Wilbur Smith - B3 The Angels Weep
PART ONE.
Three horsemen rode out from the edge of the forest with a restrained eagerness that not even weary weeks of constant searching could dull.
They reined in, stirrup to stirrup, and looked down into another shallow valley. Each stalk of the dry winter grass bore a fluffy seed-head of a lovely pale rose colour, and the light breeze stirred them and made them dance, so that the herd of sable antelope in the gut of the valley seemed to float belly-deep in a bank of swirling pink mist.
There was a single herd bull. He stood almost fourteen hands tall at the withers. His satiny back and shoulders were black as a panther's, but his belly and the intricate designs of his face-mask were the startling iridescent white of mother-of-pearl. His great ridged horns, curved like Saladin's scimitar, swept baIck to touch his croup, and his neck was proudly arched as that of a blood Arabian stallion. Long ago hunted to extinction in his former southern ranges, this noblest of all the antelopes of Africa had come to symbolize for Ralph Ballantyne this wild and beautiful new land between the Limpopo and the wide green Zambezi rivers.
The great black bull stared arrogantly at the horsemen on the ridge above him, then snorted and tossed his warlike head. Thick dark mane flying, sharp hooves clattering over the stony ground, he led his chocolate-coloured brood mares at a gallop up and over the far ridge, leaving the watching men mute at their grandeur and their beauty.
Ralph Ballantyne was first to rouse himself and he turned in the saddle towards his father.
"Well, Papa," he asked, "do you recognize any landmarks?" "It was more than thirty years ago," Zouga. Ballantyne murmured, a little frown of concentration puckering an arrowhead in the centre of his forehead, "thirty years, and I was riddled with malaria. "Then he turned to the third rider, the little wizened Hottentot, his companion and servant since those far-off days. "What do you think, Jan Cheroot?"
The Hottentot lifted the battered regimental cap from his head, and smoothed the little peppercorns of pure white wool that covered his scalp. "Perhaps.-" Ralph cut in brusquely, "Perhaps it was all merely a fever dream." The frown on his father's handsome bearded features sharpened, and the scar upon his cheek flushed from boneporcelain to rose, while Jan Cheroot grinned with anticipation, when these two were together it was better entertainment than a cock-fight any day.
"Damn it, boy," Zouga snapped. "Why don't you go back to the wagons and keep the women company." Zouga drew the thin chain. from his fob pocket and dangled it before his son's face. "There it is,"he snapped, "that's the proof." On the ring of the chain hung a small bunch of keys, and other oddments, a gold seal, a St. Christopher, a cigar-cutter and an irregular lump of quartz the size of a ripe grape.
This last was mottled like fine blue marble and starred through its centre with a thick wedge of gleaming native metal.
"Raw red gold, "said Zouga. "Ripe for the picking!" Ralph grinned at his father, but it was an insolent and provocative grin, for he was bored. Weeks of wandering and fruitless searching were not Ralph's style at all.
"I always suspected that you picked that up from a pedlar's stall on the Grand Parade at Cape Town, and that it's only fool's gold anyway." The scar on his father's cheek turned a darker furious red, and Ralph laughed delightedly and clasped Zouga's shoulder.
"Oh, Papa, if I truly believed that, do you think I would waste weeks of my time? What with the railroad building and the dozen other balls I am juggling, would I be here, instead of in Johannesburg or Kimberley?" He shook Zouga's shoulder gently, the smile no longer mocking. "It's here we both know it. We could be standing on the reef at this very moment, or it could be just over the next ridge."
Slowly the heat went out of Zouga's scar, and Ralph went on evenly.
"The trick, of course, is to find it again. We could stumble over it in the next hour, or search another ten years." Watching father and son, Jan Cheroot felt a small prick of disappointment. He had seen them fight once before, but that was long ago. Ralph was now in the full prime of his manhood, almost thirty years of age, accustomed to handling the hundreds of rough men that he employed in his transport company and his construction teams, handling them with tongue and boot and fist. He was big and hard and st rutty as a game cock, but Jan Cheroot suspected that the old dog would still be able to roll the puppy in the dust. The praise name that the Matabele had given Zouga Ballantyne was "Bakela', the Fist, and "he was still fast and lean.
Yes, Jan Cheroot decided regretfully, it would still be worth watching, but perhaps another day, for already the flare of tempers had faded and the two men were again talking quietly and eagerly, leaning from their saddles towards each other. Now they seemed more like brothers, for although the family resemblance was unmistakable, yet Zouga did not seem old enough to be Ralph's father. His skin was too clear and unlined, his eye too quick and vital and the faint lacing of silver in his golden beard might have been merely the bleaching of the fierce African sun.
"If only you had been able to get a sun-sight, the other observations you made were all so accurate," Ralph lamented. "I was able to go directly to every cache of ivory that you left that year."
"By that time the rains had started." Zouga shook his head. "And, by God, how it rained! We hadn't seen the sun for a week, every river was in full spate, so we were marching in circles, trying to find a ford-" He broke off, and lifted the reins in his left hand. "But I've told the tale a hundred times. Let's get on with the search," he suggested quietly, and they trotted down off the ridge into the valley, Zouga stooping from the saddle to examine the ground for chips of broken reef, or swivelling slowly to survey the skyline to try and recognize the shape of the crests or the blue loom of a distant, kopje against the towering African sky, where the silver fair-weather cumulus sailed high and serene.
"The only definite landmark we have to work on is the site of the ruins of Great Zimbabwe," Zouga muttered. "We marched eight days due westwards from the ruins." "Nine days," Jan Cheroot corrected him.
"You lost one day when Matthew died. You were in fever. I had to nurse you like a baby, and we were carrying that damned stone bird."
"We couldn't have made good more than ten miles a day," Zouga ignored him. "Eight days" march, not more than eighty miles." "And Great Zimbabwe is there. Due east of us now.) Ralph reined in his horse as they came out on the next ridge. "That is the Sentinel." He pointed at a rocky kopie, the distant blue summit shaped like a crouching lion.
"The ruins are just beyond, I would never mistake that view." For both father and son the ruined city had a special significance. There within the massive stone-built walls Zouga and Jan Cheroot had found the ancient graven bird images that had been abandoned by the long-vanished inhabitants. Despite the desperate straits to which they had been reduced by fever and the other hardships of the long expedition from the Zambezi river in the north, Zouga had insisted on carrying away with him one of the statues.
Then many years later it had been Ralph's turn. Guided by his father's diary and the meticulous sextant observations that it contained, Ralph had once again won through to the deserted citadel.
Though he had been pursued by the border imp is of Lobengula, the Matabele king, he had defied the king's taboo on the holy place and had spirited away the remaining statues. Thus all three men had intimate knowledge of those haunting and haunted ruins, and as they stared at the far hills that marked the site, they were silent with their memories.
"I still wonder, who were the men who built Zimbabwe?" Ralph asked at last. "And what happened to them?" There was an uncharacteristic dreamy tone to his voice, and he expected no answer. "Were they the Queen of Sheba's miners? Was this the Ophir of the Bible? Did they carry the gold they mined to Solomon?" "Perhaps we will never know."
Zouga roused himself. But we do know they valued gold as we do. I found gold foil and beads and bars of bullion in the courtyard of Great Zimbabwe, and it must be within a few miles of where we stand that Jan Cheroot and I explored the shafts that they drove into the earth, and found the broken reef piled in dumps ready for crushing." Zouga glanced across at the little Hottentot. "Do you recognize any of this?" The dark pixie face wrinkled up like a sun-dried prune as Jan Cheroot considered. "Perhaps from the next ridge," he muttered lugubriously, and the trio rode down into the valley that looked like a hundred others they had crossed in the preceding weeks.
Ralph was a dozen strides ahead of the others, cantering easily, swinging his mount to skirt a thicket of the dense wild ebony, when abruptly he stood in the stirrups, snatched his hat from his head and waved it high.
"Tally ho!"he yelled. "Gone away!" And Zouga saw the burnt gold flash of fluid movement across the far slope of open ground.
"Three of the devils!" Ralph's excitement and his loathing were clear in the pitch and timbre of his voice. "Jan Cheroot, you turn "em on the left! Papa, stop them crossing the ravine!" The easy manner of command came naturally to Ralph Ballantyne, and the two older men accepted it as naturally, while none of them questioned for an instant why they should destroy the magnificent animals that Ralph had flushed from the ebony thicket. Ralph owned two hundred wagons, each drawn by sixteen draught oxen. King's Lynn, Zouga's estates, taken up with the land grants that the British South Africa Company had tis sued to the volunteers who had destroyed the Matabele king's imp is covered many tens of thousands of acres that were stocked with the pick of the captured Matabele breeding herds running with blood bulls imported from Good Hope and old England.
Father and son were both cattlemen, and they had suffered the terrible depredations of the lion prides which infested this lovely land north of the Limpopo and Shashi rivers. Too often they had heard their valuable and beloved beasts bellowing in agony in the night, and in the dawn found their ravaged carcasses. To both of them, lions were the worst kind of vermin, and they were elated with this rare chance of taking a pride in broad daylight.
Ralph yanked the repeating Winchester rifle from the leather scabbard under his left knee, as he urged the chestnut gelding into full gallop after the big yellow cats. The lion had been the first away, and Ralph had only a glimpse of him, sway-backed and swing-bellied, the dense dark ruff of his mane fluffed out with alarm, padding majestically on heavy paws into the scrub. The older lioness followed him swiftly. She was lean and scarred from a thousand hunts, blue with age across the shoulders and back. She went away at a bounding gallop. However, the younger lioness, unaccustomed to men, was bold and curious as a cat. She was still faintly cub-spotted across her creamy gold belly, and she turned on the edge of the thicket to snarl at the pursuing horseman. Her ears lay flat against her skull, her furry pink tongue curled out over her fangs, and her whiskers were white and stiff as porcupine quills.
Ralph dropped his reins onto the gelding's neck, and the horse responded instantly by plunging to a dead stop and freezing for the shot, only the scissoring of his ears betraying his agitation.
Ralph tossed up the Winchester and fired as the butt plate slapped into his shoulder. The lioness grunted explosively as the bullet thumped into her shoulder, angled for the heart. She went up in a high sun fishing somersault, roaring in her death frenzy. She fell and rolled on her back, tearing at the scrub with fully extended yellow claws, and then stretching out in a last shuddering convulsion before slumping into the softness of death.
