Men of Men

"Count me amongst them then, Isazi," Ralph told him solemnly, and walked out of camp to find a place upon the riverbank from which to enjoy the sunset.

Here the banks of the Vaal were churned into mounds and irregular hollows, the old river workings, picked over by the first diggers and now abandoned and overgrown.

It was a mass burial ground of men's dreams, and looking upon it Ralph's high spirits that had buoyed this first day's trek upon the open road began to evaporate.

It was the first day in his life that Ralph had been free and completely his own man. Walking at the wheel of his own wagon, he had woven dreams of fortune. He had imagined his wagons, fifty, a hundred, carrying his cargoes across the continent. He had seen them coming south again, loaded with ivory and bars of yellow gold.

He had seen in his mind's eye the wide lands, the herds of elephant, the masses of native cattle, the riches that lay out there in the north beckoning to him, warbling the siren call in his ears.

He had been carried so high that now as his spirits turned they fell as low. He looked at the deserted diggings on the banks across the river, the vain scratchings where other men had attempted to turn this great brown slumbering giant of a continent to their own account.

Then suddenly he felt very small and lonely, and afraid. His thoughts turned to his father, and his spirits plunged lower still as he recalled the last words he had spoken.

"Go then! Go and be damned to you."

That was not the way he had wanted it. Zouga Ballantyne had been the central figure in his life until that day.

A colossus who overshadowed each of his actions, each of his thoughts.

Much as he had chafed under the shackles that his duty to his father had placed upon him, much as he had resented every one of his decisions being made for him, each of his actions ordered, yet now he felt as though the greater part of himself had been removed by some drastic surgery of the soul.

Until this moment he had not really thought of losing his father, he had not let the memory of their brutal parting cut him too deeply. Now suddenly this dirty slow river was the barrier between him and the life he had known. There was no going back, now or ever. He had lost his father and his brother and Jan Cheroot and he was alone and lonely.

He felt the acid tears scald his eyelids.

His vision wavered, played him tricks, for across the wide river course, on the far bank was the figure of a horseman.

The horseman slouched easily in the saddle, one hand on his hip, the elbow cocked; and the set of the head upon the broad shoulders was unmistakable.

Slowly Ralph came to his feet, staring in disbelief, and then suddenly he was running and sliding down the sheer bank and splashing waist deep through the grey waters of the ford. Zouga swung down from Tom's back and ran forward to meet Ralph as he came up the bank.

Then both of them stopped and stared at each other.

They had not embraced since the night of Aletta's funeral, and they could not bring themselves to do so now, though longing was naked in the eyes of both of them.

"I could not let you go, not like that," said Zouga, but Ralph had no reply, for his throat had closed.

,"It is time for you to go out on your own," Zouga nodded his golden beard. "Past time. You are like an eaglet that has outgrown the nest. I realized that before you did, Ralph, but I did not want it to be. That is why I spoke so cruelly."

Zouga picked up Tom's reins and the pony nudged him affectionately. Zouga stroked his velvety muzzle.

"There are two parting gifts that I have for you." He placed the reins in Ralph's hand. "That is one," he said evenly, but the green shadows in his eyes betrayed how dearly that gesture had cost him. "The other is in Tom's saddle-bag. It's a book of notes. Read them at your leisure. You may find them of interest, even of value."

Still Ralph could not speak. He held the reins awkwardly, and blinked back the stinging under his eyelids.

"There is one other small gift, but it has no real value.

It is only my blessing."

"That is all that I really wanted," whispered Ralph.

It was six hundred miles to the Shashi river, to the border of Matabeleland.

Isazi inspanned at dusk each evening and they trekked through the cool of the night. When the moon went down and it was utterly dark, then Umfaan threw the lead rein over Dutchman's head, and the big black ox put his nose down and stayed on the track, like a hunting dog on the spoor, until the first glimmering of dawn signalled the outspan.

During a good night's trek they made fifteen miles but when the going was heavy with sand they might make only five miles.

During the days, while the cattle grazed or chewed the cud in the shade, Ralph saddled up Tom and, with Bazo running beside his stirrup, they hunted.

They found herds of buffalo along the banks of the Zouga river, the river on whose bank Ralph's father had been born, big herds, two hundred beasts together.

The herd bulls were huge, bovine and bald with age, their backs crusted with the mud from the wallow, the spread of their arnioured heads wider than the stretch of a man's arms, the tips of the polished black horns rising into symmetrical crescents like the points of the sickle moon, while the bosses above their broad foreheads were massively crenellated.

they ran them down, and Tom loved those wild flying chases every bit as much as his rider.

They chased the ghostly grey gemsbuck over the smoking red dunes, and in the thorn country they hunted the stiff-legged giraffe and sent their grotesque but stately bodies plunging and sliding to earth with the crack of rifle fire, the long graceful necks twisting in the agony of death like that of a swan.

They baited with the carcasses of zebra, and the coppery red Kalahari lions came to the taint of blood, and Tom stood down their charge. Though he trembled and snorted and rolled his eyes at the shockingly offensive cat smell, he stood for the shot which Ralph had to take from the saddle, aiming between the fierce yellow eyes or into the gape of rose-pink jaws starred with white fangs.

Thus, fifty days out from Kimberley they came at last to the Shashi river, and when they had made the crossing Bazo was on his native soil. He put on his war plumes and carrying his shield on his shoulder he walked with a new spring and joy in his stride as he led Ralph to a hilltop from which to survey the way ahead.

"See how the hills shine," Bazo whispered with an almost religious fervour. And it was true. In the early sunlight the granite tops gleamed like precious jewels.

Soft, dreaming, ruby, delicate sapphires and glossy pearl shaded like a peacock tail into a fanfare of colour.

The hills rolled away, rising gradually towards the high central plateau ahead of them, and the valleys were clad with virgin forest.

"You never saw such trees on the plains around Kimberley," Bazo challenged him, and Ralph nodded. They stood on soaring trunks, some scaled like the crocodile, others white and smooth as though moulded from potter's clay, their tops sailing in traceries of green high above the open glades of yellow grass.

"See, the buffalo herds, thick as cattle."

There was other game. There were small family groups of grey kudo, pale as ghosts, trumpet-eared, the bulls carrying the burden of their long black cork-screw horns with studied grace.

There were clouds of red impala antelope upon the woven silk carpet of golden grasses. There were the darkly massive statues of the rhinoceros seemingly graven from the solid granite of the hills, and there were the noblest antelope of all, the sable antelope, black and imperial as the name implied, the long horns curved and cruel as Saladin's scimitar, the belly blazing white, the neck of the herd bull arched haughtily as he led his lighter coloured females out of the open glade into the cool green sanctuary of the forest.

"Is it not beautiful, Henshaw?" Bazo asked.

"It is beautiful."

There was the same awe in Ralph's voice, and a strange unformed longing in his throat, a wanting that he knew could never be satisfied, and suddenly he understood his own father's obsession with this fair land: "My north," as Zouga called it.

"My north," Ralph whispered, and then, thinking of his father, the next question came immediately to mind.

"Elephant, Indhlovu? There are no elephant, Bazo.

Where are the herds?"

"Ask Bakela, your own father," Bazo grunted. "He was the first to come for them with the gun, but others followed him, many others. When Gandang, my father, son of Mzilikazi the Destroyer, half brother of the great black bull Lobengula, when he crossed the Shashi as a child on his mother's hip, the elephant herds were black as midnight upon the land and their teeth shone like the stars. Now we will find their bones growing like white lilies in the forest."

In the last hours of daylight, when Bazo and Isazi and Umfaan still slept to fortify themselves for the. long night's trek, Ralph took the leather-bound notebook out of Tom's saddle-bag.

By now the pages were dog-eared and grubby from the constant perusal to which Ralph had subjected it. It was the gift that Zouga Ballantyne had given him on the bank of the Vaal river, and the inside cover was inscribed: To my son Ralph.

May these few notes guide your feet northwards, and may they inspire you to dare what I have not dared Zouga Ballantyne The first twenty pages were filled with hand-drawn sketch maps of those areas of the land between the Zambezi and the Limpopo and the Shashi rivers over which Zouga, and before him the old hunter Tom Harkness, had travelled.

Often the map was headed by the notation: Copied from the original map drawn by Tom Harkness in 1851.

Ralph recognized the unique value of this information, but there was more. Page 21 of the notebook bore a terse explanation in Zouga's precise spiky hand: In the winter of 1860 while on trek from Tete on the Zambezi River, to King Mzilikazi's town at Thabas Indunas I slew 216 elephant. Lacking porters or wagons I had perforce to cache the ivory along my route.

During my later expeditions to Zambezia, I was able to recover the bulk of this treasure.

There remain fifteen separate caches, containing eighty-four good tusks, which I was for various reasons unable to reach.

Here follows a list of these caches with directions and navigational notes to reach them:

And on page 22 the list began:

Cache made 16 September 1860.

Position by sun sight and dead reckoning300 5 5" E. 170 45" S. A granite kopje which I named Mount Hampden. The largest for many miles in any direction. Distinct peak with three turrets. On the northern face between two large ficus natalensis trees there is a rock fissure.

18large tusks total weight 426 pounds placed in fissure and covered with small boulders.

The current price of ivory was twenty-two shillings and sixpence the pound, and Ralph had added the total weights of the ivory still lying out in the veld. It exceeded three thousand pounds: a great fortune waiting merely to be picked up and loaded on his wagon.

Still that was not all. The final entry in the notebook read: In my book A Hunter's Odyssey I described my discovery of the deserted city which the tribes call "zimbabwe a name which can be translated as "The Grave yard of the Kings".

I described how I was able to glean fragments of gold from the inner courtyards of the walled ruins, a little over 50 pounds weight of the metal in all. I also carried away with me one of the ancient bird-like statues. A souvenir which has been with me from that time until very recently.

It is possible that there is precious metal which I overlooked, and certainly there remain within the walled enclosures six more bird carvings which I was unable to bring away.

In Hunter's Odyssey I deliberately refrained from giving the location of the ancient ruin. As far as I know, it has not been rediscovered by any other white Man while a superstitious taboo forbids any African to venture into the area.

Thus there is every reason to believe the statues lie where last I laid eyes upon them.

Bearing in mind that my chronometer had not been checked for many months when these observations were made, I now give you the position of the city as calculated by myself at that time.

The ruins lie on the same longitude as the kopje which I named Mount Hampden on 30" 55" E., but 175 miles farther south at 20" 0" S. There followed a detailed description of the route that Zouga had taken to reach Zimbabwe, and then the notes ended with this statement: mister Rhodes offered the sum of 1000 pounds for the statue which I rescued.

The following noon Ralph took the brass sextant from its travel-battered wooden case. He had bid ten shillings for it at one of the Saturday auctions in the Market Square of Kimberley, and Zouga had checked its accuracy against his own instrument and showed Ralph how to shoot an "apparent local noon" to establish his latitude. Ralph had no chronometer to fix a longitude, but he could guess at it from his proximity to the confluence of the Shashi and Macloutsi rivers.

Half an hour's work with Brown's Nautical Almanac gave him an approximate position to compare with the one that his father had given in the notes for Zimbabwe.

"Less than one hundred and fifty miles," he muttered to himself, still squatting over his father's map, but staring eastwards.

"Six thousand pounds just lying there," Ralph said quietly, and shook his head in wonder. It was a sum difficult to imagine.

He packed away the sextant, rolled the map and went to join the slumbering trio beneath the wagon for what remained of the drowsy afternoon.

Ralph woke to a stentorian challenge that seemed to echo off the granite cliffs above the camp.

"Who dares take the king's road? Who chances the wrath of Lobengula?"

Ralph scrambled out from under the wagon. The day was almost gone, the sun flamed in the top branches of the forest, and the chill of evening prickled his bare chest. He stared about him wildly, but some instinct warned him not to reach for the loaded rifle propped against the rear wheel of the wagon. Below the trees the shadows were alive, blackness moved on blackness, dusky rank on rank.

"Stand forth, white man," the voice commanded.

"Speak your business, lest the white spears of Lobengula turn to red."

The speaker stepped forward, out of the forest to the edge of the camp. Behind him the ring of dappled black and white war-shields overlapped, edge to edge in an unbroken circle surrounding the entire outspan, the "bull's borns" of the Matabele fighting formations.

There were many hundreds of warriors in that deadly circle, and the broad stabbing spears were held in an underhand grip so that the silver blades pointed forward at belly height between the shields.

Above each shield the frothy white ostrich-feather headdress trembled and swayed in the small evening breeze, the only movement in that silent multitude.

The man who had broken the ranks was one of the most impressive figures that Ralph had ever seen. The high crown of ostrich feathers turned him into a towering giant. The breadth of his chest was enhanced by the flowering bunches of white cowtails that he wore on his upper arms. Each separate tail had been awarded him by his king for an act of valour, and he wore them not only on his arms but around his knees also.

His broad intelligent face was lightly seamed by the passage of the years, as though by the chisel of a skilled carpenter, forming a frame for the dark penetrating sparkle of his eyes; yet his chest was covered with the elastic muscle of a man only just reaching his prime and his lean belly rippled with the same muscle as he moved forward.

His legs were long and straight under the kilt of black spotted civet tails, and the war-rattles bound about his ankles rustled softly at each pace.

"I come in peace," Ralph called, hearing the catch in his own voice.

"Peace is a word that sits as lightly on the tongue as the sunbird sits upon the open flower, and as lightly does it fly., There was movement beside Ralph, and Bazo came from his bed under the wagon.

"Baba!" Bazo said reverently, and clapped his hands softly at the level of his face. "I see you Baba! The sun has been dark all these years, but now it shines again, my father."

The tall warrior started, took a swift pace forward, and for an instant a wonderful smile bloomed upon the sculptured ebony of his face; then he checked himself, and drew himself up to his full height again, his expression grave, but the feathers of his headdress trembled and there was a light in his tar-bright eyes that he could not extinguish. Still clapping his hands, stooping with respect, Bazo went forward and knelt on one knee.

"Gandang, son of Mzilikazi, your eldest son, Bazo the Axe, brings you the greetings and the duty of his heart."

Gandang looked down at his son, and at that moment nothing else existed for him in all the world.

"Baba, I ask your blessing."

Gandang placed his open hand on the short cropped fleecy cap of the young man's head.

"You have my blessing," he said quietly, but the hand lingered, the gesture of blessing became a caress, and then slowly and reluctantly Gandang withdrew the hand.

"Rise up, my son."

Bazo was as tall as his father, and for a quiet moment they looked steadily into each other's eyes. Then Gandang turned, and flirted his war-shield, a gesture of dismissal, and instantly the still and silent ring of warriors turned their own shields edge on, so that they seemed to fold like a woman's fan, and with miraculous swiftness they split into small platoons and disappeared into the forest.

Within seconds it seemed as though they had never been. Only Gandang and his son still remained at the edge of the camp, and then they too turned and slipped away like two shadows thrown by the moving branches of the mopani trees.

Isazi came out from under the wagon, naked except for the sheath of hollowed gourd covering the head of his penis, and he spat in the fire with a thoughtful and philosophical air.

"Chaka was too soft," he said. "He should have followed the traitor Mzilikazi, and taught him good manners. The Matabele are upstart bastards, with no breeding and less respect."

"Would a Zulu induna have acted that way?" Ralph asked him, as he reached for his shirt.

"No," Isazi admitted. "He would certainly have stabbed us all to death. But he would have done so with greater respect and better manners."

"What do we do now?" Ralph asked.

"We wait," said Isazi. "While that vaunting dandy, who should wear the induna headring not on his forehead but around his neck like the collar of a dog decides what should become of us." Isazi spat in the fire again, this time with contempt. "We may have long to wait, a Matabele thinks at the same speed as a chameleon runs., And he crawled back under the wagon and pulled the kaross over his head.

in the night the cooking fires from the camp of the Matabele impi down the valley glowed amber and russet on the tops of the mopani, and every time the fickle night wind shifted, the deep melodious sound of their singing carried down to Ralph's outspan.

in the grey dawn Bazo appeared again, as silently as he had disappeared.

"My father, Gandang, induna of the Inyati Regiment, summons you to indaba, Henshaw."

Ralph bridled immediately. He could almost hear his father's voice. "Remember always that you are an Englishman, my boy, and as such you are a direct representative of your Queen in this land."

The reply rose swiftly to Ralph's lips: "If he wants to see me, tell him to come to me." But he held the words back.

Gandang was an induna of two thousand, the equivalent of a general. He was a son of an emperor and half brother of a king, the equivalent of an English duke, and this was the soil of Matabeleland on which Ralph was an intruder.

"Tell your father I will come directly., And he went to fetch a fresh shirt and the spare pair of boots, which he had taught Umfaan to polish.

"You are Henshaw, the son of Bakela," Gandang sat on a low stool, intricately carved from a single piece of ebony. Ralph had been offered no seat, and he squatted down on his heels. "And Bakela is a man." Arid there was a murmur of assent and a rustle of plumes as the massed ranks of warriors about them stirred.

"Tshedi is your great-grandfather, and in the king's name has given you the road to Gubulawayo. Tshedi has the right to do so, for he is Lobengula's friend and he was Mzilikazi's friend before that."

