Men of Men

by Wilbur Smith

  Zouga wrote out a contract of land grant sale on the back page of his message pad, and twelve of them signed it. Will Daniel and two other illiterates made their marks, and then they squabbled over the division of the gold sovereigns from Zouga’s belt. Zouga was relieved to be rid of them, and as he returned the pad to his saddle-bag, he realized abruptly that, if those grants were valid, then Will Daniel was right. He had got a bargain. He decided that when he rejoined Jameson’s column, he would buy up all the other grants that were on offer from any of the rootless drifters who wanted to sell for the price of a bottle of whisky.

  Zouga had forgotten just how intense were the peculiar brooding silences of the magical Matopos hills. The silence was a thing of weight and substance that made their spirits quail. No bird twittered or danced upon a twig in the dense undergrowth that pressed in upon the narrow path, and no breeze reached into the depths of the granite-sided valleys.

  The silence and the heat weighed even upon the hard and unsusceptible men who followed Zouga in single file. They rode with their rifles held across their laps, their eyes narrowed against the glare from the sparkling chips of mica in the granite walls, watchful and anxious, the dense dark green bush about them charged with a nameless menace.

  At times the narrow game trails they were following pinched out or ended abruptly in the gut of a valley, and they were forced to retrace their route and try another; but always Zouga kept working south and west. Then, on the third day, he was rewarded.

  He cut the broad beaten road that led from GuBulawayo to the hidden valley of the Umlimo. It was wide and smooth enough for Zouga to spur his horse into a canter. At Zouga’s orders, his troopers had muffled their equipment, and put leathers over the hooves of their mounts, so the only sound was the creak of saddlery and the occasional brush and whip of an overhanging branch.

  The earlier uneasiness was gone now, and they leaned forward in their saddles, eager as hunting dogs on the leash with a hot scent in their nostrils. Jameson had promised them a bonus of twenty guineas each and all the loot that they could carry away from the valley of the Umlimo.

  Zouga began to recognize landmarks that he passed. There was a pile of rocks, the largest of them the size of St Paul’s dome, and three others, graded down in size, all of them weathered to almost perfect spheres and balanced one upon the other, and he knew they would reach the entrance to the valley before noon. He halted the patrol and let them snatch a quick meal standing at their horses’ heads as he went down the line checking their equipment and assigning each of them a separate task.

  ‘Sergeant, you and Trooper Thorn are to stay close behind me. We will be the first through the pass and into the valley. There is a small village in the centre of it, and there may be Matabele amongst the huts. Don’t stop for them – even if there are warriors with them, leave them for the others. Ride straight on to the cave at the end of the valley; we must find the witch before she can escape.’

  ‘This witch, what does she look like, skipper?’

  ‘I am not sure, she may be quite young, probably naked.’

  ‘You leave ‘er to me, mate.’ Jim Thorn grinned lasciviously and nudged Will, but Zouga ignored him.

  ‘Any woman you find in the cave will be the witch. Now don’t be put off by the sound of wild animals, or strange voices – she is a skilled ventriloquist.’ He went on, giving precise details, and ended grimly: ‘Our orders are harsh, but they may eventually save the lives of many of our comrades by breaking the morale of the Matabele fighting impis.’

  They mounted again, and almost immediately the road began to narrow so that the branches brushed their stirrups as they passed, and Zouga’s horse stumbled in a narrow stream, clumsy with the leathers over its hooves. Then he was through and he looked up the sheer granite cliff that blocked their way. The entrance to the passage through the rock was a dark vertical cleft and high above it a thatched watch-hut was perched in a niche of the granite.

  As he stared up at it, Zouga saw an indistinct movement on the ledge.

  ‘Look out above!’ Even as he yelled, a dozen black men appeared on the lip of the cliff, and each of them hurled a bundle of what looked like staves out over the edge. They scattered as they fell, and the steel sparkled as the weighted heads dropped, points first, towards them. There was a fluting sound in the air all around them, soft as swallows’ wings, then the rattle of steel against rock and the thud of the points into the earth beneath the hooves of the horses.

  One of the steel-headed javelins caught a trooper in the side of his neck, driving down behind the collar bone, deep into one lung so that when he tried to scream the blood gagged him and bubbled out over his chin. His horse reared and whinnied wildly, and he fell backwards out of the saddle; and then all was milling, shouting confusion on the narrow track.

