Men of Men (52 page)

‘Salina, you are the most beautiful girl – woman – I mean, lady, that I have ever seen.’

‘That’s kind, but untrue, Ralph. I do have a mirror, you know.’

‘It’s true, I swear—’

‘Please don’t swear, Ralph. In any event, there are much more important things in life than physical beauty – kindness, and goodness and understanding, for instance.’

‘Oh yes, and you have all those.’

Suddenly Salina stopped in mid stroke, and she stared at him with an expression of dawning consternation.

‘Ralph,’ she whispered. ‘Cousin Ralph—’

‘Cousin I may be,’ he was stammering slightly in his rush to have it all said, ‘but I love you. Salina, I loved you from the first moment I saw you at the river.’

‘Oh Ralph, my poor dear Ralph.’ Consternation was mingled now with compassion.

‘I would never have spoken, not before – but now, after this expedition I have some substance. I will be able to pay off my debts, and when I come back I will have my own wagons. I
am not yet rich, but I will be.’

‘If only I had known. Oh Ralph, if only I had suspected, I would have been able to—’

But he was gabbling it out now.

‘I love you, Salina, oh how dearly I love you, and I want you to marry me.’

She came to him then, and her eyes filled with blue tears that trembled on her lower lids.

‘Oh dear Ralph. I am so sorry. I would have given anything to save you from hurt. If only I had known.’

He stopped then, bewildered. ‘You will not – does that mean you will not marry me?’ The bewilderment faded, and his jaw thrust out and his mouth hardened. ‘But why not, I
will give you everything, I will cherish and—’

‘Ralph.’ She touched his lips, and left a little dab of flour upon them. ‘Hush, Ralph, hush.’

‘But, Salina, I love you! Don’t you understand?’

‘Yes, I do. But, dear Ralph, I don’t love you!’

C
athy and the twins went as far as the river with Ralph. Vicky and Lizzie rode, two up, on Tom’s back. They rode astride, with their skirts
up around their thighs, and squealed with delight every few seconds, until Ralph thought his eardrums would split, and he scowled moodily ahead – not replying to Cathy’s questions and
comments as she skipped along beside him, until the spring went out of her step and she, too, fell silent.

The bank of the Khami river was where they would part. All of them knew that, without speaking about it. And when they reached it Isazi had already taken the wagon through the drift. The
iron-shod wheels had left deep scars in the far bank. He would be an hour or so ahead. They stopped on the near bank and now even the twins were silent. Ralph looked back along the track, lifting
his hat and shading his eyes with the brim against the early sunlight.

‘Salina isn’t coming then?’ he said flatly.

‘She’s got a belly ache,’ said Vicky. ‘She told me so.’

‘If you ask me, it’s more like the curse of Eve,’ said Lizzie airily.

‘That’s rude,’ Cathy said. ‘And only silly little girls talk about things they don’t understand.’

Lizzie looked chastened, and Vicky assumed a virtuous air of innocence.

‘Now both of you say goodbye to Cousin Ralph.’

‘I love you. Cousin Ralph,’ said Vicky, and had to be prised off him like a leech.

‘I love you, Cousin Ralph.’

Lizzie had counted the kisses that Vicky had bestowed on him, and she went for a new world record, a noble attempt, but frustrated by Cathy.

‘Now, scat,’ Cathy told them. ‘Go, both of you.’

‘Cathy is crying,’ said Lizzie, and both twins were immediately entranced.

‘I am not,’ said Cathy furiously.

‘Oh yes you are,’ said Vicky.

‘I have something in my eye.’

‘Both eyes?’ asked Lizzie sceptically.

‘I warn you,’ Cathy told them. They knew that expression of old, and reluctantly they retired just out of range. Cathy turned her back to them so they missed half of what
followed.

‘They are right.’ Her whisper was as blurred as her eyes. ‘I am crying, Ralph. I hate so to see you go.’

Ralph had not truly looked at her, not ever, his eyes had been for Salina alone, but now her frank admission touched him and he saw her for the first time.

