by Wilbur Smith
‘She is dead.’ The kanka had left Ruth, and come down the path. He had left his apron in the bushes. His blue shirt-tails flapped around his bare legs.
Both of them stared down at the dead girl.
‘I did not mean it,’ said the kanka with the hot rifle in his hands.
‘We cannot let the other one go back to tell what has happened,’ his companion replied, and turned back up the pathway. As he passed, he picked up his own rifle from where it leaned against the rock. He stepped off the path, behind the thin screen of bushes.
The other man was still staring into Imbali’s blank eyes when the second shot rang out. He flinched to the crack of it, and lifted his head. As the echoes lapped away amongst the granite cliffs, the kanka stepped back onto the path. He ejected the spent cartridge case from the breech and it pinged against the rock.
‘Now we must find a story for One-Bright-Eye, and for the indunas,’ he said quietly, and strapped the fur apron back around his thick waist.
They brought the two girls back to Gandang’s kraal on the back of the police sergeant’s grey horse. Their legs dangled down one side and their arms down the other. They had wrapped a grey blanket around their naked bodies, as though ashamed of the wounds upon them, but the blood had soaked through and dried black upon it, and the big metallic green flies swarmed joyously upon the stains.
In the centre of the kraal, the sergeant gestured to the kanka who led the grey, and he turned back and cut the line that secured the girl’s ankles. The corpses were immediately unbalanced and slid head-first to the swept bare earth. They fell without dignity in an untidy tumble of bare limbs, like game brought in from the hunting veld for skinning and dressing out.
The women had been silent until then, but now they began the haunting ululation of mourning, and one of them scooped a handful of dust and poured it over her own head. The others followed her example, and their cries brought out the gooseflesh down the arms of the sergeant, though his expression remained neutral and his voice level as he spoke to Gandang.
‘You have brought this sadness on your people, old man. If you had obeyed the wishes of Lodzi and sent in your young men, as is your duty, these women would have lived to bear sons.’
‘What crime did they commit?’ Gandang asked, and watched his senior wife come forward to kneel beside the bloody dust-smeared bodies.
‘They tried to kill two of my police.’
‘Hau!’ Gandang expressed his scornful disbelief, and the sergeant’s voice rasped with anger for the first time.
‘My men caught them and forced them to lead them to where the amadoda are hiding. At last night’s camp, when my men were asleep, they would have thrust sharpened sticks into their earholes to the brain, but my men sleep lightly, and when they awoke, the women ran into the night and my men had to stop them.’
For a long moment Gandang stared at the sergeant, and his eyes were so terrible that Ezra turned away to watch the senior wife as she knelt beside one of the girls. Juba closed the slack jaws, and then gently wiped the congealed blood from Ruth’s lips and nostrils.
‘Yes,’ Gandang advised Ezra. ‘Look well, white man’s jackal, remember this thing for all the days that are left to you.’
‘Dare you threaten me, old man?’ the sergeant blustered.
‘All men must die,’ Gandang shrugged, ‘but some die sooner and more painfully than others.’ And Gandang turned and walked back to his hut.
Gandang sat alone by the small smoky fire in his hut. Neither the broiled beef nor white maize cakes in the platter at his side had been touched. He stared into the flames, and listened to the wailing of the women and the beat of the drums.
He knew that Juba would come to tell him when the girls’ bodies had been bathed and wrapped in the green skin of the freshly slaughtered ox. As soon as it was light, it would be his duty to supervise the digging of the grave in the centre of the cattle kraal, so he was not surprised when there was a soft scratching at the doorway and he called softly to Juba to enter.
She came to kneel at his side. ‘All is ready for the morning, my husband.’
He nodded, and they were silent for a while, and then Juba said, ‘I wish to sing the Christian song that Nomusa has taught me when the girls are put into the earth.’
He inclined his head in acquiescence, and she went on.
‘I wish also that you would dig their graves in the forest so that I may place crosses over them.’
‘If that is the way of your new god,’ he agreed again, and now he rose and crossed to his sleeping-mat in the far corner.
