Men of Men (28 page)

He turned, still clutching the book, and crept back along the verandah. As he turned the far corner there was a furry rush of dark bodies out of the shadows, and the soft squeals of the bush
rats as they squabbled over the sacrifice.

Jordan pushed open the door of the kitchen and it smelled of woodsmoke and curry powder and carbolic soap.

He stooped to the ashbox of the black iron stove, and when he blew lightly through the grating the ashes glowed.

He pushed a long wax taper through the bars and blew again and a little blue flame popped into life. He carried it carefully across the kitchen, sheltering it with his cupped hand, and
transferred the flame to the stump of candle in the neck of the dark green champagne bottle. Then he blew out the taper and placed the bottle on the scrubbed yellow deal table and stepped back.

For a few seconds longer he hesitated, then he took the skirts of the faded and patched nightshirt, lifted them as high as his shoulders and looked down at his body.

The puppy fat had disappeared from his belly and hips. His navel was a dark eye in the flat clean plain of his trunk, and his legs were gracefully shaped. His buttocks lean and tight, like
immature fruit.

His body was smooth and hairless except for the golden wisps at the juncture of his legs. It was not yet thick enough to curl, and was sparse and fine as silk thread freshly spun upon the
cocoon.

From the centre of this cloudy web his penis hung down limply. It had grown alarmingly in the last few months, and in Jordan’s horrified imagination, he foresaw the day when it would be
thick and heavy as his arm, a huge shameful burden to carry through life.

At this moment it looked so soft and white and innocent, but when he woke in the mornings it was hard as bone, hot and throbbing with a sinfully pleasurable ache.

That was bad, but in these last weeks that terrible swelling and stiffening had come upon him at the most unexpected times: at the dinner table with his father seated opposite him, in the
schoolroom when the new schoolmistress had leaned over him to correct his spelling, seated at the sorting-table beside Jan Cheroot, on the gelding’s back when the friction of the saddle had
triggered it, and that awful stiff thing had thrust out the front of his breeches.

He took it in his hand now and it seemed helpless and soft as a newborn kitten, but he was not deceived. He stroked it softly back and forth and instantly he felt it change shape between his
fingers. He released it quickly.

The joint of mutton that the family had dined off the previous evening stood on the deal table, under a steel mesh fly-cover. Jordan lifted the cover, and the leg was hacked down to the
bone.

His father’s hunting knife lay beside the cold joint. The handle was stag-horn and the blade was nine inches long, sweeping up to a dagger point, and the white mutton fat had congealed
upon the blade.

Jordan picked up the knife in his right hand.

The previous evening he had watched his father flicking the edge of the blade across the long steel. It always fascinated him, because Zouga held the razor edge towards his own fingers as he
worked.

The proof of his father’s expertise with the steel was the way in which the heavy knife seemed to glide effortlessly through the meat of the joint. It was wickedly sharp.

Jordan looked down again at that long white thing that stuck out of his body. The loose skin at the tip was half retracted so that the pink acorn pushed out from beneath it.

He tucked the tail of his shirt under his chin to free both hands and seized himself at the root, enclosing within the circle of his fingers the wrinkled bag with its tender marbles of flesh,
and he pulled it out, stretching it out like the neck of the condemned man upon the headsman’s block, while with the other hand he brought the knife down and laid the blade against his own
belly, just above the fine golden fluff of pubic hair.

The blade was so cold that he gasped, and the mutton fat left a little greasy smear on his belly. He took a long breath to steel himself, and then slowly began to draw the blade downwards, to
free himself for ever of that shameful wormlike growth.

‘Jordie, what are you doing?’ The voice from the doorway behind him startled him so that he cried out aloud. He threw the knife onto the table and at the same time dropped the shirt
to cover himself.

‘Jordie!’

He turned swiftly, breathing in sharp little gasps, and Ralph came towards him from the kitchen door. He wore only a pair of baggy shorts, and there were goose-bumps on the smooth bare skin of
his chest from the pre-dawn chill.

‘What were you doing?’ he repeated.

‘Nothing. I wasn’t doing anything.’ Jordan shook his head wildly.

