The Covenant (9 page)

The old fellow reflected on this question and replied, “In this life man is assigned difficult tasks. How to find a good wife. How to find sixteen horns. It is his task to find them.”

Chief Ngalo smiled. It was pleasurable to be with this old man. Always when he wanted something badly, he devised sententious and moral justifications. “Mankind does not want sixteen rhinoceros horns,” he chided. “You want them.”

“I am mankind.”

The chief could not resist such blandishments, but neither could he comply. “Look, dear friend. We have no rhinos, but we have something much better.” Clapping for an aide, he cried, “Tell Nxumalo to fetch the heavy earth!” And in a moment a boy of sixteen appeared, smiling, bearing three roughly rectangular ingots made from some kind of metal. Placing them on the ground before his father, he started to depart, but the Old Seeker asked, “Do you understand what you have brought me, son?”

“Iron from Phalaborwa,” the boy said promptly. “When my father’s people went there to barter for these, I went with them. I saw the place where men worked the earth like ants. They had done so, they told me, for as long as anyone alive could remember, and many generations before that.”

“What did you trade?” the old man asked.

“Cloth. The cloth we weave.”

The Old Seeker smiled to indicate his pleasure that this lad should know the provenance of things, but once he had done so, he frowned. “If I had wanted iron from the mines of Phalaborwa, I would have gone directly there. Thaba!” he shouted. “Bring me the staff!” And when his servant ran up, bearing the carefully wrapped iron staff, the old man uncovered it and thrust it at the boy.

“That’s real iron. From our mines south of Zimbabwe. We have all we need,” and contemptuously he pushed aside Nxumalo’s rude ingots. Then he drew out from inside his robe a small oval object such as Nxumalo had never seen before. It was a shimmering yellow that glistened when light fell upon it, and it was suspended from a chain, each careful link of which was made of the same substance. When the old man thrust it suddenly upon him, Nxumalo found that it was surprisingly heavy.

“What is it?” he asked.

“Amulet.” There came a long pause. “From Persia.” Another pregnant halting, then: “Gold.”

“What is gold?” the boy asked.

“Now, there’s a question!” the old man said, sitting back on his haunches and staring at the lake. “For forty travels of the moon through the stars it was my job to find gold, and like you, I never knew what it was. It’s death at the bottom of a deep pit. It’s fire engulfing the iron containers when the smithy melts the ore. It’s men sitting day after day, hammering out these links. But do you know what it is most of all?”

Nxumalo shook his head, liking the feel of the heavy metal. “In the end it’s a mystery, son. It’s magic, because it lures men from lands you never heard of to come to our shores, to ford our rivers, to climb our mountains, to come a journey of many moons to Zimbabwe to get our gold.” Gently, almost lovingly, he retrieved the amulet and placed the chain about his neck, hiding the golden pendant beneath his cotton robe.

That was the beginning of his attempt to persuade Nxumalo: “What you must do, son, is find eight rhinos and take their horns, then follow my trail to Zimbabwe …”

“What is Zimbabwe?” the boy asked one evening.

“How sad,” the old man said with unfeigned regret. “Not one person in this village has ever seen Zimbabwe!”

“What is it?”

“Towers and soaring walls.” He paused and pointed to the low stone wall that surrounded the cattle kraal and said in an awed voice, “Walls ten, twenty times higher than that. Buildings that reach to the sky.” A group of elders shook their heads in disbelief and clucked among themselves, but the Old Seeker ignored them. “Our king, lord of a thousand villages bigger than yours, the great one the spirits talk to, he lives in a kraal surrounded by walls higher than trees.” He placed his hand on Nxumalo’s arm and said, “Until you’ve seen Zimbabwe, you live in darkness.”

Whenever he spoke like this, telling the boy of the grandness of the city from which he came, he reverted to the problem of the rhinoceros horns and the necessity of bringing them to the city, but one morning as he spoke with Nxumalo and his father he said abruptly, “Ngalo, dear friend of many searchings, today I leave you to look for the Ridge-of-White-Waters, and I want Nxumalo to lead me.”

“He knows the way,” Ngalo said, pointing directly west to where the prominent ridge lay. It was a four-day journey which entailed some dangers, but the path was a pleasant one. “Why do you wish to go?”