Ralph made no reply. He realized that these statements about his great-grandfather, old Doctor Moffat, whose Matabele name was Tshedi, were for the waiting warriors rather than for himself. Gandang was explaining his decision to his impi.

"But for what reason do you take the road to the king's kraal?"

"I come to see this fair land of which my father has told me."

"Is that all?" Gandang asked.

"No, I come also to trade, and if the king is kind enough to give me his word, then I wish to hunt the elephant."

Gandang did not smile, but there was a sparkle in his dark eyes. "It is not for me to ask which you desire most, Henshaw. The view from a hilltop, or a wagonload of ivory."

Ralph suppressed his own smile, and remained silent.

"Tell me, son of Bakela, what goods do you bring with you to trade?"

"I have twenty bales of the finest beads and cloth."

Gandang made a gesture of disinterest. "Women's fripperies," he said.

"I have fifty cases of liquor, of the kind preferred by King Lobengula and his royal sister Ningi."

This time the line of Gandang's mouth thinned and hardened. "If it were my word on it, I would force those fifty cases of poison down your own throat." His voice was almost a whisper, but then he spoke again in a natural tone. "Yet Lobengula, the Great Elephant, will welcome your load., And then he was silent and yet expectant. Ralph realized that Bazo would have reported to his father every detail of his little caravan.

"I have guns," he said simply, and suddenly there was an intense hunger in Gandang's expression. His eyes narrowed slightly and his lips parted.

"Sting the mamba with his own venom," he whispered, and beside him Bazo started. It was the Umlimo's prophecy that his father had repeated, and he wondered that Gandang could have uttered it in the presence of one who was not Matabele.

"I do not understand," Ralph said.

"No matter." Gandang waved it away with a graceful pink-palmed hand. "Tell me, Henshaw. Are these guns of yours of the kind that swallow a round ball through the mouth and place the life of the man that fires them in more danger than the man who stands in front?"

Ralph smiled at the description of the ancient trade muskets, many of which had survived Wellington's Iberian campaign and some of which had seen action at Bull Run and Gettysburg before being shipped out to Africa in trade; the barrel worn paper thin, the priming pan and hammer mechanism so badly abused that each shot fired threatened to tear the head off any marksman bold enough to press the trigger.

"These guns are the finest," he replied.

"With twisting snakes in the barrel?" Gandang asked, and it took Ralph a moment to recognize the allusion to the rifling in the barrel.

He nodded. "And the barrel opens to take the bullet."

"Bring me one of these guns," Gandang ordered.

"The price of each is one large tusk of ivory," Ralph told him, and Gandang stared at him impassively for a moment longer. Then he smiled for the first time, but the smile was sharp as the edge of his stabbing spear.

"Now," he said. "I truly believe that you have come to Matabeleland to see how tall stand the trees."

"I am leaving you now, Henshaw," Bazo said, without lifting his eyes from the thick yellow tusk that he had brought from his father in payment for the rifle.

"We knew it was not for ever," Ralph answered him.

"The bond between us is for ever," Bazo replied, "but now I must go to join my regiment. My father will leave ten of his men to escort and guide you to Gubulawayo where King Lobengula awaits you."

"Is Lobengula. not at Thabas Indunas, the Hills of the Chiefs?" Ralph asked.

"It is the same kraal, in the days of Mzilikazi it was Thabas Indunas, but now Lobengula has changed the name to Gubulawayo, the Place of Killing."

"I see," Ralph nodded, and then waited for it was clear that Bazo had more to say.

"Henshaw. You did not hear me say this, but the ten warriors who will go with you to the king's kraal are not only for your protection. Do not look too closely at the stones and rocks along the road, and do not dig a hole, even to bury your own excrement, else Lobengula will hear of it and believe that you are searching for the shiny pebbles and yellow metal. That is death."

"I understand."

"Henshaw, while you are in Matabeleland, give up your habit of travelling at night. Only magicians and sorcerers go abroad in the darkness, mounted on the backs of the hyena. The king will hear of it, and that is death."

"Yes."

"Do not hunt the hipopotamus. They are the king's beasts. To kill one, is death."

"I understand., "When you enter the presence of the king, be sure that your head is always below that of the Great Elephant, even if You must crawl on your belly., "You have told me this already."

"I will tell you again" Bazo nodded. "And I will tell you once more that the maidens of Matabeleland are the most beautiful in all the world. They light a raging fire in a man's loins, but to take one of them without the king's word is death for both man and maiden."

For an hour they squatted opposite each other, casionally taking a little snuff or passing one of Ralph's cheap black cheroots back and forth, but always with Bazo talking and Ralph listening.

Bazo spoke quietly, insistently, reciting the names of the most powerful indunas, the governors of each of atabeleland's military provinces, listing those who had M the king's ear and should be treated with care, explaining how a man should conduct himself so as not to give offence, advising how much tribute each would ask and finally accept, trying to give it all to Ralph in these last minutes, and then finally glancing up at the sky.

"It is time." He stood. "Go in peace, Henshaw." And he walked out of Ralph's camp without looking back.

As Ralph's wagon, with its escort of warriors, climbed out of the low veld, so the heat abated. The air was so sweet and clean that it made Ralph feel as though the blood sparkled and fizzed in his veins.

Isazi was infected by the same elation. He composed new verses to sing to his bullocks, lauding their strength and beauty, and occasionally he slipped in a reference to a "feathered baboon" or some other fanciful and unlovely creature, while rolling his eyes significantly in the direction of the bodyguard of Matabele warriors that preceded the wagon.

The forests thinned as they climbed, becoming open woodlands of shapely mimosa trees, the paper-thin bark peeling away to reveal the clear smooth underbark, and the branches loaded with the fluffy yellow flower heads.

The grass cloaked the undulating earth, thick and sweet, so that the bullocks fleshed out after the enervating heat of the lowlands, and they stepped out with a new will against the yoke.

This was cattle country, the heartland of the Matabele, and they began to encounter the herds. Huge assemblies of multi-coloured animals, red and white and black and all the combinations of those colours. Smaller than the big Cape bullocks, but sturdy and agile as wild game, the bulls with the hump and heavy dewlap of their Egyptian forebears.

Isazi looked at them covetously, and came back to Ralph at the forewheel of the wagon to say: "Such were the herds of Zululand, before the soldiers came."

"There must be hundreds of thousands, and they would be worth twenty pounds a head."

"Will you never learn, Little Hawk." Isazi still returned to the diminutive when one of Ralph's stupidities exasperated him. "A man cannot place a value on a fine breeding cow or a beautiful woman in little round coins."

"Yet, as a Zulu you pay for a Wife."

"Yes, Little Hawk." Isazi's voice was weary with Ralph's obtuse arguments. "A Zulu pays for a wife; but he pays in cattle, not in coin, which is what I have been telling you all along." And he ended the discussion with a thunderous clap of his long trek whip.

Small family kraals dotted the wide savannabs, each built around its own cattle stockade and fortified against predators, or against marauders. As they passed the settlements of thatched beehive-shaped huts, the little naked herd boys scampered to alert the kraals, and then the women came out, bare-legged and naked-breasted, balancing the clay pots and hollowed gourds upon their heads, an exercise that gave them a stately dignity of movement.

Then Ralph's bodyguard of warriors from Gandang's regiment paused to refresh themselves on the tart and bubbling millet beer or on the delicious soured milk, thick as yoghurt. The young women examined Ralph With bold and curious eyes. Totally unaware that he spoke the language, they speculated about him in such ntimate terms that his ears turned bright red, and he challenged them: "It is easy to speak the lion's name and question his size and his strength when he is hidden in the long grass, but will you be so brave when he raises himself in his rage to confront you face to face?"

The silence, stunned and incredulous, lasted only a second, then they covered their mouths and shrieked with delighted laughter, before the bravest came to wheedle coquettishly for a strip of ribbon or a handful of pretty beads.

As they drew closer to the stronghold of Lobengula, so they passed the great regimental kraals. Each of them was fifty miles from its neighbours, a day's travel at the rate of a marching impi, the ground-devouring trot that they could maintain for hour after hour.

Here there was no exchange of greeting and banter.

The warriors came swarming from the kraal like bees from a disturbed hive, and they lined each side of the track and settled into a deathly stillness, watching Ralph's wagon pass in total silence. There was a blankness in their eyes, the inscrutable gaze wich the lion watches his prey before he begins the stalk.

Ralph passed between the massed ranks at a measured walk, sitting very upright on Tom's back, without deigning to glance left or right at the silent menacing ranks; but when they had passed out into the open grasslands again, his shirt was wet under the arms and between his shoulder blades, and there was a catch in his breathing and a chill in the pit of his belly.

The Khami was one of the last wide rivers to cross before reaching the king's kraal at Gubulawayo.

As soon as Ralph saw the denser and greener growth of mimosa trees that marked the river course, he threw the saddle on Tom's back and trotted ahead to survey the drift.

Ports had been cut into the steep sides of the river banks to enable a wagon to enter the watercourse, and the sandbank between two tranquil green pools had been corduroyed with carefully selected branches, cut to length and laid side by side across the softer going to prevent the narrow ironshod wheels from sinking.

Whoever had travelled this road ahead of Ralph had saved him a great deal of trouble. Ralph knee-haltered Tom on a patch of good grass and went down into the riverbed to check the crossing. It was obviously many months since the last wagon had crossed, and Ralph worked his way slowly over the corduroyed pathway, repairing the damage that time had wrought, kicking the dried branches back into place and refilling the hollows scooped by water and wind beneath them.

It was furnace-hot in the riverbed and the white sand bounced the sun's rays back at him so that by the time he reached the far bank he was sweating heavily, and he threw himself down in the shade of one of the trees and wiped his face and arms with his scarf moistened in the waters of the river pool.

Quite suddenly he was aware of being watched, and he scrambled quickly to his feet. There was someone standing on the bank above him at the head of the roadway.

With a shock of disbelief, he realized that it was a girl a white girl, and she was dressed all in white: a loose cotton shift that reached to her ankle just above her bare feet. It was caught in at the waist with a ribbon of blue, and she was so slim that Ralph felt he could lift her with one hand.

The dress was buttoned with mother of pearl to the throat and the sleeves reached to her elbows; but the cotton had been washed, ironed and bleached so often that it seemed to have less substance than gossamer, and the light was behind her.

Ralph could clearly see the outline of her legs under the skirt, and it shocked him again so his breathing tripped. Her legs were long and so delicately shaped that he had to exercise his will to tear his eyes from them. With his heart still pounding he looked at her face.

It was pale as bone china, and seemed almost translucent, so that he thought he could see the sheen of fragile bone beneath the skin.

Her hair was pale shining silver blond, brushed into a fine cascade that flowed over her shoulders, and shimmered and shook with each breath that lifted the tiny girlish breasts under the thin cotton.

There were flowers on her brow, and a garland of them over her shoulders and about the brim of the wide straw hat that she held in her hands at the level of her narrow hips, and Ralph felt a sense of unreality. The flowers were roses. The girl and the flowers seemed not to belong in this wilderness but in some gentle and cultivated English garden.

She came down the cutting; her bare feet were silent and seemed to glide over the sandy earth. Her eyes were huge and luminous blue in her pale face, and she was smiling. It was the sweetest smile that Ralph had ever seen, and yet it was neither shy nor simpering.

While Ralph still stood, self-conscious and gawking, the girl lifted her slim smooth arms and stood on tiptoe to kiss him full upon the mouth. Her lips were cool and soft, delicate as the roses petals at her brow.

oh Ralph, we are so glad to see you. Nobody has talked of anything else since first we heard that you were upon the road."

"Who, who are you?" Ralph blurted, his surprise and embarrassment making him boorish; but she seemed unaffected by the gauche question.

"Salina" she said, and slipped her hand into the crook of his "elbow to lead him up the bank. "Salina Codrington."

"I don't understand." He pulled against the hand so that she had to turn to face him again.

"Salina -" she repeated, laughing now, and her laughter was warm and sweet as her smile. "I'm Salina Codrington." And then when it was apparent that the name meant nothing, "I'm your cousin, Ralph. My mother is your father's sister, Robyn Codrington, but she was Robyn Ballantyne., "Good God" Ralph stared at her. "I didn't know Aunt Robyn had a daughter."

suppose not. Uncle Zouga never was a good correspondent." But suddenly the smile was no longer on Salina's lips, and Ralph remembered abruptly that he had never taken the trouble to unravel the tangled skein of family history, except to comprehend vaguely that there was ill-feeling and unsettled scores between Zouga and his Aunt Robyn. Then it came back to him, he had overheard his father recalling bitterly how Robyn had taken unfair advantage by publishing her own version of their joint expedition to the Zambezi months before Zouga's Hunter's Odyssey, thereby robbing Zouga of his fair share of critical acclaim, and royalties.

Ralph's touching on the family enmities must account for Salina's quick change of mood, but it was fleeting.

She took his arm again, and was smiling as they came up the bank.

"Not one daughter, Ralph. We Codringtons will not let you off so lightly. There are a whole tribe of us, four of us, all girls." And she stopped, lifted the straw hat to shade her eyes and looked down the winding overgrown track that meandered away across the grassy savannah.

"Oh dear!" she exclaimed. "I came ahead to warn you and I was only just in time!"

Down the track towards them pelted three small figures, jostling one another for advantage, their faint squeaks of excitement gaining rapidly in volume, long hair flying wildly, fluttering skirts of faded and patched cloth lifted high above the knees so that bare legs flashed, faces freckled and flushed, contorted with exertion and excitement and recrimination.

"Salina! You promised to wait!"

They bore down on where Ralph stood with the lovely blond girl on his arm.

"Good God!" Ralph whispered again, and Salina squeezed his elbow.

"That's the second time that you have used the Lord's name, Cousin Ralph. Please don't." So that was the reason for her faint displeasure.

"Oh, I'm terribly sorry." And he remembered too late that Salina's parents were pious missionaries. "I didn't mean -" Again he was thick-tongued, for suddenly this girl's opinion was the most important thing in all the world. "I won't do it again. I promise."

"Thank you," she said softly, and before either of them could speak again they were surrounded by what appeared to be an ocean of small females, every one of which was bobbing up and down with remarkable rapidity, competing vocally for Ralph's attention and at the same time shrieking accusations at their eldest sister.

"You cheated, Salina. You told us "Ralph, Cousin Ralph, I'm Victoria, the eldest twin."

"Cousin Ralph, we prayed God to speed you to us."

Salina clapped her hands, and there was a barely noticeable reduction in the volume of sound.

"In order of age!" she said calmly.

"You always say that because you are the eldest!"

Salina ignored the protest and picked out a dark-haired child with a hand on her shoulder.

"This is Catherine." She drew her forward to face Ralph. "Cathy is fourteen."

"And a half, almost fifteen," said Cathy, and her manner changed with this declaration, becoming ladylike and controlled.

She was thin, and as flat-chested as a boy, but the young body gave the immediate impression of strength and suppleness. Her nose and cheeks were peppered with freckles, but the mouth was full and frank, her eyes the same Ballantyne green as Ralph's own, and her thick dark brows were a frame for their bright intelligent gleam. Her chin was a little too large, as was her nose, but they had a determined set and thrust. Her thick dark hair was plaited and piled on top of her head, leaving her ears expose small and pointed and lying flat against her head.

"Welcome to Khami, Ralph," she said evenly, and bobbed a small curtsey, holding her skirts up as she had obviously been coached; and Ralph realized that the skirt was made of old flour bags that had been stitched together and dyed a muddy green. The lettering still showed through: "Cape Flour Mills".

Then Cathy reached up and kissed him quickly, and it left a little wet spot on Ralph's lips. Kissing was obviously the accepted family salutation, and Ralph glanced with trepidation at the eager but grubby faces of the twins.

"I'm Victoria, the eldest., "And I'm Elizabeth, but if you call me "baby", I shall hate you, Cousin Ralph."

"You won't hate anybody," Salina said, and Elizabeth hurled herself at Ralph's neck, got a fair grip and hung on as she plastered her mouth to Ralph's.

"I was teasing, Ralph. I shall love you," she whispered fiercely.

"Always! Always!"

"Me!" howled Victoria indignantly. "I'm older than Lizzie. Me first."

Salina led them with that gliding walk which did not move her shoulders and barely ruffled the white-gold curtain of her hair, and every once in a while she turned to smile at Ralph, and he thought he had never seen anything so lovely.

The twins each had hold of one of Ralph's hands, and they gabbled out all the things they had saved up for weeks to tell him, and skipped to keep pace with his stride. Cathy came up behind them all, leading Tom. She and the pony had formed an immediate accord.

oh, he's beautiful, Ralph," she had said and kissed Tom's velvety muzzle.

"We don't have a horse," Victoria explained. "Daddy is a man of God, and men of God are too poor to have horses."

The small party straggled over the first low rise beyond the river, and Salina stopped and pointed down into the shallow basin ahead of them.

"Khami!" she said simply, and all of them looked to Ralph for approbation.

There was a notch in the next line of granite hills, a natural divide and shed for underground water, which accounted for the spread of lush grass that carpeted the valley.

Like chickens under the hen, the small huddle of buildings crouched beneath the hills. They were neatly laid out, thatched with yellow grass and painted dazzlingly white with burnt limewash. The largest building had a wooden cross set proudly on the ridge of the roof.

"Daddy and Mummy built the church with their own hands. King Silly Cat would not allow any of his people to help them," Victoria explained.