Ralph pumped a fresh round into the chamber of the Winchester, and gathered up the reins. The gelding leaped forward.
Out on the right Zouga was pounding up the lip of the ravine, leaning forward in the saddle, and at that moment the second lioness broke into the open ahead of him, going for the deep brush-choked ravine at a driving run, and Zouga fired still at full gallop. Ralph saw dust spurt under the animal's belly.
"Low and left. Papa is getting old," Ralph thought derisively, and brought the gelding crashing down to a stiff4 egged halt. Before he could fire, Zouga had shot again, and the lioness collapsed and rolled like a yellow ball on the stony earth, shot through the neck a hand's span behind the ear.
"Bully for you!" Ralph laughed With excitement, and kicked his heels into the gelding's flank as they charged up the slope, shoulder to shoulder.
"Where is Jan Cheroot?" Zouga shouted, and as if in reply they heard the clap of rifle fire in the forest on the left, and they swung the horses in that direction.
"Can you see him? "Ralph called.
The bush was thicker ahead of them, and the thorn branches whipped at their thighs as they passed. There was a second shot, and immediately afterwards the furious ear-numbing roars of the lion mingled with Jan Cheroot's shrill squeals of terror.
"He is in trouble!" Zouga called anxiously, as they burst out of the thick scrub.
Before them there lay parkland, fine open grass beneath the tall flat-topped acacia trees along the crest of the ridge. A hundred yards ahead Jan Cheroot was tearing along the crest, twisted in the saddle to look over his shoulder, his face a mask of terror, his eyes huge and glistening white. He had lost his hat and rifle, but he was lashing his mount across the neck and shoulders, although the animal was already at a wild uncontrolled gallop.
The lion was a dozen strides behind them, but gaining with each elastic bound as though they were standing still. Its heaving flank was painted slick and shiny with bright new blood, shot through the guts, but the wound had not crippled nor even slowed the beast. Rather it had maddened him, so that the solid blasts of sound from his throat sounded like the thunder of the skies.
Ralph swerved his gelding to try and intercept the little Hottentot, and alter the angle to give himself an open shot at the lion, but at that moment the cat came up out of its flat snaking charge, reared up over the bunched and straining quarters of the horse and raked them with long curved talons so that the sweat-darkened hide opened in deep parallel wounds, and the blood smoked from them in a fine crimson cloud.
The horse shrieked and lashed out with its hind hooves, catching the lion in his chest, so that he reeled and lost a stride.
Immediately he gathered himself and came again, quartering in beside the running horse, his eyes inscrutably yellow as he prepared to leap astride the panic driven animal.
"Jump, Jan Cheroot!" Ralph yelled. The lion was too close to risk a shot. "Jump, damn you!" But Jan Cheroot did not appear to have heard him, he was clinging helplessly to the tangled flying mane, paralysed with fear.
The lion rose lightly into the air, and settled like a huge yellow bird on the horse's back, crushing Jan Cheroot beneath his massive, blood-streaked body. At that instant, horse and rider and lion seemed to disappear into the very earth, and there was only a swirling column of dust to mark where they had been. Yet the shattering roars of the enraged animal and Jan Cheroot's howls of terror grew even louder as Ralph galloped up to the point on the ridge where they had disappeared.
With the Winchester in one hand he kicked his feet from the stirrup irons and jumped from the saddle, letting his own momentum throw him forward until he stood on the edge of a sheer-sided pitfall at the bottom of which lay a tangle of heaving bodies.
"The devil is killing me!" screamed Jan Cheroot, and Ralph could see him pinned beneath the body of the horse. The horse must have broken its neck in the fall, it was a lifeless heap with head twisted up under its shoulder and the lion was ripping the carcass and saddle, trying to reach Jan Cheroot.
"Lie still," Ralph shouted down at him. "Give me a clear shot!"
But it was the lion that heard him. He left the horse and came up the vertical side of the pit with the ease of a cat climbing a tree, his glossy muscular hindquarters driving him lightly upwards and his pale yellow eyes fastened upon Ralph as he stood on the lip of the deep hole.
Ralph dropped on one knee to steady himself for the shot, and aimed down into the broad golden chest. The jaws were wide open, the fangs long as a man's forefinger and white as polished ivory, the deafening clamour from the open throat dinned into Ralph's face. He could smell the rotten-flesh taint of the lion's breath and flecks of hot saliva splattered against his cheeks and forehead.
He fired, and pumped the loading-handle and fired again, so swiftly that the shots were a continuous blast of sound. The lion arched backwards, hung for a long moment from the -wall of the pit, and then toppled and fell back upon the dead horse.
Now there was no movement from the bottom of the pit, and the silence was more intense than the shattering uproar that had preceded it.
"Jan Cheroot, are you all right?" Ralph called anxiously. There was no sign of the little Hottentot, he was completely smothered by the carcasses of horse and lion.
"Jan Cheroot, can you hear me?" The reply was in a hollow, sepulchral whisper. "Dead men cannot hear it's all over, they have got old Jan Cheroot at last." "Come out from under there,"Zouga Ballantyne ordered, as he stepped up to Ralph's shoulder. "This is no time to play the clown, Jan Cheroot." Ralph dropped a coil of manilla rope down to Jan Cheroot, and between them they hauled him and the saddle from the dead horse to the surface.
The excavation into which Jan Cheroot had fallen was a deep narrow trench along the crest of the ridge. In places it was twenty feet deep, but never more than six feet wide. Mostly it was choked with creepers and rank vegetation, but this could not disguise the certainty that it had been dug by men.
"The reef was exposed along this line," Zouga guessed, as they followed the edge of the old trench, "the ancient miners simply dug it out and did not bother to refill." "How did they blast the reef" Ralph demanded. "That's solid rock down there." "They probably built fires upon it, and then quenched it with water. The contraction cracked the rock." "Well, they seem to have taken out every grain of the ore body and left nary a speck for us." Zouga nodded. "They would have worked out this section first, and then when the reef pinched out they would have started sinking potholes along the strike to try and intercept it again." Zouga turned to Jan Cheroot and demanded, "Now do you recognize this place, Jan Cheroot?" And when the Hottentot hesitated, he pointed down the slope. "I'he swamp in the valley down there, and the teak trees--" "Yes, yes." Jan Cheroot clapped his hands, and his eyes twinkled with delight. "This is the same Place where you killed the bull elephant the tusks are on the stoep at King's Lynn." "The ancient dump will be just ahead." Zouga hurried forward.
He found the low mound covered by grass, and went down on his knees to scrabble amongst the grass roots, picking out the chips of white sugar quartz, examining each one swiftly and discarding it.
Occasionally he wet one with his tongue, held it to the sunlight to try and highlight the sparkle of metal, then frowned and shook his head with disappointment.
At last he stood and wiped his hands on his breeches.
"It's quartz all right, but the ancient miners must have hand-sorted this dump. We will have to find the old shafts if we want to see visible gold in the ore." From the top of the ancient dump Zouga orientated himself rapidly.
"The carcass of the bull elephant fell about there," he pointed, and to confirm it Jan Cheroot searched in the grass and lifted a huge thighbone, dry and white as chalk, and at last after thirty years beginning to crumble.
"He was the father of all elephant," Jan Cheroot said reverently.
"There will never be another like him, and it was he that led us to this place. When you shot him he fell here to mark it for us." Zouga turned a quarter-circle and pointed again. "The ancient shaft where we buried old Matthew will be there." Ralph recalled the elephant hunt as his father had described it in his celebrated book A Hunter's Odyssey.
The black gunbearer had not flinched from the great bull elephant's charge, but had stood it down and handed Zouga the second gun, sacrificing his own life for that of his master. So Ralph understood and remained silent, as Zouga went down on one knee beside the rock pile that marked the gunbearer's grave.
After a minute, Zouga rose and dusted off his knee, and said simply, "He was a good man." "Good, but stupid," Jan Cheroot agreed.
"A wise man would have run." "And a wise man would have chosen a better grave," Ralph murmured. "He is plumb in the centre of a gold reef. We will have to dig him out." But Zouga frowned. "Let him lie.
There are other shafts along the strike." He turned away, and the others followed him. A hundred yards farther on, Zouga stopped again. "Here!" he called with satisfaction. "The second shaft there were four of them altogether." This opening had also been refilled with chunks of native rock. Ralph shrugged off his jacket, propped his rifle against the hole of the nearest tree and climbed down into the shallow depression until he stooped over the narrow blocked entrance.
"I'm going to open it up." They worked for half an hour, pr ising loose the boulders with a branch of a lead wood and manhandling them aside until they had exposed the square opening to the shaft. It was narrow, so narrow that only a child could have passed through it. They knelt and peered down into it. There was no telling how deep it was, for it was impenetrably black in the depths and it stank of damp, of fungus and bats, and of rotting things.
Ralph and Zouga stared into the opening with a horrid fascination.
"They say the ancients used child slaves or captured Bushmen in the workings,"Zouga murmured.
"We have to know if the reef is down there," Ralph whispered.
"But no grown man-" he broke off and there was another moment of thoughtful silence, before Zouga and Ralph glanced at each other and smiled, and then both their heads turned in unison towards Jan Cheroot.
"Never!" said the little Hottentot fiercely. "I am a sick old man. Never! You will have to kill me first!" Ralph found a stump of candle in his saddlebag, while Zouga swiftly spliced together the three coils of Rrope used for tethering the horses, and Jan Cheroot watched their preparation like a condemned man watching the construction of the gallows.
"For twenty-nine years, since the day I was born, you have been telling me of your courage and daring," Ralph reminded him, as he placed an arm around Jan Cheroot's shoulder and led him gently back to the mouth of the shaft.
"Perhaps I exaggerated a little," Jan Cheroot admitted, as Zouga knotted the rope under his armpits and strapped a saddlebag around his tiny waist.
"You, who have fought wild men and hunted elephant and lion what can you fear in this little hole? A few snakes, a little darkness, the ghosts of dead men, that's all." "Perhaps I exaggerated more than a little," Jan Cheroot whispered huskily.
