by Wilbur Smith
Now, he lined up with the other male passengers for the body search by the black police members; on the far side of the bus the women passengers were forming a separate line. Women police would search them to the skin. The girl courier was in fifth place in the line, she was joggling the sleeping infant on her back, and its tiny head waggled from side to side. Tungata could wait no longer.
Abruptly he pushed his way to the front of the queue, and spoke urgently but quietly to the black sergeant in charge of the search. Then Tungata pointed deliberately at the girl in the women’s line. The girl saw the accuser’s finger pointed at her, she looked about her, and then broke from the line and started to run.
‘Stop her!’ the sergeant bellowed, and the running girl loosed the strap of cloth that held the infant to her back and let the tiny black body fall to the earth. Freed of her burden, she raced for the line of thick thornbush along the verge of the road. However, the road-block had been laid to prevent just such an escape, and two police constables rose from concealment at the edge of the bush. The girl doubled back, but they had her trapped and a heavy blow with a gun-butt knocked her sprawling in the grass. They dragged her back, struggling and kicking, spitting and snarling, like a cat, and as she passed Tungata, she shrieked at him.
‘Traitor, we will eat you! Jackal, you will die—’
Tungata stared at her with bovine indifference.
One of the constables picked up the naked infant from where the girl had abandoned it, and he exclaimed immediately.
‘It’s cold.’ He turned the body gingerly, and the tiny limbs sprawled lifelessly. ‘It’s dead!’ The constable’s voice was shocked, and then he started again. ‘Look! Look at this!’
The child’s body had been gutted like that of a fish. The cut ran upwards from its groin, across its stomach, through the sternum of the chest to the base of the little throat and the wound had been closed with sacking twine and crude cobbled stitches. The white police captain, with a sickly expression on his face, snipped the stitches and the body cavity bulged open. It was packed with ropes of brown plastic explosive.
‘All right.’ The captain stood up. ‘Hold them all. We will run a full check on every one of the bastards.’
Then the captain came to Tungata. ‘Well done, friend.’ He clapped Tungata’s shoulder. ‘You can claim your reward from the main police station. Five thousand dollars – that’s good, hey! You just give them this.’ He scribbled on his notebook and tore off the sheet. ‘That’s my name and rank. I will witness your claim. One of our Land-Rovers will be going into Bulawayo in a few minutes – I’ll see you get a lift into town.’
Tungata submitted docilely to the customary search by the guards at the gates to Khami Mission Hospital. He was still dressed in his labourer’s rags, and carrying the forged discharge from the Wankie collieries.
One of the guards glanced at the work papers. ‘What is wrong with you?’
‘I have a snake in my stomach.’
Tungata clasped his hands over the offending organ. A snake in the stomach could mean anything from colic to duodenal ulcers.
The guard laughed. ‘The doctors will cut out your mamba for you, go to the out-patients department.’ He pointed out the side entrance, and Tungata went up the driveway with an ungainly sloppy gait.
The Matabele sister at the out-patient desk recognized him with a flicker of surprise, then her expression went dead-pan and she made out a card for him and waved him to one of the crowded benches. A minute or two later the black sister rose from the desk and crossed to the door marked ‘Duty Doctor’. She went in and closed the door behind her.
When she came out again, she pointed at Tungata. ‘You next!’ she said.
Tungata shambled across the hall and went in through the same door. Leila St John came joyfully to meet him, as soon as he closed the door behind him.
‘Comrade Commissar!’ she whispered, and embraced him. ‘I was so worried!’ She kissed him on each cheek, and as she stepped back, Tungata had changed character from dull-witted peasant to deadly warrior, tall and dangerously cold-faced.
‘You have clothes for me?’
Behind the movable screen, Tungata changed swiftly and stepped out again buttoning the white laboratory-coat. On his lapel he wore a plastic dog-tag that identified him as ‘DOCTOR G. J. KUMALO’, which placed him immediately above idle suspicion.