‘You were whacking your old winker, weren’t you?’ Ralph accused and grinned. ‘You dirty little bugger.’

Jordan let out a choking sob and fled past him to the door, and Ralph chuckled and shook his head.

Then he picked up the stag-handled knife and cut a thick slab of mutton off the joint, dipped the blade into the stone pot and smeared a gob of yellow mustard over the meat, and munched it as he
went about building up the fire in the stove and setting the coffee water to boil.

T
he following Sunday afternoon on the white sand of the fighting arena, Inkosikazi, the spider, died an agonizing death in the ghastly embrace of
a smaller more agile adversary.

Bazo mourned her as he would a lover, and Kamuza sang the dirge with him just as sadly, for the Matabele syndicate had lost twenty sovereigns with her passing.

The return from Market Square to Zouga’s camp resembled Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow, headed by Ralph and Bazo bearing between them the basket and its sorry contents.

Opposite Diamond Lil’s canteen, Ralph halted the cortege for a moment and wistfully contemplated the painted windows across the street, and listened for a moment to the sounds of laughter
from beyond the green door – imagining that he could distinguish Lil’s tinkling chimes.

When they reached the thatched beehive communal hut, Kamuza passed Ralph the clay pot of bubbling millet beer.

‘How much did you lose, Henshaw?’

‘Everything,’ Ralph replied tragically. The very reason for living.’ He took a long swallow of the thick gruel-like beer.

‘That is bad; only a foolish man keeps all his cows in the same kraal.’

‘Kamuza, your words are always a great solace,’ Ralph told him bitterly. ‘But I am unworthy of such wisdom. Keep those treasures for yourself alone.’

Kamuza looked smug and turned to Bazo. ‘Now you know why I would not lay fifty gold queens, as you bid me.’

Bazo shot a glance at Ralph, and they acted together.

Ralph draped a seemingly brotherly arm over Kamuza’s shoulders, but it was a steely yoke that held him helpless, and with the other hand he pulled open the front of Kamuza’s
loincloth – and Bazo scooped the soft furry carcass of the great spider out of the basket and dropped it into the opening.

As Ralph released him, Kamuza went up into the air, rearing like an unbroken stallion feeling the saddle and spur for the first time, whinnying wildly with horror, beating at his own loins with
both hands.

If Ralph had not caught him, Bazo, in a shaking paralysis of mirth, might have fallen into the fire in the centre of the hut.

K
amuza had been gone almost three years.

When Bazo and the other Matabele had signed their contracts for a third period, Kamuza alone had asked Bakela to ‘
Bala Isitupa
’, to write off the contract as complete, and
he had taken the road north back to Matabeleland.

Bazo had missed him deeply. He had missed the spiked tongue and shrewd acerbic counsel. He had missed Kamuza’s intuitive understanding of the white man’s ways of thinking, ways which
Bazo still found unfathomable.

Even though Henshaw was his friend, had worked at Bazo’s shoulder for all those long years, though they had hawked and hunted together, dipped into the same baking of maize porridge and
drunk from the lip of the same beer-pot – though Henshaw spoke his language so easily that sitting in the darkness when the fire had burned down to embers it might have been a young Matabele
buck talking, so faithfully did Henshaw echo the deep cadence of the north, so complete was his command of the colloquial, so poetic the imagery he used – yet Henshaw would never be Matabele
as Kamuza was Matabele, could never be brother as Kamuza was, had never shared the initiation rites with Bazo as Kamuza had, had never formed the ‘horns of the bull’ with him as the
impi closed for the kill, and had never driven the assegai deep and seen the bright blood fly as Kamuza had.

Thus Bazo was filled with joy when he heard the word.

‘Kamuza is amongst us again.’

Bazo heard it first whispered by another Matabele as they formed a line at the gate of the security compound.

‘Kamuza comes as the king’s man,’ they whispered around the watch-fires, and there was respect, even fear, in their voices. ‘Kamuza wears the headring now.’

Many young Matabele had come to work at
Umgodi Kakulu
, ‘The Big Hole’, these last few years, and each month more came down the long and weary road from the north, small
bands of ten or twenty, sometimes only in pairs, or threes and occasionally even a man travelling alone.