He had thought her a child, but he had been wrong, he realized suddenly. It was the thick dark eyebrows and the firm chin that gave strength to her face, so that he sensed that anything that
made her cry was deeply felt. Surely she had not been so tall when first he met her almost a year before. Now the top of her head reached his chin.

The freckles on her cheeks kept her young, but her nose was set in the shape of maturity and the gaze of her green eyes below the arched brows, though flooded now with tears, was too wise and
steady for childhood.

She still wore the muddy green dress of sewn flour sacks, but its fit had altered. Now it was baggy at the waist, while at the same time it was too tight across her chest. Yet it could not
suppress the thrust of young firm breasts, and the seams strained across hips that he remembered being as narrow and bony as a boy’s.

‘You will come back, Ralph? Unless you promise, I cannot let you go.’

‘I promise,’ he said, and suddenly the pain of rejection by Salina, which he had thought might destroy him, was just supportable.

‘I will pray for you each day until you do,’ Cathy said, and came to kiss him. She no longer felt skinny and awkward in his arms, and Ralph was suddenly very aware of the softness of
her against his chest – and lower.

Her mouth had a taste like chewing a stalk of green spring grass. Her lips formed a pillow for his. He had no burning desire to break the embrace, and Cathy also seemed content to let it
persist. The pain of unrequited love ebbed a little more to be replaced by a warm and comforting sensation, a most pleasant glow, until with a shock Ralph realized two things.

Firstly, the twins were an avid audience, their eyes enormous and their grins impudent. Secondly, that the pleasant glow which had suffused him had its source considerably lower than his broken
heart, and was accompanied by more tangible changes that must soon become apparent to the fresh young innocent in his arms.

He almost shoved her away, and vaulted up onto Tom’s back with unnecessary violence. However, when he looked down at Cathy again, the tide of green tears in her eyes had receded and been
replaced by a look of satisfaction, a knowingness that proved beyond doubt what he had just come to realize, that she was no longer a child.

‘How long?’ she asked.

‘Not before the end of the rains,’ he told her. ‘Six or seven months from now.’ And suddenly that seemed to Ralph to be a very long time indeed.

‘Anyway,’ she said. ‘I have your promise.’

On the far bank of the river he looked back. The twins had lost interest and started home. They were racing each other down the track, skirts and plaits flying – but Cathy still stood
staring after him. Now she lifted her hand and waved. She kept waving until horse and rider disappeared amongst the trees.

Then she sat down on a log beside the track. The sun made its noon and then sank into the misty smoke of the bush fires that blued the horizon and turned to a soft red orb that she could look at
directly without paining her eyes.

In the gloaming a leopard sawed and hacked harshly from the dense dark riverine forest nearby. Cathy shivered and stood up. She cast one last lingering glance across the wide river bed and then
at last she turned for home.

B
azo could not sleep; hours ago he had left his sleeping-mat and come to squat by the fire in the centre of the hut. The others had not even
stirred when he moved, Zama and Kamuza and Mondane, those who would accompany him tomorrow.

Their finery was piled beside their recumbent figures. The cloaks of feathers and furs and beads, the headdresses and kilts – the regalia reserved for only the most grave and momentous
occasions – like the Festival of the First Fruits, or a personal report to the king, or, again, the ceremony for which they had gathered and which would start at the dawn of the morrow.

Bazo looked at them now, and his chest felt congested with his joy, joy so intense that it sang in his ears and fizzed in his blood. Joy even more intense in that these his companions of the
years, with whom he had shared boyhood and youth and now manhood, would be there again at one of the most important days of his life.

Now Bazo sat alone at the fire while his companions snored and muttered in sleep, and he took each coin of his good fortune and, like a miser counting his treasure, fondled it with his mind,
turning each memory over and gloating upon it.

He lived again every moment of his triumph when the lines of captive women had filed before Lobengula and piled the spoils in front of his wagon, the bars and coils of red copper, the axe heads,
the leather bags of salt, the clay pots full of beads, for Pemba had been a famous wizard and had gathered his tribute from a host of fearful clients.