"You are not a coward are you, Jan Cheroot?" "Yes," Jan Cheroot nodded fervently. "That is exactly what I am, and this is no place for a coward." Ralph drew him back, struggling like a hooked catfish on the end of the rope, lifted him easily and lowered him into the shaft. His protests faded gradually as Ralph paid out the rope.
Ralph was measuring the rope across the reach of his outstretched arms. Reckoning each span at six feet, he had lowered the little Hottentot a little under sixty feet before the rope went slack.
"Jan Cheroot!"Zouga bellowed down the shaft.
"A little cave." Jan Cheroot's voice was muffled and distorted by echoes. "I can just stand. The reef is black with soot." "Cooking fires. The slaves would have been kept down there," Zouga guessed, "never seeing the light of day again until they died. "Then he raised his voice. "what else?" "Ropes, plaited grass ropes, and buckets, leather buckets like we used on the diamond diggings at New Rush-" Jan Cheroot broke off with an exclamation. "They fall to pieces when I touch them, just dust now." Faintly they could hear Jan Cheroot sneezing and coughing in the dust he had raised and his voice was thickened and nasal as he went on, "Iron tools, something like an adze," and when he called again they could hear the tremor in his voice. "Name of the great snake, there are dead men here, dead men's bones. I am coming up pull me up!" Staring down the narrow shaft, Ralph could see the light of the candle flame wavering and trembling at the bottom. "Jan Cheroot, is there a tunnel leading off from the cave?" "Pull me up." "Can you see a tunnel?" "Yes, now will you pull me up?" "Not until you follow the tunnel to the end." "Are you mad? I would have to crawl on hands and knees." "Take one of the iron tools with you, to break a piece off the reef." "No. That is enough. I go no farther, not with dead men guarding this place." "Very well," Ralph bellowed into the hole, "then I will throw the end of the rope down on top of you." "You would not do that!" "After that I will put the rocks back over the entrance." "I am going." Jan Cheroot's voice had a desperate edge, and once again the rope began slithering down into the shaft like a serpent into its nest.
Ralph and Zouga squatted beside the shaft, passing their last cheroot back and forth and waiting with ill grace and impatience.
"When they deserted these workings, they must have sealed the slaves in the shaft. A slave was a valuable chattel, so that proves they were still working the reef and that they left in great haste."
Zouga paused, cocked his head to listen and then said, "Ah!" with satisfaction. From the depths of the earth at their feet came the distant clank of metal tool on living rock. "Jan Cheroot has reached the working-face." However, it was many minutes more before they saw the wavering candle light in the bottom of the pit again and jan Cheroot's pleas, quavering and pitiful, came up to them.
"Please, Master Ralph, I have done it. Now will you pull me up, please?" Ralph stood with one booted foot on each side of the shaft, and hauled in the rope hand over hand. "The muscles of his arms bulged and subsided under the sleeves of his thin cotton shirt, as he lifted the Hottentot and his burden to the surface without a pause, and when he had finished, Ralph's breathing was still even and quiet and there was not a single bead of perspiration on his face.
"So, Jan Cheroot, what did you find?" Jan Cheroot was coated all over with fine pale dust through which his sweat had cut muddy tunnels and he stank of bat guano and the mushroom odour of long-deserted caves. With hands that still shook with fear and exhaustion, he opened the flap of the saddlebag at his waist.
"This is what I found, he croaked, and Zouga took a lump of the raw rough rock from him.
It had a crystalline texture, that glittered like ice and was marbled with blue and riven by minute flaws and fissures, some of which had cracked through under the pounding of the iron adze with which Jan Cheroot had hacked it from the rock face. However, the shattered fragments of shining quartz were held together by the substance that had filled every crack and fault line in the ore. This cement was a thin malleable layer of bright metal, that twinkled in the sunlight when Zouga wet it with the tip of his tongue.
"By God, Ralph, will you look at that!" And Ralph took it from his father's hand with the reverence of a worshipper receiving the sacrament.
"Gold!" he whispered, and it sparkled at him, that lovely yellow smile that had captivated men almost from the time they had first stood upon their hind legs.
"Gold!" Ralph repeated.
To find this glimmer of precious metal they had laboured. most of their lives, father and son, they had ridden far and, in the company of other freebooters, had fought bloody battles, had helped destroy a proud nation and hunt a king to a lonely death.
Led by a sick man with swollen crippled heart and grandiose dreams, they had seized a vast land that now bore that giant's name, Rhodesia, and they had forced the land to yield up, one by one, its riches. They had taken its wide sweet pastures and lovely mountain ranges, its forests of fine native timber, its herds of sleek cattle, its legions of sturdy black men who for a pittance would provide the thews to gather in the vast harvest. And now at last they held the ultimate treasure in their hands.
"Gold!" Ralph said for the third time.
They struck their pegs along the ridge, cutting them from the living acacia trees that oozed clear sap from the axe cuts, and they hammered them into the hard earth with the flat of the blade. Then they built cairns of stone to mark the corner of each claim.
Under the Fort Victoria Agreement, which both of them had signed when they volunteered to ride against Lobengula's imp is they were each entitled to ten gold claims. This naturally did not apply to Jan Cheroot. Despite the fact that he had ridden into Matabeleland with Jameson's flying column and shot down the Matabele amadoda at the Shangani river and the Bembesi crossing with as much gusto as had his masters, yet he was a man of colour, and as such he could not share the spoils.
In addition to the booty to which Zouga and Ralph were entitled under the Victoria Agreement, both of them had bought up many blocks of claims from the dissolute and spendthrift troopers of Jameson's conquering force, some of whom had sold for the price of a bottle of whisky. So between them they could peg off the entire ridge and most of the valley bottoms on each side of it.
It was hard work, but urgent, for there were other prospectors abroad, one of whom could have followed their tracks. They worked through the heat of noon and by the light of the moon until sheer exhaustion forced them to drop their axes and sleep where they fell.
On the fourth evening, they could stop at last, content that they had secured the entire reef for themselves. There was no gap between their pegs into which another prospector could jump.
"Jan Cheroot, there is only one bottle of whisky left," Zouga groaned, and stretched his aching shoulders, "but tonight I am going to let you pour your own dop." They watched with amusement the elaborate precautions which Jan Cheroot took to get the last drop into his brimming mug. In the process, the line around the bottom that marked his daily grog ration was entirely ignored, and when the mug was full, he did not trust the steadiness of his own hand but slurped up the first mouthful on all fours like a dog.
Ralph retrieved the bottle, and ruefully considered the remnants of the liquor before pouring a dram for his father and himself.
"The Harkness Mine," Zouga gave them the toast.
"Why do you call it that?" Ralph demanded, when he lowered his mug and wiped his moustache with the back of his hand.
"Old Tom Harkness gave me the map that led me to it," Zouga replied.
"We could find a better name." "Perhaps, but that's the one I want." "The gold will be just as bright, I expect," Ralph capitulated, and carefully moved the whisky bottle out of the little Hottentot's reach, for Jan Cheroot had drained his mug already. "I am glad we are doing something together again, Papa." Ralph settled down luxuriously against his saddle.
"Yes," Zouga agreed softly. "It's been too long since we worked side by side in the diamond pit at New Rush." "I know just the right fellow to open up the workings for us. He is a top man, the best on the Witwatersrand gold fields and I'll have my wagons bringing up the machinery before the rains break." It was part of their agreement that Ralph would provide the men and machinery and money to run the Harkness Mine when Zouga led him to it. For Ralph was a rich man. Some said he was already a millionaire, though Zouga knew that was unlikely.
Nevertheless, Zouga remembered that Ralph had provided the transport and commissariat for both the Mashonaland column and the Matabeleland expedition against Lobengula, and for each he had been paid huge sums by Mr. Rhodes" British South Africa Company,_not in cash but in company shares. Like Zouga himself, he had speculated by buying up original land grants from the thriftless drifters that made up the bulk of the original column and had paid them in whisky, carried up from the railhead in his own wagons. Ralph's Rhodesia Lands Company owned more land than did even Zouga himself. Ralph had also speculated in the shares of the British South Africa Company. In those heady days when the column first reached Fort Salisbury, he had sold shares that Mr. Rhodes had issued to him at 1 pound for the sum of 15 pounds on the London stock market. Then, when the pioneers" vaunting hopes and optimism had withered on the sour veld and barren ore bodies of Mashonaland, and Rhodes and Jameson were secretly planning their war against the Matabele king, Ralph had re-purchased British South Africans at eight shillings. He had then seen them quoted at 8 pounds when the column rode into the burning ruins of Lobengula's kraal at GuBulawayo. and the Company had added the entire realm of the Matabele monarch to its possessions.
Now, listening to his son talk with that infectious energy and charisma which even those hard days and nights of physical labour on the claims could not dull, Zouga reflected that Ralph had laid the telegraph lines from Kimberley to Fort Salisbury, that his construction gangs were at this moment laying the railway lines across the same wilderness towards Bulawayo, that his two hundred wagons carried trade goods to more than a hundred of Ralph's own trading posts scattered across Bechuanaland and Matabeleland and Mashonaland, that as of today Ralph was a half-owner of a gold mine that promised to be as rich as any on the fabulous Witwatersrand.
Zouga smiled to himself as he listened to Ralph talk in the flickering firelight, and he thought suddenly, "Damn it, but they might be right after all the puppy might just possibly be a millionaire already." And his pride was tinged with envy. Zouga himself had worked and dreamed from long before Ralph was born, had made sacrifices and had suffered hardships that still made him shudder when he thought about them, all for much lesser reward. Apart from this new reef, all he had to show for a lifetime of striving was King's Lynn and Louise and then he smiled. With those two possessions, he was richer than Mr. Rhodes would ever be.
Zouga sighed and tilted his hat forward over his eyes, and with Louise's beloved face held firmly in the eye of his mind he drifted into sleep, while across the fire Ralph still talked quietly, for himself more than for his father, and conjured up new visions of wealth and power.
It was two full days" ride back to the wagons, but they were still half a mile from the camp when they were spotted, and a joyous tide of servants and children and dogs and wives came clamouring out to greet them.