‘Nkosi,’ Juba remained kneeling. ‘Lord, there is something else.’
‘What is it?’ He looked back at her. His beloved features remote and cold.
‘I, and my women, will carry the steel as you bid me,’ she whispered. ‘I made an oath with my finger in the wound in Ruth’s flesh. I will carry the assegais to the amadoda.’
He did not smile, but the coldness went out of his eyes, and he held out one hand to her. Juba rose and went to him, and he took her hand and led her to the sleeping-mat.
Bazo came down out of the hills three days after the girls had been placed in the earth, under the bare spreading branches of a giant mimosa at a place which overlooked the river. There were two young men with him, and the three of them went directly to the graves with Juba guiding them. After a while, Bazo left the two young bridegrooms to mourn their women and he went back to where his father waited for him under the fig tree.
After he had made his dutiful greetings, they drank from the same beerpot, passing it back and forth between them in silence, and when it was empty Gandang sighed.
‘It is a terrible thing.’
Bazo looked up at him sharply. ‘Rejoice, my father. Thank the spirits of your ancestors,’ he said. ‘For they have given us a greater bargain than we could ever have wished for.’
‘I do not understand this.’ Gandang stared at his son.
‘For two lives – lives of no importance, lives that would have been spent in vain and empty-headed frivolity – for this insignificant price, we have kindled a fire in the belly of the nation. We have steeled even the weakest and most cowardly of our amadoda. Now when the time comes, we know that there will be no hesitating. Rejoice, my father, at the gift we have been given.’
‘You have become a ruthless man,’ Gandang whispered at last.
‘I am proud that you should find me so,’ Bazo replied. ‘And if I am not ruthless enough for the work, then my son or his son, in their time, will be.’
‘You do not trust the oracle of the Umlimo?’ Gandang demanded. ‘She has promised us success.’
‘No, my father.’ Bazo shook his head. ‘Think carefully on her words. She has told us only to make the attempt. She promised us nothing. It is with us alone to succeed or fail. That is why we must be hard and relentless, trusting nobody, looking for any advantage, and using it to the full.’
Gandang thought about that for a while, then sighed again.
‘It was not like this before.’
‘Nor will it ever be again. It has changed, Baba, and we must change with it.’
‘Tell me what else there is to be done,’ Gandang invited. ‘What way can I help to bring success?’
‘You must order the young men to come down out of the hills and to go in to work as the white men are bidding.’
Gandang considered the question without speaking.
‘From now until the hour, we must become fleas. We must live under the white men’s cloak, so close to the skin that he does not see us, so close that he forgets we are there waiting to sting.’
Gandang nodded at the sense of it, but there was a fathomless regret in his eyes. ‘I liked it better when we formed the bull, with the horns outflung to surround the enemy and the veterans massed in the centre to crush them. I loved the closing in when we went in singing the praise song of the regiment, when we made our killing in the sunlight with our plumes flying.’
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nbsp; ‘Never again, Baba,’ Bazo told him. ‘Never again will it be like that. In the future we will wait in the grass like the coiled puff-adder. We may have to wait a year or ten, a lifetime or more – perhaps we may never see it, my father. Perhaps it will be our children’s children who strike from the shadows with other weapons than the silver steel that you and I love so well, but it is you and I that will open the road for them to follow, the road back to greatness.’
Gandang nodded, and there was a new light in his eyes, like the first glow of the dawn. ‘You see very clearly, Bazo. You know them so well, and you are right. The white man is strong in every way except patience. He wants it all to happen today. While we know how to wait.’
They were silent again, sitting with their shoulders just touching, and the fire had burned low before Bazo stirred.
‘I will be gone by daylight,’ he said.
‘Where?’ Gandang asked.
‘East to the Mashona.’
‘For what reason?’
‘They also must prepare for the day.’
‘You seek aid from Mashona dogs, from the very eaters of dirt?’
‘I seek aid wherever it can be found,’ said Bazo simply. ‘Tanase says that we will find allies beyond our borders, beyond the great river. She speaks even of allies from a land so cold that the waters there turn hard and white as salt.’
