Men of Men
Page 68
Louise took his hand, and they walked down under the trees towards the river.
A man and a woman came down the narrow winding pathway through the thick riverine bush.
The man carried his shield on his left shoulder, with the broad-bladed assegai secured to it by the rawhide thongs; but his right arm was shortened and deformed, twisted out from his shoulder as though the bone had been broken and badly set.
There was no superfluous flesh upon his powerfully boned frame; the rack of his ribs showed through, and his skin lacked the lustre of health. It was the dull lifeless colour of lamp-black – as though he had just risen from a long sickbed. On his trunk and back gleamed the satiny rosettes of freshly healed gunshot wounds, like newly-minted coins of pure blue cobalt.
The woman who followed him was young and straight. Her eyes were slanted and her features those of an Egyptian princess. Her breasts were fat and full with milk, and her infant son was strapped tightly to her back so that his head would not jerk or wobble to her long, swinging gait.
Bazo reached the bank of the river and turned to his wife.
‘We will rest here, Tanase.’
She loosened the knot and swung the child onto her hip. She took one of her swollen nipples between thumb and forefinger until milk spurted from it, and then she touched it to the boy’s lips. Immediately he began to feed with little pig-like snuffles and grunts.
‘When will we reach the next village?’ she asked.
‘When the sun is there.’ Bazo pointed halfway down the sky. ‘Are you not weary of the road we have travelled so far, so long!’
‘I will never weary, not until we have delivered the word to every man and woman and child in Matabeleland,’ she replied, and she began to joggle the baby and croon to it:
‘Tungata is your name, for you will be a seeker.
‘Zebiwe is your name, for what you will seek is that which has been stolen from you and your people.
‘Drink my words Tungata Zebiwe, even as you drink my milk. Remember them all your days, Tungata, and teach them to your own children. Remember the wounds on your father’s breast, and the wounds in your mother’s heart – and teach your children to hate.’
She changed the infant to her other hip, and her other breast, and she went on crooning until he had drunk his fill and his little head drooped sleepily. Then she slung him upon her back once more, and they crossed the river and went on.
They reached the village an hour before the setting of the sun. There were less than a hundred people living in the scattered huts. They saw the young couple from afar and a dozen of the men came out to greet them with respect and lead them in.
The women brought them grilled maize cakes and thick soured milk in calabash gourds, and the children came to stare at the strangers and to whisper to one another. ‘These are the wanderers – these are the people from the Hills of the Matopos.’
When they had eaten, and the sun had set, the villagers built up the fire. Tanase stood in the firelight, and they squatted in a circle about her, silent and intent.
‘I am called Tanase,’ she said. ‘And once I was the Umlimo.’
There was a low gasp of shock at her mention of that name.
‘I was the Umlimo,’ Tanase repeated. ‘But then the powers of the spirits were taken from me.’
They sighed softly and stirred like dead leaves when a random breeze passes.
‘There is another who is now the Umlimo and lives in the secret place in the hills, for the Umlimo never dies.’
There was a little hum of assent.
‘Now I am the voice of the Umlimo only. I am the messenger who brings you the word of the Umlimo. Listen well, my children, for the Umlimo prophesies thus.’ She paused and now the silence was charged with religious terror.
‘When the noon sun goes dark with wings, and the trees are bare of leaves in the springtime – then warriors of Matabele put an edge to your steel.’
Tanase paused and the firelight gleamed on the hundreds of eyes that watched her.
‘When the cattle lie with their heads twisted to touch their flank and cannot rise – then will be the time to rise up and to strike with the steel.’
She spread her arms like a crucifix and cried out:
‘That is the prophecy. Harken to it, children of Mashobane; Harken to the voice of the Umlimo. For the Matabele will be great once again.’
In the dawn the two wanderers, carrying the infant who was named the ‘Seeker after what has been stolen’, went on towards the next village, where the elders came out to greet them.