Ralph spurred forward and leaned low from the saddle to sweep Cathy up onto the pommel so violently that her hair tumbled into her face and she shrieked breathlessly until he silenced her with a kiss full on the mouth, and he held the kiss unashamedly while little Jonathan danced impatiently around the horse shouting, "Me too! Lift me up, too, Papa!" When at last he broke the kiss, Ralph held her close still, and his stiff dark moustache tickled her ear as he whispered, "The minute I get you into the tent, Katie MY love, we will give that new mattress of yours a stiff test." She flushed a richer tone of pink and tried to slap his cheek, but the blow was light and loving. Ralph chuckled, then reached down and picked Jonathan up by one arm and dropped him into the gelding's croup behind the saddle.
The boy wrapped his arms around Ralph's waist and demanded in a high piping voice. "Did you find gold, Papa?" "A ton." "Did you shoot any lions?" "A hundred." "Did you kill any Matabele?" "The season's closed," Ralph laughed, and ruffled his son's dark thick curls, but Cathy scolded quickly.
"That's a wicked thing to ask your father, you bloodthirsty little pagan." Louise followed the younger woman and the child at a more sedate pace, stepping lightly and lithely in the thick dust of the wagon road. Her hair was drawn back from her broad forehead and hung down her back to the level of her waist in a thick braid. It emphasized the high arches of her cheekbones.
Her eyes had changed colour again. It always fascinated Zouga to see the shifts of her mood reflected in those huge slanted eyes. Now they were a lighter softer blue, the colour of happiness. She stopped at the horse's head and Zouga stepped down from the stirrup and lifted the hat from his head, studying her gravely for a moment before he spoke.
"Even in such a short time I had forgotten -how truly beautiful you are, he said.
"It was not a short time," she contradicted him. "Every hour I am away from you is an eternity." It was an elaborate camp, for this was Cathy and Ralph's home. They owned no other, but like gypsies moved to where the pickings were richest. There were four wagons out spanned under the tall arched wild fig trees on the bank of the river above the ford. The tents were of new snowy canvas, one of which, set a little apart, served for ablution. This contained a galvanized iron bath in which one could stretch out full length. There was a servant whose sole duty was to tend the forty-gallon drum on the fire behind the tent and to deliver unlimited quantities of hot water, day and night.
Another smaller tent beyond held a commode whose seat Cathy had hand-painted with cupids and bouquets of roses, and beside the commode she had placed the ultimate luxury, scented sheets of soft coloured paper in a sandalwood box.
There were horse-hair mattresses on each cot, comfortable canvas chairs to sit on, and a long trestle-table to eat off under the fly of the open-sided dining tent. There were canvas coolers for the champagne and lemonade bottles, food safes screened with insect-proof gauze, and thirty servants. Servants to cut wood and tend fires, servants to wash and iron so that the women could change their clothing daily, others to make the bed and sweep up every fallen leaf from the bare ground between the tents and then sprinkle it with water to lay the dust, one to wait exclusively upon Master Jonathan, to feed him and bathe him and ride him on a shoulder or sing to him when he grew petulant. Servants to cook the food and to wait upon the table, servants to light the lanterns and lace up the flies of the tents at nightfall and even one to empty the bucket of the hand-painted commode whenever the little bell tinkled.
Ralph rode in through the gate of the high thorn bush stockade that surrounded the entire camp to protect it from the nocturnal visits of the lion prides. Cathy was still on the saddle in front of him and his son up behind.
He looked about the camp with satisfaction, and squeezed Cathy's waist. "By God, it's good to be home, a hot bath, and you can scrub my back, Katie." He broke off, and exclaimed with surprise. "Damn it, woman! You might have warned me!" "You never gave me a chance," she protested.
Parked at the end of the row of wagons was a closed coach, a vehicle with sprung wheels, the windows fitted with teak shutters that could be raised against the heat. The body of the coach was painted a cool and delightful green under the dust and dried mud of hard travel, the doors were picked out in gold leaf and the high wheels piped with the same gold. The interior was finished in glossy green leather with gold tassels on the curtains. There were fitted leather and brass steamer trunks strapped to the roof rack, and beyond the coach in Ralph's kraal of thorn bush the big white mules, all carefully matched for colour and size, were feeding on bundles of fresh grass that Ralph's servants had cut along the river bank.
"How did Himself find us?" Ralph demanded, as he let Cathy down to the ground. He did not have to ask who the visitor was, this magnificent equipage was famous across the continent.
"We are camped only a mile from the main road up from the south," Cathy pointed out tartly. "He could hardly miss US." "And he has his whole gang with him, by the looks of it," Ralph muttered. There were two dozen blood horses in the kraal with the white mules.
"All the king's horses and all the king's men," Cathy agreed, "and at that moment Zouga hurried in through the gate with Louise on his arm. He was as excited by their visitor as Ralph was irritated.
"Louise tells me that he has broken his journey especially to talk to me." "You had better not keep him waiting then, Papa," Ralph grinned sardonically. It was strange how all men, even the aloof and cool-headed Major Zouga Ballantyne, came under the spell that their visitor wove. Ralph prided himself -that he alone was able to resist it, although at times it required a conscious effort.
Zouga was striding eagerly down the row of wagons towards the inner stockade with Louise skipping to keep up with him. Ralph dawdled deliberately, admiring the remarkable animals that Jonathan had moulded from river clay and now paraded for his approbation.
"Beautiful hippos, Jon-Jon! Not hippo? Oh, I see, the horns fell off, did they? Well then, they are the most beautiful, fattest hornless kudu that I have ever seen." Cathy tugged at his arm at last.
"You know he wants to speak to you also, Ralph," she urged, and Ralph swung Jonathan up onto his shoulder, took Cathy on his other arm, for he knew that such a display of domesticity would irritate the man they were going to meet, and sauntered into the inner stockade of the camp.
The canvas sides of the dining marquee had been rolled up to allow the cool afternoon breeze to blow through it, and there were half a dozen men seated at the long trestle table In the centre of the group was a hulking figure, dressed in an ill-fitting jacket of expensive English cloth that was closed to the top button. The knot of his necktie had slipped and the colours of Oriel College were dulled with the dust of the long road up from the diamond city of Kimberley.
Even Ralph, whose feelings for this ungainly giant of a man were ambivalent, hostility mixed with a grudging admiration, was shocked by the changes that a few short years had wrought on him. The meaty features seemed to have sagged from the raw bones of his face, his colour was high and unhealthy. He was barely forty years of age, yet his moustache and sideburns had faded from ruddy blond to dull silver, and he looked fifteen years older. Only the pale blue eyes retained their force and mystic visionary glitter.
"Well, how are you, Ralph?" His voice was high and clear, incongruous in such a big body.
"Good afternoon, Mr. Rhodes," Ralph replied, and despite himself let his son slip from his shoulder and lowered him gently to the ground. Instantly the child darted away.
"How is my railway progressing, while you are out here enjoying yourself?" "Ahead of schedule and below budget," Ralph countered the barely veiled rebuke, and with a small effort broke the hypnotic gaze of those blue eyes and glanced at the men who flanked Mr. Rhodes.
On his right was the great man's shadow, small, narrow shouldered and as neatly dressed as his master was untidy. He had the prim but nondescript features of a schoolmaster, and receding wispy hair, but keen and acquisitive eyes that gave the lie to the rest of it.
"Jameson," Ralph nodded coolly at him, using neither Doctor Leander Starr Jameson's title nor the more familiar and affectionate "Doctor Jim'.
"Young Ballantyne." Jameson slightly emphasized the diminutive and gave it a faintly derogatory twist. From the very first, their hostility had been mutual and instinctive.
From Rhodes" left rose a younger man with straight back and broad shoulders, an open handsome face and a friendly smile which showed big even white teeth.
"Hello, Ralph." His handshake was firm and dry, his Kentucky accent easy and pleasant.
"Harry, I was speaking of you this very morning." Ralph's pleasure was obvious, and he glanced at Zouga "Papa, this is Harry Mellow, the best mining engineer in Africa." Zouga nodded. "We have been introduced." And father and son exchanged a glance of understanding.
This young American was the one that Ralph had chosen to develop and operate the Harkness Mine. It meant little to Ralph that Harry Mellow, like most of the bright young bachelors of special promise in southern Africa, already worked for Cecil John Rhodes. Ralph intended to find the bait that would tempt him away.
"We must talk later, Harry,"he murmured, and turned to another young man seated at the end of the table.
"Jordan," he exclaimed. "By God, it's good to see you." The two brothers met and embraced, and Ralph made no effort to hide his affection, but then everybody loved Jordan.
They loved him not only for his golden beauty and gentle manner, but also for his many talents and for the warmth and real concern that he extended to all about him.
"Oh Ralph, I have so much to ask, and so much to tell you. "Jordan's delight was as intense as Ralph's.
"Later, Jordan," Mr. Rhodes broke in querulously. He did not like to be interrupted, and he waved Jordan back to his seat. Jordan went instantly. He had been Mr. Rhodes" private secretary since he was nineteen years of age, and obedience to his master's least whim was part of his nature by now.
Rhodes glanced at Cathy and Louise. "Ladies, I am sure you will find our discourse tedious, and you have urgent chores to attend to, I am certain." Cathy glanced up at her husband, and saw Ralph's quick annoyance at the artless presumption with which Mr. Rhodes had taken over his camp and all within it. Surreptitiously Cathy squeezed his hand to calm him, and felt Ralph relax slightly. There was a limit to even Ralph's defiance. He might not be in Rhodes" employ, but the railway contract and a hundred cartage routes depended upon this man.
Then Cathy looked across at Louise, and saw that she was as piqued by the dismissal. There was a blue spark in her eyes and a faint heat under the fine freckles on her cheeks, but her voice was level and cool as she replied for both Cathy and herself, "Of course you are chrrect, Mr. Rhodes. Will you please excuse us." It was well known that Mr. Rhodes was uncomfortable in the presence of females. He employed no female servants, would not allow a painting nor statue of a woman to decorate his ornate mansion at Groote Schuur in the Cape of Good Hope, he would not even employ a married man in a position close to his person, and immediately discharged even the most trusted employee who took the unforgivable plunge into matrimony. "You cannot dance to a woman's whims and serve me at the same time," he would explain as he fired an offender.