‘Is there such a land?’
‘I do not know. I know only that we must welcome any ally, from wherever they may come. For Lodzi’s men are hard, fierce fighters. You and I both have learned that well.’
All the windows of the mule coach were open and the shutters were lowered so that Mr Rhodes could converse freely with the men who rode in close attendance upon each side. They were the aristocracy of this new land, only a dozen or so of them, but between them they owned vast tracts of fertile, virgin country, sprawling herds of native cattle, and blocks of mineral claims beneath which lay dreams of uncountable wealth.
The man in the luxurious carriage, drawn by a team of five matched white mules, was their head. In his capacity as a private citizen, he enjoyed such wealth and power as was usually only commanded by kings. His Company owned a land which was bigger than the United Kingdom and Ireland put together, which he administered by decree as a private estate. He controlled the world’s production of diamonds through a cartel that he had made as powerful as an elected government. He owned outright the mines that produced ninety-five per cent of the world’s diamonds. On the fabulous Witwatersrand gold fields, his influence was not as great as it might have been, for he had passed up many opportunities to acquire claims along the strike, where the gold-rich banket reef had once stood proud above the surrounding grassland, sharp and black as a shark’s dorsal fin, before the miners had whittled it away.
‘I do not sense the power in this reef,’ he had said once, as he stood on the outcrop, staring at it moodily with those pale Messianic blue eyes. ‘I can sit on the lip of the great hole at Kimberley and I know just how many carats are coming up with each load, but this—’ He had shaken his head and gone back to his horse, turning his back on £100 million in pure gold.
When, finally, he had been forced to accept the true potential of the ‘Ridge of White Waters’ and was on the very point of hurrying back to pick up what few properties were still available, a tragic accident had distracted him. His dearest friend, a fine and beautiful young man named Neville Pickering, his companion and partner of many years, had been thrown from his horse and dragged.
Rhodes had stayed at Kimberley to nurse him, and then when Neville died, to mourn him. The great opportunities had slipped away from Rhodes in those weeks. Yet still he had at last founded his Consolidated Goldfields Company upon the reef, and though it was nothing like his De Beers Consolidated Mines Company, nor the gold empire that his old rival J. B. Robinson had built, yet at the end of the last financial year it had paid a dividend of 125 per cent.
His fortune was such that when, on a whim, he decided to pioneer the farming of deciduous fruit in southern Africa, he had instructed one of his managers to purchase the entire Franschhoek valley.
‘Mr Rhodes, it will cost a million pounds,’ the manager had demurred.
‘I did not ask for your estimate,’ Rhodes replied testily. ‘I simply gave you an order – buy it!’
That was his private life, but his public life was no less spectacular.
He was a privy councillor to the queen, and thus could speak directly to the men who steered the greatest empire the world had ever known. In truth, some of them were less than sympathetic to him. Gladstone had once remarked, ‘I know only one thing about Mr Rhodes. He has made a great deal of money in a very short time. This does not fill me with any overwhelming confidence.’
The rest of the British nobility were less critical, and whenever he visited London, he was the darling of society, lords and dukes and earls flocked to him, for there were lucrative directorships on the Board of the BSA Company to be filled, and a single word from Mr Rhodes could lead to a killing on the stock exchange.
Added to all this, Mr Rhodes was the elected prime minister of Cape Colony, sure of the vote of every English-speaking citizen and through the good offices of his old friend Hofmeyr and his Afrikander Bond, sure of most of the Dutch-speaking votes as well.
Thus, as he lolled on the green leather seat of his coach, dressed untidily in a rumpled high-buttoned suit, the knot of his Oriel College necktie slipping a little, he was at the very zenith of his wealth and power and influence.
Seated opposite him, Jordan Ballantyne was pretending to study the shorthand notes that Mr Rhodes had just dictated, but over the pad he was watching his master with a shadow of concern in his sensitive long-lashed eyes. Although the flat brim of his hat kept Mr Rhodes’ eyes in shadow and prevented Jordan from reading any trace of pain in them, yet his colour was high and unhealthy, and though he spoke with all his old force, he was sweating more heavily than the early morning cool warranted.
