by Wilbur Smith
He crushed it and it crackled and exploded in a burst of yellow juice. ‘Locusts!’ He looked up again, marvelling at their multitudes. ‘The third plague of Egypt,’ he spoke aloud, then swung the mare away from the onrushing wall of flying bodies, and put his heels into her, driving her at a gallop back down the hill towards the Mission. The locust cloud flew faster than the mare could go at a full gallop, so he rode in semi-darkness, surrounded by the great drumming roar of wings.
A dozen times he almost lost the track, so dense was the swarm in the air around him. They settled on his back and crawled over him, the sharp feet needling his exposed skin. As soon as he struck them away, others took their place, and he had a sense of horror, of being overwhelmed and drowned in a seething cauldron of living organisms.
Ahead of him the buildings of Khami Mission loomed out of the darkened noon day. The twins and servants were gathered on the veranda, paralysed with astonishment, and he flung himself off the mare and ran towards them.
‘Get every person who can walk down into the fields. Take pots, drums – anything they can bang to make a noise, blankets to wave—’
The twins recovered swiftly. Elizabeth pulled a shawl over her head to protect it and ran out into the swirling storm of locusts towards the church and the wards, while Vicky disappeared into the kitchen and came out carrying a nest of iron pots.
‘Good girl,’ Mungo gave her a quick hug. ‘When this is over I want a word about you and Harry.’ He snatched the largest pot from her. ‘Come on.’
With a suddenness that brought them up short from a dead run, the air cleared and the sunlight was so white and blinding that they had to shield their eyes against it.
It was no release, for the entire heaven-high cloud of locusts had sunk to the earth, and though the sky was blue and high, the fields and the forest were transformed. The tallest trees looked like grotesquely coloured haystacks, seething heaps of orange and black. The branches swayed and sagged to the unbearable weight of tiny bodies, and every few seconds there was a sharp crack as a branch snapped and came crashing down. Before their eyes the standing corn flattened under the onslaught, and the very earth crawled with the myriad clicking, rustling bodies.
They ran into the fields, a hundred frantic human figures, banging the metal pots and flapping the coarse grey hospital blankets, and in front of each of them the insects rose in a brief puff of wings and resettled as they passed.
Now the air was raucous with a new sound. The excited shrieks of thousands of birds gorging upon the swarm. There were squadrons of jet-black drongos with long forked tails, starlings of iridescent malachite green, rollers and bee-eaters in jewelled colours of turquoise and sunlight yellow, carmine and purple, jinking and whirling in full flight, ecstatic with greed. The storks strode knee-deep through the living carpet, marabous with horrific scaly heads, woolly-necked storks with scarves of fluffy white, saddle-bills with yellow medallions decorating their long red and black beaks, all of them pecking hungrily at the living banquet.
It did not last long, less than an hour. Then, as abruptly as it had settled, the great swarm roared spontaneously into the air as though it were a single creature. Once again an unnatural dusk fell across the earth as the sun was obliterated, and a false dawn followed as the clouds thinned and winged away southwards. In the empty fields, the human figures seemed tiny and insignificant as they stared about them in horror. They did not recognize their home.
The maize fields were reduced to bare brown earth, even the coarse pithy stalks of the corn had been devoured. The rose bushes around the homestead were merely brown sticks. The peach and apple blossom in the orchards was gone and bare twisted branches seemed to be an echo of winter, even the indigenous forests on the hills and the thick riverine bush along the banks of the Khami river had been devastated.
There was no trace of green, no leaf nor blade of grass untouched in the wide brown swathe of destruction that the swarm had blazed through the heart of Matabeleland.
Juba travelled with two female attendants. It was a symptom of the decline that had come upon the Matabele nation. There was a time, before the occupation of the Company, when a senior wife of one of the great indunas of the House of Kumalo would have had an entourage of forty women in waiting, and fifty plumed and armed amadoda to see her safely to her husband’s kraal. Now Juba carried her own sleeping-mat balanced upon her head, and despite her great and abundant flesh, she moved with an extraordinary lightness and grace, her back straight and her head on high.