"Silly Cat?" Ralph asked, puzzled.

"King Mzilikazi," Salina translated. "You know Mama does not like you using fun names for the kings, Vicky," she rebuked the child mildly; but Victoria was shaking Ralph's hand excitedly and pointing to a distant figure in the valley below them.

"Daddy!" shrieked the twins in unison. There's Daddy!"

He was working in the precise geometrically laid out gardens below the church, a lanky figure whose shoulders remained stooped even when he stood upright and looked towards them, stabbed his spade into the earth and came striding up the hill.

"Ralph!" He swept off the sweatstained hat, and he was bald, like a monk, with just a fringe of silky hair forming a halo around his pate at the level of his ears. It was immediately apparent from whom Salina had inherited her glorious white-gold tresses.

"Ralph," the man repeated, and he wiped his right hand on the seat of his pants and then held it out. Despite the stoop, he was as tall as Ralph, his face deeply tanned, his bald dome as shiny as if it had been waxed and polished, his eyes pale blue as a summer sky, washed out by heat haze; but his smile was like Salina's, calm and tranquil, so that as he took the hand Ralph realized that this was the most contented and deeply happy man he had ever met in his life.

"I'm Clinton Codrington," he said. "And I suppose I must count as your uncle, though goodness knows I do not feel that old."

"I would have known you anywhere, sir," said Ralph.

"Would you indeed?"

"I have read Aunt Robyn's books, and I have always admired your exploits as a Royal Naval officer."

"Oh dear." Clinton shook his head in mock dismay. "I thought to have left that all far behind me., "You were one of the most illustrious and courageous officers in the African anti-slavery squadron, sir." Ralph's eyes shone with a still boyish hero worship.

"Your Aunt Robyn's account suffered a dreadful list to port, I'm afraid."

"Daddy is the bravest man in the world," Victoria declared stoutly, and she released Ralph's hand and ran to her father.

Clinton Codrington gathered her up and held her on his hip.

"And yours, young lady, is probably the most unbiased opinion in Matabeleland," he chuckled, and Ralph was suddenly sharply jealous of this palpable aura of deep affection and love which welded the little group, from which he felt himself excluded. It was something beyond his experience, something he had never missed until that moment. Somehow Salina seemed to sense his pang of melancholy, and she took the hand that Victoria had relinquished.

,"come," she said. "Mama will be waiting. And there is one thing you will soon learn, Ralph. in this family, nobody keeps Mama waiting."

They went down towards the church, passing between the beds of growing vegetables.

"You didn't bring any seed?" Clinton asked, and when Ralph shook his head, "Well, how were you to know?"

and he went on to point out with pride his flourishing crops. "Maize, potatoes, beans, tomatoes do particularly well here."

"We divide it this way," Cathy told Ralph, teasing her father. "One for the bugs, two for the baboons, three for the bushbuck, and one for Daddy."

"Be good to all God's creatures." Clinton reached out to niffle her dark hair, and Ralph realized that these gentle people were always touching and kissing one another. He had never experienced anything like it.

Squatting patiently on the shady side against the wall of the church were twenty or more Matabele of all ages and sexes, from a skeleton-thin ancient with a completely white cap of wool on his bowed head and both his eyes turned to blind orbs of milky jelly by tropical oph thalmia to a new-born infant held against its mother's milk-swollen breasts with its tiny dark face screwed up with the terrible colic of infant dysentery.

Catherine tethered Tom beside the church door, and they all trooped into the cool interior, insulated by thatch and thick walls of unbaked brick from the outside heat. The church smelled of homemade soap, and of iodine. The pews of rough-hewn timber had been pushed aside to make way for an operating table of the same material.

There was a girl at work over the table, but as they came in she tied the last knot in a bandage and dismissed her semi-naked black patient with a word and a pat then, wiping her hands on a clean but threadbare cloth, she came down the aisle of the church towards them.

Ralph was certain that she was Cathy's twin, for though she was a little taller, she was as slim and as flat-chested; her hair had the same dark brown colouring, though shot through with tones of russet and chestnut, her skin the same youthful lustre, and her nose and chin the same forceful size and thrust.

Then as she came closer, Ralph realized that he had been mistaken and that she was older than Cathy, perhaps even older than Salina, but not much.

"Hello, Ralph," the girl said. "I'm your Aunt Robyn."

Ralph felt the blasphemy of surprise leap to his lips again, conscious of Salina's hand in his he suppressed it.

"You are so young," he said instead.

"Bless you for that," she laughed. "You turn a prettier compliment than your daddy ever did." She was the only one who made no effort to kiss him; instead she turned to the twins.

"Right!" she said. "I want ten pages of copperplate written out before Evensong, and I don't want to see a single blot., "Oh Mama!

Ralph "Ralph has been your excuse for two weeks. Go, or you will eat in the kitchen hut tonight."

Then, to Cathy: "Have you finished the ironing, young lady?"

"Not yet, Mama." Cathy followed the twins "Salina, your baking."

"Yes, Mama."

Then there were three of them alone in the little church, and Robyn ran a professional eye over her nephew.

"Well, Zouga has bred a likely boy," she gave her opinion. "But I never expected anything else."

"How did you all know I was coming?" Ralph voiced his bewilderment at last.

"Grandpa Moffat sent a runner when you left Kuruman, and Induna Gandang passed here two weeks ago on his way to King Lobengula's kraal.

His eldest son was with him, and Bazo's mother is an old friend of mine."

"I see."

"Nothing moves in Matabeleland but the whole nation knows of it immediately," Clinton explained.

"Now, Ralph, how is your father? I was terribly distressed to hear of the death of Aletta, your mother. She was a lovely person, so good and gentle. I wrote to Zouga, but he never replied."

Robyn seemed determined to catch up on the doings of a decade in the first ten minutes, and her questions were quick and incisive; but Clinton soon excused himself and left the two of them alone in the little church to return to his gardens.

Ralph replied dutifully to all her questions, while he reassessed his first impression of his aunt. Youthful she looked, but childlike she was not. Now at last he could understand the remarkable achievements of this forceful woman. How she had enrolled at a famous London hospital, one which would never accept a female on its student body, by impersonating a man. Dressed in breeches, she had kept her terms and been granted her doctorate when she was twenty-one years of age. The scandal which attended the discovery that a female had invaded an exclusive male preserve had rocked all England.

Then she had accompanied Zouga to Africa, equal partners in the expedition to find their father Fuller Ballantyne, who had been missing in the unexplored interior for eight years. When she and Zouga had fallen out over the conduct of the expedition, she had pushed on, a white woman alone with only primitive black tribesmen as companions, and achieved the main object of the expedition on her own.

Her book describing the expedition, entitled Africa in My Blood, had been a publishing phenomenon and had sold almost a quarter of a million copies, three times as many as Zouga Ballantyne's A Hunter's Odyssey published six months later.

Robyn had signed over all her royalties from the book to The London Missionary Society, and that august body had been so delighted by the donation that they had reinstated her as a society officer, had ordained her husband as her assistant, and had approved her heading a mission to Matabeleland.

Her two subsequent publications had not enjoyed the same success as the first. The Sick African, a practical study of tropical medicine, had contained ludicrous theories that had earned her the derision of her medical peers she had even dared to suggest that malarial fever was not caused by breathing the foul night airs of tropical swamps, when this fact had been known since the time of Hippocrates.

Then her further account of her life as a medical missionary, Blind Faith, had been too homely in style and too prejudiced in championing the indigenous tribes.

She had firmly embraced the beliefs of lean-Jacques Rousseau and had added her own refinements to them. Her round condemnation of all settlers, hunters, prospectors and traders, and of their treatment of the noble savages, had been too salty for her European readers.

Indeed, scandal and contention seemed to follow Robyn Codrington as vultures and jackals follow the lion, and at each new provocation all her previous adventures would be recalled: What decent female missionary would provoke men sufficiently to make them fight a bloody duel over her?

Robyn Ballantyne had.

What God-fearing lady would sail aboard a notorious slaver, unchaperoned and with only slavers for company?

Robyn Ballantyne had.

What lady would choose for husband a man who had been court-martialled, stripped of his naval rank and imprisoned for piracy and dereliction of duty? Robyn Codrington had.

What loyal subject of the Queen would hail the terrible reversal of British arms at Isandhlwana, the bloody death of hundreds of Englishmen at the hands of the savage Zulus, as a judgement of God, Robyn Codrington had, in a letter to the Evening Standard.

Who, other than Robyn Codrington, would write to Lord Kimberley demanding that half the profits of the diamond fields that bore his name should go to the Griqua captain, Nicholaas Waterboer?

Only Robyn Codrington would demand of Paulus Kruger, the newly-elected President of the little Transvaal Republic, that he return to Lobengula, King of the Matabele, the land below the Cashan mountains from which the Boer commandos had driven Mzilikazi, his father.

She spared no one. Nothing was sacred to her except her God, whom she treated rather like a senior partner in the business of running Africa.

Her enemies, and they were legion, hated her fiercely, and her friends loved her with equal passion. It was impossible to be unmoved by her, and Ralph found himself fascinated as she sat beside him on the church pew and subjected him to an exhaustive catechism that covered every aspect of his life and that of the family.

"You have a brother," she seemed to know it all.

"Jordan? That is his name, isn't it? Tell me about him."

It was a comnand.

"Oh, Jordie is everybody's favourite; everybody loves him."

Ralph had never met anybody like her. He doubted he could ever bring himself to like her, she was far too prickly. That was the exact word to describe her, but he would never doubt her strength and her determination.

Clinton Codrington came back into the church as the light outside was mellowing into late afternoon.

"My dear, you really must let the poor fellow go now."

He turned to Ralph. "Your wagon has come up. I showed your driver where to outspan. He seems a first-rate chap, I must say."

"You will sleep in the guest house," Robyn announced as she stood.

"Cathy has taken your soiled clothes from the wagon, and she has washed and ironed them," Clinton went on.

"You will want to put on a fresh shirt before Evensong," Robyn told him. "We shall not begin the service until you return."

He had liked it better on the open road, Ralph thought sourly; then he had made his own decisions as to when he made his ablutions, as to how he dressed and where he spent his evenings, but he went to change his shirt as he was bidden.

The distaff side of the Codrington family filled the front pew. Clinton Codrington faced them from the pulpit. Ralph was between the twins; there had been a brief but ferocious competition between Victoria and Elizabeth to decide who should sit closest to him.

Apart from the family, there was nobody else in the church, and Victoria saw his glance and explained to Ralph in a penetrating whisper, "King Ben won't let any of his people come to our church."

"King Lobengula," Salina corrected her sweetly, "not King Ben."

Despite the full attendance, Clinton delayed the commencement of the evening service, finding and losing his place in the Book of Common Prayer half a dozen times and glancing repeatedly towards the rear of the tiny church.

From this quarter there was a sudden commotion. A "iretinue of Matabele women had arrived outside church. Clearly they were servants, house slaves and the ladies-in-waiting to the imposing female figure in their midst. She dismissed them with a royal gesture and came in through the doors of the church. Every one of the Codringtons turned their heads and their faces lit with pleasure.

The way in which this matron paced majestically down the aisle left not a doubt as to her high breeding and her place in the aristocracy of Matabeleland. She wore bangles and bracelets of beaten red copper, strings of highly prized sam-sarn beads that only a chief would afford. Her cloak was of beautifully tanned leather, ornamented with feathers of the blue jay and worked with designs of chipped ostrich shell.

"i see you, Nomusa," she declared.

Her huge naked breasts shone with an ointment of fat and red clay; they pushed out ponderously from under her tanned cloak and dangled weightily to the level of her navel.

Her arms were thick as a grown man's thigh, her thighs as thick as his waist. There were rolls of fat around her belly, and her face was a black full moon, the glossy skin stretched tightly over her abundant flesh.

Her merry eyes sparkled from between creases of fat, and her teeth flashed like the sunlit surface of a lake as she smiled. All this size was evidence to the world of her station, of her amazing beauty, of her fecundity. It was also unassailable proof of the high regard of her husband, of his prosperity and importance in the councils of Matabeleland.

"I see you, Girlchild of Mercy," she smiled at Robyn.

"I see you, Juba, the little dove." Robyn answered her.

"I am not a Christian," Juba intoned. "Let no evil one bear false tidings to Lobengula, the Black and Mighty Elephant."

"If you say so, Juba," Robyn answered primly, and Juba pinioned her in a vast embrace while at the same time she called to Clinton in the pulpit.

"I see you also, Hlopi. I see you, White Head! But do not be deceived by my presence here, I am not a Christian." She drew an elephantine breath and went on, "I come merely to greet old friends, not to sing hymns and worship your God. Also I warn you, fflopi, that if you read the story tonight of a man called the Rock who denied his God three times before the call of the cock, I shall be displeased."

"I shall not read that story," Clinton answered. "For by now you should know it by heart."

"Very well, Hlopi, then let the singing begin." And led by Juba in a startlingly clear and beautiful soprano, the entire Codrington family rollicked into the first verse of "Onward Christian Soldiers", which Robyn had translated into the Matabele vernacular.

After the service Juba bore down on Ralph.

"You are Henshaw?" she demanded.

"Nkosikazi!" Ralph agreed, and Juba inclined her head to acknowledge the correct style of address to the senior wife of a great chief that Ralph had employed.

"Then you are the one whom Bazo, my first-born son, calls brother," Juba said. "You are very skinny and very white, Little Hawk, but if you are Bazo's brother, then you are my son."

"You do me great honour, Umame!" Ralph said, and Juba took him in those mammoth arms. She smelled of clarified fat, and ochre and wood-smoke, but the embrace was strangely comforting, not at all unlike the feeling, only half remembered, that he had once experienced in Aletta's arms.

The twins knelt side-by-side at the low truckle cot, both in long nightdresses, their hands clasped before their eyes which were so tightly closed that they seemed to be in pain.

Salina, also in her nightdress, stood over them to supervise the last prayer of the day.

"Gentle Jesus meek and mild Cathy was already in her own bed, hair ribboned for the night, writing the day's entry in her diary by the light of the guttering candle made from buffalo fat and cloth wick.

pity my simplicity -" gabbled the twins, at such a speed that it came out as, "Pretty mice, and pretty me!"

Arriving at the "Amen" in a dead heat, the twins leaped into the bed that they shared, pulled the blanket to their chins and watched with fascination as Salina began to brush her hair, one hundred strokes with each hand, so that it rippled and flamed with white fire in the candlelight. Then she came to kiss them, blew out the candle, and the thongs of her bed squeaked from across the small thatched hut as she climbed into it.

Tina?" whispered Victoria.

"Vicky, go to sleep."

"Just one question, please."

"All right then, just one."

"Does God allow a girl to marry her own cousin?"

The silence that followed the question seemed to hum in the darkened bedroom like a copper telegraph wire struck by a sword.

Cathy broke the silence.

"Yes, Vicky," she answered quietly. "God does allow it.

Read the Table of Kindred and Affinity on the last page of your prayer book."

The silence was contemplative now.

Una?"

Uzzie, go to sleep."

"You allowed Vicky to ask a question."

"All right then, just one."

"Does God get cross if you pray for something just for yourself, not for Daddy or Mama or your sisters, but just for you alone?"

"I don't think so," Salina's voice was becoming drowsy.

"He might not give it to you but I don't think He will be cross. Now go to sleep, both of you."

Cathy lay very still, on her back with her hands clenched at her sides, staring at the lighter oblong across the hut where the moon defined the single window.

"Please God," she prayed. "Let him look at me the way he looks at Salina, just once. Please."

"What do you think of Zouga's boy?" Robyn took Clinton's arm as they stood together on the darkened stoep and looked out at the star-pricked black velvet curtain of the African night.

"He's a powerful lad, and I don't mean merely muscle." Clinton took his pipe from between his teeth and peered into the bowl. "His wagon is loaded with cases, long wooden cases from which the markings. have been burned with a hot iron."

"Guns?" Robyn asked.

"I think so."

"there is no law against trading guns north of the Limpopo Robyn reminded him. "And Lobengula needs all the power he can get to defend himself."

"Still, guns! I mean, it does go against the grain." Clinton sucked at his pipe, and each puff of smoke he exhaled was denser and ranker. They were both silent for a while.

"He has a hard and ruthless streak, like his father Robyn judged at last.

"A man needs that to survive in this land.

Robyn shivered suddenly, and hugged her own arms.

"Are you cold?" Clinton was immediately solicitous.

"number A grey goose walked over my grave."

"Let's go off to bed."

"A moment longer, Clinton. The night is so beautiful."

Clinton put his arm about her shoulders.

"Sometimes I am so happy that it frightens me," he said. "So much happiness cannot go on for ever."

His words seemed to precipitate the thick but formless dread that had hung over Robyn all this day like the pall of smoke above the winter bush fires. It weighed her down with the premonition that something had changed in all their lives.

"May God save us all," she whispered.

"Amen to that," said Clinton as softly, and took her in out of the night.

The interior of the thatched hall was domed and darkened, so that the patterns of latticed branches and lovingly knotted bark rope disappeared into the gloom above their heads like the arches of a medieval cathedral.

The only light was from the small fire on the clay hearth in the centre of the floor. One of the king's wives threw another handful of dried herbs upon it and oily blue tendrils of smoke twisted upwards towards the unseen roof.

