Men of Men

by Wilbur Smith

  Her limbs were long and supple as a heron’s neck, her feet and hands finely shaped. She was in the prime of her womanhood, her body not yet distorted by childbearing; although her belly was luscious as a ripening fruit her waist was narrow as a lad’s. All she wore was a single string of crimson beads about her waist, knotted at the level of the deeply sculptured pit of her navel. Her hips flared with a delicate line, forming a broad basin to contain the spade-shaped wedge of her sex. It nestled there like a dark furry little animal possessed of separate life and existence.

  Her head was perfectly balanced on the long stem of her neck; the neat cap of her hair set off the marvellous domed contours of her skull and exposed the small neat shape of her ears. Her features were oriental, the huge eyes slanted, her cheekbones high and her nose delicate and straight – but her mouth was twisted with anguish and her eyes blinded with tears as she stared at the young induna who stood at the king’s back.

  Slowly she lifted one hand and reached out towards him; the long, delicate palm was pink and soft, the gesture infinitely sad.

  ‘Tanase!’ whispered Bazo, staring at her, and his hands shook so that the blade of his assegai clattered against the rim of his shield.

  This was the woman he had chosen and who had been so cruelly taken from him. Since her going Bazo had sought no other to wife, though the king had chided him, and others whispered that it was unnatural, yet Bazo had held to the memory of this bright, sweet maid. He wanted to rush to her and seize her, to swing her high upon his shoulder and bear her away, but he stood rooted, her anguish reflected in his own eyes.

  For though she stood before him, she was as remote as the full moon. She was a child of the spirits and protected by their horrid servants, far beyond the reach of his loving hands and constant heart.

  Her attendants came now from the cave behind her, to scold and whine. Slowly Tanase lowered her arm, though for a moment longer her whole body yearned towards Bazo, and then her lovely head wilted like a flower upon the long, graceful stalk of her neck and she allowed them to take her arms.

  ‘Tanase!’ Bazo said her name for the last time, and her shoulders jerked at the sound of his voice.

  Then a terrible thing happened. A shuddering convulsion ran up Tanase’s back, from the perfect globes of her tight, hard buttocks to the nape of her neck, so that the nerves and muscles twitched and contracted on each side of her spine. Then her spine began to bend backwards like a hunter’s bow.

  ‘The spirit is upon her,’ shrieked the old witch. ‘Let the spirit take her!’

  They let her be, drawing back from her wracked body.

  Every muscle in her body was under such strain that it stood out in clear and separate definition under her glossy skin – and her spine arched to an impossible angle, the base of her skull almost touching the soft flesh at the back of her knees.

  Her face was contorted with the unbearable agony of divination; her eyes rolled back into her head so that only the whites showed. Her lips were drawn back so that the small perfect white teeth were exposed in a frozen rictus and creamy froth bubbled from the corners of her mouth.

  Though her lips did not move, a voice boomed from her tortured throat. It was the deep bass of a man, the stentorian voice of a warrior, and it bore no trace of the terrible travail of the young woman from whom it issued.

  ‘The falcons! The white hawk has torn open the nest of stone. The falcons are flying. Save the falcons! The falcons!’

  The voice rose abruptly into a wild shriek, and Tanase collapsed and writhed like a squashed insect upon the earth.

  ‘No black man, neither Matabele nor Rozwi nor Karanga, none of them would dare desecrate the nest of the falcons,’ said Lobengula, and the circle of indunas nodded. ‘Only a white man would have the effrontery to defy the word of the king and chance the wrath of the spirits.’

  He paused and took snuff, drawing out the little ritual to put off the moment of decision.

  ‘If I send an impi to Zimbabwe and we take a white man in the red act of plundering the ancient place, dare I send steel through his heart?’ Lobengula turned to Somabula, and the old man lifted his grey head and looked sadly at his king.

  ‘Kill one of them, and the others will come swarming like ants,’ he said. ‘Set not a feast for the birds, when it will bring a pride of lions instead.’

  Lobengula sighed and looked to Gandang:

  ‘Speak, my father’s son.’