  Through it Zouga craned to watch the ledge, and saw the defenders lining the lip again, each with another bundle of javelins on his shoulder. Zouga dropped his reins and used both hands to aim his rifle vertically upwards.

  He emptied the magazine, firing as rapidly as he could pump cartridges into the breech, and though his aim was spoiled by the dancing horse under him, one of the men on the ledge arched over backwards with his arms windmilling wildly and then fell free, writhing and twisting and shrieking in the air until he hit the rock in front of Zouga’s horse, and his screams and struggles ceased abruptly.

  The rest of the men on the ledge scattered away, and Zouga waved the empty rifle over his head.

  ‘Forward!’ he yelled. ‘Follow me!’ And he plunged into the forbidding crevice that split the cliff vertically from base to crest.

  The passage was so narrow that his stirrup irons struck sparks from the rock walls on each side of him, but he looked back and saw Will Daniel pounding along behind. He had lost his slouch hat. His bald head was washed with sweat, and he was grinning like a hungry hyena as he reloaded his rifle from the bandolier across his chest.

  The passage turned sharply, and the white sand that floored it splashed up under the hooves, and the mica chips sparkled even in the gloom. Ahead of Zouga a tiny freshet of clear water fountained from the rock, and his horse gathered its front feet under its chest and jumped the stream easily; then suddenly they burst out from the narrow passage, back into the sunlight again.

  The hidden valley of the Umlimo lay in a green basin below them, the little village of huts as its centre; and in the base of the cliff beyond it, a mile or so away, Zouga could make out the low entrance of the cavern, dark as the eye cavity in a bleached skull. It was all exactly as he remembered it.

  ‘Troop, into line wheel!’ he shouted as his horsemen galloped out into the open behind him; and they swung into extended formation, facing the valley, the rifles unsheathed and cocked, impatient and fierce as they saw before them the prize they had come so far to find.

  ‘Amadoda!’ shouted Will Daniel, pointing at the band of warriors that were trotting out of the village to face the line of horsemen.

  ‘Twenty of them,’ Zouga counted swiftly. ‘They’ll give us no trouble.’ And then he stood in his stirrups. ‘Walk march, forward!’

  The horsemen moved down the slope, keeping their line – while the warriors lifted their shields high and raced to meet them.

  ‘Troop, halt.’ Zouga ordered when the nearest Matabele was a hundred paces ahead. ‘Pick your targets.’

  The first volley, carefully aimed by hard and experienced soldiers, scythed the line of charging warriors like the reaper’s steel; and they went down, falling over their shields, plumes tumbling from their heads, assegais pinning harmlessly into the earth, and yet a handful of them came on without checking.

  ‘Fire at will!’ Zouga called, and looked over the sights of his rifle at a bounding Matabele, watching him grow in size with every pace, seized by a strange reluctance to kill a brave man such as this one.

  ‘Jee! Jee!’ the Matabele yelled defiantly, and raised his shield to clear his spear arm. Zouga shot him in the notc
h of bone at the base of his throat and the Matabele spun sharply round, hit the ground with one shoulder and rolled against the legs of Zouga’s horse.

  Half a dozen of the Matabele had broken in the face of those deadly volleys, and were running back towards the village. The others were strewn about in front of the line of horsemen.

  ‘After them.’ Zouga hardly raised his voice above a conversational tone. ‘Forward! Charge!’

  ‘Sergeant Daniel, Trooper Thorn, to the cave.’ He swung his horse’s head to gallop clear of the cluster of huts, and there was the body of one of the fallen Matabele directly in his path. He altered course again to miss it, and both Thorn and Daniel pulled a length ahead of him.

  Then the Matabele rolled lithely to his feet, and dodged in front of Zouga. Playing dead was an old Zulu trick, and Zouga should have been ready for it. But his rifle was in his left hand, and he tried to get it across, at the same time trying to turn his horse and shouting an impotent challenge at the warrior.

  The Matabele extended his spear arm stiffly and let the running horse impale itself upon the broad silver blade. It went deeply into the heaving chest between the front legs, and the horse reeled from the blow and then went over on its side.