How many had reached Kimberley? There was nobody to keep a tally, a thousand certainly, two thousand perhaps, and each of them had been given the road southwards by the great black elephant,
each of them had the king’s permission to journey beyond the borders of Matabeleland, for without it they would have been speared to death by the bright assegais of the impis that guarded
every road to and from the king’s great kraal at Thabas Indunas – the Hills of the Chiefs.

Even in exile these young Matabele formed a close-knit tribal association. Each newcomer from the north carried tidings, long messages from fathers and indunas, repeated verbatim with every
nuance of the original. Just as every Matabele who left the diamond fields, whether he had worked out his three-year contract or was bored and homesick or had fallen foul of the white man’s
complicated and senseless laws and was deserting, carried back with him messages and instructions that he had committed to the phenomenal memory of a people who did not have the written word.

Now the word passed swiftly from Matabele to Matabele.

‘Kamuza is here.’

Kamuza had never warranted such attention before. He had been one amongst a thousand; but now he had returned as the king’s man, and they lowered their voices when they spoke his name.

Bazo looked for him each day, searching the faces on the high stagings and on the running skips. He lay sleepless on his mat beside the cooling watch-fire, listening for Kamuza’s whisper
in the darkness.

He waited for many days and many nights, and then suddenly Kamuza was there, stooping through the low entrance and greeting Bazo.

‘I see you, Bazo, son of Gandang.’

Bazo stifled his joy and replied calmly.

‘I see you also, Kamuza.’

And they made a place for Kamuza in the circle, not pressing him too closely, giving him space, for now Kamuza wore the simple black tiara upon his close-cropped pate, the badge of the
Councillor, the induna of the king of Matabeleland.

They called him ‘Baba’, a term of great respect, and even Bazo clapped his hands softly in greeting and passed him the beer pot.

Only after Kamuza had refreshed himself could Bazo begin to ask the questions of home, disguising his eagerness behind measured tones and an expression of calm dignity.

Kamuza was no longer a youth, neither of them were; the years had sped away and they were both in the full flowering of their manhood. Kamuza’s features were sharper than the true Matabele
of Zanzi blood, the old blood from Zululand, for his was mixed with Tswana, the less warlike but shrewd and cunning peoples of King Khama. Kamuza’s grandmother had been captured as a maiden,
still short of puberty, by one of King Mzilikazi’s raiding impis, and taken to wife by the induna who commanded her captors. From her Kamuza had inherited his mulberry black skin and the
Egyptian slant of his eyes, the narrow nostrils and the thin and knowing twist of his lips.

There were very few Matabele who could still trace their bloodline back to the pure Zanzi, to the line of Chaka and Dingaan, the Zulus, the Sons of Heaven, and Bazo was one of those. Yet it was
Kamuza who wore the ring of the induna on his head now.

In the time of Mzilikazi, a man would have the hoar frost of wisdom and age powdering his hair, and the cowtails bound about his elbows and knees would proclaim his deeds in battle to the world
before the king ordered him to take the
isicoco.
Then his wives would plait and twist the headring into his own hair and cement it permanently into place with gum and clay and ox blood, a
permanent halo of honour that entitled the wearer to his seat on the Council of the Matabele nation.

However, the old times were changing. More cunning than fierce, Lobengula, son of Mzilikazi, looked for cunning in those about him. Mzilikazi had been a warrior and lived by the white flash of
the assegai. Lobengula, though he had blooded his spear, had never been a warrior, and he scorned the warriors’ simpleness of thought and directness of action. As his father’s
greybeards faltered, he replaced them with men who thought as swiftly as the old ones had stabbed.

He had no patience with the old men’s preoccupation with a world that was passing, and he sought out the young ones with clear fresh eyes, men who could see with him the dark clouds
gathering on the southern borders like the soaring thunderheads of high summer.

Men who could sense the change and terrible events which his wizards and his own divinations warned him would soon rush down upon him like the fires that sweep the papyrus beds of the Zambezi
swamps at the end of the dry season.

Lobengula, the great Black Elephant, whose very tread shakes the earth’s foundations, and whose voice splits the skies, was choosing young men with eyes to see and ears to hear.