‘I would like to know what arrangements you have made,’ he said, and seated himself facing Leila St John across her desk.
‘I have had the Umlimo in our geriatric ward since she was brought in by her followers from the Matopos Reservation about six months ago.’
‘What is her physical condition?’
‘She is a very old lady – ancient, is perhaps the better word. I see no reason to doubt her claim that she is 120 years old. She was already a young woman when Cecil Rhodes’ freebooters rode into Bulawayo and hunted King Lobengula to his death.’
‘Her condition, please.’
‘She was suffering from malnutrition, but I have had her on a nutritional drip and she is much stronger, though she cannot walk, nor is she in control of her bowels and bladder. She is an albino, and she suffers from a type of skin allergy, but I have been able to prescribe an antihistamine ointment which has given her a great deal of relief. Her hearing and eyesight are failing, but her heart and other vital organs are remarkably strong for her age. Moreover, her brain is sharp and clear. She appears to be totally lucid.’
‘So she can travel?’ Tungata insisted.
‘She is eager to do so. It is her own prophecy that she must cross the great waters before the spears of the nation prevail.’
Tungata made an impatient gesture, and Leila St John interpreted it.
‘You do not set any store by the Umlimo, and her predictions, do you, Comrade?’
‘Do you, Doctor?’ he asked.
‘There are areas which our sciences have not yet penetrated. She is an extraordinary woman. I don’t say I believe everything about her, but I am aware of a force within her.’
‘It is our estimate that she will be extremely valuable as a propaganda weapon. The great majority of our people are still uneducated and superstitious. You still have not answered my question, Doctor. Can she travel?’
‘I think she can. I have prepared medications for her to take on the journey. I have also made out medical certificates, which should be sufficient to see her safely through any security checks as far as the border with Zambia. I will provide one of my best medical orderlies, a black male nurse, to travel with her. I would go myself, but it would attract too much attention.’
Tungata was silent for a long time, his hard handsome features rapt in thought. He had such a presence of command and authority that Leila found herself waiting almost timidly for his next words, eager to respond whether they were command or question.
However, when he spoke, it was to muse softly. ‘The woman is as valuable dead as alive, and dead she would be easier to handle, I presume you could preserve her body in formaldehyde or something of that nature.’
Despite herself, Leila was shocked, and yet strangely awed by the ruthlessness, excited by the man’s deadly resolve.
‘I pray that won’t be necessary,’ she whispered, staring at him. She had never met a man like this.
‘I will see her first, then I will decide,’ Tungata said quietly. ‘I wish to do so immediately.’
There were three weird crones squatting outside the door of the private ward on the top floor in the south wing of the hospital. They were dressed in the dried skins of wild cat and jackal and python, and hung about the neck and waist with bottles and gourds and stoppered buckhorns, with dried goat-bladders and bone rattles, with phials and the leather bags that contained their divining bones.
‘These are the old woman’s followers,’ Leila St John explained, ‘they will not leave her.’
‘They will,’ said Tungata softly, ‘when I decide that they will.’
One of them hopped towards him, whining and snivelling, reaching out to touch his leg with filth-encrusted fingers, and Tungata spurned her aside with his foot, and opened the door to the private ward. He went in, and Leila followed him and closed the door behind them. It was a small room with bare tiled floor and the walls were painted with a white gloss paint. There was a bedside locker with a stainless-steel tray of medicines and instruments upon it. The bed was on castors with an adjustable handle and screw at the foot. The head of the bed-frame was raised and the frail figure under the single sheet seemed no larger than a child. There was the glass bowl of a drip suspended above the bed, and a transparent plastic tube snaked down from it.
The Umlimo was asleep. Her unpigmented skin was a dusty pinkish grey, crusted with dark scabs that extended up over the pale bald scalp. The skin that covered her skull was so thin and fragile that the bone seemed to shine through it like a water-worn pebble beneath the surface of a mountain stream, but from her brow down to the edge of the white sheet beneath her chin, the skin was impossibly wrinkled and folded, like that of some prehistoric relic from the age of the great reptiles. Her mouth was open, the scabbed lips trembled with each breath, and there was a single yellow worn tooth left in the desiccated grey gums. She opened her eyes. They were pink as those of a white rabbit, sunk deeply in folds of grey skin, swimming in their own gummy mucus.