Across the fire, on a low platform of dried clay covered with a thick mattress of furs, silver-backed jackal and blue monkey, bat-eared fox and spotted civet, sat the king.

He was a mountainous figure, stark naked, and his skin polished with fat so that he gleamed like an enormous Buddha carved from a solid block of washed anthracite. His head was round as a cannon ball, surmounted by the induna's ring. His arms were massive, bulging with muscle and fat, but the hands in his lap were strangely dainty, narrow across the pink palms, with long tapered fingers.

His trunk was thickened, his breasts pendulous. All this was flesh which he had carefully cultivated. The beer pots and beef dishes stood close at hand. The thick millet beer bubbled softly and the cuts of beef each had a thick rind of yellow fat. Every few minutes one of his wives responded to a nod or a small movement of one graceful hand by proffering a dish. Weight and size were the mark of a king. Not for nothing was Lobengula called the Great Black Elephant of Matabeleland.

His manner was slow, imbued with the vast dignity of his size and rank. Yet his eyes were thoughtful and deeply intelligent, his features despite the burden of fat which blurred them were handsome, lacking outward traits of the hideous cruelties which any Matabele king had to make part of his life.

"My people expect me to be strong and harsh. There are always those who look for the smallest weakness in me, as the young lions watch the black-maned leader of the pride," Mzilikazi had explained to his son. "See how my chickens follow me to be fed." He had pointed with the toy spear of kingship at the high wheel of tiny specks turning slowly in the sky above the hills of Thabas Indunas. "When my vultures desert me, I will be as dust."

Lobengula, his son, had learned the lesson well, but it had not brutalized him. Indeed, there was a line to his mouth that was almost diffident, and a shadow behind the light of intelligence in his eyes that was hesitant, the confusion of a man tugged at by too many currents AND winds, a man caught up by his destiny, and uncertain as to how he could break away from its remorseless toils.

Lobengula had never expected to take up his father's spear of kingship. He was never the heir apparent, there had been older brothers from mothers of higher rank and nobler blood.

He stared now across the fire at the man that squatted there. A magnificent warrior, his body tempered to black steel by long marches and savage warfare, his understanding and compassion expanded by close and intimate daily contact with common men, his courage and loyalty proven to all the world ten thousand times so there could be no doubts, not even in his own midnight watches, which is the time of doubts, and Lobengula found himself longing to rid himself of this fearsome burden of kingship and place it on the other man's shoulders. He found himself wishing for that quiet and secret cave in the Matopos hills where he had known the only happy days of his life.

The man opposite him was a half-brother; his blood line, like that of Lobengula himself, reaching back unsullied to the Zanzi of Zululand.

He was a prince of the House of Kumalo, wise and brave and untroubled by doubts.

"Such a one should have been king," Lobengula thought, and his love for his half-brother choked his throat so that he coughed. He moved one little finger, and a wife held the beer pot to his lips and he swallowed once and then signed for it to be taken away.

"I see you, Gandang." His voice was throaty and low, the sadness still in it for he knew that he could not escape that way. He felt like a man on a solitary journey through the forest where the lions are hunting. His recognition released Gandang from his respectful silence.

The induna clapped his hands softly and began to recite his half-brother's ritual praises, and Loberigula's mind wandered back across the years.

His earliest memory was of the road, the hard road up from the south, driven by the mounted men dressed all in brown, riding brown ponies. He remembered the popping sound of the guns, which He learned only later to fear, and the smell of gunsmoke, spicy and sour as the wind brought it down to where he clung to his mother, and he remembered the wailing of the women as they mourned the dead.

He remembered the heat and the dust, trotting naked as a puppy at his mother's heels. How tall she had seemed, the muscles of her back gleaming with sweat, and Ningi, his sister, in the sling upon her hip, clinging to one of his mother's fat jostling breasts with mouth and tiny determined fists.

He remembered toiling up the stony hills with his father's single wagon rolling and pitching along ahead of them. On it rode Mzilikazi's senior wife, and her son Nkulumane, three years older than Lobengula and heir apparent to the kingship of the Matabele. They were the only ones who did not walk.

He remembered how his mother's back had with-tred, the beautiful gleaming skin becoming loose and baggy, the ribcage beginning to show through as the famine wasted her substance, and Ningi screaming with hunger as the rich creamy flow from her teats dried up.

This was where the memory of "Saala" began; it was mixed up at first with the shouting and singing as a band of raiding Matabele returned to the fleeing column. He had first seen Saala in the firelight, as the warriors slaughtered the captured cattle, and Lobengula could almost still feel the hot grease and the bloody juices of the beef running down his chin and dripping onto his naked chest as they feasted, breaking the long days and months of starvation on cattle taken from the white men, the buni.

Once his belly was bulging tightly with meat, Loberigula had joined the circle of curious Matabele princelings and princesses who surrounded the captives; but he had stood back from the teasing and jeering and prodding of the other children.

Saala was the eldest of the two little girls. It was only long afterwards that Lobengula learned that her name was Sarah, but even now he could not pronounce that sound. The Matabele raiding party had surprised a small an of Boer wagons, and had killed everybody except these two small white children.

Her whiteness was the first thing that had struck Lobengula. How white her face was in the firelight, as white as an egret's wing, and she had not wept as her younger sister wept.

After that the memories grew stronger, Saala walking ahead of him as the slow column wound through thick thorn forest. Saala taking the infant Ningi from his mother when she slipped and fell with weakness in the black mud of the swamps while the mosquitoes formed a dark whining cloud over them.

Exactly where Saala's little sister died, Lobengula could not recall. It might have been in the swamps. They left her small naked white body unburied, and the column marched on.

At last Lobengula's own mother fell and could not rise again, and with her last strength handed little Ningi to Saala; then she curled up quietly and died. All the weak ones died like that, and their infants died with them, for no other women would take the orphans, for each of them had her own infants to care for.

However, Saala strapped little Ningi on her own thin white back in the way that the Matabele carry their babies, then she took Lobengula's hand in hers and they toiled on -after the fleeing nation.

By now Saala's clothing had long ago fallen off her thin white body, and she was as the other Matabele girls who had not yet reached puberty, completely naked. She had half forgotten her own language, and spoke only the language of the tribe. The sun had darkened her skin, and the soles of her bare feet had grown a thick covering, hard as rhinoceros skin, so she could march over razor flint and needle thorns.

Lobengula came to love Saala, transferring everything he had ever felt for his mother to her, and she stole extra food for him and protected him from the bullying of his older brothers, from Nkulumane the cruel one, and from Nkulumane's mother, who hated all that might one day stand in the way of her son's claim to the kingship of the Matabele.

Then the Matabele crossed the Limpopo, the River of Crocodiles, and the land beyond was fair, thick with game and running with sweet rivers. The wandering nation followed Mzilikazi into the magical hills of the Matopos. There on a lonely hilltop the king met the wizard of the Matopos, face to face.

Mzilikazi saw fire spring up at the Umlimo's bidding, and he heard the spirits speak from the very air about the Umlimo, a hundred different voices, voice of infant and crone, of man and of beast, the cry of the fish eagle, the snarl of the leopard, and from that day the Umlimo had the reverence and superstitious awe of the king and all his people.

The Umlimo pointed the way north again, and as the Matabele emerged from the broken hills of the Matopos, they saw spread before them a beautiful land, rich with grass and tall trees.

"This is my land," said Mzilikazi, and built his kraal under the Hills of the Indunas.

However, the Matabele had lost nearly all their cattle and many of the women and children had died on that cruel journey northwards.

At Thabas Indunas Mzilikazi left his senior wife, mother of Nkulumane, as his regent, and he took five thousand of his finest warriors and went out against the tribes, for women and for cattle.

He went westwards into the land ruled by great Khatna, and there was no word from him. The seasons came and changed, the rains followed the long dryness, the heat followed the frosts, and still there was no word of Mzilikazi.

Slowly the strict order of Matabele society began to break up, for the regent, Mzilikazi's senior wife, was unrestrained in her intercourses, and she rutted shamelessly with her lovers.

Some of the lesser wives followed her example, and then the common people took sexual licence, the youths, unblooded and without the royal permission to go into the women, lay in wait for the young girls on the path to the water-hole, and dragged them giggling into the bushes.

With the code of morality broken, other vices followed. The remaining cattle, the breeding herds, were slaughtered, and the feasting went on for months. Loose ess and drunkenness swept through the nation like a plague, and in the midst of this debauchery, one of the Matabele patrols captured a little yellow Bushman who had wandered in out of the west, and the Bushman had momentous tidings.

Mzilikazi is dead" he told his captors. "I have thrust my own fingers into the stab wound in his heart, and watched the hyena wolfing down his flesh and cracking his bones."

The senior wife had her guards boil clay pots of water, and pour them over the Bushman until his flesh fell off his bones and he died, which is fitting treatment for one who brings news of the death of a king. Then she called the indunas into council, and urged them to proclaim Nkulumane king in place of his dead father. However, none of the indunas were fools. One whispered to the other, "It would take more than a Tswana dog to kill Mzilikazi."

While they procrastinated and talked, the senior wife grew wild with impatience and sent for the executioners, determined now that there would be no rival for her son.

Saala was playing outside the queen's hut, moulding little clay oxen and figures of men and women for Ningi.

Through the thatched wall she heard the queen giving her orders to the Black Ones. Frantic with terror for the safety of Lobengula, Saala ran to the other royal mothers.

"The Black ones are coming for the royal sons. You must hide them., Then Saala left little Ningi, now weaned and strong, with one of the royal women who was barren and childless.

"Look after her," she whispered, and ran out into the grasslands.

Lobengula was by now ten years of age, and was tending what remained of the royal herds: the duty of every Matabele boy, the essential service through which he learned the secrets of the veld and the ways of cattle, the nation's treasure.

Saala found him bringing in the herd to water. He was naked except for the little flap of leather over his loins, and armed only with two short fighting sticks with which he was expected to drive off any predator and to hold his owr. in competition with the other herd boys.

Holding hands again, the Matabele princeling and the little white girl fled, and instinctively they turned southwards, back the way they had come.

They lived on roots and berries, on the eggs of wild birds and the flesh of the iguana lizards. They competed with the jackals and vultures for the remains of the lion kill, and sometimes they went hungry, but at last they found themselves in the maze of the Matopos Hills where the Black Ones would not follow them. They slept under the single kaross that Saala had brought with her, and the nights crackled with frost so they slept in each other's arms, clinging together for warmth.

Early one morning the old man found them thus. He was thin and mad-looking, with strange charms and magical objects about his neck, and the children were terrified of him.

Saala pushed Lobengula behind her, and with a show of false courage faced the wizard.

"This is Lobengula. Favourite son of Mzilikazi," she declared stoutly. "Who harms him, harms the king."

The old man rolled his mad eyes, and drooled horribly as he grinned with toothless gums. Then suddenly the air was full of the sound of ghost voices, and Saala.

screamed and Lobengula wailed with terror, and they clung to each other pitifully.

The wizard led the children, chastened, shivering and weeping, through secret passages and over precipitous trails, deeper and deeper into the hills, until at last they came to the caves which honeycombed the rock.

Here the old man began the instruction of the boy who would be king. He taught him many of the mysteries, but not how to control the ghost voices, nor how to throw fire by pointing his finger, nor how to see the future in a calabash of mountain water.

Here in the caves of the Matopos, Lobengula learned the scope and power of the magical order. He learned how the little wizards, the witchdoctors, were spread across the land, performing the small rites, making rain and giving charms for fertility and childbirth, smelling out the evil-doers, and sending back their reports to the cave in the Matopos.

Here the grand wizards, of which the old man was one, worked the great magics, called up the spirits of their ancestors, and looked into the mists of time to see what the future would bring. Above them all was the Umlimo.

It was a name only for Lobengula, Umlimo, a name that even after he had lived five years in the cave could still make him shiver and sweat.

Then when he was sixteen, the mad old wizard took him to the cave of the Umlimo. And the Umlimo was a woman, a beautiful woman.

What Lobengula saw in the cave of the Umlimo he would never speak about, not even to Saala, but when he came back from the cave there was a sadness in his eyes, and the weight of knowledge seemed to bow his young shoulders.

There was a furious thunderstorm the night of Lobengula's return, and the blue lightning clanged upon the anvil of the hills with strokes that tortured their eardrums as they lay together under the kaross. Then it was that the little orphan white girl made the boy into a man, the princeling into a king; and when her term was run she gave him a son who was the colour of the early morning sunlight on the yellow winter grass, and Lobengula knew happiness for the only time in his life.

In their joy they paid little attention to tidings which the mad old wizard brought to their cave.

He told them how Mzilikazi, great with plunder, fat with cattle, had come back to Thabas Indunas, arriving suddenly with the blood barely dried on the spears of his impi, and red rage in his art.

At Mzilikazi's nod the Black Ones gathered all those who had acted as if the king were dead. Some they hurled from the cliff of execution, some they pegged down upon the sandbanks of the river where the crocodiles sunned themselves, others they skewered with bamboo spikes through the secret openings of their bodies.

But when the mother of Nkulumane was led before the king, she wept so and tore her own flesh with her nails while she called on all the spirits of the dead to witness how faithful she had been to Mzilikazi in his absence, how constant had been her belief in his eventual safe return and how during his absence she had guarded the other royal sons from the Black Ones and even sent Lobengula into the wilderness to save him so that Mzilikazi, who at the bottom was only a man, believed her. However, the others died in their hundreds, victims of the king's wrath, and the nation rejoiced for the king had returned and the good old days were back.

Through all this Lobengula and Saala and their little yellow son stayed on in the cave of the Matopos and knew happiness.

Far away in the south below the Limpopo river, a Hottentot elephant hunter stopped to water his horse at the well beside a Boer homestead that stood not far from the battlefield where the Boer horsemen had long ago first defeated Mzilikazi before driving him out of this country.

"I saw a curious thing" said the Hottentot to the big, solemn, bearded man who was his host. "In the southern hills of Matabeleland, I saw a white woman, full grown and naked. She was shy as a wild buck and ran into the rocky ground where I could not follow her."

Two months later, when the Boer farmer took his family into the service of Nachtmaal in the new church at Rustenberg, he repeated the strange story which the Hottentot hunter had brought from the north. Someone recalled the story of the massacre of the Van Heerden family, and the two little girls, Sarah and Hannah, taken by the murderous plundering savages.

Then Hendrik Potgieter, that doughty trekker and kaffir-fighter, stood up in the pulpit, and thundered: "The heathen have a Christian woman as captive!" And the words offended much that the congregation held dear: God and their womankind.

"Commando!" roared Hendrik Potgieter. "I call commando!"

The women filled the powder-horns and Poured the lead into the bullet moulds, and the men picked out their best horses and elected Potgieter as their leader.

Not all of it was for God and womankind; for one whispered to another, "Even if there is no white woman, I have heard that there are fine new herds in Matabeleland."

Then the old wizard came to Lobengula's cave and rolled his eyes and cackled.

The buni have crossed the river of crocodiles, riding on the backs of strange beasts. Many men, many men!"

Instinctively Lobengula knew why the Boer commando was coming, and he knew also what to do about it. "Stay here, with the child," he ordered Saala. "I am going to my father's kraal, and I will lead his impis back here."

But Saala was a woman, with a woman's curiosity, and blood called to blood. Vaguely she remembered that these strange white men had once been her kin.

When Lobengula had gone north to Thabas Indunas, she slung the baby on her back and crept out of the cave.

At first the distant sound of gunfire guided her, for the Boer commando was living off the abundant herds of wild game. Then later she heard the shout of voices, and the whicker of horses, sounds that awakened a terrible nostalgia in her breast.

She crept closer and closer to the bivouac, with all the stealth of a wild animal, closer still until she could clearly see the tall sun-bronzed men, dressed to throat and wrists in brown homespun, the white-brimmed felt hats on their heads, closer still until she could hear their voices lifted in praise of their God as they sang their hymns around the camp fire.

She recognized the words, and memories flooded back to her. She was no longer Saala but Sarah, and she rose from her place of hiding to go down to her people. Then she looked down at her body, and she saw that she was naked. She looked at the child on her hip, and saw that it was yellow, and its features were neither hers nor yet those of its Matabele father.

The awareness of sin came upon her, as it had done to Eve in another Paradise, and Sarah was ashamed.

She crept away, and in the dawn she stood on the top of one of those soaring granite precipices that rend the Matopos hills.

She kissed her baby and then holding the little mite to her breast she stepped out into the void.

Lobengula found them at the bottom of the cliff. He found them before the vultures did, and they were still together, Sarah's grasp on the infant had not faltered during the long plunge from the top of the precipice.

Strangely, both she and the child seemed to be merely sleeping, quiet and at peace.

At the memory Lobengula sighed now, and returned his gaze to his half-brother, the Induna Gandang who still sat across him from the fire.

If only he had been able to escape the prophecy of the Umlimo, for she had foreseen this destiny for him: Your name is Lobengula, the one who drives like the wind. Yet the winds will drive you, high as an eagle.

"Lobengula will hold the spear of Mzilikazi. Yet again the winds will drive you, down, down, down, and your nation with you.

Those were the words of that strange and beautiful woman of the cave, and already the first part of the prophecy had held true.

