarsely in the nearest hut.

  He was about to slip out from behind his rocky screen when faint movement in the gloom between the huts made him sink gently down again. A dark figure scurried directly towards where he hid. He shifted his grip on the assegai, but only a few paces from him the figure stopped.

  It was swathed in a skin cloak against the pre-dawn chill, hunched up like an old woman, until it straightened and threw off the cloak. Bazo felt his breath hiss up his throat and he bit down to stop it reaching his lips.

  The naked girl was in that lovely tender stage just past puberty, on the very brink of full womanhood. There were the last vulnerable vestiges of childhood in the plump little buttocks and in the kitten awkward way she stood with toes turned slightly inwards. She was naked and the first light touched her sable skin with a lemon glow. Then she turned her head.

  She had a long slender neck and the neat little head balanced perfectly upon it. The dome of her skull was covered with an intricate pattern of closely woven plaits. Her forehead was high and smooth, her cheekbones vaulted in the Egyptian way, her lips chiselled into perfect sweeps, symmetrical as the wings of a beautiful butterfly, and the light glinted briefly in her huge slanted eyes as she looked about her.

  Then she squatted briefly and her water tinkled against the earth. It was a sound that unaccountably filled Bazo’s chest with a swollen tender feeling, for the act was so innocent and so natural.

  She stood, and in the instant before she covered her head once more with the cloak, he had one more glimpse of her face. He knew then that he had never seen anything so beautiful in all his life – and he stared after her as she hurried back between the huts with a peculiar aching hunger consuming his very being.

  It took him many minutes to rouse himself, and then as he crept forward he found that, hard as he tried, he could not drive the girl’s image from his mind. The pathway that led from the village to the ladder drawbridge was unmistakable. It was broad and its surface beaten smooth. There were walls of worked stone on each side of it behind which the defenders could meet any thrust up the path. There were piles of stones at intervals along its course, placed ready to be hurled down at anybody attempting to force the ladder or fight their way up the path.

  The pathway dropped steeply into the gully, and then ended on a wide level stone platform. The light was stronger now and Bazo coul
d see that there were sentries here; two of them stood on the lip watching the plain fifty feet below the platform, guarding the massive counterbalanced ladder. Farther back four other guards squatted around a small smoky fire, and Bazo’s saliva flooded as he smelled the roasting maize cakes. The men were talking in the low sleepy tones of men who had stood a long watch, and their backs were turned to the gully, for they would never expect an enemy to come from that direction.

  Bazo crept closer. There was another pile of rocks at the corner of the platform, ready for the guards to hurl down the cliff. Bazo crawled into the shadows behind it.

  He did not have long to wait. Very faintly on the morning wind he heard the singing. Zama had begun the dance below the cliff. The song was the fighting hymn of his regiment, and Bazo’s blood thrilled in his veins. He felt the divine madness begin. It was a feeling that other lesser men got only from the hemp pipe.

  He felt the sweat break on his skin, and the madness mount from his belly to his heart – felt the blood swell in his throat, felt his eyes burn and bulge.

  The guards had left the fire now and crowded the edge of the cliff, peering downwards, laughing and pointing.

  ‘Hear Lobengula’s puppies yap!’

  ‘Look at them dance like virgins at the Festival of First Fruits!’

  The signal Bazo had agreed with Zama was the moment the battle song ended, but he could barely contain himself that long.

  He rose from his crouch, and his muscles twitched, his head jerked like that of a maniac, and in the dawn light his eyes were glazed like shards of ceramic pottery, the red rage of the berserker. At that instant the distant song ended.

  Bazo’s cry froze the men on the edge of the cliff, it was the bellow of a heart-struck buffalo bull, the screech of the stooping eagle.

  In the paralysed moment before they could turn, Bazo struck them. He charged with outstretched arms and swept four of them away into the void. They twisted and turned in the air as they fell, and they screamed the whole way down on a high receding note that was cut off abruptly at the end.