In the southern springtime of 1896 on the shores of a lake near the southern extremity of the Rift Valley, that mighty geological fault which splits the African Continental Shield like an axe stroke, a bizarre hatching occurred.
The huge egg masses of schistocerca gregaria, the desert locust, that were buried in the loose earth along the border of the lake, released countless multitudes of flightless nymphs. The eggs had been laid by females in the solitary phase of the locust’s life cycle; but so vast was the hatching of their progeny that the earth could not contain them, and though they spread out over an area of almost fifty square miles, they were forced to crawl upon one another’s backs.
The constant agitation and stimulation of contact with other nymphs wrought a miraculous change in this teeming tide of insects. Their colour turned to a vivid orange and midnight black, unlike their parents’ drab brown. Their metabolic rate surged and they became hyperactive and nervous. Their legs grew longer and stronger, their gregarious instincts more powerful, so that they flowed in a compact body that seemed to be a single monstrous organism. They had entered the gregarious phase of the life cycle, and when at last they moulted for the last time and their newly-fledged wings had dried, the entire swarm took spontaneously to the air.
In that first baptism of flight, they were spurred by their high body temperature, which was raised further by their muscular activity. They could not stop until the cool of evening, and then they settled in such dense swarms that the branches of the forest snapped under their weight. They fed voraciously all night, and in the morning the rising heat spurred them into flight once more.
They rose in a cloud so dense that the sound of their wings was the drumming roar of hurricane winds. The trees they left behind were stripped completely of their tender springtime foliage. As they passed overhead, their wings eclipsed the noonday sun, and a deep shadow fell over the land.
They were headed south towards the Zambezi river.
From the Great Sud where the infant Nile river weaves its way through fathomless swamps of floating papyrus, southwards over the wide savannahs of eastern and central Africa, down to the Zambezi and beyond, roamed vast herds of buffalo.
They had never been hunted by the primitive tribes, who preferred easier game; only a few Europeans with sophisticated weapons had ventured into these remote lands, and even the lions which followed the herds could not check their natural multiplication.
The grasslands were black with the huge bovine black beasts. Twenty or thirty thousand strong, the herds were so dense that the animals in the rear literally starved, for the pasture was destroyed before they could reach it. Weakened by their own vast multitudes, they were ripe for the pestilence that came out of the north.
It was the same plague that Moses’ God had inflicted on the Pharaoh of Egypt, the rinderpest, the peste bovine, a virus disease which attacks cattle and all other ruminants. The stricken animals were blinded by the discharge of thick mucus from their eyes. It poured in ropes from their gaping jaws and nostrils to contaminate the pastures and infect any other animal that passed over them.
Their emaciated bodies were wracked by spasms of profuse diarrhoea and dysentery. When at last they dropped, the convulsions twisted their heads back upon their tortured necks, so that their noses touched one of their flanks – and they could never rise again.
So swift was the passage of the disease that a herd of ten thousand
Swiftly, carried by the vultures and the blundering, bellowing herds, the plague swept southwards towards the Zambezi river.
On the banks of that mighty river Tanase stood beside another watch-fire and repeated the prophecy of the Umlimo:
‘When the noon sun goes dark with wings, and the trees are bare of leaves in the springtime –
‘When the cattle lie with their heads twisted to touch their flank, and cannot rise—’
Thus she cried, and the people of the Matabele listened and took new heart and looked to their steel.
OUT NOW
VICIOUS CIRCLE
THE LATEST HECTOR CROSS NOVEL BY WILBUR SMITH
LOVE. LOSS. REVENGE.
On the far side of the boggy hollow, Hazel’s Ferrari was just topping the crest of the hill. Hector realized that they had been neatly cut off from each other by the van and bike.
‘Hazel!’ Hector shouted her name as all his feral instincts kicked in at full force. ‘They are after Hazel!’ He grabbed his mobile phone and punched in her number.
A disembodied voice answered the call: ‘The person you have called is presently unavailable. Please try again later.’
When Hector Cross’s new life is overturned, he immediately recognizes the ruthless hand of an enemy he has faced many times before. A terrorist group has re-emerged – like a deadly scorpion from beneath its rock.
