Men of Men (68 page)

The silence fell again, but charged with promise and the threat of an unseen presence watching them from the utter darkness of the cave’s recesses.

Then there was a voice, the voice of a child, sweet and piping clear. It issued not from the cave but from the air above the king’s head, so that all of them raised their eyes. There was
nothing there except the voice.

‘The stars will shine upon the hills, and the Black Bull will not quench them.’

The little group of indunas drew closer together as though to take comfort from one another, and the silence fell again. Bazo felt himself shivering, although his sweat tickled like an insect as
it ran down between his shoulder blades. Then he jerked his head as another voice spoke. It came from the ground at the king’s feet, and it used the liquid purring tones of a beautiful and
seductive woman.

‘The sun will shine at midnight, and the Great Elephant will not dim it.’

Again that fraught and frightening silence, before something croaked from the cliff high above them, a hoarse inhuman sound, like the croak of a carrion crow.

‘Heed the wisdom of the vixen before that of the dogfox, Lobengula, King of—’ The voice broke off abruptly, and there was a scuffling sound deep in the black maw of the cave,
and the old crone who had been nodding and grinning at Lobengula’s feet scrambled up and shouted an order in an unknown tongue.

Now there was a flash of movement within the cave, and it caused consternation to Lobengula and his indunas, for they had visited the cave a hundred times and more but they had never seen the
Umlimo nor had any glimpse of her presence in the depths of the cave.

This was something beyond ritual and custom, and the crone hopped forward, shouting angrily; and now they could make out what was happening in the gloom. It seemed that two of the macabre
attendants of the Umlimo were trying to restrain a smaller and more agile figure. They were unsuccessful, for the person threw off their clutching, claw-like hands and ran forward to the threshold
of the cave, where the early sunlight revealed the Umlimo at last.

She was so beautiful that all of them, even the king, gasped and stared. Her skin was oiled and polished to the colour of dark amber.

Her limbs were long and supple as a heron’s neck, her feet and hands finely shaped. She was in the prime of her womanhood, her body not yet distorted by childbearing; although her belly
was luscious as a ripening fruit her waist was narrow as a lad’s. All she wore was a single string of crimson beads about her waist, knotted at the level of the deeply sculptured pit of her
navel. Her hips flared with a delicate line, forming a broad basin to contain the spade-shaped wedge of her sex. It nestled there like a dark furry little animal possessed of separate life and
existence.

Her head was perfectly balanced on the long stem of her neck; the neat cap of her hair set off the marvellous domed contours of her skull and exposed the small neat shape of her ears. Her
features were oriental, the huge eyes slanted, her cheekbones high and her nose delicate and straight – but her mouth was twisted with anguish and her eyes blinded with tears as she stared at
the young induna who stood at the king’s back.

Slowly she lifted one hand and reached out towards him; the long, delicate palm was pink and soft, the gesture infinitely sad.

‘Tanase!’ whispered Bazo, staring at her, and his hands shook so that the blade of his assegai clattered against the rim of his shield.

This was the woman he had chosen and who had been so cruelly taken from him. Since her going Bazo had sought no other to wife, though the king had chided him, and others whispered that it was
unnatural, yet Bazo had held to the memory of this bright, sweet maid. He wanted to rush to her and seize her, to swing her high upon his shoulder and bear her away, but he stood rooted, her
anguish reflected in his own eyes.

For though she stood before him, she was as remote as the full moon. She was a child of the spirits and protected by their horrid servants, far beyond the reach of his loving hands and constant
heart.

Her attendants came now from the cave behind her, to scold and whine. Slowly Tanase lowered her arm, though for a moment longer her whole body yearned towards Bazo, and then her lovely head
wilted like a flower upon the long, graceful stalk of her neck and she allowed them to take her arms.

‘Tanase!’ Bazo said her name for the last time, and her shoulders jerked at the sound of his voice.

Then a terrible thing happened. A shuddering convulsion ran up Tanase’s back, from the perfect globes of her tight, hard buttocks to the nape of her neck, so that the nerves and muscles
twitched and contracted on each side of her spine. Then her spine began to bend backwards like a hunter’s bow.