“In my day, Ngalo, I have sought many things. Women, high office, the path to Sofala, the king’s good wishes. But the best thing I ever sought was gold. And I am convinced that in your terrain, there must be gold somewhere.” Contemptuously he dismissed the iron ingots that remained under the tree. Addressing only Nxumalo, he said, “Iron gives temporary power. It can be made into spearheads and clubs. But gold gives permanent power. It can be fashioned into dreams, and men will come a long way to satisfy their dreams.”

On the third day of their journey west, after they had passed many small villages which the old man seemed to know, it became apparent to Nxumalo that the Seeker knew very well where the Ridge-of-White-Waters lay and that he had insisted on having companionship only because he wanted to convince Nxumalo of something. That night, as they were resting at the edge of a miserable kraal, the old man spied the boy standing alone, in his eyes a mixture of sadness and anticipation as he stared toward the empty lands to the south.

“What is it, young friend?”

“It is my brother, mfundisi,” he said, using a term of respect. “Last year he left for the south, and I must go too, when it is time.” It was a custom that he must honor: the oldest brother always succeeded to the chieftainship, while the younger brothers moved to the
frontier and started their own villages. And this had been done since these blacks came down from the north, centuries ago.

“No, no!” the Old Seeker protested. “Find me the rhinoceros horn. Bring it to me in Zimbabwe.”

“Why should I do so?”

The old man took the boy’s hands and said, “If one like you, a boy of deep promise, does not test himself in the city, he spends his life where? In some wretched village like this.”

On the fourth day such discussions halted temporarily, for the Old Seeker’s troop was attacked by a band of little brown men who swarmed like pestilential flies determined to repel an invader. When their slim arrows began buzzing, Nxumalo shouted, “Beware! Poison!” and he led the Old Seeker to safety inside a ring of porters whose shields repelled the arrows.

The fight continued for about an hour, with the little men shouting battle orders in a preposterous series of clicking sounds, but gradually the taller, more powerful blacks herded them away, and they retreated into the savanna, still uttering their clicks.

“Aiee!” Nxumalo shouted with exasperation as the little fellows disappeared. “Why do they attack us like jackals?”

Old Seeker, who had worked with the small people in the north, said calmly, “Because we’re crossing hunting grounds they claim as their own.”

“Jackals!” the boy snorted, but he knew the old man was right.

On the morning of the fifth day, as planned, the file of men reached the Ridge-of-White-Waters, which later settlers would call Witwatersrand, where the Old Seeker hoped to find evidence that gold existed, but the more carefully he explored the region—a handsome one, with prominent hillocks from which Nxumalo could see for miles—the more disappointed he became. Here the telltale signs, which in the lands about Zimbabwe indicated gold, were missing; there was no gold, and it became obvious that the exploration had been fruitless, but on the evening of their last day of tramping the hills the Old Seeker discovered what he was looking for. It was an ant hill, eleven feet high, and he rushed to it, breaking it apart with a long stick and fumbling through the fine-grained soil.

“What are you looking for?” Nxumalo asked, and the old man said, “Gold. These ants dig down two hundred feet to build their tunnels. If there’s gold here, they bring flecks to the surface.”

At this site there were none, and reluctantly the Old Seeker had to
admit that he had taken this long journey to no avail: “I didn’t come to see your father. I didn’t come for rhino horn. Son, when you have a multitude of targets, always aim for the one of merit. I came seeking gold, and I’m convinced there’s gold here.”

“But you didn’t find it.”

“I had the joy of hunting. Son, have you listened to what I’ve been telling you these days?” He led Nxumalo some distance from the spot where his bearers waited, and as he looked out over the vast bleakness visible from the fruitless ridge he said, “It isn’t even gold I seek. It’s what gold can achieve. To Zimbabwe come men from all across the world. They bring us gifts you cannot imagine. Four times I went down the trails to Sofala. Twice I sailed upon the dhows to mighty Kilwa. I saw things no man could ever forget. When you seek, you find things you did not anticipate.”

“What are you seeking?” Nxumalo asked.

The old man had no answer.

The task of collecting sixteen rhinoceros horns was proving much more complex than Nxumalo anticipated when he accepted the challenge, and after the Old Seeker had departed to visit other tribes who might or might not know of gold mines, the boy approached his father: “I want to track down the rhinos.”

“So the old talker poisoned you?”