  ‘Oh King, Somabula is wise and his words have the same weight as boulders of black ironstone. Yet the king’s words are heavier still, and the king’s words have been given – the despoilers of the ancient places must die. Those are the words of Lobengula.’

  The king nodded slowly.

  ‘Bazo!’ he said softly, and the young induna dropped on one knee before the king’s stool.

  ‘Take one of the wizards to guide your impi to the nest of the falcons. If the stone birds are gone, follow them. Find the despoiler. If it is a white man, take him where no other eyes can see you, not even those of your most trusted warriors. Kill the man and bury him in a secret place, and speak of it to no man but your king. Do you hear the words of Lobengula?’

  ‘I hear, oh Great King, and to hear is to obey.’

  Dutchman, the bullock with the narrowest spread of horns, was the only one which Isazi could coax down the narrow passageways and over the tumbled stonework into the temple enclosure of the ruins. In the baskets on his sturdy, dappled back, they ferried out the bird images, even the damaged ones, and repacked them onto the backs of the other oxen which waited outside the massive walls.

  With Isazi’s skilful handling of the bullocks and their burdens, the work was finished by mid-afternoon, and they roped the oxen in single file. With patent relief, Isazi led them away through the forest towards the south.

  Ralph’s relief was every bit as intense. He had been uneasy ever since that chance encounter with the Matabele impi in the hills. Now he let Isazi go on with the oxen, while he circled back across their incoming tracks to the north-west of the ruined city, examining the ground with the hunter’s eye for any sign that they had been followed, or that there were any other human beings in the area. It need not be a war party – even a band of honey-gatherers or a hunter could carry word back to Lobengula’s kraal or alert the border impis.

  He knew what he would have to do if he found a wanderer or solitary hunter, and he eased the rifle in the leather boot at his knee. These forests were populous. He saw troops of big-eared striped kudu, sable antelope with snowy bellies and sweeping scimitar horns, big black bovine buffalo and spreading herds of plump zebra with alert pricked ears and stiff, black manes, but there was no sign of human presence.

  He was only slightly mollified when he turned back and picked up the spoor of the bullock file five miles on the other side of the ruins. He trotted along the widely beaten sign, and his misgivings returned at full strength. This was too easy to follow.

  He caught up with Isazi and his bullock train as the dusk was falling, and he helped him lift the heavy packs down from the backs of the oxen and examine them for galling or saddle sores, before hobbling them and letting them graze. More than once during the night he started awake, and listened for the sound of men’s voices – but heard only the yipping of jackal.

  In the early light they entered a wide grassy plain; the trees on the far side were a dark line on the horizon, and there were huge troops of zebra grazing out in the open. They lifted their heads to watch the strange little caravan go past, and sounded their curiosity and concern with their sharp, almost dog-like, barks.

  Halfway across the plain Ralph turned the bullock train at a right angle to their track, and they marched due east until noon, when they re-entered the forest. Still Ralph headed on east until darkness fell and they camped.

  Isazi muttered and complained about the wasted day, and the detour of so many miles out of their direct route towards the Limpopo river and the Bushman wells beyond, where Umfaan waite
d for them with the wagons.

  ‘Why do we do this?’

  ‘For the benefit of anyone who follows us.’

  ‘They will still be able to follow the spoor we have laid,’ Isazi protested.

  ‘I will change that, in the morning,’ Ralph assured him, and in the dawn he allowed Isazi to resume the southerly direction again.

  ‘If I do not rejoin you, do not wait for me. Keep on until you reach the wagons, well beyond the frontier of the Matabele. Wait for me there,’ he ordered, and he left Isazi and rode back on their spoor of the previous day.

  He reached the open grassland where they had made such a dramatic change of direction the preceding morning, and the zebra barked at him. Their stripes were indistinguishable at this distance, and the herds were moving silver-grey masses on the yellow grassland.

  ‘You are going to enjoy this, old Tom.’ Ralph patted the horse’s neck and then trotted out onto the plain towards the nearest herd of zebra. There were more than a hundred animals in the group, and they let horse and rider approach to within a few hundred paces before bunching up and galloping away.