Determined to fight back, Hector draws together a team of his most loyal friends from his former life in Cross Bow Security, a company originally contracted to protect his beloved wife, Hazel Bannock, and her company, the Bannock Oil Corp. Together they travel to the remotest parts of the Middle East, to hunt down those who pursue him and his loved ones.
For Hazel and Hector have a child, a precious daughter, who he will go to the ends of the earth to protect. And brutal figures from the Bannock family’s past – thought long gone – are returning, with an agenda so sinister that Hector realizes he is facing a new breed of enemy. One whose shifting attack and dark secrets take Hector to the heart of Africa and to a series of crimes so shocking they demand revenge.
PRAISE FOR WILBUR SMITH
‘Wilbur Smith rarely misses a trick’
Sunday Times
‘The world’s leading adventure writer’
Daily Express
‘Action is the name of Wilbur Smith’s game and he’s a master’
Washington Post
‘The pace would do credit to a Porsche, and the invention is as bright and explosive as a fireworks display’
Sunday Telegraph
‘A violent saga . . . told with vigour and enthusiasm . . . Wilbur Smith spins a fine tale’
Evening Standard
‘A bonanza of excitement’
New York Times
‘A natural storyteller who moves confidently and often splendidly in his period and sustains a flow of convincing incident’
Scotsman
‘Raw experience, grim realism, history and romance welded with mystery and the bewilderment of life itself’
Library Journal
‘Extrovert and vigorous . . . constantly changing incidents and memorable portraits’
Liverpool Daily Post
‘An immensely powerful book, disturbing and compulsive, harsh yet compassionate’
She
‘An epic novel . . . it would be hard to think of a theme that was more appropriate today . . . Smith writes with a great passion for the soul of Africa’
Today
‘I read on to the last page, hooked by its frenzied inventiveness piling up incident upon incident . . . mighty entertainment’
Yorkshire Post
‘There is a streak of genuine poetry, all the more attractive for being unfeigned’
Sunday Telegraph
‘Action follows action . . . mystery is piled on mystery . . . tales to delight the millions of addicts of the gutsy adventure story’
Sunday Express
‘Action-crammed’
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‘Rattling good adventure’
Evening Standard
MEN OF MEN
WILBUR SMITH was born in Central Africa in 1933. He was educated at Michaelhouse and Rhodes University. He became a full-time writer in 1964 after the successful publication of When the Lion Feeds, and has since written over thirty novels, all meticulously researched on his numerous expeditions world-wide. His books are now translated into twenty-six languages.
Find out more about Wilbur Smith
by visiting his author website,
www.wilbursmithbooks.com
THE NOVELS OF WILBUR SMITH
THE COURTNEYS
When the Lion Feeds
The Sound of Thunder
A Sparrow Falls
Birds of Prey
Monsoon
Blue Horizon
The Triumph of the Sun
THE COURTNEYS OF AFRICA
The Burning Shore
Power of the Sword
Rage
A Time to Die
Golden Fox
Assegai
THE BALLANTYNE NOVELS
A Falcon Flies
Men of Men
The Angels Weep
The Leopard Hunts in Darkness
THE EGYPTIAN NOVELS
River God
The Seventh Scroll
Warlock
The Quest
Also
The Dark of the Sun
Shout at the Devil
Gold Mine
The Diamond Hunters
The Sunbird
Eagle in the Sky
The Eye of the Tiger
Cry Wolf
Hungry as the Sea
Wild Justice
Elephant Song
Those in Peril
Vicious Circle
First published in the UK 1981 by William Heinemann Ltd
This electronic edition published 2015 by Pan Books
an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
Pan Macmillan, 20 New Wharf Road, London N1 9RR
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www.panmacmillan.com
ISBN 978-0-330-47294-4
Copyright © Wilbur Smith 1981
Cover Images © Shutterstock
The right of Wilbur Smith to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, organizations, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, places, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
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