Mzilikazi, the mighty warrior, had died like an old woman, riddled with arthritis and dropsy and gout and liquor, in his royal hut.

His widows had wrapped him in the skin of a freshlykilled bull, and sat mourning over him for twelve days: until his remains were almost liquid with putrefaction in the summer heat.

After the mourning the regiments had carried his corpse into the Matopos Hills, the Sacred Hills, and they had seated Mzilikazi in the cave of the king. They placed all his possessions about him: his assegais, his guns, his ivory; even his wagon was taken down and the pieces piled in the crevices of the cave.

Then masons closed the opening with blocks of granite, and after the feasting and dancing the indunas of Matabele met to decide who would succeed Mzilikazi as king.

The argument and counter-argument lasted many weeks, until the indunas led by the princes of Kumalo returned into the Matopos bearing rich gifts to the cave of the Umlimo.

"Give us a king!" they pleaded.

"The one who drives like the wind!" replied the Umlimo, but Lobengula had fled, trying even at the last moment to escape his destiny.

The border impis captured him, and led him back to Thabas Indunas like a criminal to judgement. The indunas came to him one by one, and swore their allegiance and loyalty unto death.

"Black Bull of Matabele, The Thunderer, The Great Elephant. The one whose tread shakes the earth., Nkulumane was the first of his brothers to crawl before him, and Nkulumane's mother, the senior wife of Mzilikazi, followed her son on her knees.

Lobengula turned to the Black Ones who stood behind him, like hounds on the leash.

"I do not wish to look upon their faces again."

It was Lobengula's first command, spoken like a true king, and the Black Ones took mother and son into the cattle stockade and twisted their necks, quickly and mercifully.

"He will be a great king," the people told one another delightedly. "Like his father."

But Lobengula had never known happiness again. Now with a shudder he threw off the terrible burden of the past, and his voice was a deep but melodious bass. "Rise up, Gandang my brother. Your countenance warms me like a watch-fire in the frosty night."

They spoke then, easily and intimately, trusted companions of a lifetime, until at last Gandang passed the Martini-Henry rifle to his king and Lobengula held it in his lap and rubbed the cold blued metal of the block with one forefinger and then held the finger to his nose to smell the fresh grease.

"Sting the mamba with his own venom,"he murmured "This is the fang of the mamba."

"The lad, Henshaw, son of Bakela, has a wagon filled with these."

"Then he will be welcome," Lobengula nodded. "But now let me hear all this from the mouth of your own son. Bring him to me."

Bazo lay face down on the hard clay floor of the king' 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 impatiently. Come closer."

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

"There are prettier stones than these in every river of my land," he said. "These are ugly., "The buni are mad for them. No other stone 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 repeat the prophecy of the Umlimo and then went on, !" these ugly little stones the claws of the lion? Then, 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 ffle 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 scail, 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 Kurnalo, 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 rear-most 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: "Thus will I stab the traitor dog and thus will I rip out the bellies of his sons 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.

Lobengula. 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 sleeves reached only halfway down his forearms. With the toy spear of kingship, the shaft of red wild mahogany and the blade of brightest silver, in his right hand, he used it to summon a 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." and The boy crept forward and laid the lustrous gold dappled skin at Lobengula's feet.

"Take your choice of three cows from my black 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.

He 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."

Even from where he stood Bazo could see that the grain bins were overflowing with corn that had been sundried 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.

Rain-doctor as he claims."

Perhaps he is "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."

As if to confirm his words the tiny distant figure of a girl appeared suddenly out of the gulley. She was foreshortened by her height above them, and the ledge along which she climbed was not apparent from where they stood.

She had a calabash gourd balanced on her head, with green leaves stuffed into its mouth to stop the water splashing out of it as she moved.

She disappeared over the top of the cliff.

"So," grunted Bazo. "We must climb up to them., "It would be easier to fly," Zama grunted. "That rock would daunt a baboon, or a klipspringer."

The rock was pearly grey and marble smooth. There were streaks of lichen dashed across it, green and blue and red, like dry paint on an artist's palette.

"Come," Bazo ordered, and they began a slow measured circuit of the hill, and as they went so the armed guards on the clifftop above kept pace with them, watching every move they made, and if they approached too close to the foot of the cliff, a hail of rocks fell upon them, striking sparks from the scree slope and caroming viciously past their heads, forcing them to shelve their dignity as they retired in haste.

"It is always the Mashona. way," Zama grumbled, "Stones instead of spears."

In places the cliff was riven by vertical cracks, yet none of these reached from base to crest, none of them offered a route to the summit. Bazo looked for a place that had been polished by the paws of wild baboon or marked by the hooves of the tiny little chamois-like klipspringer which might reveal a way up the rock face, but there was none. The cliff girded the entire hill, and transformed it into a fortress.

"There!"Zama pointed to a tiny irregularity in the face.

"That is where two warriors of the swimmers" impi tried to force a road to the top. They climbed as far as that little bush." It grew in a crack in the face a hundred feet from the base of the cliff. "And there the ledge narrowed and gave out. They could not go on, nor could they return. They hung there two days and three nights until their strength failed and they fell, one after the other, to be crushed like beetles on the rocks here where we stand."

They went on, and as the sun was setting they came back to where they had started, the bivouac below the ladderway. Pemba's people had built a ladder of long straight mopani poles, bound together with bark rope, and they had used it to span the lowest point in the cliff a place where a deep gully descended from the summit to within fifty feet of the surrounding plain. Like a drawbridge, the massive ladder was cunningly counter-weighted with round ironstone boulders, so that it had only to be drawn up on its ropes, as it was now, and the mountain stronghold was impregnable.

When the sun set, Bazo was still leaning on his long shield staring up the cliff, seemingly oblivious to the faint shouted insults of the Mashona that just reached him in the evening silence.

"Pustules on Lobengula's fat buttocks."

"Puppies of the rabid dog Lobengula."

"Dried turds of the spavined Matabele elephant."

only when it was too dark to make out the top of the cliff did Bazo turn away, but even then he sat late beside the watch-fire, and rolled into his kaross only after the rise of the big white star over the top of the kopje.

Even then his sleep was troubled with dreams. He dreamed of water, of streams and lakes and waterfalls.

He woke again before light and checked that his sentries were alert before he slipped from the camp and under cover of the darkness crept up to the base of the cliff, at the point directly below the gulley choked with green growth where they had seen the girl carry water the day before.

Bazo heard the liquid chuckling, and his spirits soared.

Guided by the sound he groped through the darkness, and found the spring in the base of the cliff. It filled a small natural basin of grey rock and then overflowed to waste itself again in the dry earth of the plain. Bazo scooped a handful and it was icy cold and sweet on his tongue. The fountain came splashing out of a dark rent in the rock face. Bazo explored it in the short time that was left before the strengthening light threatened to expose him to the sentries on the cliff above.

"Up," Bazo shouted as he strode into the bivouac. "All of you, up!" And his men came off their sleeping-mats, leopard swift and with the stabbing spears in their fists.

"What is it?" Zama hissed.

"We are going to dance," Bazo told them, and they looked from one to the other in amazed disbelief.

On the north side of the kopje, farthest from the spring in the rock cliff and from the long ladder drawbridge, they danced. While they danced, all Pemba's people lined the clifftop to watch them, first in puzzled silence and then yelling with ribald laughter, hurling down taunts and stones.

"I count four hundred, without the children," Zama panted, as he stamped and leaped and stabbed at the air.

"There will be enough for each of us," Bazo agreed, and pirouetted with his shield high over his head, They danced until the sun was high and then Bazo led them back to the camp, and when he stretched out on his mat and fell instantly asleep, his warriors looked at Zama with exasperation, but Zama could only shrug and turn his eyes to the sky.

An hour before sunset Bazo woke. He ate a little maize cake and drank a small gourd of sour milk, then he called for Zama and spoke quietly with him until it was almost dark.

Zama listened and nodded and his eyes shone, and while he talked, Bazo was honing the silver blade of his assegai until the light twinkled like tiny stars along its cutting edge.

At dark Bazo rose to his feet, handed his long dappled war shield to Zama and, armed only with his assegai, strode out of the bivouac. At the spring in the base of the cliff, Bazo shed his kilt and cloak and headdress. He rolled them into a bundle and hid them in a rock crevice.

Then stark naked with only his assegai tied to his back by a leather thong, he waded across the pool. The reflection of the stars on its surface exploded into chips of light.

The water cascaded over him from the fountain in the cliff and he shuddered and gasped with the cold and then reached up into the dark rocky opening, found a fingerhold, drew a deep breatht and pulled himself upwards.

With a solid black jet of water racing over his head, he held his breath and wriggled frantically up into the hole in the cliff. The force of water opposed him, and it required all his strength to go against it. Inch by inch, his chest throbbing for air, he fought his way upwards and then just when he knew he would have to let himself be washed back into the pool, his head broke out and he could breathe.

He sucked air desperately, wedging shoulders and knees against the smooth water-polished rock to hold himself in the torrent. It was utterly dark, not the faintest glimmering of starlight, and the darkness seemed to have physical weight that threatened to crush him.

He reached as high as he could and found another smoo the fingerhold, and with all the strength of his arms gained another few feet, rested a moment, and then reached up again. The rock was like glass, and in places coated with a thick beard of algae, slippery as an eel's skin. The cold was a terrible living thing that invaded his body. His bones ached and his fingers were so numbed that he could barely take his holds.

The water tore at him, battering his shoulders, forcing its way into his nose and mouth and ears, filling his head with its angry animal roaring. Still he went up in the irregular twisting tunnel, sometimes horizontal, wriggling forward on his belly, the roof cracking his skull if he lifted his head too quickly to find the few precious inches of air trapped beneath it. Mostly the tunnel climbed vertically, and he wedged with knees and elbows to hold himself against the cascade, while his skin, softened with water, was smeared and torn away in slabs against the stone; but the inches became yards, and the minutes became hours, and still he went up.

Then the tunnel narrowed so sharply that he was trapped, cold slippery rock at each shoulder and hard heavy rock cramming down between his shoulderblades. He could not go on, nor could he go back. He was trapped in the rocky maw of the mountain, and he screamed with terror, but his voice was lost in the thunder of water and the water gushed into his throat.

He fought with the last of his drowning, desperate strength, and suddenly he kicked himself forward into a narrow cavern where he could breathe again, and where the water swirled into little back-eddies so that he could rest a few moments from its drag.

Even while he coughed and choked on his flooded lungs, he realized that he had lost his assegai, and he groped for it until he felt the tug of the thong on his shoulder; there was still something tied to the other end.

Hand over hand he drew in the thong and then his fingers closed on the familiar shaft and he sobbed with relief and pressed his lips to the beloved steel.

It took time for him to realize that the air in the tiny cavern was sweet, and he felt it moving like a lover's fingers on his skin, warm and soft, warmth, that was what made his heart soar. Warmth from the outside world, beyond this icy roaring tomb of water. He found the shaft down which the torrent was sucking air from the surface, and from somewhere came the strength to attempt it. He climbed slowly, agonizingly, and suddenly there was a white prick of light ahead of him, distorted by racing black water.

He thrust his head forward, and the night wind struck his cheek, and he smelled woodsmoke and grass and earth redolent of the lingering warmth of the sun, and the great white star stood in the night sky high above his head. That dreadful passage had connected the fountain at the base of the cliff to the one high above.

the strength to drag himself more than He did not have a few feet from the fountainhead, and there under a bush on the soft bed of leaf mould he lay and panted like a dog.

He must have drifted into an exhausted and cold-drugged sleep, for he woke with a start. The sky had paled.

He could just see the branches of the bush above his head outlined against it. He dragged himself out, and he ached down to the bones of his spine and found that his skinned elbows and knees burned even at the touch of the dawn wind.

There was a narrow path, well marked by many feet from the fountainhead up the last few feet of the crest and as he stepped out onto it he looked down and saw far below him the moonsilver forest and the tiny sparks that were the watch-fires of his own bivouac. As he moved, he felt his muscles easing and unknotting, felt the blood recharging his limbs.

Although he was ready for one, there was no sentry at the top of the path, and he peered out cautiously from behind the stone portals of the gulley onto the tranquil village.

"By Chaka's teeth, they sleep like fat and lazy dogs," Bazo thought grimly. The doors were all tightly closed, and smoke oozed from every chink in the walls. They were half suffocating themselves to keep out the mosquitoes. He could hear a man coughing hoarsely in the nearest hut.

He was about to slip out from behind his rocky screen when faint movement in the gloom between the huts made him sink gently down again.

A dark figure scurried on directly towards where he hid. He shifted his assegai, but only a few paces from him the figure stopped.

It was swathed in a skin cloak against the pre-dawn chill, bunched up like an old woman, until it straightened and threw off the cloak. Bazo felt his breath hiss up his throat and he bit down to stop it reaching his lips.

The naked girl was in that lovely tender stage just past puberty, on the very brink of full womanhood. There were the last vulnerable vestiges of childhood in the plump little buttocks and in the kitten awkward way she stood with toes turned slightly inwards. She was naked and the first light touched her sable skin with a lemon glow. Then she turned her head.

She had a long slender neck and the neat little head balanced perfectly upon it. The dome of her skull was covered with an intricate pattern of closely woven plaits, Her forehead was high and smooth, her cheekbones vaulted in the Egyptian way, her lips chiselled into perfect sweeps, synuretrical as the wings of a beautiful butterfly, and the light glinted briefly in her huge slanted eyes as she looked about her.

Then she squatted briefly and her water tinkled against the earth.

It was a sound that unaccountably filled Bazo's chest with a swollen tender feeling, for the act was so innocent and so natural.

She stood, and in the instant before she covered her head once more with the cloak, he had one more glimpse of her face. He knew then that he had never seen anything so beautiful in all his life, and he stared after her as she hurried back between the huts with a peculiar aching hunger consuming his very being.

It took him many minutes to rouse himself, and then as he crept forward he found that, hard as he tried, he could not drive the girl's image from his mind. The pathway that led from the village to the ladder drawbridge was unmistakable. It was broad and its surface beaten smooth. There were walls of worked stone on each side of it behind which the defenders could meet any thrust. There were piles of stones at intervals along the path. placed ready to be hurled down at anybody attempting to force the ladder or fight their way up the path.

The pathway dropped steeply into the gulley, and then ended on a wide level stone platform. The light was stronger now and Bazo could see that there were sentries here; two of them stood on the lip watching the plain fifty feet below the platform, guarding the massive counterbalanced ladder. Farther back four other guards squatted around a small smoky fire, and Bazo's saliva flooded as he smelled the roasting maize cakes. The men were talking in the low sleepy tones of men who had stood a long watch, and their backs were turned to the gulley, for they would never expect an enemy to come from that direction.

Bazo crept closer. There was another pile of rocks at the corner of the platform, ready for the guards to hurl down the cliff. Bazo crawled into the shadows behind it.

He did not have long to wait. Very faintly on the morning wind he heard the singing. Zama had begun the dance below the cliff. The song was the fighting hymn of his regiment, and Bazo's blood thrilled in his veins.

He felt the divine madness begin. it was a feeling that other lesser men got only from the hemp pipe.

He felt the sweat break on his skin, and the madness mount from his belly to his heart, felt the blood swell in his throat, felt his eyes burn and bulge.

The guards had left the fire now and crowded the edge of the cliff, peering downwards, laughing and pointing.

"Hear Lobengula's puppies yap!"

"Look at them dance like virgins at the Festival of First Fruits" The signal Bazo had agreed with Zama was the moment the battle song ended, but he could barely contain himself that long.

He rose from his crouch, and his muscles twitched, his head jerked like that of a maniac, and in the dawn light his eyes were glazed like shards of ceramic pottery, the red rage of the berserker. At that instant the distant song ended.

Bazo's cry froze the men on the edge of the cliff, it was the bellow of a heart-struck buffalo bull, the screech of the stooping eagle.

In the paralysed moment before they could turn, Bazo, struck them.

He charged with outstretched arms and swept four of them away into the void. They twisted and turned in the air as they fell, and they screamed the whole way down on a high receding note that was cut off abruptly at the end.

Bazo's charge had been so headlong that he almost followed them over the brink; for a giddy moment he tottered there, and then he caught his balance and spun to strike underhand at one of the survivors. The blade went into the man's belly and out the other side, cleaving his bowels and his kidneys, and crunching through his backbone; and when Bazo jerked the steel clear, the life blood sprayed hotly onto his forearm and his chest. The last sentry ran, silently and desperately, for the pathway, and Bazo let him go.

Bazo bounded along the edge of the cliff and reached the point where the top of the ladder was secured. The ropes that held it were of twisted and plaited bark, reinforced with liana and leather thongs. They were thick as Bazo's arm, and he changed his grip on the assegai to a chopping stroke.

The ropes popped and crackled as he hacked through them. He grunted at each Stroke, slitting his eyes against the flying chips of wood and bark.

Behind him he heard the babble of many voices on the pathway. The sentry would call them down like hunting dogs, but Bazo scorned to turn until the work was done.

One rope gave, and the massive unwieldy ladder sagged and twisted.

He cut again, reversing his grip to swing back-handed, and the other ropes went.