  ‘After them, Tom!’ Ralph whooped, and they tore into the bellowing dust cloud, gaining swiftly on the chubby, striped ranks of bobbing hindquarters. Ralph quartered and turned them, and they gathered up another herd, and then another, until there were two or three thousand zebra in stampede ahead of them.

  He rode out onto one flank and pushed the herd over the ground which his bullock train had crossed the previous day. Thousands of broad hooves churned the earth into soft explosions of dust. When they reached the far side of the plain, Ralph forced Tom ahead of the leading zebras and rode across their front, yelling and waving his hat about his head. The dense mass of animals turned like a living whirlpool, and the dust boiled up into the sky.

  Back they went across the open ground with Tom delighting in the chase, and Ralph worked them northward until the zebra herds reached the forest line and swung parallel with the trees, and they scoured the earth with driving hooves in a swathe five hundred yards wide.

  Back and forth again Ralph drove them, sheep-dogging them deliberately over the bullock tracks on each pass, until at last even Tom’s pace was short and knocked up, and he was sweating in black streaks down his shoulders and flanks and blowing like a south-easterly gale over False Bay.

  Ralph off-saddled in the shade of the treeline, while out on the plain the zebra herds, skittish and nervous at the harassment – still galloped in aimless circles, or snorted and pawed the torn earth.

  ‘Nobody, not even a Bushman, will be able to pick the spoor through that,’ Ralph told Tom, and stooped to lift each of his hooves in turn.

  With his clasp knife Ralph prised off Tom’s iron horseshoes and bundled them into the saddle-bag.

  Without shoes, Tom’s tracks were almost identical to those of a zebra stallion. He might go lame before they reached the wagons at Bushman wells, but they could limp in at their own speed, sure at last that there would be no pursuit. Once they reached the wagon, there was forge and anvil to re-shoe him, and Tom would suffer no lasting injury.

  Ralph wiped Tom down with the saddle blanket and let him rest for another hour before re-saddling. Then he rode back amongst the scattered zebra herds to mingle and lose Tom’s hoof prints amongst theirs before deliberately turning westwards, the opposite direction to Isazi’s bullocks. He settled down in the saddle to lay a false trail into the forest before circling back southwards to find Isazi.

  Ralph slept until sunrise the following morning, secure at last, and the temptation to drink coffee was too much for him. He chanced a small fire and delighted in the strong hot brew.

  When they rode on, the sun was well up, and clear of the forest tops. Ralph let old Tom amble along at his own pace to save his unshod hooves, and he pushed his hat onto the back of his head and repeated the opening bars of Yankee Doodle over and over in a flat tuneless whistle.

  The morning was cool and fresh. He felt elated at the success of his coup; already he was planning the sale of the statues. He would send letters to the British Museum and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.

  Out on his right a red-breasted cuckoo uttered its staccato call that sounded like a greeting ‘Pete-my-friend!’.

  Tom flicked his ears but Ralph went on whistling happily, slouched down in the saddle.

  Old J. B. Robinson, one of the Kimberley millionaires who had made millions more on the new Witwatersrand goldfield, would buy at least one of the birds simply because Rhodes had one. He could not bear—

  In the grassy glade ahead of Ralph a francolin called harshly, ‘Kwali! Kwali!’ only twice, and it rang falsely to Ralph’s ear. These brown partridges usually called five or six times, not twice.

  Ralph checked Tom and stood up in the stirrups. Carefully he surveyed the narrow open strip of head-high elephant grass. Suddenly a covey of brown partridge burst out of the grass and whirled away on noisy wings.

  Ralph grinned and slouched down again in the saddle, and Tom trotted into the waving stand of coarse grass – and instantly it was full of dark figures of dancing plumes and red shields. They swarmed around Tom and the sunlight sparkled on the long silver blades.

  ‘Go, Tom!’ Ralph urged, and kicked his heels into his flank, while he jerked the rifle from its bucket and held it against his hip.

  As Tom lunged forward, one of the plumed warriors leapt to catch his bridle, and Ralph fired. The heavy lead bullet hit the Matabele in the jaw and blew half of it away; for a moment teeth and white bone flashed in the shattered face, and then were smothered in an eruption of bright blood.