She had shed the woollen vest, now that she was away from the Mission, although she still wore the crucifix around her neck. Her huge naked breasts swung and bounced with youthful elasticity. They had been anointed with fat and shone in the sunlight, and her legs flashed under the short cowhide apron as she moved at a gait between a trot and a glide, that covered the dusty track at surprising speed.
The two attendants, both young newly married women from Juba’s kraal, followed her closely, but they were silent, not singing nor laughing. Instead they turned their heads from side to side under their burdens to stare in awe at the bleak and denuded land around them. The locust swarms had passed this way also. The bare crippled trees were devoid of insect or bird life. The sun had already scorched the exposed earth and it was crumbling into dust and blowing away on the little eddies of wind.
They came up over a low rise, and involuntarily stopped and drew closer together, not even laying down their bundles, so complete was their horrified fascination at what lay ahead of them. Once it had been the great regimental kraal of the Inyati impi which Gandang commanded. Then, by the decree of the Native Commissioner at Bulawayo, the impi had been disbanded and scattered. The kraal had been destroyed by fire. However, when the women had last seen it, new growth of grass had begun to cover the scars, but now it had been stripped away by the locust swarms and the circular black banks of ash lay exposed once again. They invoked memories of a past grandeur, and the new kraal built to house Gandang and his close family was tiny and insignificant in comparison.
It lay a mile down the bank of the Inyati river, and the pasture in between was destroyed. The spring rains had not yet filled the river and the sandbanks were silvery white, the polished water-worn boulders glittered like reptile scales in the sunlight. The new kraal itself seemed deserted, and the cattle-pens were empty.
‘They have taken the cattle again,’ said Ruth, the handsome young woman who stood beside Juba. She was not yet twenty years of age, and although she had already worn the headdress of the married woman for two seasons, she had not yet conceived. It was the secret terror that she was barren that had driven her to convert to Christianity – three gods as omnipotent as the ones which Juba had described to her would certainly not allow one of their own to remain childless. She had been baptized by Nomusa almost a full moon previously, and her name had been changed by her new gods and Nomusa from Kampu to Ruth. Now she was most anxious to rejoin her husband, one of Gandang’s nephews, and to put to the test the efficacy of her new religion.
‘No,’ Juba told her shortly. ‘Gandang will have sent the herds eastwards to find new pasture.’
‘The amadoda – where are the men?’
‘Perhaps they have gone with the cattle.’
‘That is work for boys, not men.’
Juba snorted. ‘Since One-Bright-Eye has taken their shields, our men are merely mujiba.’
The mujiba were the herdboys, not yet initiated into their fighting regiments, and Juba’s companions were shamed by the truth of her words. It was true that their men had been disarmed, and that the cattle and slave raids which had been the main activity and diversion of the amadoda had been forbidden. At least their own husbands were blooded warriors, they had washed their spears in the blood of Wilson’s troopers on the banks of the Shangani river in the one beautiful killing, the one small Matabele victory of that war, but what would become of the younger men, now that a whole way of life had been denied them? Would they ever be
able to win on the battlefield the right to go in to the women, and take a wife? Or would the customs and laws under which they had lived all their lives fall into disregard and disuse? And if they did, then what would become of the nation?
‘The women are still here,’ Juba pointed out the rows of workers in the brown denuded cornfields. They swayed in rhythm to the swing of the hoes.
‘They are replanting the fields,’ Ruth said.
‘It is too late,’ Juba muttered, ‘there will be no harvest to celebrate at the dance of the first fruits this season.’ Then she roused herself. ‘Let us go down.’
At one of the shallow pools between the sandbanks, they laid aside their headloads and shed their aprons. In the cool green water they washed away the sweat and dust of the road. Ruth found a buffalo creeper that had escaped the locusts and she picked yellow flowers to twine into headpieces for all of them.