Now Rhodes beckoned Ralph. "Sit here, where I can see you," he commanded, and immediately turned back to Zouga, and began rapping out questions. His questions cut like the lash of a stock whip, but the attention with which he listened to the replies was evidence of the high regard he had for Zouga Ballantyne. Their relationship went back many years, to the early days of the diamond diggings at Colesberg kopje which had since been renamed Kimberley after the colonial secretary who accepted it into Her Majesty's dominions.
On those diggings Zouga had once worked claims which had yielded up the fabulous "Ballantyne Diamond', but now Rhodes owned those claims, as he owned every single claim on the fields. Since then, Rhodes had employed Zouga as his personal agent at the kraal of Lobengula, King of the Matabele, for he spoke the language with colloquial fluency. When Doctor Jameson had led his flying column in that swift and victorious strike against the king, Zouga had ridden with him as one of his field officers and had been the first man into the burning kraal of GuBulawayo after the king had fled.
After Lobengula's death, Rhodes had appointed Zouga "Custodian of Enemy Property, and Zouga had been responsible for rounding up the captured herds of Matabele cattle and redistributing them as booty to the company and to Jameson's volunteers.
Once Zouga had completed that task, Rhodes would have appointed him Chief Native Commissioner, to deal with the indunas of the Matabele, but Zouga had preferred to retire to his estates at King's Lynn with his new bride, and had let the job go to General Mungo St. John. However, Zouga was still on the Board of the British South Africa Company, and Rhodes trusted him as he did few other men.
"Matabeleland is booming, Mr. Rhodes," Zouga reported. "You will find Bulawayo is almost a city already, with its own school and hospital. There are already more than six hundred white women and children in Matabeleland, a sure sign that your settlers are here to stay at last. All the land grants have been taken up, and many of the farms are already being worked. The blood stock from the Cape is taking to the local conditions and breeding well with the captured Matabele cattle." "What about the minerals, Ballantyne?" "Over ten thousand claims have been registered, and I have seen some very rich crushings."
Zouga hesitated, glanced at Ralph, and when he nodded, turned back to Rhodes. "Within the last few days, my son and I have rediscovered and pegged the ancient workings I first stumbled on in the sixties." "The Harkness Mine," Rhodes nodded heavily, and even Ralph was impressed by the range and grasp of his mind. "I remember your original description in The Hunter's Odyssey. Did you sample the reef?" In reply, Zouga placed a dozen lumps of quartz upon the table in front of him, and the raw gold glistened so that the men around the table craned forward in rapt fascination. Mr. Rhodes turned one of the samples in his big mottled hands before passing it to the American engineer.
"What do you make of these, Harry?" "It will go fifty ounces a ton," Harry whistled softly. "Perhaps too rich, like Nome and Klondike." The American looked up at Ralph. "How thick is the reef?
How broad is the strike?" Ralph shook his head. "I don't know, the workings are too narrow to get into the face." "This is quartz, of course, not the ban ket reef like we have on the Witwatersrand," Harry Mellow murmured.
The ban ket reef was named after the sweetmeat of toffee and nuts and almonds and cloves which the conglomerated reef so much resembled.
It was made up of the thick sedimentary beds of ancient buried lakes, not as rich in gold as this chip of quartz, but many feet thick and extending as wide as the broad lakes had once stretched, a mother lode which could be mined for a hundred years without exhausting its reserves.
"It's too rich," Harry Mellow repeated, fondling the sample of quartz. "I can't believe that it will be more than a stringer a few inches thick." "But if it isn't?" Rhodes demanded harshly.
The American smiled quietly. Then you will not only control nearly all the diamonds in the world, Mr. Rhodes, but most of the gold as well." His words were a sharp reminder to Ralph that the British South Africa Company owned fifty per cent royalty in every ounce of gold mined in Matabeleland, and Ralph felt his resentment return in full force. Rhodes and his ubiquitous BSA Company were like a vast octopus that smothered the efforts and the fortunes of all lesser men.
"Will you allow Harry to ride with me for a few days, Mr. Rhodes, so that he can examine the strike?" Ralph's irritation sharpened the tone of his request, so that Rhodes" big shaggy head lifted quickly and his pale blue eyes seemed to search out his soul for a moment before he nodded, and then with a mercurial change of direction abandoned the subject of gold and shot his next question at Zouga.
"The Matabele indunas how are they behaving themselves?" This time Zouga hesitated. "They have grievances, Mr. Rhodes." Yes? "The swollen features coagulated into a scowl.
"The cattle, naturally enough, are the main source of trouble," Zouga said quietly, and Rhodes cut him off brusquely.
"We captured less than 125,000 head of cattle, and we returned 40,000 of those to the tribe." Zouga did not remind him that the return was made only after the strongest representation by Robyn St. John, Zouga's own sister. Robyn was the missionary doctor at Khami Mission Station and she had once been Lobengula's closest friend and adviser.
"Forty thousand head of cattle, Ballantyne! A most generous gesture by the Company! "Rhodes repeated portentously, and again he did not add that he had made this return in order to avert the famine which Robyn St. John had warned him would decimate the defeated Matabele nation, and which would have surely brought the intervention of the Imperial government in Whitehall, and possibly the revocation of the Royal Charter under which Rhodes" Company ruled both Mashonaland and Matabeleland. Not such an outstanding act of charity, after all, Ralph thought wryly.
"After giving back those cattle to the indunas, we were left with less than eighty-five thousand head, the Company barely recouped the cost of the war." "Still the indunas claim they were given back only inferior beasts, the old and barren cows and scrub bulls." "Damn it, Ballantyne, the volunteers earned the right to first pick from the herds. Quite naturally, they chose the prime stock." He shot out his right fist with the forefinger aimed like a pistol at Zouga's heart.
"They do say that our own herds, chosen from the captured cattle, are the finest in Matabeleland." "The indunas don't understand that" Zouga answered. "Well then, the least they should understand is that they are a conquered nation. Their welfare depends on the goodwill of the victors. They extended no such consideration to the tribes that they conquered when they lorded it across the continent. Mzilikazi slew a million defenceless souls when he devastated the land south of the Limpopo, and Lobengula, his son, called the lesser tribes his dogs, to kill or cast into slavery as the whim took him. They must not whine now at the bitter taste of defeat." Even gentle Jordan, at the end of the table, nodded at this. "To protect the Mashona tribes from Lobengula's depredations was one of the reasons why we marched on Bulawayo,"he murmured.
"I said that they had grievances," Zouga pointed out. "I did not say that they were justified." "Then what else do they have to complain about?" Rhodes demanded.
"The Company police. The young Matabele bucks whom General St. John has recruited and armed are strutting through the kraals, usurping the power of the indunas, taking their pick of the young girL---" Again Rhodes interrupted. "Better that than a resurrection of the fighting imp is under the indunas. Can you imagine twenty thousand warriors in impi under Babiaan and Gandang and Bozo? No, St. John was right to break the power of the indunas. As Native Commissioner, it is his duty to guard against resurgence of the Matabele fighting tradition."
"Especially in view of the events that are in train south of where we now sit." Dr. Leander Starr Jameson spoke for the first time since he had greeted Ralph, and Rhodes turned to him swiftly.
"I wonder if this is the time to speak of that, Doctor Jim." "Why not? Every man here is trustworthy and discreet. We are all committed to the same bright vision of Empire, and the Lord knows, we are in no danger of being overheard. Not in this wilderness. What better time than now to explain why the Company police must be made even stronger, must be better armed and trained to the highest degree of readiness?"Jameson demanded.
Instinctively Rhodes glanced at Ralph Ballantyne, and Ralph raised one eyebrow, a cynical and mildly challenging gesture that seemed to decide Rhodes.
"No, Doctor Jim," he spoke decisively. "There will be another time for that." And when Jameson shrugged and capitulated, Rhodes turned to Jordan. "The sun is setting," he said, and Jordan rose obediently to charge the glasses. The sundowner whisky was already a traditional ending to the day in this land north of the Limpopo.
The brilliant white gems of the Southern Cross hung over Ralph's camp, dimming the lesser stars, and sprinkling the bald domes of the granite kopjes with a pearly light as Ralph picked his way towards his tent. He had inherited his father's head for liquor, so that his step was even and steady. It was ideas, not whisky, which had inebriated him.
He stooped through the fly of the darkened tent and sat down on the edge of the cot. He touched Cathy's cheek.
"I am awake," she said softly. What time is it?" "After midnight." "What kept you so long?" she whispered, for Jonathan slept just beyond the canvas screen.
"The dreams and boasts of men drunk with power and success." He grinned in the dark and dragged off his boots. "And by God, I did my fair share of dreaming and boasting." He stood to strip off his breeches. "What do you think of Harry Mellow?"he asked, with an abrupt change of pace.
"The American? He is very- Cathy hesitated. "I mean, he seems to be manly and rather nice." "Attractive?" Ralph demanded. "Irresistible to a young woman?" "You know I don't think like that," Cathy protested primly.
"The hell you don't," Ralph chuckled, and as he kissed her, he covered one of her round breasts with his cupped hand. Through the thin cotton nightdress it felt taut as a ripening melon. She struggled genteelly to free her lips from his and to prise his fingers loose, but he held her fast and after a few seconds she struggled no more, and instead she slipped her arms around the back of his neck.
"You smell of sweat and cigars and whisky." "I'm sorry." "Don't be, it's lovely," she putted. "Let me take off my shirt." "No, I'll do it for you." Much later Ralph lay upon his back with Cathy snuggled down against his bare chest.
"How would you like to have your sisters come down from Khami?" he asked suddenly. "They enjoy camp life, but even more, they like to escape from your mother." "It was I who wanted to invite the twins," she reminded him sleepily. "You were the one who said they were too unsettling." "Actually, I said they were too rowdy and boisterous," he corrected her, and she raised her head and looked at him in the faint moonlight that filtered through the canvas.
"A change of heart-" She thought about it for a moment, aware that her husband always had good reason for even his most unreasonable suggestions.
"The American," she exclaimed, with such force that behind the canvas screen Jonathan stirred and whimpered. Instantly, Cathy dropped her voice to a fierce whisper. "Not even you would use my own sisters you wouldn't, would you?" He pulled her head down onto his chest again. "They are big girls now. How old are they?" "Eighteen." She wrinkled her nose as his damp, curly chest hairs tickled it. "But, " "Old maids, already." "My own sisters you wouldn't use them?"
