Men of Men (48 page)

Bazo lay face down on the hard clay floor of the king’s hut, and he chanted the ritual praises with a catch in his throat, and brave as he was, he sweated with fear in the king’s
presence.

‘Rise up. Bazo the Axe,’ Lobengula broke in impatiently. ‘Come closer.’

Bazo crept forward on all fours, and he offered the beaded kilt. Lobengula spilled the diamonds from it into a glowing puddle and he stirred them with his finger.

‘There are prettier stones than these in every river bed of my land,’ he said. ‘These are ugly.’

‘The
buni
are mad for them. No other stone will satisfy them, but for these their hunger is so great that they will kill any who stand in their way.’

‘Tear the lion with his own claws.’ Lobengula repeated the prophecy of the Umlimo and then went on, ‘Are these ugly little stones the claws of the lion? Then, if they are, let
all men see how Lobengula is ready with claws.’

And he clapped his hands for his wives to come to him.

The royal hut was crowded now, rank upon rank of squatting men faced the low platform on which Lobengula lay. Every man of them except Bazo wore the headring of the induna, and their names were
the rolls of glory of the Matabele nation.

There was Somabula, the lion-hearted old warrior, and beside him Babiaan, royal prince of Kumalo, and all the others. Their ranks were silent and attentive, their faces grave in the light of the
fire which had been built up and whose flames leapt almost to the high-domed roof of the king’s hut.

They were watching the king.

Lobengula lay on his back on the built-up platform beyond the fire. There was a low carved headrest under the nape of his neck. Only the tip of his penis was covered by the dried and
hollowed-out gourd, otherwise he was stark naked. His great belly was mountainous and his limbs were like tree trunks.

Four of his wives squatted about him in a circle, each of them with a calabash of rendered white beef fat beside her. They anointed the king, smearing the fat thickly over his body from his
throat to his ankles. Then when it was done they rose silently, and stooped out through the opening in the back of the hut which led to the women’s quarters.

Singing softly, shuffling and swaying to the song, another file of younger wives began to wind into the hut; each of them carried upon her head a beer pot of fired clay; but these pots were not
filled with the bubbling millet beer.

The wives knelt on each side of the king, and at a word from the senior wife they dipped into the clay pots and each of them came out with a large uncut diamond in her fingers. They began
sticking the stones on the king’s skin, and the thick coating of grease held them in the patterns that they built up to ornament Lobengula’s gleaming limbs. They worked swiftly, for
they had done this before, and under their fingers Lobengula was transformed. He became a creature of mythology: half man, half glittering scaled fish.

The diamonds caught the beam of the fire, and sent it spinning against the thatched walls and high roof, darting insects of golden light that flashed in the eyes of the watchers and dazzled them
so that they grunted with amazement, and their voices went up like a choir in praise of their king.

At last the work was done and the wives crept away and left Lobengula lying on the thick soft furs, covered from throat to wrist to ankle in a silver burning coat of mail, each link of which was
a priceless diamond; and as the king’s chest and belly rose and subsided to the tide of his breathing, so this immense treasure burned and flamed.

‘Indunas of Matabele, Princes of Kumalo, hail your King.’

‘
Bayete! Bayete!
’ The royal salute burst from their throats. ‘
Bayete!
’

Then the silence was complete but expectant, for it had become the king’s custom that after this ritual display of the contents of the nation’s treasury, he would dispense honours
and rewards.

‘Bazo,’ Lobengula’s voice was sonorous. ‘Stand forward!’

The young man rose from his lowly position in the rearmost rank.

‘
Bayete, Nkosi
.’

‘Bazo, you have pleased me. I grant you a boon. What shall it be? Speak!’

‘I crave only that the king should know the depth of my duty and love for him. Set me a task, I pray you, and if it should be fierce and hard and bloody, my heart and my mouth will sing
the king’s praises for ever.’

‘On Chaka’s royal buttocks, your pup is hungry for glory.’ Lobengula looked to Gandang in the front rank of indunas. ‘And he shames all those who ask for trinkets and
cattle and women.’

He thought a moment, and then chuckled.

