Men of Men

by Wilbur Smith

  A troop of the gaunt, mange-ridden pariah dogs that skulked about the king’s kraal had come to snarl and squabble over the morsel, and when one of the black-cloaked executioners would have scattered them with blows of his knobkerrie, the king restrained him.

  ‘The poor beasts are hungry, let them be.’ And he turned back to Bazo. ‘Tell me how it was done.’

  Bazo relived in his mind every word with which he had described the expedition, and while he told it he had begun to giya, to dance and sing the ode to Pemba which he had composed:

  ‘Like a mole in the earth’s gut

  Bazo found the secret way—’

  He sang, and in the front row of the senior indunas, Gandang, his father, sat grave and proud.

  ‘Like the blind catfish

  that live in the caves of Sinoia

  Bazo swam through darkness—’

  Then as the verses of the song mentioned them, Zama and his warriors sprang forward to whirl and dance at his side.

  ‘Like the black mamba from under a stone

  Zama milked death from his silver fang—’

  When the triumph dance was over, they threw themselves face down on the earth in front of the wagon.

  ‘Bazo, son of Gandang, go out and choose two hundred head from the royal herds,’ said Lobengula.

  ‘Bayete!’ shouted Bazo, still panting from the dance.

  ‘Bazo, son of Gandang – you who commanded fifty so skilfully – now I give you one thousand to command.’

  ‘Nkosi! Lord!’

  ‘You will command the levy of young men waiting now at the royal kraal on the Shangani river. I give you the insignia for your new regiment. Your shields will be red, your kilts the tails of the genet cat, your plumes the wing feathers of the marabou stork, and your headband the fur of the burrowing mole,’ Lobengula intoned, and then paused. ‘The name of your regiment will be Izimvukuzane Ezembintaba – the moles that burrow under a mountain.’

  ‘Nkosi kakhula! Great King!’ Bazo roared.

  ‘Now Bazo, rise up and go into the women to choose yourself a wife. Be sure that she is virtuous and fruitful, and let her first duty be to set the headring of the induna on your brow.’

  ‘Indhlovu! Ngi ya bonga! Great Elephant, I praise you!’

  Sitting his solitary watch by the fire, Bazo remembered every word, every change of tone, every pause and emphasis that the king had used to heap his honours upon him. He sighed with contentment and placed another log upon the fire, carefully so as not to wake his companions, and the sparks floated up through the opening in the highest point of the domed roof.

  Then a distant sound interrupted his reverie; it was the single whoop of a hyena, not an unusual sound except that it was the first time that he had heard it since nightfall. On every other night the hideous cries of these loathsome animals began when they crept from their burrows at dusk and continued until sunrise.

  They haunted the small woody copse beyond the cattle enclosure that all the inhabitants of Gandang’s kraal used as a communal open-air latrine. They hyena cleansed the area of excrement during the hours of darkness. For this reason, Gandang’s people tolerated the presence of an animal that they usually abhorred with a superstitious dread.

  So tonight the single whooping cry at midnight drew attention to the silence that had preceded it. Bazo listened a few seconds longer and then let his thoughts stray to the morrow.

  After the king, Gandang was one of the three most important personages in Matabeleland – only Somabula and Babiaan were his peers, so that a marriage at his kraal would have been a momentous event even if it were not his eldest son – himself a newly appointed induna of one thousand – who was to be the bridegroom.

  Juba, senior wife of Gandang, and mother of Bazo the bridegroom, had supervised the brew of beer, watching with an expert eye for the bloom of yeast on the germinating sorghum, testing with her own plump finger the temperature of the ground meal gruel as it was malted, judging the addition of the final booster of yeast and then standing over the matrons as they strained the brewing through woven bamboo sieves into the huge black clay beer-pots. Now there were a thousand pots each holding half a gallon of her famous brew, ready to greet the guests as they arrived at Gandang’s kraal. There would be a thousand invited guests.

  Lobengula and his retinue were already on the road; they were sleeping tonight at the regimental kraal of the Intemba regiment, only five miles distant, and they would arrive before noon.