The ladder swung outwards and downwards, gathering momentum, and the timbers crackled and squealed, drowning out the voices of the men coming down behind him. The bottom of the ladder struck the scree below the cliff with a shattering crash, and some of the uprights snapped under the impact. The head of the ladder was still secured at Bazo's feet, and the whole twisted mess hung down like the rigging of a dismasted ship.

Bazo stood long enough to watch Zama lead his warriors swarming up the dangling tangle of rope and timber. Then he turned.

They were coming down the pathway, a solid phalanx of black bodies and sparkling weapons; but their advance was hesitant enough for Bazo to race forward and reach the narrow gap in the wall before the leaders did. With solid rock to guard his flanks, he laughed at them, and it was a sound to stop them dead, those in front pushing back and those behind struggling forward.

one of them threw a long spear and it clashed sparks from the wall at the level of Bazo's head. He drove forward and stabbed into the press of bodies caught in the narrow gut between the stone walls. The screams and moans goaded him, and the blood from the gaping wounds splattered his face and sprayed into his open mouth, a ghastly draught that maddened him further.

They broke and fled, leaving four of their number writhing and twisting on the pathway.

Bazo glanced behind him. None of his Matabele had reached the head of the ladder yet. He looked back up the pathway and saw that the real men were coming.

These would be the picked warriors, the best spearmen , there was no mistaking their superiority over the rabble that Bazo had just scattered; they were bigger and more powerful in body, their expressions grim and determined, and their formation ordered and controlled.

They came down in massed ranks to where Bazo stood, their shields raised, their spears poised, and at their head danced a skinny wizened old man with a face ravaged by some terrible disease, his nose and ears rotted away and his cheeks and forehead covered with silver white blotches.

He was hung about the waist and neck with the accoutrements of his magical trade, and he shrieked and gibbered like an enraged ape.

"Kill the Matabele dog."

Bazo was naked, without a shield, but he hefted the assegai and stood to meet them and their horrid master and he laughed again, the wild joyous laughter of a man who was living a lifetime in his last few seconds.

"Bazo!" The cry reached him, even through his rage, and he turned.

Zama had crawled onto the platform, blown from that long scrambling climb up the swinging twisted ladder.

He rose on his knees and sent the great dappled shield skimming across the platform. Like a falcon coming to bate it settled on Bazo's shoulder, and Bazo laughed and went springing forward.

His assegai drove through the wizard's rotting flesh as though it were soft as a boiled yam, and Pemba screeched one last time.

"Bazo, wait! Leave some of them for us!" The shouts of his fifty Matabele behind him, as they scrambled onto the platform, and then Zama's muscled shoulder was touching his as they locked shields and swept the pathway, the way the flash floods of summer scour the dry riverbeds.

It was a beautiful stabbing, a glory which men would sing about. The assegais seemed to hold their keen edge no matter how often they were buried and the spear arms never tired despite the heavy work. The line of Matabele swept the hilltop from end to end, roaring their frustration when the last of Pemba's men threw down their spears and leapt out over the cliff, grudging them that easy death for the assegais were still thirsty and the madness was still on them.

Then they turned and went back through the village, ransacking the huts, throwing a toddling infant high and catching it on the point as it fell, or sending the steel full length out between the withered dugs of some scurrying crone, for the divine madness does not pass swiftly.

With his shoulder, Bazo smashed open another hut, and Zama leaped in at his side, both of them were painted from throat to knee with red running crimson, their contorted faces hideous, blood-glutted masks. Someone tried to escape from the dark interior of the hut.

"Mine!" roared Zama and sped his long steel, and the low early sun struck a ray through the open doorway, sparkling on Zama's assegai and falling in the same instant on the huge slanted terrified eyes and high Egyptian cheekbones of the girl he was killing.

Zama's steel clashed against Bazo's great shield and was deflected past the girl's cheek by the width of a finger, so that the stroke died in the air. Before Zama could strike again Bazo stood over the girl, spreading the shield over her the way a heron covers its chick with a wing, and he snarled at Zama like a leopard whose cub is menaced.

After the first weary day of the return march, while the long file of roped captives was settling exhausted and miserable beneath the grove of msasa trees, Bazo strode down the line and stopped beside the girl.

"You!"he said, and with a careless stroke of his assegai severed the thong at her neck. "Cook my meal!"

While she worked over the fire, Bazo joked loudly with Zama and his men, trying to prevent his eyes from straying from their faces. He ate what she cooked without showing either pleasure or displeasure, while she knelt at a respectful distance and watched every mouthful he took.

Then suddenly when he had finished eating, she came gliding to his side with that disconcerting silent grace, and she lifted the bunch of wilted leaves from the swollen and crusted spear wound in Bazo's flank.

It was an impertinence, and he lifted his hand to strike her, and then let the hand fall. She had not flinched and her manner was assured and competent.

She cleaned the wound with deft fingers and then she unstoppered two of the little buck-horn containers that she wore on her belt and with the powder they contained made a poultice. It burned like fire for a few seconds, but then felt much easier.

Bazo made no acknowledgement, but when one of his Matabele came to rope her back with the other captives, Bazo frowned, and the man passed her by.

When Bazo lay on his sleeping-mat, she curled like a puppy at his feet. He was ready for her to try to escape once the camp settled, but after midnight she had not stirred and he fell asleep.

In the hour before dawn when he rose to check the sentries, there was frost on the grass, and he heard the girl's teeth chattering softly. He dropped his fur regimental cloak over her as he passed and she cuddled down into it quickly.

When he called for the day's march to begin, she had his bedding roll and cooking-pot balanced on her head, and a dozen times during the march, Bazo had to go back along the winding column for no reason that he could explain to Zama, and each time his steps slowed as he came up behind the girl, and he watched the play of muscle down her back, the roll of her plump black buttocks and the joggle of her glossy sable breasts. But when she turned her head and smiled shyly at him, his hauteur was frosty and he stalked back to the head of the column.

That night he permitted himself a nod of approval at the first taste of her cooking, and when she dressed the wound, he said, "The heat has gone from it."

She did not lift her eyes.

"Who taught you this skill" he insisted.

"Pemba, the wizard," she whispered.

"Why?"

"I was his apprentice."

"Why you?"

"I have the gift."

"So then, little witch, make me an oracle," Bazo laughed, and she lifted her head and he looked into those disconcerting slanted tar-bright eyes.

"Do not scoff, lord."

INKOSI, lord," she called him, but Bazo stopped laughing, and felt the spirits tickle the hair at the nape of his neck. That night, when he heard her shiver, he opened a fold of his kaross and she crept into it.

Bazo feigned sleep, but his body was tense and he was aware of each tiny movement that the girl made as she settled to sleep. It would have been so easy to reach out and hold her down with his arm across her chest while he forced his knee between hers. The thought made him twitch and grunt.

"Lord?" she whispered. "Something troubles you."

"What is your name?" he asked, for want of a reply, and found that he was whispering also.

"Tanase."

He measured it on his tongue, and it fitted "Tanase." well enough, although he recognized it was a Rozwl name, one of the splinter tribes of the Mashona, and he did not know the meaning.

"I know your name, everyone speaks it with respect," she said. "Bazo, the Axe."

"I killed your master, Pemba. I struck him down with my own hand." He did not know what compelled him to say that.

"I know," she whispered.

"Do you hate me for that, little witch?"

"I praise you for that!" Her voice shook with quiet vehemence, and her hip touched his under the kaross.

"Praise? Did you not love Pemba as a dog loves its master?"

"I hated him, and when I foresaw his death in the magic calabash, I was filled with joy."

"You saw his death?"

"I saw his death, as I saw your face, long before you came to take me."

Bazo shuddered involuntarily, and she felt it.

"You are cold, lord." She pressed a little closer to him.

Her flesh was hot and soft, he felt his own flesh respond to its touch.

"Why did you hate Pemba?"

"He was evil beyond the telling. The things he forced me to do I will never forget., "He used your body?" There was a rough edge to Bazo's question.

"Not even Pemba would dare tamper with the body of one of the chosen ones, for to tear the veil of maidenhood is to destroy the gift."

"The gift?"

"The gift of foresight which the likes of Pemba value 4 so highly., "What then did he force upon you?"

"Dark things, midnight things, torture not of the body but of the spirit."

Now it was her turn to shudder, and she turned towards him and clung to his broad smooth chest, hiding her face against it so that her voice was muffled and he could hardly catch her next words.

"I did not wish to be chosen, I hate and fear what still lies ahead of me if I follow that road."

"Pemba is dead."

"You do not understand. Pemba was but a little wizard already he had taught me almost all he knew. Then I would have been called by the one whose name I dare not speak aloud. That call will still come, and I shall not be able to deny it."

"You are under my protection."

"There is only one way you can protect me, Bazo Lord."

"How?"

"Make me worthless to them. Destroy this gift which is such a terrible burden."

"How?"

"As you destroyed Pemba with the stabbing spear of steel, destroy it with your great spear of flesh, tear my veil and let this thing pass from me."

she felt him, hot and fierce, pressing against her, and her body seemed to melt and become pliant and yielding.

"Ah yes, Lord. Make me as other women, so that I may feel your noble belly on mine in the nights, that I may feel your son kick in my womb and tug at my breast when I give him suck., "All these things you will have, Tanase." Bazo's voice was hoarse with his wanting. "When we reach Gubulawayo the king will reward me, and give me leave to go in to the women, and take a wife."

Lord, it is dangerous to wait."

"i will not rut on you like a slave girl. You will be the first and senior of all my wives."

"Lord,"

"Enough, Tanase, tempt me no further, for what you feel, hard though it may be, is not stone but flesh only."

INKOSI, you do not know the power of the wizards.

Save me from them."

"I know the law and custom of Matabele, and that is all a man should know and heed."

Bazo's scout came in at a dead run, the sweat snaking down his back and chest, and he shouted his report the moment he came up to the head of the column.

Bazo whirled and barked three sharp orders. Immediately the column closed up, and the captives were forced to squat with a dozen warriors standing guard over them.

The rest of the Matabele formed up behind Bazo and he led them away at that gait between a trot and a ran which lifted the dust to their knees.

Bazo picked his ambush with an unerring eye. He chose a place where broken ground and thick bush allowed only one passage through, and the single horseman rode into it. The long shields were suddenly all around him, fencing him in as his dun-coloured pony snorted and skittered.

The rifle was half-way drawn from the leather boot at the horseman's knee when Bazo stopped him with a shout.

"Too late for that. You were dead, and the jackals feasting already. You grow careless, despite all that I taught you, Henshaw."

Ralph let the rifle slide back into its scabbard, and he threw up his hands, pleasure and chagrin warnng on his face.

"Shake any tree and a Matabele falls out of it., His voice was mock-mournful, and he swung down off Tom's sturdy back and strode to meet Bazo.

"I expected to see the induna's ring on your forehead already, oh mighty slayer of Mashona," he laughed as they embraced.

"Soon, Little Hawk, very soon. But you, I thought your wagon would be heavy with ivory "Done, Little Axe, already done." Ralph stepped back and looked at him. In the months since they had parted, both men had changed.

In Bazo there remained no trace of the young trim labourer who had worked his shifts in the pit and eaten Zouga Ballantyne's rations. Here was a warrior and a prince, tall and plumed and proud.

Ralph was no longer the callow lad, his every action ordered by his father. Instead he was a grown man, with a jaunty lift to his chin and a self-assured set to his shoulder. Yet though his clothes were travel-worn an stained the training of Zouga Ballantyne still showed, for they were recently washed and his jaws had been clean shaven that very morning. They looked at each other and the affection between them was tempered and hardened with respect.

"I shot a young buffalo cow, not two hours ago."

"Yes," Bazo nodded. "It was the shot which brought us."

"Then I am glad of it. The buffalo meat is fat, and there is enough even for a hungry Matabele."

Bazo glanced at the sun. "Though I am in haste, on the king's business, my prisoners are in need of rest. We will help you eat your buffalo, Henshaw, but in the dawn we will go on."

"Then there is much to talk about, and little time to do so."

There was the pop of a trek-whip, and Bazo glanced beyond Ralph's shoulder to see the oxen come plodding between the trees and the wagon lurching and wallowing behind them.

"You still keep bad company,"Bazo scolded with a grin as he recognized Umfaan at the head of the span and Isazi, the little Zulu, on the flank, "but the load you carry is welcome."

From the wagon box hung the raw quarters and shoulders of the freshly-butchered buffalo carcass.

"We have not tasted fresh meat since we left the king's kraal."

Ralph and Bazo sat at a separate fire apart from their retinues, where they could talk freely.

"The king agreed to buy the guns and bottles that I carried up from Kimberley," Ralph told Bazo, "and he paid me generously., He did not go on to describe to Bazo the currency in which he had been paid. He did not describe his own astonishment when Lobengula had offered him an uncut diamond, a big bright first-water stone.

His surprise had immediately been tempered by conscience; he had no doubts about where that stone had come from. His conscience lasted about as long as his surprise, and he haggled with gusto, forcing up the price to six stones, which he had picked with an eye trained by many years on the diggings. He knew they would be worth 10,000 pounds when he got them back to civilization.

Thus in a single stroke he had paid for the wagon and team, his entire debt to Diamond Lil, interest and all and was already many thousands of pounds in profit.

"Then I asked Lobengula to let me hunt elephant, and he laughed and said I was too young and that the elephant would eat me up. He kept me waiting outside his kraal for ten days."

"If he kept you such a short time, then you have found favour with the king," Bazo interrupted. "Some white men have waited from the beginning of the dry season to the middle of the wet, merely for permission to take the road out of Matabeleland."

"Ten days was long enough for me," Ralph granted.

"But when I asked him in which part of his lands I was allowed to hunt, he laughed again and said, "The elephant will be in so little danger from you, Little Hawk, that you may go where you wish, and kill as many as are stupid or lame enough to let you."

Bazo chuckled delightedly. "And how many lame stupid elephant have you found so far, Henshaw?"

"I have fifty good tusks in the wagon already., "Fifty!" Bazo's chuckles died and he stared at Ralph in amazement; then he stood up and crossed to the wagon.

He untied one of the straps and lifted the canvas cover to peer in at the load, while Isazi looked up from his cooking fire, frowned and called to Ralph.

"This boy's great-grandfather, Mashobane, was a thief, his grandfather, Mzilikazi was a traitor, you have every reason to trust him with our ivory, Henshaw."

Bazo did not look at him, but glanced up into the trees.

"The monkeys hereabout make a frightful chatter," he murmured, and then came back to Ralph.

"Fine tusks!" he admitted. "Like the ones the hunters took when I was still a child."

Ralph did not tell him that most of those in the wagon were taken even before that time. He had discovered all but two of the caches that his father had bequeathed to him.

The ivory had dried out, lost almost a quarter of its green weight; but most of it was still in good condition, and would fetch the market price once he got it to the railhead.

Though Ralph had hunted diligently for his own elephant whilst he sought out Zouga's ancient dumps, he had had little success. He had killed five, only one of which was a bull and whose green tusks had weighed just over sixty pounds. The others had been small female barely worth taking.

ivory The great herds that Zouga had described in A Hunter's Odyssey no longer existed. Since those days there had been many hunters, some of them inspired by Zouga's own writing. Boer and Briton, Hottentot and German, they had hunted and harried the huge grey beasts and left their white bones piled on the veld and in the forest.

"Yes, they are good tusks," Ralph nodded. "And my wagon is heavy laden now. I am on the road back to the king's kraal to ask him for permission to leave Matabeleland and go back to Kimberley."

"Then when you have gone, we will see you no more," Bazo said quietly. "You will be like the other white men who come to Matabeleland. You will take what you want, and never come back."

Ralph laughed. "No, old friend, I will be back. I do not have everything I wish, not yet. I will come back with more wagons, perhaps six wagons, all loaded with trade goods. I will set up trading posts from the Shashi river to the Zambezi., "You will be a rich man, Henshaw. I am sure of it," Bazo agreed. "But rich men are not always happy men.

This I have remarked often. Is there nothing else in Matabeleland for you but ivory and gold and diamonds?"

Ralph's expression changed. "How did you know that?"

he demanded.

"I asked, I did not know," Bazo denied, still smiling.

Though I do not have to throw the bones or look in the magic calabash to know it is a woman, you have suddenly the look of a dog that smells the bitch. Tell me, Henshaw, who is she and when will you take her to wife?" Then he laughed aloud. "You have not yet asked her father? Or you have asked and he has refused?"

"It is not a matter for laughter," Ralph said stiffly, and with an effort Bazo wiped the mirth from his face, though it twinkled still in his eyes.

"Forgive one who loves you as a brother, I did not know it was such a heavy matter." And at last he managed to match Ralph's portentous expression, while he waited for him to speak again.

"Once, long ago, while we rode up in the skip, you spoke of a woman with hair as white and fine as the winter grass," Ralph said at last, and Bazo nodded.

"It is she, Bazo. I have found her."

"She wants you as much as you want her?" Bazo said firmly. "If she does not, then she is so stupid that she does not deserve you."

"i haven't asked her yet," Ralph admitted.

"Do not ask her, tell her, and then ask her father. Show the father your tusks of ivory; that will settle the matter."

"You are right, Bazo," Ralph looked dubious. "It will be that simple." And then softly in English, so that Bazo could not understand. "God knows what I shall do if it is not. I don't think I can live without her."