  Tom bounded into the gap in their line that the man had left, but as he went through, one of them darted in from the side and grunted with the strength of his stroke.

  With a thrill of horror Ralph saw the long steel blade go into Tom’s ribs, an inch in front of his toe cap. He swung the empty rifle at the warrior’s head, but the man ducked under it, and while Ralph twisted in the saddle, a second Matabele darted in, and Tom’s whole body shuddered and convulsed between Ralph’s knees as the man stabbed deep and hard into Tom’s neck, an inch in front of his plunging shoulder.

  Then they were through the line of Matabele, but the assegai had been plucked from the warrior’s hand and the shaft stuck out of Tom’s neck at a brutal angle that showed the point must be buried in his lungs. Still the gallant old pony carried his master on across the glade and into the first trees of the forest.

  Then abruptly a double stream of frothy bright lung-blood burst from Tom’s nostrils, and splattered back against Ralph’s boots. Tom died in full run. His nose dropped to the earth and he went over in a somersault that pitched Ralph high over his head.

  Ralph smashed into the earth, and he felt as though his ribs were stoved in and his teeth cracked from his jaws, but he crawled desperately to his fallen rifle and jammed a fresh cartridge into the breech.

  When he looked up, they were almost upon him, a line of racing red shields and pounding bare feet below; the war rattles on their ankles clashed and the hunting chorus was like the deep baying of hounds.

  One tall indoda lifted his shield high to clear his spear arm for the killing stroke, and the blade flashed as it started down, and then the movement froze.

  ‘Henshaw!’ The name exploded out of the warrior’s straining throat, and then Bazo continued the stroke, but at the last instant rolled his wrist and the flat of the heavy blade smashed against Ralph’s skull above his temple; and he pitched forwards, face down against the sandy earth, and lay still as death.

  ‘You took the irons from the horse’s hooves.’ Bazo nodded approval. ‘That was a good trick. If you had not slept so long this morning, we might never have caught up with you.’

  ‘Tom is dead now,’ replied Ralph.

  He was propped against the trunk of a mopani tree. There was a bright scarlet smear of gravel rash on one cheek where he had hit the ground when he was thrown from the saddle. Th
e hair above his temple was caked with black dried blood where the flat of Bazo’s blade had knocked him senseless, and he was bound at ankles and wrists with thongs of rawhide. Already his hands were puffy and blue from the constriction of his bonds.

  ‘Yes!’ Bazo nodded again gravely, and looked at the carcass of the horse where it lay fifty paces away. ‘He was a good horse, and now he is dead.’ He looked back at Ralph. ‘The indoda whom we will bury today was a good man – and now he is dead also.’

  All about them squatted ranks of Matabele warriors, all Bazo’s men drawn up in a dense black circle, sitting on their shields and listening intently to every word spoken.

  ‘Your men fell upon me without warning, as though I were a thief or a murderer. I defended myself as any man would do.’

  ‘And are you not a thief then, Henshaw?’ Bazo interrupted.

  ‘What question is that?’ Ralph demanded.

  ‘The birds, Henshaw. The stone birds.’

  ‘I do not know what you speak of,’ Ralph challenged angrily, pushing himself away from the tree trunk and staring arrogantly at Bazo.

  ‘You know, Henshaw. You know about the birds, for we have spoken about them many times. You know also the king’s warning that to despoil the ancient places is death to any man, for I myself have told you of it.’

  Still Ralph glared his defiance.

  ‘Your spoor led straight to the burial place of the kings and straight away from it – and the birds are gone. Where are they, Henshaw?’

  A moment longer Ralph continued his show, and then he shrugged and smiled and sank back against the tree.

  ‘They are gone, Bazo, flown afar where you cannot follow them. It was the prophecy of the Umlimo, beyond the powers of mortal men to prevent.’

  At the mention of the prophetess, a shadow of sorrow passed over Bazo’s face.

  ‘Yes, it was part of the prophecy,’ he agreed. ‘And now it is time to carry out the orders of the king.’ He stood up and addressed the squatting ranks of Matabele.