‘Greetings, old Mother.’ Leila went to her and touched the age-ravaged cheek. ‘I have a visitor for you,’ she said in perfect Sindebele.
The old woman made a small keening sound in her throat, and she began to shake, her entire body taken by convulsions, as she stared at Tungata.
‘Calm yourself, old Mother.’ Leila was concerned. ‘He will not harm you.’
The old woman lifted one arm from under the sheet. It was skeletal, the elbow-joint enlarged and distorted by arthritic processes, the hand was a claw, with lumpy knuckles and twisted fingers. She pointed them at Tungata.
‘Son of kings,’ she wailed, her voice surprisingly clear and strong, ‘father of kings. King that will be, when the falcons return. Bayete, he that will be king, Bayete!’ It was a royal salute, and Tungata went rigid with shock. His own skin-tone changed to dark grey, and little blisters of sweat burst out upon his brow. Leila St John fell back until she was against the wall. She stared at the frail old woman in the high steel bed. Spittle frothed on the thin scabbed lips, and the pink eyes rolled back into the ancient skull, yet the wailing voice rose higher.
‘The falcons have flown afar. There will be no peace in the kingdoms of the Mambos or the Monomatopas until they return. He who brings the stone falcons back to roost shall rule the kingdoms.’ Her voice rose to a shriek. ‘Bayete, Nkosi nkulu. Hail, Mambo. Live for ever, Monomatopa.’ The Umlimo greeted Tungata with all the titles of the ancient rulers, and then collapsed against the soft white pillows. Leila hurried back to her side, and placed her fingers over the sticklike wrist.
‘She’s all right,’ she said after a moment, and looked up at Tungata. ‘What do you want me to do?’
He shook himself like a man awakening from deep sleep, and with the sleeve of his white coat, wiped the icy sweat of superstitious dread from his forehead.
‘Look after her well. Make sure she is ready to leave by morning. We will take her north across the great river,’ he said.
Leila St John backed up her small Fiat into the ambulance bay beside the casualty department, and screened from curious eyes, Tungata slipped through the back door and crouched down between the seats. Leila spread a mohair travelling-rug over him and drove down to the main gates. She spoke briefly to one of the guards, and then swung the Fiat onto the branch road that led to the superintendent’s residence.
She spoke without looking back or moving her lips.
‘No sign of security forces, not yet. It looks as though your arrival has gone unnoticed, but we will take no chances.’
She parked in the lean-to garage which had been added to the old stone-walled building, and while she unloaded her valise and a pile of files from the seat, she made certain they were still not observed. The garden was screened from the road and the thatched church by trellised creepers and flowering shrubs.
She opened the side door to the house, and said, ‘Please keep low, and go in as quickly as you can.’
He ducked out of the Fiat, and she followed him into the living-room. The shutters and curtains were drawn and it was half-dark.
‘My grandmother built this house after the original was burned down during the 1896 troubles. Fortunately she took precautions against the troubles of the future.’
Leila crossed the floor of sawn Rhodesian teak, the highly polished surface of which was strewn with tanned animal skins and hand-woven rugs in bold patterns and primary colours.
She entered the walk-in stone fireplace and drew aside the black grate. The floor of the fireplace was of slate flags, and she used the fire irons to prise and lift one of these. When Tungata stepped up beside her, he saw that she had exposed a square vertical shaft, into one wall of which were set stone steps.
‘This was where Comrade Tebe was hiding that night?’ Tungata asked. ‘When the Scouts, the kanka, could not find him?’
‘Yes, he was here. It would be best if you went down now.’