  Somabula was with the king, while Babiaan was coming in from his kraal in the east with a hundred warriors in his bodyguard. Nomusa and Hlopi were coming from the mission station at Khami as Juba’s special guests, and they were bringing all their daughters with them.

  Gandang had picked fifty fat bullocks from his herds, and the bridegroom and his young companions would begin to slaughter and butcher them in the dawn – while the unmarried girls took the bride down to the river pool, bathed her and then anointed her with fat and clay until she glistened in the early sunlight. Then they would deck her with wild flowers.

  The hyena called again much closer this time, sounding as if it were right outside the stockade – and then a strange thing happened. The single cry was answered by a chorus, as though a great multitude of the huge shaggy spotted doglike beasts had surrounded Gandang’s kraal.

  Bazo started up from the fire in astonishment. He had never heard anything to equal this – there must be a hundred or more of the ungainly animals out there. He could imagine them, their high shoulders sloping down to meagre hindquarters, the flat snake-like heads held low as though the weight of massive underslung jaw and yellow carnassial teeth was too heavy for the neck.

  One hundred at least, he could almost smell their breath as they opened those iron jaws, capable of crunching the thigh bone of a bull buffalo to splinters. They would reek of long-dead carrion and excrement and other filth, but it was the sound of their voices that chilled Bazo’s guts and started the march of ghost feet along his spine.

  It was as though all the souls of the dead had risen from their graves to clamour outside Gandang’s stockade. They whooped and howled, beginning in a low moan and rising sharply in key.

  ‘Oooh – wee!’

  They shrieked like the ghost of a Mashona feeling again the steel cleave his breast, and the terrible cries woke the echoes amongst the kopjes along the river.

  Almost humanly, they giggled, and they laughed – that maniacal and mirthless laughter. The peals of fiendish laughter mingled with the tormented shrieks, and then with them were the cries of the kraal’s watchmen, the screeches of the waking women in their huts, the shouts of the men, still half-asleep, as they scrambled for their weapons.

  ‘Do not go out,’ Kamuza shouted across the hut as Bazo sprang to the door with his shield on his shoulder and his assegai in his right hand. ‘Do not go into the dark, this is a witchcraft. Those are not animals out there.’

  His words stopped Bazo at the threshold. There was nothing of flesh and blood he would not face, but this—

  The fiendish chorus reached a climax, and then abruptly ceased. The silence that followed was even more chilling, and Bazo shrank away from the door. His companions crouched on their sleeping-mats, weapons in their hands, their eyes wide and white in the firelight – but not one of them moved towards the door.

  All of Gandang’s kraal was awake now, but silent, waiting, the women creeping away into the farthest recesses of their huts and covering their heads with their fur karosses, the men frozen with superstitious terror.

  The silence lasted the time it would take for a man to run the full circle of the stockade, and then was broken by the call of a single hyena, the same whooping cry, starting low and rising to a shriek. The head of every one of the warriors in Bazo’s hut lifted, and they all stared upwards to the roof and the star-pricked sky above it – for that was from where the ghostly cry emanated – from the very air high above Gandang’s kraal.

  ‘Sorcery.’ Kamuza�
�s voice shook, and Bazo choked down on the wail of terror that rose in his own throat.

  As the animal cry died in the night, there was only one other sound. The voice of a young girl, raised in terrible distress.

  ‘Bazo! Help me, Bazo!’

  It was the only thing that could have roused him. Bazo shook himself like a dog that leaps from water to land, throwing off the terror that paralysed him.

  ‘Do not go!’ Kamuza yelled, after him. ‘It is not the girl, it is a witch voice.’

  But Bazo tore the locking bar from the door.

  He saw her immediately. Tanase raced towards him from the women’s quarters, from Juba’s own great hut where she had been passing the last night before her nuptials.

  Her dark naked body was without substance, like a moon shadow as she sped to him. Bazo leaped towards her, and they met in front of the main gate of the stockade, and Tanase clung to him.

