The Angels Weep

by Wilbur Smith

  Now at last the Matabele were rallying, closing up shoulder to shoulder to meet the thin line of Zulus and overrun it. It was the moment Ralph had waited for. He led his own Matabele racing across their rear and flung them at the naked undefended backs of the struggling warriors.

  Long ago, as boys on the Kimberley diamond-workings, Bazo had taught Ralph the art of spearsmanship. Ralph had been as skilful with the broad blade as any of the Matabele youths who were his companions. However, it was one thing to practise the long under-handed killing stroke, and another actually to send the point into living flesh.

  Ralph was unprepared for the sensation of the steel in his hand running in and slowing against the sucking resistance, feeling the steel touch and grate on bone, and the haft kick in his hand as his victims bucked and convulsed at the agony. It felt like the butt of the rod when a salmon makes its first run.

  Instinctively Ralph twisted the blade in the man’s body, the way Bazo had taught him, maximizing the tissue damage and breaking the vacuum that held the steel – then he jerked it clear, and for the first time felt the fine hot spray of blood from the wound fly into his face and splatter his right arm and chest.

  He stepped over the dying man who thrashed on the earth, and sank the steel again and then again. The smell of blood and the screams maddened him, but it was a cold fierce madness that magnified his vision and slowed down the micro-seconds of mortal combat, so that he saw the counter-thrust and turned his adversary’s blade aside with contemptuous ease, using the momentum of his shoulders to drive his own point through the Matabele guard and into the notch formed by the joint of his collar-bones at the base of his throat. The man’s breath whistled over his severed vocal cords, and he dropped his assegai and seized Ralph’s blade with his bare hands. Ralph pulled it back, and the razor edges cut to the bone of the man’s fingers, and his hands fell open nervelessly as the Matabele dropped to his knees.

  Ralph leaped over him and poised to thrust again.

  ‘Henshaw!’ a voice screamed in his face. ‘It is me!’ and through his madness Ralph saw the white cow-tail tassels about the neck and held the stroke; the two lines of attackers had met.

  ‘It is over,’ Isazi panted, and Ralph looked about him in bewilderment. It had happened so swiftly. He shook his head to free the cold vice of fighting madness that gripped it.

  They were all down, though a few of them still twisted and twitched and groaned.

  ‘Isazi, finish them!’ Ralph ordered, and watched the Zulus begin the grim work, passing quickly from body to body, feeling for the pulse below the ear and if they found it, stilling it with a quick thrust.

  ‘Ralph,’ Harry came scrambling down the slope at the head of the Cape boys. ‘By God, that was one—’

  ‘No English,’ Ralph warned him, then raising his voice. ‘We will take the horses now. Bring the spare bridles and lead-reins.’

  There were fifty-three fine horses in the thornbush kraal. Most of them carried the BSA Company brand. Each of the unmounted Zulus and Matabele selected a mount, and the remaining animals were put onto lead-reins.

  In the meantime the Cape boys were going over the field with the speed and precision of born footpads, selecting the rifles that could be used and throwing the ancient Martini-Henrys and muzzle-loaders and knobkerries onto the fire, snapping the assegai blades in the fork of a tree. The loot they discovered, cutlery and crockery and clothing of European manufacture, proved that this impi had taken part in the depredations of the first few days of the rising. That, too, was thrown upon the flames. Within an hour of the first rifle-shot, they were moving out again. This time every man was well mounted, and the spare horses followed at a canter on the lead-reins.

  They rode down the main street of Bulawayo in the uncertain grey light of pre-dawn. In the front rank Ralph and Harry had scrubbed most of the blackening from their faces, but to make certain they did not draw the fire of a jittery sentry, they carried a flag made from Harry Mellow’s white flannel undershirt.

  The inhabitants of the laager tumbled out of their beds to gape and question, and then as they began to realize that this little cavalcade heralded the first retaliation against the slaughter and arson committed by the tribes, the cheering began and rose into joyous hysteria.