If he did not follow the words, Bazo understood the sense and the mood. He sighed, and his eyes strayed to Tanase at the cooking fire.

"They are so soft and weak, but they wound more deeply than the sharpest steel."

Ralph followed his eyes, and then suddenly his own expression cleared and it was his turn to guffaw and reach across to slap Bazo's shoulder.

"Now I recognize the look you spoke of earlier, the dog with the smell of the bitch in his nostrils."

"It is not a matter for laughter," said Bazo, haughtily, Long after the last gnawed buffalo bone was thrown upon the fire and the last beer pot emptied; long after the Matabele warriors had tired of singing the song of Pemba, the ode to their own prowess and courage on the hill of the wizard, and rolled into their sleeping karosses; long after the last captive girl had ceased wailing, Bazo and Ralph sat on beside their own fire, and the drone of their voices and the munch of the oxen chewing the cud were the only sounds in the camp.

It was as though every last moment was precious to them for both sensed that when they met again they would be changed, and perhaps the world with them.

They relived their youth, remembering Scipio, the falcon, and Inkosikazi, the great spider; they smiled at the stinging mewary of the fighting sticks, and Bakela's wrath when Bazo gave him the shattered diamond; they talked of Jordan and Jan Cheroot and Kamuza and all the others, until at last reluctantly Bazo rose.

"I will be gone before the sun, Henshaw," he said.

"Go in peace, Bazo, and enjoy the honours that await you and the woman you have won."

When Bazo reached his sleeping-mat, the girl was already wrapped in his kaross.

As soon as Bazo lay down beside her, she reached for him. She was as hot as though she was in high fever her body burning and her skin dry. Silent sobs racked her and her grip was fierce.

"What is it, Tanase?" He was shocked and alarmed.

"A vision. A terrible vision."

"A dream." He was relieved. "It was only a dream., "It was a vision," she denied. "Oh, Bazo, will you not take this terrible gift from me, before it destroys us both."

He held her and could not answer her; her distress moved him deeply, but he was helpless to alleviate it.

After a while she was quiet, and he thought that she slept, but then she suddenly whispered.

"It was a terrible vision, Bazo Lord, and it will haunt me unto my grave., He did not answer, but he felt the superstitious chill in his guts.

"I saw you high upon a tree-" She broke off, and another single sob hit her like a blow. "The white man, the one you call Henshaw, the Hawk, do not trust him."

"He is as my brother, and like a brother I love him., "Then why did he not weep, Bazo, why did he not weep when he looked up at you upon the tree?"

Salina Codrington rolled out her pastry with long and expert strokes of the pin. The sleeves of her blouse were rolled high and she was floury to the elbows. Little blobs of pastry stuck to her hands and fingers.

The thatched ceiling of the kitchen at Khami Mission Station was sooty from the open iron stove, and the smell of the dough was yeasty and warm.

A single skein of white-gold hair had escaped the ribbon and now tickled her nose and chin. Salina pursed her lips and blew it away; it floated like gossamer and then gently settled across her face again, but she did not change the rhythm of the rolling-pin.

Ralph thought that little gesture the most poignant he had ever witnessed, but then everything she did fascinated him, even the way she cocked her head and smiled at him as he slouched against the jamb of the kitchen door.

Her smile was so gentle, so unaffected, that his chest squeezed again, and his voice sounded choked in his own ears.

"I am leaving tomorrow."

"Yes," Salina nodded. "We shall all miss you dreadfully."

"This is the first chance I have had to speak to you alone, without the monsters "Oh Ralph, that's an unkind, if totally accurate, description of my darling sisters." Her laughter had a surprising timbre and depth to it. "If you wanted to speak to me, you should have asked."

"I'm asking now, Salina."

"And we are alone."

"Will you not stop still for a moment."

"The baking will spoil, but I can listen well enough while I work."

Ralph shifted his feet, and hunched his shoulders uncertainly. It was not as he had planned it. It was going to be a feat of timing and dexterity to sweep her up in arms all covered with flour and dough and with a heavy rolling-pin clutched in her hands.

"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!"

Cathy 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 ironshod 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 leach.

"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 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.

Bazo 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 abble over the morsel, and when one of the blacksqu 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: "Like a mole in the earth's gut Bazo found the secret way He sang, and in the front row of the senior indunas, Gandang, his father, sat grave and proud.

"Like the blind catfish that live in the caves of Sinoia Bazo swam through darkness.

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

"Like the black mamba from under a stone Zama milked death from his silver fang 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 roole," Lobengula intoned, and then paused. "The name of your regiment will be Izimv-ukuzane 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., "Indh1ovu!

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. The 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, udging 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.

Lobengula and his retinue were already on the road; they were sleeping tonight at the regimental kraal of the Intemba regiment, only five miles distant, and they would arrive before noon.

Somabula was with the king, while Babiaan was coming in from his kraal in the east with a hundred warriors in his bodyguard. Nomusa and Hlopi were coming from the mission station at Khami as Juba's special guests, and they were bringing all their daughters with them.

and Gandang had picked fifty fat bullocks from his herds, the bridegroom and his young companions would begin to slaughter and butcher them in the dawn, while the unmarried girls took the bride down to the river pool, bathed her and then anointed her with fat and clay until she glistened in the early sunlight. Then they would deck her with wild flowers.

The hyena called again much closer this time, sounding as if it were right outside the stockade, and then a strange thing happened. The single cry was answered by a chorus, as though a great multitude of the huge shaggy spotted dog-like beasts had surrounded Gandang's kraal.

Bazo started up from the fire in astonishment. He had never heard anything to equal this, there must be a hundred or more of the ungainly animals out there. He could imagine them, their high shoulders sloping down to meagre hindquarters, the flat snakelike heads held low as though the weight of massive underslung jaw and yellow carnassial teeth was too heavy for the neck.

One hundred at least, he could almost smell their breath as they opened those iron jaws, capable of crunching the thigh bone of a bull buffalo to splinters. they would reek of long-dead carrion and excrement and other filth, but it was the sound of their voices that chilled Bazo's guts and started the march of ghost feet along his spine.

it was as though all the souls of the dead had risen from their graves to clamour outside Gandang's stockade. They whooped and howled, beginning in a low moan and rising sharply in key.

"Oooh, wee!" They shrieked like the ghost of a Mashona feeling again the steel cleave his breast, and the terrible cries woke the echoes amongst the kopjes along the river.

Almost humanly, they giggled, and they laughed, that maniacal and mirthless laughter. The peals of fiendish laughter mingled with the tormented shrieks, and then with them were the cries of the kraal's watchmen, the screeches of the waking women in their huts, the shouts of the men, still haff-asleep, as they scrambled for their weapons.

"Do not go out," Kamuza shouted across the hut as Bazo sprang to the door with his shield on his shoulder and his assegai in his right hand. "Do not go into the dark, this is a witchcraft. Those are not animals out there."

His words stopped Bazo at the threshold. There was nothing of flesh and blood he would not face, but this The fiendish chorus reached a climax, and then abruptly ceased. The silence that followed was even more chilling, and Bazo shrank away from the door. His companions crouched on their sleeping-mats, weapons in their hands, their eyes wide and white in the firelight , but not one of them moved towards the door.

All of Gandang's kraal was awake now, but silent, waiting, the women creeping away into the farthest recesses of their huts and covering their heads with their fur karosses, the men frozen with superstitious terror.

The silence lasted the time it would take for a man to run the full circle of the stockade, and then was broken by the call of a single hyena, the same whooping cry, starting low and rising to a shriek. The head of every one of the warriors in Bazo's hut lifted, and they all stared upwards to the roof and the star-pticked sky above it, for that was from where the ghostly cry emanated from the very air high above Gandang's kraal.

"Sorcery." Kamuza's voice shook, and Bazo choked down on the wail of terror that rose in his own throat.

As the animal cry died in the night, there was only one other sound. The voice of a young girl, raised in terrible distress.

"Bazo! Help me, Bazo!" It was the only thing that could have roused him. Bazo shook himself like a dog that leaps from water to land, throwing off the terror that paralysed him.

"Do not go!" Kamuza yelled, after him.

"It is not the girl, it is a witch voice."

But Bazo tore the locking bar from the door.

He saw her immediately. Tanase raced towards him from the women's quarters, from Juba's own great hut where she had been passing the last night before her nuptials.

Her dark naked body was without substance, like a moon shadow as she sped to him. Bazo leaped towards her, and they met in front of the main gate of the stockade, and Tanase clung to him.

No other person had left the huts; the kraal was deserted, the fearful silence oppressive. Bazo lifted his shield to cover both himself and the girl, and instinctively he turned to face the gateway.

It was only then that he realized that the gate was open.

He tried to retreat towards the hut, taking the girl with him, but she was rigid in his arms, rooted to the earth like the stump of a wild ebony tree, and his own strength was sapped by terror.

"Bazo," Tanase whispered. "It is them, they have come., As she spoke the watch-fire beside the gate, which had long ago burned down to ash and charred logs, suddenly burst into flame once again. The flames sprang higher than a man's head, roaring like a waterfall, and the stockade and gateway were lit brightly by the yellow dancing light. Beyond the open gateway, at the very edge of the firelight stood a human figure. It was the figure of a very old man, with stick-like limbs and bowed back; his cap of hair was white as the salt from the Makarikari pan; his skin was grey and dusty with age. The whites of his eyes flashed as they squinted and rolled upwards into his skull, and glassy strings of spittle dribbled from his toothless mouth onto his chest, wetting the dry parchment skin through which each skeletal rib stood out clearly.

His voice was a quavering ancient squeal.

"Tanase!" he called. "Tanase, daughter of the spirits."

In the firelight all life went out of Tanase's eyes; they became blank.

"Do not heed-" Bazo croaked, but a bluish sheen appeared over Tanase's eyeballs like the nictitating membrane that covers the eye of a shark or the cataract of tropical ophthalmia, and blindly her head turned towards the spectral figure beyond the gates.

"Tanase, your destiny calls you!"

She broke out of Bazo's arms. It seemed to require no effort. He could not hold her. Her strength was superhuman.

She began to walk towards the gateway, and when Bazo tried to follow her, he found he could not lift a foot. He dropped his shield, and it clattered on the hard earth, but Tanase did not look back. She walked with a floating grace, light as river mist towards the ancient stooped figure.

"Tanase!" Bazo's voice was a despairing cry, and he fell upon his knees, yearning after her.

The old man held out one hand, and Tanase took it, and as she did so, the watch-fire died down as abruptly as it had flared, and the darkness beyond the gateway was instantly impenetrable.

"Tanase!" whispered Bazo, his arms outstretched, and far away, down by the river the hyena called one last time.

The twins came pelting into the church, tumbling over each other with eagerness to be the first to tell.

"Mama! Mama!

"Vicky, I saw first, let me!"

Robyn Codrington looked up from the black body stretched on the table and quelled them with a frown.

"Ladies don't push."

They came up in a parody of demureness, but hopping with impatience.

"Very well, Vicky. What is it?"

They began together, and Robyn stopped them again.

"I said Vicky."

And Victoria puffed up importantly.

"There is someone coming."

"From Thabas Indunas?" Robyn asked.

"No, Mama, from the south., "It's probably one of the king's messengers."

"No, Mama, it's a white man on a horse."

Robyn's interest quickened; she would never have admitted even to herself how often the isolation palled.

A white traveller would mean news, perhaps letters, stores and supplies, or even the most precious of all, books. Failing those treasures there would be the mere mental stimulation of a strange face and of conversation and ideas.

She was tempted to leave the patient on the table, it was not a serious burn, but she checked herself.

"Tell Papa I shall come directly," she said, and the twins fled, jammed in the doorway for a moment, and then popped through like a cork from a champagne bottle.

By the time Robyn had finished dressing the burn, dismissed the patient, washed her hands and hurried out onto the porch of the church, the stranger was coming up the hill.

Clinton was leading the mule on which he was mounted. It was a big strong-looking grey animal, so the rider looked small and slim upon the broad back. He was a lad, dressed in an old tweed jacket and a boy's cloth cap.

The twins danced on each side of the mule, and Clinton at its head was looking back over his shoulder, listening to something that the stranger was saying.

"Who is it, Mama?" Salina came out of the kitchen and called across the yard.

"We shall find out in a moment."

Clinton led the mule to the porch, and the rider's head was on a level with Robyn's.

"Doctor Ballantyne, your grandfather, Doctor Moffat, sent me to you, I have letters and gifts from him for you."

With a start Robyn realized that under the patched tweed coat and cap was a woman, and even in that moment of surprise she was aware that it was an extraordinarily handsome woman, younger than Robyn herself, not much over thirty years of age, with steady, dark eyes and almost Mongolian cheekbones.

She jumped down from the mule with the agility of an expert horsewoman, and came up the steps of the porch to seize Robyn's hands. Her grip was firm as a man's, and her expression was intense.

"My husband is ill and suffering. Doctor Moffat says you are the only one who can help him. Will you do it? Oh please, will you?"

"I am a doctor." Robyn gently twisted her fingers out of the other woman's painful grip, but it was not that which troubled her, there was something too intense, too passionate about her. "I am a doctor, and I could never refuse to help anyone who is suffering. Of course, I shall do whatever I can."

"Do you promise that?" the woman insisted, and Robyn nodded slightly.

"I have said I will help, there is no need to promise."

"Oh, thank you." The woman smiled with relief.

"Where is your husband?"

"Not far behind. I rode ahead to warn you, and to make sure that you would help us."

"What is it that ails your husband?"

"Doctor Moffat has explained it all in a letter. He sent gifts for you also." The woman was evasive, turning away from Robyn's scrutiny and running back to the mule.

From the saddle-bags she lifted down two packages, wrapped in oilskin to protect them against the elements and bound up with rawhide thongs. They were so heavy and bulky that Clinton took them from her and carried them into the church.

"You are tired," Robyn said. "I am sorry I cannot offer you coffee, we used the last a month ago, but a glass of lemonade?"

"No." The woman shook her head decidedly. "I shall go back immediately, to be with my husband, but we shall arrive before nightfall."

She ran back, and vaulted lightly to the mule's back.

None of them had ever seen a woman do that.

"Thank you," she repeated, and then trotted out of the yard, back down the hill.

Clinton came out of the church and put one arm around Robyn's shoulders.

"What a very beautiful and unusual woman," he said, and Robyn nodded. That was one of the things that had troubled her. Robyn mistrusted beautiful women.

"What is her name. she asked.

"I didn't have a chance to ask."

"You-were too busy looking, perhaps," Robyn suggested tartly, and wriggled out from under his arm and went back into the church, while Clinton stared after her with a rueful expression.

After a moment he made a move as if to follow her but then sighed and shook his head. It was always as well to let Robyn come round on her own, coaxing only angered her even more unreasonably.

In the quiet of the church Robyn untied the first package, and unpacked the contents onto the table.

There were five heavy bottles with glass stoppers, and she read the labels as she lifted out each one.

"Carbolic Acid."

Alum."

$Quicksilver."

"Iodine."

And then the fifth bottle was labelled: "Trichloromethane."

"Bless you, Grandfather." She smiled delightedly, but still she unstoppered the last bottle and sniffed cautiously at the mouth to confirm her good fortune.

The pungent sweet odour was unmistakable. Chloroform was to her more precious than her own life's blood; she would gladly have exchanged drop for drop.

Her own last supply had been exhausted months before and the London Missionary Society was as parsimonious as ever with its stores. She wished she had retained just a few hundred guineas of her enormous book royalties to enable her to purchase her own medicines rather than having to plead for them with the secretary in London by a correspondence which often took twelve months each way.

sometimes, in a flagrantly unchristian manner, she wished she could have that bloodless myopic little man at her side when she removed an eye damaged by a blow with a knobkerrie and hanging out of its socket onto a black cheek, or when she went for a Caesarian section all without anaesthetic.

She hugged the bottle to her chest for a moment.

"Darling Grandfather," she repeated, then as reverently as if it were the fabulous Kohinoor diamond, she set the bottle of colourless but precious fluid aside, and turned to the second package.

A roll of newspapers, The Cape Times and The Diamond Fields Advertiser. In the weeks ahead every column would be read and re-read, down to the announcements of auction sales and the legal notices; then the newsprint itself would be used for a dozen domestic chores. Under the newspaper, books, wonderful fat leather-bound books.

"Bless you, Robert Moffat."

She lifted out a translation of Ibsen's An Enemy of the People. She admired the Norwegian for his insight into the human mind, and the muted poetry of his prose.

Robert Louis Stevenson's Virginibus Puerisque'; the title made her pause. She had four virgins in her household, and she intended maintaining that happy condition without allowing any inflammatory literature to thwart her.

She flipped through the book. Despite the dubious title, it was merely a collection of essays, and the man was a good Calvinistic Scot.

It might just do to let the girls read it, but she would read it first.

Then there was Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer. Here she was less sanguine. She had heard of this American's frivolous and irreverent attitude towards adolescence, industry and filial duty. She would read it carefully before letting it anywhere near Salina or Catherine. Reluctantly she left the other books for future study and turned to her grandfather's letter.

There were many pages, written with sooty homemade ink, and the script was shaky and wavering. She skimmed swiftly through the salutations and the personal news until she reached the middle of the second page: Robyn, they say a doctor buries his mistakes: blatantly untrue. I send mine to you. The patient who delivers this letter should long ago have sought the sanctuary of a modern hospital, such as that at Kimberley.