  No other person had left the huts; the kraal was deserted, the fearful silence oppressive. Bazo lifted his shield to cover both himself and the girl – and instinctively he turned to face the gateway. It was only then that he realized that the gate was open.

  He tried to retreat towards the hut, taking the girl with him, but she was rigid in his arms, rooted to the earth like the stump of a wild ebony tree – and his own strength was sapped by terror.

  ‘Bazo,’ Tanase whispered. ‘It is them, they have come.’

  As she spoke the watch-fire beside the gate, which had long ago burned down to ash and charred logs, suddenly burst into flame once again. The flames sprang higher than a man’s head, roaring like a waterfall, and the stockade and gateway were lit brightly by the yellow dancing light. Beyond the open gateway, at the very edge of the firelight stood a human figure. It was the figure of a very old man, with stick-like limbs and bowed back; his cap of hair was white as the salt from the Makarikari pan; his skin was grey and dusty with age. The whites of his eyes flashed as they squinted and rolled upwards into his skull, and glassy strings of spittle dribbled from his toothless mouth onto his chest, wetting the dry parchment skin through which each skeletal rib stood out clearly.

  His voice was a quavering ancient squeal.

  ‘Tanase!’ he called. ‘Tanase, daughter of the spirits.’

  In the firelight all life went out of Tanase’s eyes; they became blank.

  ‘Do not heed—’ Bazo croaked, but a bluish sheen appeared over Tanase’s eyeballs like the nictitating membrane that covers the eye of a shark or the cataract of tropical ophthalmia, and blindly her head turned towards the spectral figure beyond the gates.

  ‘Tanase, your destiny calls you!’

  She broke out of Bazo’s arms. It seemed to require no effort. He could not hold her. Her strength was superhuman.

  She began to walk towards the gateway, and when Bazo tried to follow her, he found he could not lift a foot. He dropped his shield, and it clattered on the hard earth, but Tanase did not look back. She walked with a floating grace, light as river mist towards the ancient stooped figure.

  ‘Tanase!’ Bazo’s voice was a despairing cry, and he fell upon his knees, yearning after her.

  The old man held out one hand, and Tanase took it, and as she did so, the watch-fire died down as abruptly as it had flared, and the darkness beyond the gateway was instantly impenetrable.

  ‘Tanase!’ whispered Bazo, his arms outstretched – and far away, down by the river the hyena called one last time.

  The twins came pelting into the church, tumbling over each other with eagerness to be the first to tell.

  ‘Mama! Mama!—’

  ‘Vicky, I saw first, let me!’

  Robyn Codrington looked up from the black body stretched on the table and quelled them with a frown.

  ‘Ladies don’t push.’

  They came up in a parody of demureness, but hopping with impatience.

  ‘Very well, Vicky. What is it?’

  They began together, and Robyn stopped them again.

  ‘I said Vicky.’

  And Victoria puffed up importantly.

  ‘There is someone coming.’

  ‘From Thabas Indunas?’ Robyn asked.

  ‘No, Mama, from the south.’

  ‘It’s probably one of the king’s messengers.’

  ‘No, Mama, it’s a white man on a horse.’

  Robyn’s interest quickened; she would never have admitted even to herself how often the isolation palled. A white traveller would mean news, perhaps letters, stores and supplies, or even the most precious of all, books. Failing those treasures there would be the mere mental stimulation of a strange face and of conversation and ideas.

  She was tempted to leave the patient on the table, it was not a serious bum, but she checked herself.

  ‘Tell Papa I shall come directly,’ she said, and the twins fled, jammed in the doorway for a moment, and then popped through like a cork from a champagne bottle.

  By the time Robyn had finished dressing the bum, dismissed the patient, washed her hands and hurried out onto the porch of the church – the stranger was coming up the hill.

  Clinton was leading the mule on which he was mounted. It was a big strong-looking grey animal, so the rider looked small and slim upon the broad back. He was a lad, dressed in an old tweed jacket and a boy’s cloth cap. The twins danced on each side of the mule, and Clinton at its head was looking back over his shoulder, listening to something that the stranger was saying.