  Zouga barely had time to kick his feet out of the irons and jump clear before the carcass hit the earth with all four legs kicking briefly at the sky.

  Zouga landed badly, but gathered himself and whirled to face the warrior. He was only just in time to deflect the blood-smeared assegai as the Matabele struck at his belly. The steel rang against the barrel of his rifle and then they were straining chest to chest.

  The man smelled of woodsmoke and ochre and fat, and his body was hard as carved ebony and slippery as a freshly caught catfish. Zouga knew he could not hold him for more than a few seconds, and with one hand on the muzzle and the other on the breech, Zouga rammed the barrel of the rifle up under the man’s chin into his bulging corded throat, and hooked desperately with the rowel of his spur for the ankle.

  They went over backwards, Zouga on top, and he threw all his weight onto the rifle at the moment they hit the hard earth, savagely driving it into the Matabele’s throat, and the neck broke with a crunch like a walnut in a silver nutcracker. The warrior’s lids fluttered down over the smoky bloodshot eyes and the body went limp under Zouga’s chest.

  Zouga pushed himself to his feet and looked around him quickly. His troopers were amongst the huts, and there was the thudding of scattered rifle fire as they finished off the survivors of that gallant but futile charge. He saw one of his men chase a scampering old naked crone, her empty dugs swinging and her thin legs almost giving under her with terror. He rode her down, and then backed his horse up to trample her – shouting and swearing with excitement and firing down into the frail, withered body that lay crushed against the earth.

  Beyond the village, Zouga saw two horses going up the slope towards the base of the cliff at full gallop, and even as he started forward, they reached it and Daniel and Thorn jumped from the saddles and disappeared into the mouth of the cavern.

  It was half a mile from where Zouga had fallen to the base of the cliff. He reloaded his rifle as he ran. The fight with the Matabele had shaken him, and his riding boots hampered each step. It took him many long minutes to toil up the slope to where Daniel and Thorn had left their horses, and by then he was badly winded.

  He leaned against the stone portal of the cavern, peering into the black and threatening depths, while each breath he drew jarred his whole body. Tumultuous echoes boomed out of the blackness of the cavern, the shouts of men and the bellowing and snarling of wild animals, the screams of a woman in terrible anguish and the crash of rifle fire.

  Zouga pushed himself away from the cliff and stooped through the entrance. Almost immediately he stumbled over a body. It was that of an old man, his hair pure white and his skin wrinkled like a dried prune. Zouga stepped over him, into a puddle of his dark, sticky blood.

  As he moved forward, Zouga’s eyes accustomed to the gloom, and he peered about him at the mummified bodies of ancient dead piled haphazard against the walls of the cavern. Here and there white bone gleamed through the parchment of leathery dried flesh, and an arm was raised in a macabre salutation or a gesture of supplication.

  Zouga moved on through this grisly catacomb, and ahead of him there was a diffused source of light. He quickened his pace as another gale of wild screams was this time mingled with booming inhuman laughter that bounced from the rocky walls and roof.

  He turned a corner of jagged rock and looked down into a natural amphitheatre in the floor of the cavern. It was lit by the flames of a flickering orange fire, and from above by a single beam of sunlight that came in through a narrow crack in the high arched roof. The sunbeam was dimmed to an unearthly blue by the tendrils of curling smoke from the fire, and like the limelights of a theatre stage it dramatized the group of struggling figures on the floor of the amphitheatre beyond the fire.

  Zouga ran down the natural steps, and had almost reached them before he realized what they were doing.

  Between them Daniel and Thorn had the body of a young black girl stretched out on the rocky floor, the girl was naked, on her back with her limbs spreadeagled. Her oiled body was as glossy as the pelt of a panther, her limbs were long and shapely. She was struggling with the desperation of a wild animal in a trap. But her screams were muted by the fur kaross wrapped about her head, and Jim Thorn knelt upon her shoulders, pinning her helplessly while he twisted her arms back against the joint of the elbows and roared with cruel laughter that was too loud for his skinny body.

  Will Daniel was over the girl, his face swollen and dark with congested blood. His belt and breeches were down across the back of his knees. He was grunting and snuffling like a boar at the trough. His pale buttocks were covered with a fuzz of sparse curly black hair. He drove against the girl with a wet slapping sound like a washerwoman pounding laundry on a slab.

