Men of Men (69 page)

When they rode on, the sun was well up, and clear of the forest tops. Ralph let old Tom amble along at his own pace to save his unshod hooves, and he pushed his hat onto the back of his head and
repeated the opening bars of Yankee Doodle over and over in a flat tuneless whistle.

The morning was cool and fresh. He felt elated at the success of his coup; already he was planning the sale of the statues. He would send letters to the British Museum and the Smithsonian
Institution in Washington, D.C.

Out on his right a red-breasted cuckoo uttered its staccato call that sounded like a greeting ‘Pete-my-friend!’.

Tom flicked his ears but Ralph went on whistling happily, slouched down in the saddle.

Old J. B. Robinson, one of the Kimberley millionaires who had made millions more on the new Witwatersrand goldfield, would buy at least one of the birds simply because Rhodes had one. He could
not bear—

In the grassy glade ahead of Ralph a francolin called harshly, ‘Kwali! Kwali!’ only twice, and it rang falsely to Ralph’s ear. These brown partridges usually called five or six
times, not twice.

Ralph checked Tom and stood up in the stirrups. Carefully he surveyed the narrow open strip of head-high elephant grass. Suddenly a covey of brown partridge burst out of the grass and whirled
away on noisy wings.

Ralph grinned and slouched down again in the saddle, and Tom trotted into the waving stand of coarse grass – and instantly it was full of dark figures of dancing plumes and red shields.
They swarmed around Tom and the sunlight sparkled on the long silver blades.

‘Go, Tom!’ Ralph urged, and kicked his heels into his flank, while he jerked the rifle from its bucket and held it against his hip.

As Tom lunged forward, one of the plumed warriors leapt to catch his bridle, and Ralph fired. The heavy lead bullet hit the Matabele in the jaw and blew half of it away; for a moment teeth and
white bone flashed in the shattered face, and then were smothered in an eruption of bright blood.

Tom bounded into the gap in their line that the man had left, but as he went through, one of them darted in from the side and grunted with the strength of his stroke.

With a thrill of horror Ralph saw the long steel blade go into Tom’s ribs, an inch in front of his toe cap. He swung the empty rifle at the warrior’s head, but the man ducked under
it, and while Ralph twisted in the saddle, a second Matabele darted in, and Tom’s whole body shuddered and convulsed between Ralph’s knees as the man stabbed deep and hard into
Tom’s neck, an inch in front of his plunging shoulder.

Then they were through the line of Matabele, but the assegai had been plucked from the warrior’s hand and the shaft stuck out of Tom’s neck at a brutal angle that showed the point
must be buried in his lungs. Still the gallant old pony carried his master on across the glade and into the first trees of the forest.

Then abruptly a double stream of frothy bright lung-blood burst from Tom’s nostrils, and splattered back against Ralph’s boots. Tom died in full run. His nose dropped to the earth
and he went over in a somersault that pitched Ralph high over his head.

Ralph smashed into the earth, and he felt as though his ribs were stoved in and his teeth cracked from his jaws, but he crawled desperately to his fallen rifle and jammed a fresh cartridge into
the breech.

When he looked up, they were almost upon him, a line of racing red shields and pounding bare feet below; the war rattles on their ankles clashed and the hunting chorus was like the deep baying
of hounds.

One tall
indoda
lifted his shield high to clear his spear arm for the killing stroke, and the blade flashed as it started down, and then the movement froze.

‘Henshaw!’ The name exploded out of the warrior’s straining throat, and then Bazo continued the stroke, but at the last instant rolled his wrist and the flat of the heavy blade
smashed against Ralph’s skull above his temple; and he pitched forwards, face down against the sandy earth, and lay still as death.

‘Y
ou took the irons from the horse’s hooves.’ Bazo nodded approval. ‘That was a good trick. If you had not slept so long
this morning, we might never have caught up with you.’

‘Tom is dead now,’ replied Ralph.