  ‘Who is it, Mama?’ Salina came out of the kitchen and called across the yard.

  ‘We shall find out in a moment.’

  Clinton led the mule to the porch, and the rider’s head was on a level with Robyn’s.

  ‘Dr Ballantyne, your grandfather, Dr Moffat, sent me to you, I have letters and gifts from him for you.’

  With a start Robyn realized that under the patched tweed coat and cap was a woman – and even in that moment of surprise she was aware that it was an extraordinarily handsome woman, younger than Robyn herself, not much over thirty years of age, with steady, dark eyes and almost Mongolian cheekbones.

  She jumped down from the mule with the agility of an expert horsewoman, and came up the steps of the porch to seize Robyn’s hands. Her grip was firm as a man’s, and her expression was intense.

  ‘My husband is ill and suffering. Dr Moffat says you are the only one who can help him. Will you do it? Oh please, will you?’

  ‘I am a doctor.’ Robyn gently twisted her fingers out of the other woman’s painful grip – but it was not that which troubled her – there was something too intense, too passionate about her. ‘I am a doctor, and I could never refuse to help anyone who is suffering. Of course, I shall do whatever I can.’

  ‘Do you promise that?’ the woman insisted, and Robyn bridled slightly.

  ‘I have said I will help, there is no need to promise.’

  ‘Oh, thank you.’ The woman smiled with relief.

  ‘Where is your husband?’

  ‘Not far behind. I rode ahead to warn you – and to make sure that you would help us.’

  ‘What is it that ails your husband?’

  ‘Dr Moffat has explained it all in a letter. He sent gifts for you also.’ The woman was evasive, turning away from Robyn’s scrutiny and running back to the mule.

  From the saddle-bags she lifted down two packages, wrapped in oilskin to protect them against the elements and bound up with rawhide thongs. They were so heavy and bulky that Clinton took them from her and carried them into the church.

  ‘You are tired,’ Robyn said. ‘I am sorry I cannot offer you coffee, we used the last a month ago – but a glass of lemonade?’

  ‘No.’ The woman shook her head decidedly. ‘I shall go back immediately, to be with my husband – but we shall arrive before nightfall.’

  She ran back, and vaulted lightly to the mule’s back. None of them had ever seen a woman do that.

  ‘Thank you,’ she repeated, and then trotted out of the yard, back down the hill.

/>   Clinton came out of the church and put one arm around Robyn’s shoulders.

  ‘What a very beautiful and unusual woman,’ he said, and Robyn nodded. That was one of the things that had troubled her. Robyn mistrusted beautiful women.

  ‘What is her name?’ she asked.

  ‘I didn’t have a chance to ask.’

  ‘You were too busy looking, perhaps,’ Robyn suggested tartly, and wriggled out from under his arm and went back into the church, while Clinton stared after her with a rueful expression.

  After a moment he made a move as if to follow her – but then sighed and shook his head. It was always as well to let Robyn come round on her own, coaxing only angered her even more unreasonably.

  In the quiet of the church Robyn untied the first package, and unpacked the contents onto the table.

  There were five heavy bottles with glass stoppers, and she read the labels as she lifted out each one.

  ‘Carbolic Acid.’

  ‘Alum.’

  ‘Quicksilver.’

  ‘Iodine.’

  And then the fifth bottle was labelled:

  ‘Trichloromethane.’

  ‘Bless you, Grandfather.’ She smiled delightedly – but still she unstoppered the last bottle and sniffed cautiously at the mouth to confirm her good fortune.

  The pungent sweet odour was unmistakable. Chloroform was to her more precious than her own life’s blood; she would gladly have exchanged drop for drop.

  Her own last supply had been exhausted months before and the London Missionary Society was as parsimonious as ever with its stores. She wished she had retained just a few hundred guineas of her enormous book royalties to enable her to purchase her own medicines rather than having to plead for them with the secretary in London by a correspondence which often took twelve months each way.