‘In the direction of the sunrise, two days’ march beyond the forests of Somabula, on a high hilltop lives a Mashona dog who deems himself such a great magician and rainmaker that he
is beyond the king’s arm. His name is Pemba.’ And there was a hiss of indrawn breath from the squatting ranks of elders. Three times in the past season the king had sent impis to
Pemba’s hilltop, and three times they had returned empty-handed. The name Pemba mocked them all. ‘Take fifty men from your old regiment, Little Axe, and fetch Pemba’s head so that
I can see his insolent smile with my own eyes.’

‘
Bayete!
’ Bazo’s joy carried him in a single bound over the grey heads of the indunas. He landed lightly in the space before the fire and he whirled into the
giya
, the challenge dance:

The indunas grinned and nodded indulgently, but their smiles were tinged with regret for the fury and passion of their youth which had long ago cooled in their own breasts.

L
obengula sat on the bench of his wagon. It was a big twenty-four-foot four-wheeler built in Cape Town from good English oak, but it still showed
all the marks of punishment from its long trek up from the south.

It had not moved in many years, so the grass had grown up through the wheel spokes and around the axle shafts. The canvas of the tent was bleached bone white and crusted with the dung of the
hens which roosted on the hoops of the tent framework, but the canvas protected Lobengula from the sun and the seat on the box elevated his head above the level of his courtiers and guards and
children and wives and supplicants who crowded the enclosed stockade.

The wagon was Lobengula’s throne, and the open stockade his audience chamber. Because there would be white men and women in his audience, he had donned his European finery for this
occasion. The long coat encrusted with gold lace had once belonged to a Portuguese diplomat. The lace was tarnished and one epaulette was missing, and the front could not be buttoned over the
king’s noble belly, not by twelve inches, and the cuffs reached only halfway down his forearms.

The toy spear of kingship, the haft of red wild mahogany and the blade of brightest silver, was in his right hand, and he used it to summon a young boy from out of the crush.

The child was shaking with terror, and his voice so tremulous that Lobengula had to lean forward to hear him.

‘I waited until the leopard entered the goat house; then I crept up and closed the door and I barricaded it with stones.’

‘How did you kill the beast?’ Lobengula demanded.

‘I stabbed him through the chinks in the wall with my father’s assegai.’

The boy crept forward and laid the lustrous gold and black dappled skin at Lobengula’s feet.

‘Take your choice of three cows from my royal herds, little one, and drive them to your father’s kraal and tell him that the king has given you a praise name. From this day you will
be known as “The one who stares into the eyes of the leopard”.’

The boy’s voice cracked in an adolescent squeak as he backed away gabbling the praises.

Next was a Hollander, a big arrogant white man with a querulous voice.

‘I have waited three weeks for the king to decide—’

This was translated for Lobengula, and he mused aloud.

‘See how red the man’s face becomes when he is angry, like the wattles on the head of the black vulture. Tell him that the king does not count days, perhaps he will have to wait as
long again, who knows?’ And he dismissed him with a flirt of the spear.

Lobengula took a pull from the bottle of champagne that stood on the wagon seat beside him. The wine fizzed and spilled onto the front of his gold-frogged jacket. Then suddenly his face lit into
a beatific smile, but his voice was carping and querulous.

‘I sent for you yesterday, Nomusa, Girlchild of Mercy. I am in great pain; why did you not come sooner?’

‘An eagle flies, a cheetah runs, but I am limited to the pace of a mule, oh King,’ said Robyn Codrington, as she picked her way through the offal that littered the earthen floor of
the stockade, and with the fly switch in her hand cleared a path through the crowd towards the wagon, even dealing a stinging cut to one of the king’s black-cloaked executioners.

‘Out of my way, eater of human flesh,’ she told him primly. ‘Be gone, child stabber.’ And the man leaped aside nimbly and scowled after her.

‘What is it, Lobengula?’ she asked as she reached the wagon. ‘What ails you this time?’

‘My feet are filled with burning coals.’

‘Gout,’ Robyn said as she touched the grotesquely swollen appendages. ‘You drink too much beer, oh King, you drink too much brandy and champagne.’ She opened her bag.

‘You would have me die of thirst. You are not well named, Nomusa; there is no pity in your heart.’

‘Nor yours, Lobengula,’ Robyn snapped. ‘They tell me you have sent another impi to murder the people of Pemba.’