Nxumalo looked down at his feet, unwilling to admit that he had been entrapped by blandishments and singing words. “Like the iron,” his father said. “You went, and you dug for iron, and you found it. And when you came home with ingots … they didn’t mean very much, not really.”

“I want to see the city,” Nxumalo said.

“And you shall. And when you come home you’ll tell me, ‘It didn’t matter very much.’ ”

Those of Nxumalo’s brothers who remained at the kraal wished him well in his quest for the rhinoceros horns but showed no interest in joining him. The tribe was essentially sedentary, with fixed villages, sturdy wattled huts and a settled agriculture. The women knew how to cultivate fields, the men how to manage cattle and tend the fattailed sheep. One brother directed the metalworkers who provided tools for the region and another was gaining a reputation in the district as a herbalist and diviner.

But it was Nxumalo who championed the ancient arts of hunting and tracking in the wild, and because of this he seemed the more regal figure, the young man who best preserved the historical merits of the tribe. He was the only one with much chance of tracking down eight rhinoceroses and delivering the sixteen aphrodisiac horns to Zimbabwe, so on a warm summer morning he and six helpers moved eastward toward the heavily wooded area leading to the sea.

He was an imposing lad, not yet full height but taller than most men, and the principal characteristic that struck those who saw him for the first time was power: his arms and legs were well-muscled and his torso much broader than his hips. His face was large and placid, as if he knew no anger, and when he smiled all his features participated and his shoulders moved forward, creating the impression that his entire body was enjoying whatever sensation had evoked the smile; and when his lips parted, his white teeth punctuated the grin. It was obvious that when he reached the age of eighteen he would be able to marry whom he pleased, for he was not only the chief’s son but also a young prince among men.

He was so totally different from the small brown hunters who had once inhabited this area that he seemed unrelated to them, and in a way he was. Earliest man, Australopithecus, had once flourished over a large part of Africa, and as he developed into modern man, one branch settled close to the equator, where the sun placed a premium on black skin, which adjusted to its punishing rays; no primitive tribe of pale-white complexion could have prospered long in those blazing regions which produced Nxumalo’s people, just as his heavily pigmented skin would have been at a severe disadvantage in the cold north, where the sun’s parsimonious rays had to be carefully hoarded.

Slowly, over many centuries, Nxumalo’s black ancestors, herding cattle before them and carrying seeds in their skin bags and baskets, had migrated southward, reaching the lake about four centuries after the birth of Christ. They arrived not as conquering heroes but as women and men seeking pasturage and safe enclaves; some had continued southward, but Nxumalo’s tribe had fancied the encompassing hills about the lake.

As they lingered they came into contact with the small brown people, and gradually these had been pushed south or into the mountain ranges to the east. From these places the insatiable little hunters raided the kraals of Nxumalo’s people, and there had to be confrontations. Some did live in peace with the invaders, trading the spoils of
their hunt for tools and sanctuary, but thousands of others were turned into serfs or put to work at the mines. Association continued over centuries, and occasionally at Nxumalo’s kraal some woman of his tribe would have enormous buttocks, signaling her inheritance from the small people. There were fierce clashes between the two groups but never a pitched battle; had there been, the end result might have been more humane, because as things turned out, the little brown people were being quietly smothered.

It was an able group that had moved south in this black migration: skilled artisans knew the secrets of smelting copper and making fine tools and weapons tipped with iron. In certain villages women wove cloth, sometimes intermixing threads of copper. And every family owned earthenware pots designed and crafted by clever women and fired in kilns in the ground.

Their language bore no resemblance to that of the small people. A few tribes, moving south along the shores of the eastern ocean, would pick up the click sounds, but Nxumalo’s people had acquired none. Their speech was pure, with an extensive vocabulary capable of expressing abstract thought and a lively aptitude for tribal remembrance.

Two special attributes set these tribes ahead of any predecessors: they had developed sophisticated systems of government, in which a chief provided civil rule and a spirit-medium religious guidance; and they had mastered their environment, so that cattle herding, agriculture and the establishment of permanent villages became practical. And there was one more significant addition: over the vast area trade flourished, so that communities could socialize; Chief Ngalo’s people could easily import iron ingots from the great mines of Phalaborwa, one hundred and seventy miles away, and then send fabricated spearheads to villages that lay two hundred miles southwest, beyond the Ridge-of-White-Waters.