Now he raised his voice, calling in that high, almost petulant tone, ‘Ballantyne!’ And Zouga Ballantyne spurred his horse up beside the window and leaned attentively from the saddle.
‘Tell me, my dear fellow,’ Rhodes demanded. ‘What is this new building to be?’
He pointed at the freshly opened foundation trenches and the stacks of red burned brick piled on the corner plot at the intersection of two of Bulawayo’s wide and dusty streets.
‘That’s the new synagogue,’ Zouga told him.
‘So my Jews have come to stay!’ Mr Rhodes said with a smile, and Zouga suspected that Mr Rhodes had known precisely what those foundations were for, but had asked the question to pave the way for his own witticism. ‘Then my new country will be all right, Ballantyne. They are the birds of good omen, who would never roost in a tree marked for felling.’
Zouga chuckled dutifully, and they went on talking while Ralph Ballantyne, riding in the bunch, watched them with such interest that he neglected the lady riding beside him, until she tapped him on the forearm with her crop.
‘I said, it will be interesting to see what happens when we reach Khami,’ Louise repeated, and Ralph’s attention jerked back to his stepmother. She rode astride, the only woman he knew that did so, and though she wore ankle-length divided skirts, her seat was elegant and sure. Ralph had seen her out-ride his own father, beating him in a gruelling point-to-point race over rough terrain. That had been in Kimberley, before the trek to the north and this land, but the years had treated Louise kindly indeed. Ralph smiled to himself as he recalled the youthful crush he had been smitten with when he first saw her driving her phaeton and pair of golden palominos down Kimberley’s crowded main street. That was so many years ago, and though she had married his father since then, he still felt a special affection for her that was definitely neither filial nor dutiful. She was only a few years older than he was, and the Blackfoot Indian blood in her veins gave her beauty a certain timeless element.
‘
I cannot imagine that even Robyn, my honoured aunt and mother-in-law, would use the occasion of her youngest daughter’s marriage for political advantage,’ Ralph said.
‘Are you confident enough to wager on that, a guinea, say?’ Louise asked with a flash of even white teeth, but Ralph threw back his head and laughed.
‘I have learned my lesson – I’ll never bet against you again.’ Then he dropped his voice. ‘Besides, I don’t really have that much faith in my mother-in-law’s restraint.’
‘Then why on earth does Mr Rhodes insist on going to the wedding? He must know what to expect.’
‘Well, firstly, he owns the land the Mission is built upon, and, secondly, he probably feels that the ladies of Khami Mission are depriving him of a valued possession.’ Ralph lifted his chin to indicate the bridegroom who rode a little ahead of the group. Harry Mellow had a flower in his button-hole, a gloss on his boots and a grin upon his lips.
‘He hasn’t lost him,’ Louise pointed out.
‘He fired him as soon as he realized he couldn’t talk Harry out of it.’
‘But he is such a talented geologist, they say he can smell gold a mile away.’
‘Mr Rhodes does not approve of his young men marrying, no matter how talented.’
‘Poor Harry, poor Vicky, what will they do?’
‘Oh, it’s all arranged,’ Ralph beamed.
‘You?’ she hazarded.
‘Who else?’
‘I should have known. In fact it would not surprise me to learn that you engineered the whole business,’ Louise accused, and Ralph looked pained.
‘You do me a grave injustice, Mama.’ He knew she did not like that title and used it deliberately, to tease her. Then Ralph looked ahead and his expression changed like a bird-dog scenting the pheasant.
The wedding party had ridden out past the last new buildings and shanties of the town, onto the broad rutted wagon road. Coming towards them, up from the south, was a convoy of transport wagons. There were ten of them, so strung out that the furthest of them were marked only by columns of fine white dust rising above the flat-topped acacia trees. On the nearest wagon-tent Louise could already read the company name, ‘RHOLANDS’, the shortened form of ‘Rhodesian Lands and Mining Co’, which Ralph had chosen as the umbrella for his multitudinous business activities.