  While Vicky and Elizabeth proudly served them a double ration breakfast under the wagon awning, Ralph and Harry received an endless string of well-wishers, of tearful widows whose husbands had perished under the Matabele assegais, bringing thanks and a half-dozen eggs or a freshly baked cake, of wistful boys come merely to stare at the heroes, and of keen young men demanding eagerly, ‘Is this where we sign up to join Ballantyne’s Scouts?’

  There were shrieks of delight as Judy set about her long-suffering husband with her baton. The children in the front row clapped their hands as the blows cracked upon Punch’s wooden head and his grotesquely humped back, and the bells on his cap jingled.

  Swimming valiantly against the mainstream of sentiment, Jon-Jon’s face was red as Punch’s hooked nose and screwed up with outrage. ‘Hit her back!’ he howled, bouncing up and down. ‘She’s only a girl!’

  ‘Spoken like a true Ballantyne,’ Ralph laughed, at the same time forcibly restraining his son from leaping into the fray on the side of down-trodden mankind.

  Elizabeth sat beyond Jon-Jon, with Robert on her lap. The child’s sickly face was solemn and he sucked dedicatedly upon his thumb like an elderly gnome upon his pipe. In contrast, Elizabeth was radiant with a childlike joy, her cheeks flushed and her eyes shining, as she egged Judy on to further excesses.

  A shining lock of her hair had come loose from the tortoiseshell comb and lay against the tender velvety skin of her temple, half curled around the lobe of her ear. Her ear was a faint pink, and so thin and delicately shaped that the sunlight showed through it as though it were made from some rare bone-china. The same sunlight made the burgundy sparks flare like electricity in her thick dark tresses.

  It drew Ralph’s attention from the marionettes, and he watched her covertly over Jonathan’s curly head. Her laughter was a throaty purr, natural and unashamed, and Ralph laughed again in sympathy. She turned her head and for a moment Ralph looked deeply into her eyes. It was like looking into a bowl of hot honey. He seemed to be able to see into limitless depths that were flecked with gold. Then Elizabeth dropped the veil of dark curved lashes over them, and looked back at the tiny stage, but she was no longer laughing. Instead her lower lip trembled and a dark flush of blood washed up her throat.

  Feeling strangely guilty and shaken, Ralph quickly fastened his own eyes, if not his attention, on the squawking, battling marionettes. The sketch ended, to Jonathan’s vast satisfaction, with Judy being led away to some nameless but richly deserved fate by a policeman in Mr Peel’s blue helmet, and the mild bespectacled little bookkeeper of Meikles Store came out from behind his candy-striped screen with the glove puppets still upon his hands, to take his bows.

  ‘He looks just like Mr Kipling,’ Elizabeth whispered, ‘and he has the same bloodthirsty and violent imagination.’

  Ralph felt a rush of gratitude towards her that she should gloss over that unexpected moment of awkwardness so gracefully. He picked up the boys, sat one upon each shoulder, and they followed the dispersing audience across the laager.

  Upon his father’s shoulder, Jonathan chattered like a flock of starlings, explaining to Bobby the finer points of the play which were clearly too subtle for any lesser intelligence than his own to follow. However, both Ralph and Elizabeth walked in silence.

  When they reached the wagon, Ralph slid both children to the ground and they scampered away. Half-heartedly, Elizabeth made to follow them, but stopped and turned back to him when Ralph spoke.

  ‘I don’t know what I would have done without you – you’ve been wonderfully kind—’ He hesitated. ‘Without Cathy—’ He saw the pain in her eyes and broke off. ‘I just wanted to thank you.’

  ‘You don’t have to do that, Ralph,’
she answered quietly. ‘Anything you need – I’ll always be here to help.’ Then her reserve cracked, she started to speak again, but her lips trembled and she turned away sharply and followed the two boys into the wagon.

  Ralph had paid siege prices for the bottle of whisky by scrawling a cheque on the label from a bully beef tin for £20. He took it hidden under his coat to where Isazi and Jan Cheroot and Sergeant Ezra sat together beside a fire away from their men.

  They swilled the coffee grounds out of their enamel mugs and proffered them for a good dram of the whisky and sipped in silence for a while, all of them staring into the camp-fire flames, letting the warmth of the spirit spread out through their bodies.