‘The spirit is upon her,’ shrieked the old witch. ‘Let the spirit take her!’

They let her be, drawing back from her wracked body.

Every muscle in her body was under such strain that it stood out in clear and separate definition under her glossy skin – and her spine arched to an impossible angle, the base of her skull
almost touching the soft flesh at the back of her knees.

Her face was contorted with the unbearable agony of divination; her eyes rolled back into her head so that only the whites showed. Her lips were drawn back so that the small perfect white teeth
were exposed in a frozen rictus and creamy froth bubbled from the corners of her mouth.

Though her lips did not move, a voice boomed from her tortured throat. It was the deep bass of a man, the stentorian voice of a warrior, and it bore no trace of the terrible travail of the young
woman from whom it issued.

‘The falcons! The white hawk has torn open the nest of stone. The falcons are flying. Save the falcons! The falcons!’

The voice rose abruptly into a wild shriek, and Tanase collapsed and writhed like a squashed insect upon the earth.

‘N
o black man, neither Matabele nor Rozwi nor Karanga, none of them would dare desecrate the nest of the falcons,’ said Lobengula, and
the circle of indunas nodded. ‘Only a white man would have the effrontery to defy the word of the king and chance the wrath of the spirits.’

He paused and took snuff, drawing out the little ritual to put off the moment of decision.

‘If I send an impi to Zimbabwe and we take a white man in the red act of plundering the ancient place, dare I send steel through his heart?’ Lobengula turned to Somabula, and the old
man lifted his grey head and looked sadly at his king.

‘Kill one of them, and the others will come swarming like ants,’ he said. ‘Set not a feast for the birds, when it will bring a pride of lions instead.’

Lobengula sighed and looked to Gandang:

‘Speak, my father’s son.’

‘Oh King, Somabula is wise and his words have the same weight as boulders of black ironstone. Yet the king’s words are heavier still, and the king’s words have been given
–
the despoilers of the ancient places must die.
Those are the words of Lobengula.’

The king nodded slowly.

‘Bazo!’ he said softly, and the young induna dropped on one knee before the king’s stool.

‘Take one of the wizards to guide your impi to the nest of the falcons. If the stone birds are gone, follow them. Find the despoiler. If it is a white man, take him where no other eyes can
see you, not even those of your most trusted warriors. Kill the man and bury him in a secret place, and speak of it to no man but your king. Do you hear the words of Lobengula?’

‘I hear, oh Great King, and to hear is to obey.’

D
utchman, the bullock with the narrowest spread of horns, was the only one which Isazi could coax down the narrow passageways and over the tumbled
stonework into the temple enclosure of the ruins. In the baskets on his sturdy, dappled back, they ferried out the bird images, even the damaged ones, and repacked them onto the backs of the other
oxen which waited outside the massive walls.

With Isazi’s skilful handling of the bullocks and their burdens, the work was finished by mid-afternoon, and they roped the oxen in single file. With patent relief, Isazi led them away
through the forest towards the south.

Ralph’s relief was every bit as intense. He had been uneasy ever since that chance encounter with the Matabele impi in the hills. Now he let Isazi go on with the oxen, while he circled
back across their incoming tracks to the north-west of the ruined city, examining the ground with the hunter’s eye for any sign that they had been followed, or that there were any other human
beings in the area. It need not be a war party – even a band of honey-gatherers or a hunter could carry word back to Lobengula’s kraal or alert the border impis.

He knew what he would have to do if he found a wanderer or solitary hunter, and he eased the rifle in the leather boot at his knee. These forests were populous. He saw troops of big-eared
striped kudu, sable antelope with snowy bellies and sweeping scimitar horns, big black bovine buffalo and spreading herds of plump zebra with alert pricked ears and stiff, black manes, but there
was no sign of human presence.

He was only slightly mollified when he turned back and picked up the spoor of the bullock file five miles on the other side of the ruins. He trotted along the widely beaten sign, and his
misgivings returned at full strength. This was too easy to follow.