The women in the fields saw them as they came up the bank and ran shrieking with delight to greet them, jostling each other in their eagerness to make obeisance to Juba.
‘Mamewethu‘, they called her, as they bowed and clapped their hands in deep respect. They took her load from her and two of her grandchildren came forward shyly to hold each of her hands. Then, singing the songs of welcome, the little procession filed up to the kraal.
Not all the men had left. Gandang sat under the bare branches of the wild fig tree on his carved stool of chiefship and Juba hurried to kneel before him.
He smiled down at her fondly, nodding comfortably at her protestations of duty and devotion. Then as an extraordinary mark of his feeling for her, he lifted her with his own hand and seated her on the mat which one of his junior wives spread before him. He waited while she refreshed herself from the big clay beerpot that another wife knelt to hand her.
Then he waved the women and children away, and alone at last the two of them leaned their heads together and talked like the beloved companions that they were.
‘Nomusa is well?’ Gandang asked. He did not share Juba’s deep love for the woman doctor at Khami Mission, in fact he viewed with deep suspicion this alien religion that his senior wife had adopted. It was Gandang’s impi that had caught Wilson’s little patrol on the banks of the Shangani river during the war and slain them to a man. Amongst the corpses, stripped naked by his warriors so that the shocking mulberry-coloured assegai wounds in their white flesh were exposed, had lain the body of the woman missionary’s first husband. There could never be love where there had been blood. However, Gandang respected the white woman. He had known her as long as he had known Juba, and he had watched her unflagging efforts to champion and protect the Matabele people. She had been friend and adviser to the old King Lobengula, and she had brought comfort to thousands of sick and dying Matabele, so now his concern was genuine. ‘Has she thrown aside the evil spirits that she brought upon herself by drinking the girl’s blood?’
It was inevitable that the accounts of Robyn’s experiment with the transference of malaria would become garbled and take on the aura of witchcraft.
‘She did not drink the girl’s blood.’ Juba tried to explain that the taking of blood had been for the good of the Matabele nation, but because she did not understand it completely herself, her explanation was unconvincing. She saw the doubt in Gandang’s eyes, and she abandoned the effort.
‘Bazo, the Axe?’ she asked instead. ‘Where is he?’ Her first-born son was also her favourite.
‘In the hills with all the other young men,’ Gandang answered.
The Matopos Hills were always the refuge of the Matabele in time of danger and trouble, and Juba leaned forward anxiously to ask, ‘There has been trouble?’
Gandang shrugged in reply. ‘In these times there is always trouble.’
‘From whence does it come?’
‘One-Bright-Eye sent word with his kanka – with his jackals – that we must provide two hundred young men to work on the new gold mine in the south that belongs to Henshaw, the Hawk.’
‘You did not send the men?’
‘I told his kanka.’ The derogatory name for the Company native police likened them to the little scavengers that followed the lion for the scraps, and expressed the hatred that the Matabele felt for these traitors. ‘I told them that the white men had deprived me of my shield and assegai and my honour as an induna, therefore I had lost the right to command my young men to dig the white men’s holes for them or to build their roads.’
‘And now One-Bright-Eye comes?’
Juba spoke with resignation. She knew all the moves that must be made: the command, the definance, the confrontation. She had watched it all before, and now she was sick of men’s pride and men’s wars and the death and maiming and suffering.
‘Yes,’ Gandang agreed. ‘Not all the kanka are traitors and one has sent word that One-Bright-Eye is on the road, with fifty men – and so the young men have gone into the hills.’
‘But you stay here to meet him?’ Juba asked. ‘Unarmed and alone, you wait for One-Bright-Eye and fifty armed men?’
‘I have never run from any man,’ Gandang said simply, ‘never in my life.’
And Juba felt her pride and her love choke her as she looked into the stern handsome face, and noticed as if for the first time the hoar-frost sparkling on the dark cap of his hair above the headring.