  At last Ralph nodded at Sergeant Ezra, and the big Matabele began to speak quietly.

  ‘Gandang and his Inyati impi are still waiting in the Khami Hills – he has twelve hundred men. They are all blooded warriors, Babiaan is bivouacked below the Hills of the Indunas with six hundred. He could be here in an hour—’ Quickly Ezra recounted the positions of the impis, the names of their indunas, and the mood and mettle of their warriors.

  ‘What of Bazo and his Moles?’ At last Ralph asked the question that concerned him most, and Ezra shrugged.

  ‘We do not have word of them. I have my best men in the hills, searching for them. Nobody knows where the Moles have gone.’

  ‘Where will we strike next?’ Ralph asked the question rhetorically, musing as he stared in the fire. ‘Will it be at Babiaan in the Hills of the Indunas, or Zama with his thousand lying across the Mangiwe Road?’

  Isazi coughed in polite disagreement, and when Ralph glanced up at him, he said, ‘Last night I sat at one of Babiaan’s camp-fires, eating his meat, and listening to his men talk. They spoke of our attack upon the camp of the horses, and how the indunas had warned them in future to be on their guard against all strangers, even though they wore the furs and feathers of the fighting impis. We will not work the same trick twice.’

  Jan Cheroot and Ezra grunted in agreement, and the little Hottentot inverted his mug to prove it empty, and glanced significantly at the bottle between Ralph’s feet. Ralph poured again, and as he cupped the mug in his hands and inhaled the pungent perfume of the spirit, his mind went back to that afternoon – to the laughter of the children and a lovely young girl whose hair burned with soft fires in the sunlight.

  His voice was rough and ugly. ‘Their women and children,’ he said. ‘They will be hidden in the caves and the secret valleys of the Matopos. Find them!’

  There were five small boys under the bank of the stream. They were all stark naked, and their legs were coated to above the knees with slick yellow clay. They laughed and squabbled good-naturedly as they dug the clay out of the bank with sharpened sticks and packed it into crudely woven reed baskets.

  Tungata Zebiwe, ‘The Seeker after what has been Stolen’, was the first to climb out of the stream, lugging the heavy basket to a shady place where he squatted and set to work. The others straggled up the bank after him and seated themselves in a circle.

  Tungata took a handful of clay from his basket and rolled it into a thick soft sausage between his pink palms. Then he moulded it with practised skill, forming the humped back and sturdy legs. When it was complete, he set the body carefully between his knees on a slab of dried bark; then turned his attention to sculpting the head separately with curved red devil thorns for the horns and chips of waterworn rock-crystal for the eyes. He attached the head to the thick neck, sticking out his tongue with concentration as he adjusted it to a proud angle, and then he sat back and studied it with a critical eye.

  ‘Inkunzi Nkulu!’ he hailed his creation. ‘Great Bull!’

  Grinning with delight, he carried the clay beast to the antheap, and set it on its bark base to dry in the sun. Then he hurried back to begin making the cows and calves for his herd. As he worked, he mocked the creations of the other boys, comparing them to his own great herd bull, and grinning cheekily at their retorts.

  Tanase watched him from the shadows. She had come silently down the path through the thick riverine bush, led on by the tinkling of child-laughter, and the happy banter. Now she was reluctant to interrupt this magical moment.

  In the sadness and striving, in the menace and smoke of war, it seemed that all joy and laughter had been forgotten. It needed the resilience and vision of a child to remind her of what had once been – and what might be again. She felt a suffocating weight of love overwhelm her, followed almost immediately by a formless dread. She wanted to rush to the child and take him in her arms, to hold him tightly to her bosom and protect him from – she was not sure what.

  Then Tungata looked up and saw her, and came to her carrying the clay bull with shy pride.

  ‘See what I have made.’

  ‘It is beautiful.’

  ‘It is for you, Umame, I made it for you.’

  Tanase took the offering. ‘He is a fine bull, and he will breed many calves,’ she said, and her love was so strong that the tears scalded her eyelids. She did not want the child to see it.

  ‘Wash the clay off your legs and arms,’ she told him. ‘We must go up to the cave.’