This he has steadfastly refused to do. His reasons are his own, and I have not pried. However, the fact that for over a year now he has had a pistol ball lodged in his body may point to his motives.

Twice I have cut for this foreign body, but at 87 years of age my eyes are not as bright nor my hand as steady as yours. Each time I have failed and I fear that I have done more harm than good.

I know that you have interest and skill in treatment of this type of injury, as so you should, for you have been provided by young Lobengula's warriors with endless opportunity to practise your technique. I recall with admiration your inspired reintroduction of the spoon of Diokles, after nearly 2,000 years, which you designed from the contemporary description by Ceisus , and your successful removal of barbed arrowheads with it.

Thus I send you one more subject on which to demonstrate your art, and with him my last bottle of Chloroform; for the poor fellow, whatever his sins has suffered enough under my knife.

The letter left her with a sense of foreboding, as did the woman who had delivered it. She folded the letter and thrust it into the pocket of her skirt as she left the church and hurried across the yard.

"Cathy," she called. "Where is that girl! She must set the guesthouse to rights."

"She's gone to it already, Mama." Salina looked up as she stormed into the kitchen.

Then where is your father?"

Within an hour the mission station was prepared to receive guests, and buzzing with anticipation; but they had to wait until midafternoon before a two-wheeled cart of unusually high and heavy construction appeared over the rise before the river. It was drawn by a pair of mules.

The entire family assembled on the front porch of the main building, and all of them had changed their clothing, while the girls had also brushed and dressed their hair with ribbons. A dozen times the twins had to be cautioned for improper comments and unrestrained behaviour, but finally the cart wheeled into the yard.

The woman had put her mule into the traces and now she walked beside the wheel of the cart, which reached almost as high as her head.

There was a coloured servant in ragged cast-off clothes leading the mules, and over the body of the cart was rigged a makeshift sunshade of saplings and stained canvas.

Below the porch the cart stopped, and all of them craned forward as a man's head and upper body appeared above its side. He was laid on a straw mattress on the floor of the cart, and now he lifted himself on one elbow.

He was a gaunt wasted figure; the flesh seemed to have melted from the big bones of his shoulders. His cheeks had fallen in and turned a muddy yellow, the hand on the side of the cart was bony, and the veins were roped under the skin like blue serpents. His hair bushed wildly about his head, coarse dark hair that was shot through with strands of dead white. He had not shaved in days; thick stubble covered his jaws and was salted with the same white as his hair. One eye was sunk into a bruised cavity, and it had that feverish glitter that Robyn recognized instantly. It was the look of mortal illness.

The other eye was covered by a black piratical patch.

There was something dreadfully familiar about the big aquiline nose and the wide mouth, yet it was only when he smiled that old mocking yet somehow tender smile that she had never forgotten that Robyn reeled backwards, one hand flying to her mouth too late to stop her cry.

She caught for support at one of the mopani poles that held the roof.

"Mama, are you all right?" But Robyn pushed Salina's hands away and went on staring at the man in the cart.

Only one memory out of so many rose up like a freak wave out of a storm-swept sea to overwhelm her. She saw again that dark bush of curls, devoid only of its silver lacing, bowing to her naked bosom. She saw above her the beamed roof of the great cabin in the sternquarters of the slave ship Huron, and she remembered as she had a thousand times in the twenty years since then that pain. The deep splitting incursion that rocked her.

Four childbirths since then had not eradicated the memory of it, the agony of passing from maiden to woman.

Her senses wavered, there was a rushing in her ears, she was going to fall, but then Clinton's voice steadied her. The hard fierce tone of it which she had not heard in years.

"You!" he said.

As Clinton drew himself erect, the years seemed to fall away from him. He was once again tall and lithe, stiff with anger as the young Royal Naval officer who had come up onto the slaver's quarter-deck with pistols and a naval cutlass on his hip to confront this same man.

Still clinging to the verandah pole, Robyn remembered the words he had spoken then in that same fierce tone: "Captain Mungo Sint John, your reputation precedes you, sir. The first trader ever to transport more than three thousand souls across the middle passage in a single twelve-month period, I'd give five years" pay to have the hatches off your holds, sir."

Robyn remembered then how it had taken another year for Clinton to get his wish, when off Good Hope he had come back onto Huron's decks, boarding her over the stern in the cannon smoke with his fighting seamen at his back, and how this action had cost him more than a mere five years" pay. He had been court-martialled and cashiered from the Royal Navy and imprisoned for it.

"You dare to come here, to us." Clinton was pale with rage; his blue eyes, so gentle for so long, were bleak and hating. "You, you cruel and bloody slaver, you dare to come here."

Mungo Sint John was still smiling taunting him with that smile and the glitter in his single eye, but his voice was low and rough with his suffering.

"And you, you kind and sainted Christian gentleman, do you dare to turn me away?"

Clinton flinched as though he had been struck across the face, and he took a step backwards. Slowly the litheness and youth went out of his stance, his shoulders slumped into their habitual stoop. He shook his bald head uncertainly, and then instinctively he turned towards Robyn.

With a huge effort Robyn gathered herself, pushed away from the supporting pole. Despite the turmoil of her emotions she managed to keep her expression neutral.

"Doctor Ballantyne," Louise Sint John came to the steps of the verandah.

She took the cap from her head, and the thick black plait tumbled out from under it.

"I find it difficult to beg," she said. "But I am begging now."

"That is not necessary, madam. I gave you my word."

Robyn turned away. "Clinton, please help missis Sint John to put this patient into the bed in the guest-house."

"Yes, dear."

"I shall be there directly to make an examination."

"Thank you, Doctor, oh thank you." Robyn ignored Louise, but when she had followed the mule cart across the yard to the guest-hut, she turned to face her daughters.

"None of you, not even you, Salina, will go near the guest-house while that man is here. You will not speak to him or the woman, you will not answer if they speak to you. You will do your best to avoid seeing either of them, and if you do by error find yourself in their presence, you will leave immediately."

The twins were quivering with excitement, their eyes shone, and even their ears seemed to be pink and pricked like those of a pair of young bunny rabbits. They could not remember a day so wildly exciting.

"Why?" gasped Vicky, forgetting herself sufficiently in this incredible series of events to question her mother's order. For a moment it seemed that she would have to pay for the impertinence with a box on one pink ear, but Robyn's hand dropped back to her side.

"Because-" Robyn said softly, "-because he is the devil the very devil."

He was propped on the iron cot, with a bolster under his shoulders, and Louise rose from the other cot as Robyn entered the guest-hut carrying her bag.

"Madam, will you kindly wait outside," Robyn ordered brusquely and, not deigning to see if she would obey, Robyn placed her bag on the chair beside his cot. Behind her the latch on the door clicked.

Mungo Sint John wore only a pair of baggy white trousers from which one leg had been hacked off high in the thigh. Like his face, his body was wasted by sickness, but there was still the width of shoulder and the solidness of bone that she remembered so well. His belly had sunk in like that of a greyhound, and his ribs stood out in a rack above it, but his skin retained the texture and silkiness of a far younger man, while the body hair that was crimped into curls upon his chest was not marred with silver as was his beard and the hair upon his head.

"Hello, Robyn,"he said.

"I will speak to you only when it is absolutely necessary for your treatment, and you will do the same," she said, without looking at his face.

She started with the wounds in his flank and back bullet wounds, she realized, but through and through and completely healed. Then with a little start she noticed the other old, long-healed scar just, below the bullet wound.

She recognized the little white pricks of the suture which had closed the knife-cut. Her own work was distinctive, there was nobody who could throw down those even and precise knotted sutures as she could, and before she realized what she was doing she touched the old hardened cicatrices "Yes," Mungo nodded. "Camacho made that."

She jerked her hand away. Mungo had taken that knife-cut when he had intervened to protect her from the Portuguese slaver. He had saved her life that night.

"Do you remember this also?" Mungo asked, and showed her the pock mark on his forearm. That was where she had inoculated him when smallpox had swept through Huron.

"Do you remember?" Mungo insisted softly, but she kept her face averted and her lips compressed in a thin hard line as she lifted the dressing from his upper leg.

Then the horror showed on her face. Her grandfather's uneven knife strokes had lacerated the leg from knee to groin, where he had probed and searched for the ball, and his crude stitches had cobbled it all back together like a man repacking a valise in haste.

"Bad?" Mungo asked.

"It's a mess," she said, and then hated herself for unbending that far, and by inference criticizing her grandfather's work.

The flesh of the leg had that unhealthy putty colour, and there was ulceration in the wounds, that awful sloughing of tissue that hinted at the corruption beneath.

Her grandfather had left drains in the wounds, thick black horse hairs that stuck stiffly out between the stitches. She drew one now, and Mungo gasped but did not flinch. A weak little trickle of watery pus followed the hair Out. She stooped and sniffed it and grimaced. This was not the rich creamy pus that the ancients had called "pus bonum et laudabile". From the stink of it, gangrene was not far off. She felt a little icy splinter of dread, and immediately wondered at it, surely there were no feelings left in her for this man.

"Tell me how it happened?"

"That, doctor, is my business."

"Dirty business, I have no doubt," she snapped. "And I want no lurid account of it, but if I am to locate the ball I must know where you were in relationship to the weapon that was fired at you, the type of weapon, the weight and charge "Of course," he said quickly. "Your grandfather did not bother to enquire."

"Leave my grandfather out of it."

"The man used a pistol; it looked like a single-action Remington army model, in which case the ball would be.44, Of lead, cone-shaped, weight one fifty grains, and driven by black powder."

"Low penetration, break up of the ball if it hit bone," she muttered.

"The man was lying on the ground, about twenty-five paces distant, and I was in the act of dismounting from my horse, this leg raised "He was ahead of you."

"Slightly ahead and on my right hand."

Robyn nodded. "This will hurt." And ten minutes later she stood back and called, "missis Sint John." As soon as Louise entered, she said, "I shall operate as soon as the light is good enough tomorrow morning. I shall need your assistance. I warn you now that even if I am successful, your husband will not recover full use of the leg. He will always have a pronounced limp."

"And if you are unsuccessful?"

"The degeneration will accelerate, mortification and gangrene "You are frank, doctor," Louise whispered.

"Yes," Robyn agreed. "I always am., Robyn could not sleep, but she reminded herself that she seldom could on the eve of an operation under anaesthetic. Chloroform was such an unpredictable substance, the margins of safety were frighteningly narrow, overdosage, too high a concentration or inadequate oxygenation, would lead to primary collapse with fatal depression of the heart, lungs, liver and kidneys.

She lay beside Clinton in the darkness and ran through a mental list of her preparations for the morrow, and set her mind on the procedures she must adopt. Firstly she must re-open and find the source of the mortification.

She moved and Clinton stirred beside her and muttered in his sleep. She froze and waited for him to settle.

The distraction altered the direction of her thoughts, and she found she was thinking about the man and not the patient. For a while she tried to prevent it, and then gave in.

She remembered him on his quarter-deck, the white linen shirt open to the throat and his chest hair curling out of the V, his head thrown back to hail the masthead, the thick dark mane of his hair rippling in the wind.

Then suddenly she remembered that morning when she slipped out of her cabin and stepped out onto Huron's main-deck. He had been under the deck pump, while two seamen worked the handles, and clear sea water hissed over him as he stood naked under the jet.

She remembered his body and the way he smiled at her without attempting to cover it from her gaze. Then abruptly she remembered his eyes, those flecked yellow eyes above her in the gloom of the cabin, eyes like those of a leopard.

She moved again, and this time Clinton came half awake. He said her name and threw one arm across her at the level of her waist. For a while she lay quiescent under his arm and then slowly she reached down and drew up the hem of her nightdress. She took Clinton's wrist lightly and guided his hand downwards. She felt him come fully awake, heard his breathing change and his hand went on without her insistence.

Long ago she had learned, painfully, that there were limits to the restraint that she could exercise over her unruly sensuality. So now she closed her eyes, relaxed her limbs and let her imagination run unchecked.

She drank only a cup of the hot coffee substitute that she had concocted of roasted sorghum and wild honey and while she did so she composed her mind by glancing through her notes.

She always found comfort in Celsus'injunctions, somehow the fact that they were written around the time of Christ made them more poignant.

Now a surgeon, the chirugus, should be youthful or at any rate closer to youth than age, with a strong and steady hand that never trembles, ready to use left hand as well as right, with vision sharp and clear and spirit undaunted... Then there was Galen, the surgeon of the gladiators, the Roman who had stored all his experience in twenty-two volumes. Robyn had read them in the original Greek, and extracted the pearls of his genius, which she had used with great success in treating the gladiatorialtype wounds of Lobengula's young men. Though she had substituted alum for corn, iodine for pigeon dung, and carbolic acid for lamp black and oil in the fight against inflammation and mortification.

The kind of trauma that faced her now as she bowed over the long table in the church was much like those described by Galen, though caused by a different projectile. Mungo Sint John's hoarse, muffled breathing was the only sound in the quiet church. Robyn tested the depth of his coma by pricking his finger with a probe, and then immediately lifted the mask of plaited bamboo and lint from his nose and mouth.

Then she listened to his breathing as it eased, and found herself examining his face as she had not been able to while he was conscious. He was still a handsome man, despite the missing eye and marks of pain and of advancing age etched into his face. Louise Sint John had borrowed Clinton's straight razor the previous day.

Mungo Sint John was clean-shaven now, and suddenly she realized that the new lines in his face and the silver wings above his temples accentuated the power of the man, while at the same time the relaxation of his mouth gave him a childlike innocence which made the breath catch in her throat.

Clinton looked across at her, and she turned her face away quickly before he could see her expression.

"Are you ready, madam?" Robyn made her voice cold and businesslike, and Louise nodded. She was very pale, the fine freckles standing out in sharp contrast on her cheeks and the bridge of her nose.

Still Robyn hesitated. She knew that she was squandering the moments during which the chloroform was having its blessed effect, but she was seized by a terrible dread. For the first time in her life she was afraid to wield the knife, and a thought transfixed her.

Iff you once love a man, can you ever cease entirely to do so?"

She dared not look again at Mungo Sint John's sleeping face; she felt she must turn and run from the church.

"Are you unwell, doctor?" Louise Sint John's concern steeled her. She would not let this woman suspect weakness in her.

The leg was painted dark yellow brown with tincture of iodine. It looked like a rotten banana. She snipped her grandfather's stitches and the wound fell open. She saw the depth of the ulceration, and knew from dreadful experience that a wound like this would never heal, even by second intention. Her main task was not to find the pistol ball but to repair this damage.

She went in deeper, down past the thick pulsing snake of the femoral artery, down to the bone, the bared femur, and again she felt her spirits quail. The bone was malformed, yellow and cheesy.

She guessed at the cause, this was where the pistol ball had struck and been deflected away. It had struck a long splinter of bone off the femur, and she picked something out of the dead stinking tissue with the forceps and held it up to the light from the window.

It was a flake of black lead. She dropped it into the bucket under the table and bent once more over the open chasm in mungo's flesh. There was hardly any blood, a few drops only from the stitches, and the rest of it was slimy yellow matter smelling like a corpse.

She knew the risks of attempting to remove this decomposing tissue surgically; she had tried it before and killed in the process. It was drastic treatment which only a very strong man could survive, yet if she closed up, the macabre spectre of gangrene lurked close at hand She took up the scraper and it rasped over the exposed bone of the femur. stinking pus welled up from out of the bone itself. Osteomyehtis, the mortification of the bony tissue. She worked at it grimly, the scraper was the only sound in the room until Louise Sint John choked.

"Madam, if you are going to throw up, please leave," Robyn told her, without looking up.

"I shall be all right," Louise whispered.

"Then use the swab as I instructed you," Robyn snapped.

The rotten bone came away, curling off the blade in little yellow whorls like wood shavings from the carpenter's plane, until Robyn reached the porous core and at last clean bright blood came up through it like wine from a sea sponge that had been squeezed, and the bone around the hole was hard and white as china.

Robyn sighed with relief, and at the same moment Mungo groaned and would have twitched the leg if Clinton had not been holding it at the ankle. Swiftly Robyn replaced the little bamboo basket over his nose and mouth then let a few drops of chloroform fall on the lint covering.

She cut away the rotten ulcerations, working perilously close to the artery and the white cord of the femoral nerve. She found more pockets of sepsis around the sutures with which her grandfather had closed the blood vessels. She cleaned these out and carefully cut away dead tissue.

There was blood now, plenty of it, but clean bright blood. Robyn had reached the most critical stage of the reparative surgery. She knew that there was still infection amongst the healthy tissue and as soon as she closed the wound it would blossom again.

She had mixed the antiseptic the night before, one part of carbolic acid to one hundred parts of rainwater. With this she washed out the open pit in Mungo's leg, and the astringent action of the mixture dried up the weeping blood from the vessels too small to tie off.

She could come out now, and sew up. She had left foreign bodies in before, and often they stabilized and became encysted, causing the patient little further discomfort, but instinct warned her not to do so this time.

She glanced at Clinton's big silver hunter watch, which he had placed beside her instrument case where she could see it readily. She had been in for twenty-five minutes, and experience had taught her that the longer she stayed in the greater the danger of primary or secondary collapse.