‘He is only a Mashona,’ Lobengula chuckled. ‘Save your sympathy for a king whose stomach feels as though it is filled with sharp stones.’

‘Indigestion,’ Robyn scolded. ‘Gluttony killed your father, and it is killing you.’

‘Now you would starve me also. You want me to be a skinny little man of no consequence.’

‘A thin live one or a fat dead one,’ Robyn told him. ‘Open your mouth.’

Lobengula choked on the draught, and rolled his eyes theatrically.

‘The pain is better than the taste of your medicine.’

‘I will leave you five of these pills. Eat one when your feet swell and the pain becomes fierce.’

‘Twenty,’ said Lobengula. ‘A box full. I, Lobengula, King of Matabele, command it. Leave me a box of these little white pills.’

‘Five,’ said Robyn firmly. ‘Or you will eat them all at one time, as you did before.’

The king rocked with gargantuan laughter, and almost fell from the wagon seat.

‘I think I will command you to leave those little white huts of yours at Khami, and come to live closer to me.’

‘I should not obey.’

‘That’s why I do not command it,’ Lobengula agreed, with another shout of laughter.

‘This kraal is a disgrace, the dirt, the flies—’

‘A few old bones and a little dog shit never killed a Matabele,’ the king told her, and then was serious and motioned her closer, dropping his voice so that only she could hear.

‘The Dutchman with the red face, you know he wishes to build a trade post at the ford of the Hunyani river—’

‘The man is a cheat. The goods he brings are shoddy, and he will deceive your people.’

‘A runner has brought this book.’ He handed the folded and wafered sheet to Robyn. ‘Read it for me.’

‘It is from Sir Francis Good. He wishes—’ For almost an hour, whispering hoarsely so that no other could hear, Lobengula consulted Robyn on fifty different matters ranging from
the British Commissioner’s letter to the menstrual problems of his youngest wife. Then at last he said, ‘Your coming is like the first sweet rain at the end of the long dry. Is there
aught I can do for your happiness?’

‘You can let your people come to worship in my church.’

This time the king’s chuckle was rueful. ‘Nomusa, you are as persistent as the termites that gnaw away the poles of my hut.’ He frowned with thought and then smiled again.
‘Very well, I will let you take one of my people – as long as it is a woman, the wife of an induna of royal blood, and the mother of twelve sons. If you can find one of my people who
meets all those conditions, you may take her and splash water on her and make your sign on her forehead; and she may sing songs to your three white gods if she so wishes.’

This time Robyn had to answer his sly and mischievous grin. ‘You are a cruel man, Lobengula, and you eat and drink too much. But I love you.’

‘And I love you also, Nomusa.’

‘Then I will ask one more favour.’

‘Ask it,’ he commanded.

‘There is a lad, son of my brother—’

‘Henshaw.’

‘The king knows all.’

‘What of this boy?’

‘Will the king listen to his petition?’

‘Send him to me.’

E
ven from where he stood Bazo could see that the grain bins were overflowing with corn that had been sun-dried still on the cob. There was enough
to feed an army, he decided bitterly. There was no chance of starving them out.

The grain bins were cylindrical in shape, their walls of plaited green saplings plastered with clay and cow dung. They stood on stilts of mopani poles to allow the air to circulate below them,
and to keep out bush rats and other vermin.

They were perched on the very edge of the precipice.

‘The dog has brought good rains to his own fields,’ murmured Zama, Bazo’s lieutenant. ‘He is fat with corn. Perhaps he is a rain-doctor as he claims.’

‘Water,’ Bazo mused, staring up the sheer cliff. Beyond the grain bins he could make out the thatched roofs of the tribal huts. ‘Can we drive them out with thirst?’ he
asked advice, for Zama had been a member of one of the previous abortive raids upon the stronghold.

‘The three other indunas tried that at first,’ Zama pointed out. ‘But then one of the Mashona that they captured told them that there is a running spring from which they draw
all the water they wish.’

The sun was beyond the summit of the hill, so Bazo squinted his eyes against it. ‘There is lush green growth there—’ He pointed to a narrow gulley that cleft the top of the
cliff like an axe stroke but was choked with growth. ‘That would be it.’