  Before Zouga could reach him, Will Daniel’s whole body stiffened and jerked spasmodically and then he rolled off the tender young body, and he was bloodied from the knees to the navel of his sagging, hairy paunch.

  ‘By God, Jim my lad,’ he panted at the little trooper, ‘that was better than a belly ache. Get up on the bitch for your turn—’ Then he saw Zouga out of the shadows, and he grinned at him. ‘First come, first served, Major—’

  Zouga took two strides to reach him, and then he kicked him in his smiling mouth with the heel of his riding boot. Will Daniel’s bottom lip split open like the petals of a rose, and he scrambled to his feet, spitting out white chips of tooth, and hauling up his breeches over his monstrous nakedness.

  ‘I’ll kill you for that.’ He tugged at the knife on his dangling unclinched belt, but Zouga thrust the muzzle of his rifle into his belly, doubling him over at the waist, and then whirled to slam the butt against Jim Thorn’s temple, as Thorn was reaching for his abandoned rifle.

  ‘Get on your feet,’ Zouga told him coldly, and, swaying and clutching the swelling above his ear, Jim Thorn backed off against the wall of the cave.

  ‘I’ll get you for this,’ Will Daniel wheezed painfully, still holding his belly, and Zouga turned the rifle back onto him.

  ‘Get out,’ he said softly. ‘Get out of here you filthy bloody animals.’

  They shuffled up the steps of the amphitheatre; and from the shadows of the cavern entrance, Will Daniel yelled again, his voice blustering and angry.

  ‘I’ll not forget this, Major bloody Ballantyne. I’ll get you yet!’

  Zouga turned back to the girl. She had pulled the kaross off her head, and she crouched on the stone floor with her legs curled up under her. She was trying to staunch the flow of her virgin blood with her hands, but she stared at Zouga with the tortured ferocity of a leopard held by the serrated jaws of a spring trap.

  Zouga felt an overwhelming compassion sweep over him – yet he knew there was no succour he could give her.

  ‘You,
who were Umlimo, are Umlimo no longer,’ he said at last, and she drew back her head and spat at him. The frothy spittle splattered against his boots, but the effort made her whimper with pain and press her hands against her lower belly. A fresh trickle of bright arterial blood snaked down her thigh.

  ‘I came to destroy the Umlimo,’ he said. ‘But she is destroyed not by a bullet from a gun. Go, child. The gift of the spirits has been taken from you. Go swiftly, but go in peace.’

  Like a wounded animal she crept on her hands and knees into the dark maze of tunnels beyond the amphitheatre, leaving a speckle of bloody drops upon the stone floor.

  She looked back at him once. ‘Peace, you say, white man. There will be no peace, ever!’

  And then she was gone into the shadows.

  The rains had not yet come – but their heralds soared up to the heavens, great ranges of cumulus cloud, their heads shaped like mushrooms. Silver and blue and imperial purple, they stood above the Hills of the Indunas.

  The heat seemed trapped beneath them. It clanged down upon the iron hills like a blacksmith’s hammer on the anvil. The impis were thick as safari ants upon the slopes; they squatted in dense ranks their shields under them, their assegais and guns laid on the rocky earth before them – thousands upon thousands they waited, every plumed head craning down towards the royal kraal at the foot of the hills.

  There was the beat of a single drum. Tap – tap! Tap – tap! And the great black mass of warriors stirred like an amorphous sea monster rising from the depths.

  ‘The Elephant comes! He comes! He comes!’ It was a soft growl in all their throats.

  Through the gates of the stockade filed a small procession, twenty men wearing the tassels of valour, twenty men walking proud, the blood royal of Kumalo, and at their head the huge heavy figure of the king.

  Lobengula had thrown off all the European gee-gaws, the brass buttons and mirrors, the gold brocaded coat – and he was dressed in the regalia of a Matabele king.

  The headring was on his brow, and heron feathers in his hair. His cloak was royal leopard skin, spotted gold, and his kilt was of leopard tails. His swollen ankles, crippled with gout, were covered by the war rattles, but he mastered the agony of the disease, striding out with ponderous dignity, so the waiting impis gasped with the splendour of his presence.