‘Gandang, my lord, the old times have passed. Things change. The sons of Lobengula work as house-boys in the kraal of Lodzi far away in the south beside the great water. The impis are scattered, and there is a new and gentle god in the land, the god Jesus. Everything has changed, and we must change with it.’
Gandang was silent a long time, staring out across the river as though he had not heard her speak. Then he sighed and took a little red snuff from the buckhorn that hung on a thong around his neck. He sneezed and wiped his eyes, and looked at her.
‘Your body is part of my body,’ he said. ‘Your first-born son is my son. If I do not trust you, then I cannot trust myself. So I tell you, that the old times will come again.’
‘What is this, Lord?’ Juba asked. ‘What strange words are these?’
‘The words of the Umlimo. She has called forth an oracle. The nation will be free and great again—’
‘The Umlimo sent the impis onto the guns at Shangani and Bembesi,’ Juba whispered bitterly. ‘The Umlimo preaches war and death and pestilence. There is a new god now. The god Jesus of peace.’
‘Peace?’ Gandang asked bitterly. ‘If that is the word of this god, then the white men do not listen very well to their own. Ask the Zulu of the peace they found at Ulundi, ask the shade of Lobengula of the peace they brought with them to Matabeleland.’
Juba could not reply, for again she had not fully understood when Nomusa explained, and she bowed her head in resignation. After a while, when Gandang was certain that she had accepted what he had said, he went on:
‘The oracle of the Umlimo is in three parts – and already the first has come to pass. The darkness at noon, the wings of the locust, and the trees bare of leaves in the springtime. It is happening and we must look to our steel.’
‘The white men have broken the assegais.’
‘In the hills there has been a new birthing of steel.’ Involuntarily Gandang lowered his voice to a whisper. ‘The forges of the Rozwi smiths burn day and night and the molten iron runs copiously as the waters of the Zambezi.’
Juba stared at him. ‘Who has done this?’
‘Bazo, your own son.’
‘The wounds of the guns are still fresh and bright upon his body.’
‘But he is an induna of Kumalo,’ Gandang whispered proudly, ‘and he is a man.’
‘One man,’ Juba replied. ‘One man only, where are the impis?’
‘Preparing in secret, in the wild places, re-learning the skills and arts which they have not yet forgotten.’
‘Gandang, my lord, I feel my heart beginning to break again, I feel my tears gathering like the rainstorms of summer. Must ther
e always be war?’
‘You are a daughter of Matabele, of pure Zanzi blood from the south. Your father’s father followed Mzilikazi, your father spilled his blood for him, as your own son did for Lobengula – do you have to ask that question?’
She was silent, knowing how futile it was to argue with him when there was that glitter in his eyes. When the fighting madness was in him, there was no room for reason.
‘Juba, my little Dove, there will be work for you when the prophecy of the Umlimo comes to full term.’
‘Lord?’ she asked.
‘The women must carry the blades. They will be bound up in rolls of sleeping-mats and in bundles of thatching-grass, and carried on the heads of the women to where the impis are waiting.’
‘Lord.’ Her voice was neutral, and she dropped her eyes from his hard glittering gaze.
‘The white men and their kanka will not suspect the women, they will let them pass freely upon the road,’ Gandang went on. ‘You are the mother of the nation now that the king’s wives are dead and scattered. It will be your duty to assemble the young women, to train them in their duty, and to see them place the steel in the hands of the warriors at the time that the Umlimo has foreseen, the time when the hornless cattle are eaten up by the cross.’
Juba was reluctant to reply, afraid to conjure up his wrath. He had to demand her answer.
‘You have heard my word, woman, and you know your duty to your husband and your people.’
Then only Juba lifted her head and looked deeply into his dark fierce eyes.
‘Forgive me, Lord. This time I cannot obey you. I cannot help to bring fresh sorrow upon the land. I cannot bear to hear again the wails of the widows and orphans. You must find another to carry the bloody steel.’