He caught up with Isazi and his bullock train as the dusk was falling, and he helped him lift the heavy packs down from the backs of the oxen and examine them for galling or saddle sores, before
hobbling them and letting them graze. More than once during the night he started awake, and listened for the sound of men’s voices – but heard only the yipping of jackal.

In the early light they entered a wide grassy plain; the trees on the far side were a dark line on the horizon, and there were huge troops of zebra grazing out in the open. They lifted their
heads to watch the strange little caravan go past, and sounded their curiosity and concern with their sharp, almost dog-like, barks.

Halfway across the plain Ralph turned the bullock train at a right angle to their track, and they marched due east until noon, when they re-entered the forest. Still Ralph headed on east until
darkness fell and they camped.

Isazi muttered and complained about the wasted day, and the detour of so many miles out of their direct route towards the Limpopo river and the Bushman wells beyond, where Umfaan waited for them
with the wagons.

‘Why do we do this?’

‘For the benefit of anyone who follows us.’

‘They will still be able to follow the spoor we have laid,’ Isazi protested.

‘I will change that, in the morning,’ Ralph assured him, and in the dawn he allowed Isazi to resume the southerly direction again.

‘If I do not rejoin you, do not wait for me. Keep on until you reach the wagons, well beyond the frontier of the Matabele. Wait for me there,’ he ordered, and he left Isazi and rode
back on their spoor of the previous day.

He reached the open grassland where they had made such a dramatic change of direction the preceding morning, and the zebra barked at him. Their stripes were indistinguishable at this distance,
and the herds were moving silver-grey masses on the yellow grassland.

‘You are going to enjoy this, old Tom.’ Ralph patted the horse’s neck and then trotted out onto the plain towards the nearest herd of zebra. There were more than a hundred
animals in the group, and they let horse and rider approach to within a few hundred paces before bunching up and galloping away.

‘After them, Tom!’ Ralph whooped, and they tore into the bellowing dust cloud, gaining swiftly on the chubby, striped ranks of bobbing hindquarters. Ralph quartered and turned them,
and they gathered up another herd, and then another, until there were two or three thousand zebra in stampede ahead of them.

He rode out onto one flank and pushed the herd over the ground which his bullock train had crossed the previous day. Thousands of broad hooves churned the earth into soft explosions of dust.
When they reached the far side of the plain, Ralph forced Tom ahead of the leading zebras and rode across their front, yelling and waving his hat about his head. The dense mass of animals turned
like a living whirlpool, and the dust boiled up into the sky.

Back they went across the open ground with Tom delighting in the chase, and Ralph worked them northward until the zebra herds reached the forest line and swung parallel with the trees, and they
scoured the earth with driving hooves in a swathe five hundred yards wide.

Back and forth again Ralph drove them, sheep-dogging them deliberately over the bullock tracks on each pass, until at last even Tom’s pace was short and knocked up, and he was sweating in
black streaks down his shoulders and flanks and blowing like a south-easterly gale over False Bay.

Ralph off-saddled in the shade of the treeline, while out on the plain the zebra herds, skittish and nervous at the harassment – still galloped in aimless circles, or snorted and pawed the
torn earth.

‘Nobody, not even a Bushman, will be able to pick the spoor through that,’ Ralph told Tom, and stooped to lift each of his hooves in turn.

With his clasp knife Ralph prised off Tom’s iron horseshoes and bundled them into the saddle-bag.

Without shoes, Tom’s tracks were almost identical to those of a zebra stallion. He might go lame before they reached the wagons at Bushman wells, but they could limp in at their own speed,
sure at last that there would be no pursuit. Once they reached the wagon, there was forge and anvil to re-shoe him, and Tom would suffer no lasting injury.

Ralph wiped Tom down with the saddle blanket and let him rest for another hour before re-saddling. Then he rode back amongst the scattered zebra herds to mingle and lose Tom’s hoof prints
amongst theirs before deliberately turning westwards, the opposite direction to Isazi’s bullocks. He settled down in the saddle to lay a false trail into the forest before circling back
southwards to find Isazi.

R
alph slept until sunrise the following morning, secure at last, and the temptation to drink coffee was too much for him. He chanced a small fire
and delighted in the strong hot brew.