  He skipped beside her on the path, his body still wet from the river, his skin glistening with a velvety black sheen, laughing delightedly when Tanase set the clay bull upon her head, walking straight-backed and hips swinging, to balance the load.

  They came up the path to the base of the cliff. It was not truly a cave, but a long low overhang of the cliff face. They were not the first to use it as a home. The rocky roof was blackened with the soot of innumerable cooking-fires, and the back wall was decorated with the ancient paintings and engravings of the little yellow Bushmen who had hunted here long before Mzilikazi led his impis into these hills. They were wonderful pictures of rhinoceros and giraffe and gazelle, and of the little stick figures, armed with bows and outsized genitalia, who hunted them.

  There were almost five hundred persons living in this place, one of the secret safe places of the tribe, where the women and the children were sent when war or some other catastrophe threatened the Matabele. Though the valley was steep and narrow, there were five escape routes, hidden paths scaling the cliffs or narrow clefts through the granite, which made it impossible for an enemy to trap them in the gut of the valley.

  The stream provided fresh clear water for drinking, thirty milch cows that had survived the rinderpest provided mass, the soured milk which was one of the tribe’s staples. And when they marched in, every woman had borne upon her head a leather grain-bag. The locusts had depleted the harvest, but with careful planning they could exist here for many months.

  The women were spread out down the length of the rock shelter, busy with their separate tasks. Some of them were stamping the corn in mortars carved from a dried tree-trunk, using a heavy wooden pestle that they swung up with both hands above their head and then let drop of its own weight into the cup of the mortar, clapping their hands and then seizing the club to lift it for the next stroke. Others were plaiting bark cloth for sleeping-mats, or tanning wild animals’ skins, or stringing ceramic beads. Over it all hung the faint blue mist of the cooking-fires, and the sweet hum of women’s voices, interspersed with the gurgling and chirping of black babes who crawled naked on the rocky floor, or hung like fat limpets from their mothers’ breasts.

  Juba was at the far end of the shelter, imparting to two of her daughters and the new wife of one of her middle sons the delicate secrets of beer-brewing. The sorghum grain had been soaked and had germinated, now came the drying and grinding of the yeast. It was an absorbing task, and Juba did not become aware of the presence of her senior daughter-in-law and her eldest grandson until they stood over her. Then she looked up, and her smile split the great round of her face.

  ‘My mother,’ Tanase knelt before her respectfully. ‘I must speak with you.’

  Juba struggled to rise, but was pinned by her own vast weight. Her daughters took an elbow each and heaved her
upright. Once she was on her feet, she moved with surprising agility, swept Tungata onto her hip and carried him easily along the pathway. Tanase fell in beside her.

  ‘Bazo has sent for me,’ Tanase told her. ‘There is dissension amongst the indunas, Bazo needs the words of the Umlimo made clear. Without that the struggle will fall into vacillation and talk. We will lose all that we have won so dearly.’

  ‘Then you must go, my child.’

  ‘I must go swiftly, I cannot take Tungata with me.’

  ‘He is safe here, I will look after him. When do you leave?’

  ‘Immediately.’

  Juba sighed and nodded. ‘So be it.’

  Tanase touched the child’s cheek. ‘Obey your grandmother,’ she said softly, and like a shadow was gone around the bend of the narrow pathway.

  Tanase passed through the granite portals that guarded the valley of the Umlimo. She had only her memories of this place for travelling companions, and they were not good company. Yet when she went down the path, she walked straight, with a kind of antelope grace, her long limbs swinging freely and her head held high on the long heron’s neck.

  As soon as she entered the little cluster of huts in the bottom of the valley, her trained senses were immediately aware of the tensions and angers that hung over the place like a sickly miasma over a fever swamp. She could feel the anger and frustration in Bazo when she knelt before him, and made her dutiful obeisance. She knew so well what those knots of tense muscle at the points of his clenched jaw and the reddish glaze in his eyes meant.

  Before she rose, she had noted how the indunas had drawn into two separate groups. On one side the elders, and facing them the young and headstrong were ranged about Bazo. She crossed the space between them and knelt before Gandang and his white-headed brothers, Somabula and Babiaan.