Lobengula had smiled when he saw his treasure, for that was what had been at the root of his feud with Pemba. The king was not above the jealousies of common men. When Lobengula smiled, all his
indunas smiled in sympathy and made those little clucking sounds of approval.

Bazo remembered how the king had called him forward, and smiled again when Bazo emptied the bag he carried over his shoulder, and the wizard’s head, which by then was in an advanced state
of decomposition, had rolled to the forewheel of the wagon and grinned up at Lobengula with ruined lips drawn back from uneven teeth stained by the hemp pipe.

A troop of the gaunt, mange-ridden pariah dogs that skulked about the king’s kraal had come to snarl and squabble over the morsel, and when one of the black-cloaked executioners would have
scattered them with blows of his knobkerrie, the king restrained him.

‘The poor beasts are hungry, let them be.’ And he turned back to Bazo. ‘Tell me how it was done.’

Bazo relived in his mind every word with which he had described the expedition, and while he told it he had begun to
giya
, to dance and sing the ode to Pemba which he had composed:

He sang, and in the front row of the senior indunas, Gandang, his father, sat grave and proud.

Then as the verses of the song mentioned them, Zama and his warriors sprang forward to whirl and dance at his side.

When the triumph dance was over, they threw themselves face down on the earth in front of the wagon.

‘Bazo, son of Gandang, go out and choose two hundred head from the royal herds,’ said Lobengula.

‘
Bayete!
’ shouted Bazo, still panting from the dance.

‘Bazo, son of Gandang – you who commanded fifty so skilfully – now I give you one thousand to command.’

‘
Nkosi!
Lord!’

‘You will command the levy of young men waiting now at the royal kraal on the Shangani river. I give you the insignia for your new regiment. Your shields will be red, your kilts the tails
of the genet cat, your plumes the wing feathers of the marabou stork, and your headband the fur of the burrowing mole,’ Lobengula intoned, and then paused. ‘The name of your regiment
will be Izimvukuzane Ezembintaba – the moles that burrow under a mountain.’

‘
Nkosi kakhula!
Great King!’ Bazo roared.

‘Now Bazo, rise up and go into the women to choose yourself a wife. Be sure that she is virtuous and fruitful, and let her first duty be to set the headring of the induna on your
brow.’

‘
Indhlovu! Ngi ya bonga!
Great Elephant, I praise you!’

Sitting his solitary watch by the fire, Bazo remembered every word, every change of tone, every pause and emphasis that the king had used to heap his honours upon him. He sighed with contentment
and placed another log upon the fire, carefully so as not to wake his companions, and the sparks floated up through the opening in the highest point of the domed roof.

Then a distant sound interrupted his reverie; it was the single whoop of a hyena, not an unusual sound except that it was the first time that he had heard it since nightfall. On every other
night the hideous cries of these loathsome animals began when they crept from their burrows at dusk and continued until sunrise.

They haunted the small woody copse beyond the cattle enclosure that all the inhabitants of Gandang’s kraal used as a communal open-air latrine. They hyena cleansed the area of excrement
during the hours of darkness. For this reason, Gandang’s people tolerated the presence of an animal that they usually abhorred with a superstitious dread.

So tonight the single whooping cry at midnight drew attention to the silence that had preceded it. Bazo listened a few seconds longer and then let his thoughts stray to the morrow.

After the king, Gandang was one of the three most important personages in Matabeleland – only Somabula and Babiaan were his peers, so that a marriage at his kraal would have been a
momentous event even if it were not his eldest son – himself a newly appointed induna of one thousand – who was to be the bridegroom.

Juba, senior wife of Gandang, and mother of Bazo the bridegroom, had supervised the brew of beer, watching with an expert eye for the bloom of yeast on the germinating sorghum, testing with her
own plump finger the temperature of the ground meal gruel as it was malted, judging the addition of the final booster of yeast and then standing over the matrons as they strained the brewing
through woven bamboo sieves into the huge black clay beer-pots. Now there were a thousand pots each holding half a gallon of her famous brew, ready to greet the guests as they arrived at
Gandang’s kraal. There would be a thousand invited guests.