He was propped against the trunk of a mopani tree. There was a bright scarlet smear of gravel rash on one cheek where he had hit the ground when he was thrown from the saddle. The hair above his
temple was caked with black dried blood where the flat of Bazo’s blade had knocked him senseless, and he was bound at ankles and wrists with thongs of rawhide. Already his hands were puffy
and blue from the constriction of his bonds.

‘Yes!’ Bazo nodded again gravely, and looked at the carcass of the horse where it lay fifty paces away. ‘He was a good horse, and now he is dead.’ He looked back at
Ralph. ‘The
indoda
whom we will bury today was a good man – and now he is dead also.’

All about them squatted ranks of Matabele warriors, all Bazo’s men drawn up in a dense black circle, sitting on their shields and listening intently to every word spoken.

‘Your men fell upon me without warning, as though I were a thief or a murderer. I defended myself as any man would do.’

‘And are you not a thief then, Henshaw?’ Bazo interrupted.

‘What question is that?’ Ralph demanded.

‘The birds, Henshaw. The stone birds.’

‘I do not know what you speak of,’ Ralph challenged angrily, pushing himself away from the tree trunk and staring arrogantly at Bazo.

‘You know, Henshaw. You know about the birds, for we have spoken about them many times. You know also the king’s warning that to despoil the ancient places is death to any man, for I
myself have told you of it.’

Still Ralph glared his defiance.

‘Your spoor led straight to the burial place of the kings and straight away from it – and the birds are gone. Where are they, Henshaw?’

A moment longer Ralph continued his show, and then he shrugged and smiled and sank back against the tree.

‘They are gone, Bazo, flown afar where you cannot follow them. It was the prophecy of the Umlimo, beyond the powers of mortal men to prevent.’

At the mention of the prophetess, a shadow of sorrow passed over Bazo’s face.

‘Yes, it was part of the prophecy,’ he agreed. ‘And now it is time to carry out the orders of the king.’ He stood up and addressed the squatting ranks of Matabele.

‘All of you heard the king’s word,’ he said. ‘What must be done, must be done in secret; it must be done by me alone, and no other may witness it, nor speak of it after,
even in a whisper, on pain of slow and lingering death. You have heard the king’s word.’

‘We have heard the king’s word,’ they agreed in deep sonorous chorus.

‘Go!’ Bazo commanded. ‘Wait for me at great Zimbabwe, and wipe from your eyes the things you have seen this day.’

His warriors sprang up and saluted him. They shouldered the body of the man that Ralph had slain, using their shields as a litter, and they bore him away. The double column of running warriors
snaked away across the glade and into the forest.

Bazo watched them go, leaning on his own shield, and then he turned back to Ralph, heavily and unwillingly.

‘I am the king’s man,’ he said softly. ‘Strictly charged with your death. What I have to do today will leave a deep scar in my heart for all my life, though I live to be
an old greyhead. The memory of this thing will keep me from sleep, and turn the food sour and heavy in my belly.’ Slowly he paced to where Ralph lay and stood over him. ‘I will never
forget this deed, Henshaw, though I will never be able to speak of it, not to my father or my favourite wife. I must lock it in the darkness of my soul.’

‘If you must do it, then do it swiftly,’ Ralph challenged him, trying to show no fear, trying to keep his gaze steady.

‘Yes,’ Bazo nodded, and shifted his grip on the haft of the spear. ‘Intercede for me with your God, Henshaw,’ he said, and struck.

Ralph cried out at the stinging bum of razor steel, and his blood burst from the wound and spilled into the dry earth.

Bazo dropped to his knee beside him and scooped up the blood in his cupped hands. He splashed it on his arms and chest. He smeared it on the haft and blade of his spear, until the bright steel
was dulled.

Then Bazo leapt up and ripped a strip of bark from the mopani tree. He plucked a bunch of green leaves and came back to Ralph’s side. He held together the lips of the deep wound in
Ralph’s forearm, then he placed the bunch of leaves over it and bound it up with the strip of bark.

The bleeding slowed and stopped, and Bazo hacked the rawhide bonds from Ralph’s ankles and wrists and stood back.

He gestured at his own blood-sullied arms and weapon.