He dropped nimbly down the shaft and found himself in darkness. Leila closed the slate hatch and came down beside him. She groped along the wall and turned a switch. A bare electric bulb lit on the roof of the tiny stone cell. There was a deal table on which were stacked a few well-thumbed books, pushed beneath it was a low stool and there was a narrow truckle-bed against the far wall. A chemical toilet stood at its foot.
‘Not very comfortable,’ she apologized. ‘But nobody will find you here.’
‘I have had less luxurious accommodation,’ he assured her. ‘Now let us go over your arrangements.’
She had the medical certificates ready on the table, and she sat on the stool and wrote down his requirements for the transportation of the Umlimo as he dictated them.
When she had finished, he said, ‘Memorize that and destroy it.’
‘Very well.’
He watched while she went over the list carefully and then looked up.
‘Now, there is a message for you to take to Comrade Inkunzi,’ she said. ‘It is from our friend in high places.’
‘Give it to me,’ he nodded.
‘Ballantyne’s Scouts, the kanka, they are planning a special operation. It is to destroy Comrade Inkunzi and his staff. Your own name is high on their list.’
Tungata’s expression did not change. ‘Do you have any details of their plans?’
‘All the details,’ she assured him. ‘This is what they will do—’
She spoke slowly and deliberately for almost ten minutes, and he did not interrupt her. Even when she had finished, he was silent for many minutes, lying flat on his back on the bed, staring up at the electric bulb. Then she saw that his jaws clenched and that a smoky red tide seemed to have spread over his eyeballs. His voice, when he spoke, was thick with loathing.
‘Colonel Roland Ballantyne. If we could get him! He is responsible for the deaths of over three thousand of our people – he and his kanka. In the camps they speak his name in whispers, as though he were some sort of demon. His name alone turns our bravest men to cowards. I have seen him and his butchers at work. Oh, if we could only take him.’ He sat up and glared at her. ‘Perhaps—’ His voice was choked and slurred as though he was drunk with hatred. ‘Perhaps this is our chance.’
He reached out and took Leila by the shoulders. His fingers dug deeply into her flesh and she winced and tried to draw away. He held her without effort.
‘This woman of his. You say that she will fly from the Victoria Falls? Can you get me the date, the number of the flight, the exact time?’
She nodded, afraid of him now, terrified by his strength and fury.
‘We have somebody in the airway booking-office,’ she whisp
ered, no longer trying to escape the agony of his grip. ‘I can get it for you.’
‘The bait,’ he said, ‘the tender lamb that will lure the leopard into the trap.’
She brought him food and drink down the stone shaft and waited while Tungata ate.
For a while he ate in silence, then abruptly he returned to the subject of the Umlimo.
‘The stone falcons,’ he started, ‘you heard what the old woman said?’
She nodded and he went on, ‘Tell me what you know of these things.’
‘Well, the stone falcons are the emblem on the flag. They are minted on the coinage of this country.’
‘Yes, go on.’
‘They are ancient carvings of bird figures. They were discovered in the ruins of Zimbabwe by the early white adventurers, and stolen by them. There is a legend that Lobengula tried to prevent them, but they were taken south.’
‘Where are they now?’ Tungata demanded.
‘One of them was destroyed by fire when Cecil Rhodes’ house at Groote Schuur was burned down, but the others, I’m not absolutely certain, but I think they are at Cape Town in South Africa.’
‘Whereabouts?’
‘In the museum, there.’
He grunted and went on eating steadily. When the bowl and mug were empty he pushed them aside and stared at her again with those smoky eyes.
‘The words of the old woman,’ he began and then paused.
‘The prophecy of the Umlimo,’ she went on for him, ‘that the man who returned the falcons would rule this land, and that you were that man.’
‘You will tell nobody what she said – do you understand me?’
‘I will tell nobody,’ she promised.
‘You know that if you do, I will kill you.’
‘I know that,’ she said simply, and gathered the bowl and mug and replaced them on the tray.
She stood before him waiting, and when he did not speak again, she asked, ‘Is there anything else?’