"They never get to meet decent young men at Khami. Your mother frightens them all off." "You are awful, Ralph Ballantyne." "Would you like a demonstration of just how awful I can be?" She considered that for a moment, and then, "Yes, please, "she giggled softly. "one day I will be riding with you," Jonathan said. "Won't I, Papa?" "One day, soon," Ralph agreed, and ruffled the child's dark curling head. "Now I want you to take care of your mother while I am away, Jon-Jon." Jonathan nodded, his face pale and set, the tears grimly restrained.
"Promise?" Ralph squeezed the small warm body that he held on his lap, and then he stooped from the saddle and stood the child beside Cathy, and Jonathan took her hand protectively, though he did not reach to her hip.
"I promise, Papa," he said, and gulped, staring up at his father on the tall horse.
Ralph touched Cathy's cheek lightly with his fingertips. 41 love you," she said softly.
"My beautiful Katie." And it was true. The first yellow rays of sunlight in her hair turned it into a bright halo and she was serene as a madonna, in the deep fastness of their love.
Ralph spurred away, and Harry Mellow swung his horse in beside him. It was a fine red thoroughbred from Mr. Rhodes'private stable, and he rode like a plainsman. At the edge of the forest both men turned to look back. The woman and child still stood at the gate of the stockade.
"You are a lucky man," Harry said softly.
"Without a good woman, there is no today, and without a son there is no tomorrow," Ralph agreed. he vultures were still hunched in the tree-tops, although the bones of the lions had been picked clean and scattered across the stony ground of the ridge. They had to digest the contents of their bloated bellies before they could soar away, and their dark misshapen bodies against the clear winter sky guided Ralph and Harry the last few miles to the ridge of the Harkness claims.
"It looks promising," Harry gave his guarded judgement that first night as they squatted beside the camp fire. "The country rock is in contact with the reef You could have a reef that continues to real depth, and we have traced the strike for over two miles. Tomorrow I will mark out the spots where you must sink your prospect holes."
"There are mineralized ore bodies right across this country," Ralph told him. "The continuation of the great gold crescent of the Witwatersrand and Pilgrims Rest and Toti gold fields curves right across here-" Ralph broke off. "But you have the special gift, I have heard them say you can smell gold at fifty miles." Harry dismissed the suggestion with a deprecating wave of his coffee mug, but Ralph went on, "And I have the wagons and capital to grubstake a prospecting venture, and to develop the finds that are made. I like you, Harry, I think we would work well together, the Harkness Mine first, and after that, who knows, the whole bloody country, perhaps." Harry started to speak, but Ralph put a hand on his forearm to stop him.
"This continent is a treasure chest. The Kimberley diamond fields and the Witwatersrand ban ket side by side, all the diamond and gold in the one bucket who would ever have believed it?" "Ralph." Harry shook his head. "I have already thrown in my lot with Mr. Rhodes." Ralph sighed, and stared into the flames of the fire for a full minute.
Then he relit the stump of his dead cheroot, and began to argue and cajole in his plausible and convincing way. An hour later as he rolled into his blanket, he repeated his offer.
"Under Rhodes you will never be your own man. You will always be a servant." "You work for Mr. Rhodes, Ralph." "I contract to him, Harry, but the profit or loss is mine. I still own my soul." "And I don't," Harry chuckled.
"Come in with me, Harry. Find out what it feels like to bet your own cards, to calculate your own risks, to give the orders, instead of taking them. Life is all a game, Harry, and there' is only one way to play it, flat out." "I'm Rhodes" man." "When the time comes, then we will talk again," Ralph said and pulled the blanket over his head.
Within minutes his breathing was slow and regular.
In the morning Harry marked the sites for the prospect bores with cairns of stone, and Ralph realized how cunningly he was quartering the extended line of the reef to pick it up again at depth. By noon Harry had finished, and as they up-saddled, Ralph made a swift calculation and realized it would be another two days before Cathy's twin sisters could arrive at the base camp from Khami Mission.
"Seeing that we have come so far, we should make a sweep out towards the east before turning back. God knows what we could find more gold, diamonds." And when Harry hesitated, "Mr. Rhodes will have gone on to Bulawayo already. He'll be holding court there for the next month at least, he won't even miss you." Harry thought for a moment, then grinned like a schoolboy about to bunk his classes to raid the orchard. "Let's go" he said.
They rode slowly, and at each river course they dismounted to pan the gravel from the bottom of the stagnant green pools. Wherever the bedrock outcropped above the overburden of earth, they broke off samples. They searched out the burrows of ant-bear and porcupine, and the nests of the swarming white termites to find what grains and chippings they had brought up from depth.
On the third day, Harry said, "We've picked up a dozen likely shows of colour. I particularly liked those crystals of beryllium, they are a good pointer to emerald deposits." Harry's enthusiasm had increased with each mile ridden, but now they had reached the end of the outward leg of their eastward sweep, and even Ralph realized that it was time to turn back. They had been out five days from the base camp, they had exhausted their coffee and sugar and meal, and Cathy would be anxious by now.
They took one last look at the country that they must leave unexplored for the time being.
"It's beautiful," Harry murmured. "I have never seen a more magnificent land. What is the name of that range of hills?" "That's the southern end of the Matopos." "I have heard Mr. "Rhodes speak of them. Aren't they the sacred hills of the Matabele?" Ralph nodded.
"If I believed in witchcraft-'he broke off and chuckled with embarrassment. "There is something about those hills." There was the first rosy flush of the sunset in the western sky, and it turned the smooth polished rock of those distant brooding hills to pink marble, while their crests were garlanded with fragile twists of cloud coloured by the softly slanting rays to ivory and ashes.
"There is a secret cave hidden in there where a witch who presided over the tribes used to live. My father took in a commando and destroyed her at the beginning of the war against Lobengula." "I have heard the story, it is one of the legends, already." "Well, it's true.
They say-" Ralph broke off and studied the tall and turreted range of rock with a thoughtful expression. "Those are not clouds, Harry," he said at last. "That's smoke. Yet there are no kraals in the Matopos.
It could be a bush-fire, but I don't think so, it's not on a broad front." "Then where is the smoke coming from?" "That is what we are going to find out," Ralph replied, and before Harry could protest, he had started his horse, and was cantering across the plains of pale winter grass towards the high rampart of bare granite that blocked off the horizon.
Matabele warrior sat aloof from the men who swarmed about the earthen kilns. He sat in the A meagre shade of a twisted cripple-wood tree. He was lean, so that the rack of his ribs showed through the covering of elastic muscle under his cloak. His skin was burned by the sun to the deep midnight black of carved ebony, and it was glossed with health, like the coat of a race-trained thoroughbred, blemished only by the old healed gunshot wounds on his chest and back.
He wore a simple kilt and cloak of tanned leather, no feathers nor war rattles, no regimentals of fur nor plumes of marabou stork upon his bared head. He was unarmed, for the white men had made roaring bonfires of the long rawhide shields and carried away the broad silver assegais by the wagon-load, they had confiscated also the Martini-Henry rifles with which the Company had paid King Lobengula. for the concession to all the mineral wealth beneath this land.
On his head the warrior wore the head ring of the and una it was of gum and clay, woven permanently into his own hair and black and hard as iron. This badge of rank announced to the world that he had once been a councillor of Lobengula, the last king of the Matabele. The simple ring declared his royal bloodline, the Zanzi blood of the Kumalo tribe, running back pure and unbroken to old Zululand, a thousand miles and more away in the south.
Mzilikazi had been this man's grandfather, Mzilikazi who had defied the tyrant Chaka and led his people away towards the north.
Mzilikazi, the little chief who had slaughtered a million souls on that terrible northward march, and in the process had become a mighty emperor, as powerful and cruel as Chaka had ever been. Mzilikazi, his grandfather, who had finally brought his nation- to this rich and beautiful land, who had been the first to enter these magical hills and to listen to the myriad weird voices of the Umlimo, the Chosen One, the witch and oracle of the Matopos.
Lobengula, son of Mzilikazi, who ruled the Matabele after the old king's death, had been the young man's blood uncle. It was Lobengula who had granted him the honours of the and una head ring and appointed him commander of one of the elite fighting imp is But now Lobengula was dead, and the young and una impi had been blown to nothing by the Maxim guns on the bank of the Shangani river, and the same Maxim guns had branded him with those deeply dimpled cicatrices upon his trunk.
His name was Bazo, which means "the axe," but more often now men spoke of him as "the Wanderer." He had sat beneath the cripple-wood tree all that day, watching the iron smiths perform their rites, for the birth of iron was a mystery to all but these adepts. The smiths were not Matabele, but were members of an older tribe, an ancient people whose origins were somehow interwoven with those haunted and ruined stone walls of Great Zimbabwe.
Although the new white masters and their queen beyond the seas had decreed that the Matabele no longer own aniahoh, slaves, yet these Rozwi iron smiths were still the dogs of the Matabele, still performed their art at the behest of their warlike masters.
The ten oldest and wisest of the Rozwi smiths, had selected the ore from the quarry, deliberating over each fragment like vain women choosing ceramic beads from the trader's stock. They had judged the iron ore for colour and weight, for the perfection of the metal it contained and for its purity from foreign matter, and then they had broken up the ore upon the rock anvils until each lump was the perfect size. While they worked with care and total preoccupation, some of their apprentices were cutting and burning the tree trunks in the charcoal pits, controlling the combustion with layers of earth and finally quenching it with clay pots of water. Meanwhile, yet another party of apprentices made the long journey to the limestone quarries and returned with the crushed catalyst in leather bags slung upon the backs of the baggage bullocks. When the master smiths had grudgingly approved the quality of charcoal and limestone, then the building of the rows of clay kilns could begin.
Each kiln was shaped like the torso of a heavily pregnant woman, like a fat, domed belly, in which the layers of iron ore and charcoal and limestone would be packed. At the lower end of the kiln was the crotch guarded by symbolically truncated clay thighs between which was the narrow opening into which would be introduced the buck horn nozzle of the leather bellows.
When all was ready, the head smith chopped the head off the sacrificed rooster, and passed down the line of kilns, sprinkling them with hot blood while he chanted the first of the ancient incantations to the spirit of iron.