‘Who, seeing me thus, would believe that I am a traitor to my king?’ he asked softly. ‘Yet the love of a brother is stronger than the duty to a king.’

Ralph dragged himself upright against the mopani trunk, holding his wounded arm against his chest and staring at the young induna.

‘Go in peace, Henshaw,’ whispered Bazo. ‘But pray to your God for me, for I have betrayed my king and forfeited my honour.’

Then Bazo whirled and ran back across the glade of yellow grass. When he reached the trees on the far side he neither paused nor looked back, but plunged into them with a kind of reckless
despair.

T
en days later, with his boots scuffed through the uppers and the legs of his breeches ripped to tatters by arrow grass and thorn, with his
inflamed and infected left arm strapped to his chest by a sling of bark, his face gaunt with starvation and his body bony and wasted, Ralph staggered into the circle of wagons that were outspanned
beside the Bushman wells – and Isazi shouted for Umfaan and ran to catch Ralph before he fell.

‘Isazi,’ Ralph croaked, ‘the birds, the stone birds?’

‘I have them safe, Nkosi.’

Ralph grinned wickedly, so that his dried lips cracked and his bloodshot eyes slitted.

‘By your own boast, Isazi, you are a wise man. Now I tell you also, that you are beautiful to behold, as beautiful as a falcon in flight,’ Ralph told him, and then reeled so that he
had to catch his balance with an arm around the little Zulu’s shoulders.

L
obengula sat cross-legged on his sleeping-mat, alone in his great hut. Before him was a gourd of clear spring water. He stared into it
fixedly.

Long ago, when he had lived in the cave of the Matopos with Saala, the white girl, the mad old witchdoctor had instructed him in the art of the gourd. Very occasionally, after many hours’
staring into the limpid water, and after the utmost exercise of his concentration and will, he had been able to see snatches of the future, faces and events, but even then they had been murky and
unclear, and soon after he left the Matopos this small gift had gone from him. Sometimes still, in desperation, he resorted to the gourd – although, as it was this night, nothing moved or
roiled darkly beneath the still surface of the spring water, and his concentration kept slipping away. Tonight he kept toying with the words of the Umlimo.

Always the oracle spoke obliquely, always her counsel was shrouded in imagery and riddles. Often it was repetitive, on at least five previous visits to the cavern the witch had spoken of
‘the stars shining on the hills’ and ‘the sun that bums at midnight’. No matter how doggedly Lobengula and his senior indunas had picked at the words, and tried to unravel
the meaning that was tied up in them, they had found no answer.

Now Lobengula set aside the fruitless gourd, and lay back upon his kaross to consider the third prophecy, made in the croaking raven’s voice from the cliff above the cavern.

‘Heed the wisdom of the vixen before that of the dogfox.’

He took each word and weighed it separately, then he considered the whole, and twisted it and studied it from every angle.

In the dawn there remained only one possible solution that had survived the night. For once the oracle seemed to have given advice that was unequivocal. It was only for him to decide which
female was the ‘vixen’ of the oracle.

He considered each of his senior wives – and there was not one of them that had any interest in anything beyond the begetting and suckling of infants, or the baubles and ribbons that the
traders brought to GuBulawayo.

Ningi, his full-blooded sister, he loved still as his one link with the mother he barely remembered. Yet now when Ningi was sober she was elephantine and slow-witted, bad-tempered and cruel.
When she was filled with the traders’ champagne and cognac, she was giggling and silly to begin with, and then incontinent and comatose at the end. He had spoken with her for an hour and more
the previous day. Little that she had said was sensible, and nothing she had said could possibly bear on the terrible pressures of Lodzi and his emissaries.

So at last Lobengula returned to what he had known all along must be the key to the riddle of the Umlimo.

‘Guards!’ he shouted suddenly, and there were quick and urgent footfalls, and one of his cloaked executioners stooped through the doorway and prostrated himself on the threshold.

‘Go to Nomusa, the Girlchild of Mercy, bid her come to me with all speed,’ said Lobengula.