Bazo watched with fascination, and a prickle of superstitious awe on his skin, as fire was introduced through the vaginal openings of the kilns, the magical moment of impregnation which was greeted with a joyous cry by the assembled smiths. Then the young apprentices pumped the leather bellows in a kind of religious ecstasy, singing the hymns which ensured the success of the smelting and set the rhythm for the work on the bellows. When each fell back exhausted, there was another to take his place and keep the steady blast of air driving deeply into the kiln.
A faint haze of smoke hung over the workings, like sea fret on a still summer's day, it rose to eddy slowly around the tall bald peaks of the hills. Now at last it was time to draw the smelting, and as the head smith freed the clay plug from the first kiln, a joyous shout of thanksgiving went up from the assembly at the bright glowing rush of the molten metal from the womb of the furnace.
Bazo found himself trembling with excitement and wonder, as he had when his first son had been born in one of the caves in these self-same hills.
"The birth of the blades," he whispered aloud, and in his imagination he could already hear the dinning "of the hammers as they beat out the metal, and the sizzling hiss of the quenching that would set the temper of the edge and point of the broad stabbing spears.
A touch on his shoulder startled him from his reverie, and he glanced up at the woman who stood over him, and then he smiled. She wore the leather skirt, decorated with beads, of the married woman, but there were no bangles nor bracelets on her smooth young limbs.
Her body was straight and hard, her naked breasts symmetrical and perfectly proportioned. Although she had already suckled a fine son, they were not marred by stretch marks. Her belly was concave as a greyhound's, while the skin was smooth and drum-tight. Her neck was long and graceful, her nose straight and narrow, her eyes slanted above the Egyptian arches of her cheekbones. Her features were those of a statuette from the tomb of some long-dead pharaoh.
"Tanase," said Bazo, "another thousand blades." Then he saw her expression and broke off. "What is it?"he asked with quick concern.
"Riders," she said. "Two of them. White men coming from the southern forests, and coming swiftly.". Bazo rose in a single movement, quick as a leopard alarmed by the approach of the hunters.
Only now his full height and the breadth of his shoulders were evident, for he towered a full head over the iron smiths about him. He lifted the buckhom whistle that hung on a thong about his neck and blew a single sharp blast. Immediately all the scurry and bustle amongst the kilns ceased and the master smith hurried to him.
"How long to draw the rest of the smelting and break down the kilns?" Bazo demanded. "TWO days, oh Lord," answered the iron-worker, bobbing respectfully. His eyes were bloodshot from the smoke of the furnace, and the smoke seemed to have stained his cap of white woolly hair to dingy yellow.
"You have until dawn.-" "Lord!" "Work all night, but screen the fires from the plain." Bazo turned from him and strode up the steep incline to where twenty other men waited below the granite cap of the hill.
Like Bazo, they wore only simple leather kilts, and were unarmed, but their bodies were tempered and fined down by war and the training for war, and there was the warrior's arrogance in their stance as they rose to acknowledge their and una and their eyes were bright and fierce.
There was no doubt that these were Matabele, not aniahoh dogs.
"Follow!" ordered Bazo, and led them at a trot along the lower contour of the hill. There was a narrow cave in the base of the cliff, and Bazo drew aside the hanging creepers that screened the mouth and stopped into the gloomy interior. The cave was only ten paces deep, and it ended abruptly in a scree of loose boulders.
Bazo gestured and two of his men went up to the end wall of the cave and rolled aside the boulders. In the recess beyond there was the glint of polished metal like the scales of a slumbering reptile. As Bazo moved out of the entrance, the slanting rays of the setting sun struck deeply into the cave, lighting the secret arsenal. The assegais were stacked in bundles of ten and bound together with rawhide thongs.
The two warriors lifted out a bundle, broke the thongs and swiftly passed the weapons down the line Of men, until each was armed. Bazo hefted the stabbing spear. The shaft was of polished red heartwood of mukusi, the blood-wood tree. The blade was hand-forged, wide as Bazo's palm and long as his forearm. He could have shaved the hair from the back of his hand with the honed edge.
He had felt naked until that moment, but now, with the familiar weight and balance in his hand, he was a man again. He gestured to his men to roll the boulders back into place covering the cache of bright new blades, and then he led them back along the path. On the shoulder of the hill, Tanase waited for him on the ledge of rock which commanded a wide view across the grassy plains, and beyond them the blue forests dreamed softly in the evening light.
"There, she pointed, and Bazo saw them instantly.
Two horses, moving at an easy canter. They had reached the foot of the hills and were riding along them, scouting for an easy route.
The riders peered up at the -tangle of boulders and at the smooth pearly sheets of granite which offered no foothold.
There were only two access trails to the valley of the iron smiths each of them narrow and steep, with necks which could be easily defended. Bazo turned and looked back. The smoke from the kilns was dissipating, there were only a few pale ribbons twisting along the grey granite cliffs. By morning there would be nothing to lead a curious traveller to the secret place, but there was still an hour of daylight, less perhaps, for the night comes with startling rapidity in Africa -above the Limpopo river.
"I must delay them until dark, Bazo said. "I must turn them before they find the path." "If they will not be turned?" Tanase asked softly, and in reply Bazo merely altered his grip on the broad assegai in his right hand, and then quickly drew Tanase back off the rocky ledge, for the horsemen had halted and one of them, the taller and broader man, was carefully sweeping the hillside with a pair of binoculars.
"Where is my son?" Bazo asked. "At the cave,"Tanase replied.
"You know what to do if-" he did not have to go on, and Tanase nodded.
"I know," she said softly, and Bazo turned from her and went bounding down the steep pathway with twenty armed amadoda at his back.
At the narrow place which Bazo had marked, he stopped. He did not have to speak, but at a single gesture of his free hand his men slipped off the narrow trail and disappeared into the crevices and cracks of the gigantic boulders that stood tall on either hand. In seconds there was no sign of them, and Bazo broke off a branch from one of the dwarfed trees that grew in a rocky pocket, and he ran back, sweeping the trail of all sign that might alert a wary man to the ambush. Then he placed his assegai on a shoulder-high ledge beside the path and covered it with the green branch. It was within easy reach if he were forced to guide the white riders up the trail.
"I will try to turn them, but if I cannot, wait until they reach this place," he called to the hidden warriors. "Then do it swiftly."
His men were spread out for two hundred paces along both sides of the trail, but they were concentrated here at the bend. A good ambush must have depth to it, so if a victim breaks through the first. rank of attackers, there will be others waiting for him beyond. This was a good ambush. in bad ground on a steep narrow trail where a horse could not turn readily nor go ahead at full gallop. Bazo nodded to himself with satisfaction, then unarmed and shield less he went springing down the trail towards the plain, agile as a klipspringer over the rough track.
"It will be dark in half an hour," Harry Mellow called after Ralph. "We should find a place to camp." "There must be a path," Ralph rode with one fist on his hip and the felt hat pushed back on his head, looking up the wild cliff.
"What do you expect to find up there?" "I don't know, and that's the devil of it." Ralph grinned over his shoulder. He was unprepared and twisted off balance, so when his horse shied violently under him, he almost lost a stirrup and had to grab at the pommel of the saddle to prevent himself going over, but at the same time he yelled to Harry.
"Cover me!" and with his free hand Ralph tugged the Winchester rifle from its leather boot under his knee. His horse was rearing and skittering in a tight circle so he could not get the rifle up. He knew that he was blocking Harry's line of fire, and that for those long seconds he was completely defenceless, and he swore helplessly, anticipating a rush of dark spearmen out of the broken rock and scrub at the foot of the cliff.
Then he realized there was only one man, and that he was unarmed, and again he yelled at Harry, with even more urgency, for he had heard the clash of the breech block behind him as the American loaded and cocked.
"Hold it! Don't shoot!" The gelding reared again, but this time Ralph jerked it down and then stared at the tall black man who had stepped so silently and. unexpectedly out of the crevice of a fractured granite block.
"Who are you?" he demanded, his voice rasping with the shock, which still screwed his guts into a ball and charged his veins with a quick rush of blood. "Damn you, I nearly shot you." Ralph caught himself, and this time repeated in fluent Sindebele, the Matabele language, "Who are you?" The tall man in the plain leather cloak inclined his head slightly, but his body remained absolutely still, the empty hands hanging at his side.
"What manner of question is that," he asked gravely, "for one brother to ask another?" Ralph stared at him. Taking in the and una head ring on his brow and the gaunt features, scored and riven by the crags and deep lines of some terrible suffering, a sorrow or an illness that must have transported this man to the frontiers of hell itself.
It moved Ralph deeply to look upon that riven face, for there was something, the fierce dark eyes and the tone of the deep measured voice that was so familiar, and yet so altered as to be unrecognizable.
"Henshaw," the man spoke again, using Ralph Ballantyne's Matabele praise name. "Henshaw, the Hawk, do you not know me? Have these few short years changed us so?" Ralph shook his head in disbelief, and his voice was full of wonder. "Bazo, it is not you surely, it is not you? Did you not after all die with your impi at Shanganir Ralph kicked both feet out of the stirrups and jumped to the ground. "Bazo.
It is you!" He ran to embrace the Matabele. "My brother, my black brother," he said, and there was the lift and lilt of pure joy in his voice.
Bazo accepted the embrace quietly, his hands still hanging at his sides, and at last Ralph stood back and held him at arm's length.
"At Shaingani, after the guns were still, I left the wagons and walked out across the open pan. Your men were there, the Moles-that-burrow-under-a-mountain." That was the name that King Lobengula himself had given to Bazo's impi, Izinivukuzane Ezembintaba.
"I knew them by their red shields, by the plumes of the marabou. stork and the headbands of fur from the burrowing mole." These were the regimentals bestowed upon the impi by the old king, and Bazo's eyes turned luminous with the agony of memory as Ralph went on. "Your men were there, Bazo, lying upon each other like the fallen leaves of the forest. I searched for you, rolling the dead men onto their backs to see their faces, but there were so many of them." "So many," Bazo agreed, and only his eyes betrayed his emotion.
"And there was so little time to look for you," Ralph explained quietly. "I could only search slowly, with care, for some of your men were fanisa file." It was an old Zulu trick to sham dead on the battlefield and wait for the enemy to come out to loot and count the kill. "I did not want an assegai between my shoulder-blades. Then the laager broke up and the wagons rolled on towards the king's kraal. I had to leave." "I was there," Bazo told him, and drew aside the leather cloak. Ralph stared at the dreadful scars, and then dropped his gaze, while Bazo covered his torso again. "I was lying amongst the dead men." "And now?" Ralph asked. "Now that it is all over, what are you doing here?" "What does a warrior do when the war is over, when the imp is are broken and disarmed, and the king is dead?" Bazo shrugged.
"I am a hunter of wild honey now." He glanced up the cliff at where the last smoke wisps were blending into the darkening sky as the sun touched the tops of the western forest. "I was smoking a hive when I saw you coming." "Ah!" Ralph nodded. "It was that smoke that led us to YOU-" "Then it was fortunate smoke, my brother Henshaw." "You still call me brother?" Ralph marvelled gently.
"When it might have been I who fired the bullets--" He did not complete the sentence, but glanced down at Bazo's chest.
"No man can be held to account for what he does in the madness of battle," Bazo answered. "If I had reached the wagons that day," he shrugged, "you might be the one who carried the scars." "Bazo," Ralph gestured to Harry to ride forward, this is Harry Mellow, he is a man who understands the mystery of the earth, who can find the gold and the iron which we seek." "Nkosi, I see you." Bazo greeted Harry gravely, calling him "Lord" and not allowing his deep resentment to show for an instant. His king had died and his nation had been destroyed by, the weird passion of the white men for that accursed yellow metal.
"Bazo and I grew up together on the Kimberley diamond fields. I have never had a dearer friend," Ralph explained quickly, and then turned impetuously back to Bazo. "We have a little food, you will share it with us, Bazo. "This time Ralph caught the shift in Bazo's gaze, and he insisted. "Camp with us here. There is much to talk about." "I have my woman and my son with me," Bazo answered. "They are in the hills." "Bring them," Ralph told him. "Go quickly, before darkness, falls, and bring them down into camp." Bazo alerted his men with the dusk call of the francolin, and one of them stepped out of the ambush onto the path. "I will hold the white men at the foot of the hills for tonight," Bazo told him quietly. "Perhaps I can send them away satisfied, without trying to find the valley. However, warn the iron smiths that the kilns must be quenched by dawn tomorrow, there must be no shred of smoke." Bazo went on giving his orders, the finished weapons and freshly smelted metal to be hidden and the paths swept clear of spoor, the iron smiths to retreat along the secret path deeper into the hills, the Matabele guards to cover their retreat. "I will follow you when the white men have gone. Wait for me at the peak of the Blind Ape." "Nkosi." They saluted him, and slipped away, silent as the night-prowling leopard, into the failing light. Bazo took the fork in the path, and when he reached the rocky spur on the prow of the hill, there was no need for him to call. Tanase was waiting for him with the boy carried on her hip, the roll of sleeping-mats upon her head and the leather grain-bag slung on her back.
"It is Henshaw," he told her, and heard the serpentine hiss of her breath. Though he could not see her expression, he knew what it must be.
"He is the spawn of the white dog who violated the sacred places-" "He is my friend," Bazo said.
"You have taken the oath," she reminded him fiercely. "How can any white man still be your friend?" "He was my friend, then." "Do you remember the vision that came to me, before the powers of divination were torn from me by this man's father?" "Tanase," Bazo ignored the question, "we must go down to him. If he sees my wife and my son are with me, then there will be no suspicions. He will believe that we are indeed hunting the honey of wild bees. Follow me." He turned back down the trail, and she followed him closely, and her voice sank to a whisper, of which he could clearly hear every word. He did not look back at her, but he listened.
"Do you remember my vision, Bazo? On the first day that I met this man whom you call the Hawk, I warned you. Before the birth of your son, when the veil of my virginity was still un pierced before the white horsemen came with their three-legged guns that laugh like the river demons that live in the rocks where the Zambezi river falls.
When you still called him "brother" and "friend", I warned you against him." "I remember." Bazo's own voice had sunk as low as hers.
"In my vision I saw you high upon a tree, Bazo." "Yes," he whispered, going on down the trail without looking back at her. There was a superstitious tremor in Bazo's voice now, for his beautiful young wife had once been the apprentice of the mad sorcerer, Pemba. When Bazo at the head of his impi had stormed the sorcerer's mountain stronghold, he had hacked off Pemba's head and taken Tanase as a prize of war, but the spirits had claimed her back.
On the eve of the wedding-feast when Bazo would have taken the virgin Tanase as his first bride, as his senior wife, an ancient wizard had come down out of the Matopos Hills and led her away, and Bazo had been powerless to intervene, for she had been the daughter of the dark spirits and she had come to her destiny in these hills.
"The vision was so clear that I wept," Tanase reminded him, and Bazo shivered.
In that secret cave in the Matopos the full power of the spirits had descended upon Tanase, and she had become the Umlimo, the chosen one, the oracle. It was Tanase, speaking in the weird voices of the spirits, who had warned Lobengula of his fate. It was Tanase who had foreseen the coming of the white men with their wonderful machines that turned the night to noon day, and their little mirrors that sparkled like stars upon the hills, speeding messages vast distances across the plains. No man could doubt that she had once had the power of the oracle, and that in her mystic trances she had been able to see through the dark veils of the future for the Matabele nation.
However, these strange powers had depended upon her maidenhead remaining un pierced She had warned Bazo of this, pleading with him to strip her of her virginity and rid her of these terrible powers, but he had demurred, bound by law and custom, until it had been too late and the wizards had come down from the hills to claim her.
At the beginning of the war which the white men had carried so swiftly to Lobengula's kraal at GuBulawayo, a small band had detached from the main army, they were the hardest and cruel lest led by Bakela the Fist, himself a hard fierce man. They had ridden swiftly into these hills. They had followed the secret path that Bakela had discovered twenty-five years or so before, and galloped to the secret cavern of the Umlimo. For Bakela knew the value of the oracle, knew how sacred she was, and how her destruction would throw the Matabele nation into despair. Bakela's riders had shot down the guardians of the caverns, and forced their way within. Two of Bakela's troopers had found Tanase, young and lovely and naked in the deepest recesses of the cave, and they had violated her, savagely tearing the maidenhead that she had once offered so lovingly to Bazo. They had rutted upon her until her virgin blood splattered the floor of the cavern and her screams had guided Bakela "to them.
He had driven his men off her with fist and boot, and when they were alone, he had looked down upon Tanase where she lay bloodied and broken at his feet. , Then strangely, this hard fierce man had been overcome with compassion. Though he had ridden this dangerous road for the sole purpose of destroying the Umlimo, yet the bestial behaviour of his troopers had weakened his resolve, had placed some burden of recompense upon him.
Bakela must have known that with her virginity torn from her she had lost her powers, for he told her. "You, who were Umlimo, are Umlimo no longer." He had accomplished her destruction without using rifle or sword, and he turned and strode from the dark cavern, leaving her life in exchange for her virginity and the loss of her dark powers.
She had told the story to Bazo many times, and he knew that the mists of time had closed before her eyes and that now they shrouded the future from her, but no man could doubt that she had once possessed the power of the Sight.
Thus Bazo shivered briefly, and he felt the ghost fingers touching the nape of his neck as Tanase went on in her husky whisper.
"I wept, Bazo my lord, when I saw you upon the high tree, and while I wept, the man you call Henshaw the Hawk was looking up at you and smiling!" "They ate cold bully beef straight from the cans, using the blade of a hunting knife to spoon it out, and "passing the cans from hand to hand. There was no coffee, so they washed down the glutinous mess with sun warmed draughts from the felt-covered water bottles, and then Ralph shared out his remaining cheroots with Harry Mellow and Bazo. They lit them with burning twigs from the fire and smoked in silence for a long time.
Close at hand a hyena warbled and sobbed in the darkness, drawn by the firelight and the smell of food, while Further out across the plain, the lions were hunting, sweeping towards the moonrise, not roaring before the kill but coughing throatily to keep in contact with the other animals in the pride.
Tanase, with the child on her lap, sat at the edge of the firelight, aloof from the men, and they ignored her. It would have offended Bazo if they had paid undue attention to her, but now Ralph took the cheroot from his mouth and glanced in her direction.
"What is your son's name?" he asked Bazo, and there was a heartbeat of hesitation before Bazo replied.
"He is called Tungata Zebiwe." Ralph frowned quickly, but checked the harsh words that rose to his lips. Instead he said, "He is a fine boy." Bazo held out his hand towards the child, but Tanase restrained him for a moment with a quiet ferocity.
"Let him come to me," Bazo ordered sharply, and reluctantly Tanase let the sleepy child stagger to his father and climb into his arms.
He was a pretty, dark toffee colour, with a pot belly and chubby limbs. Except for the bracelets of copper wire at his wrists and a single string of beads around his waist, he was stark naked. His hair was a dark fluffy cap and his eyes were owlish with sleep as he stared at Ralph.
"Tungata Zebiwe," Ralph repeated his name, and then leaned across to stroke his head. The child made no attempt to pull away, nor did he show any trace of alarm, but in the shadows Tanase hissed softly and reached out as if to take the child back, then dropped her hand again.
"The Seeker after what has been stolen," Ralph translated the child's name, and caught the mother's dark eyes. "The Seeker after justice that is a heavy duty to place upon one so young," he said quietly. "You would make him an avenger of injustice inflicted before his birth?" Then smoothly Ralph seemed to change to a different subject.
"Do you remember, Bazo, the day we first met? You were a green youth sent by your father and his brother the king to work on the diamond fields. I was even younger and greener, when my father and I found you in the veld and he signed you to a three-year labour contract, before any other digger could put his brand on you." The lines -of suffering and sorrow that marred Bazo's features seemed to smooth away as he smiled, and for a few moments he was that young guileless and carefree youth again.
"It was only later I found out that the reason Lobengula sent you and thousands of other young bucks like you to the fields was to bring home as many fat diamonds as you could steal." They both laughed, Ralph ruefully and Bazo with a vestige of his youthful glee.
Tobengula must have hidden a great treasure somewhere. Jameson never did find those diamonds when he captured GuBulawayo." "Do you remember the hunting falcon, Scipio?" Bazo asked.
"And the giant spider that won us our first gold sovereigns at the Kimberley spider-fights," Ralph continued, and they chatted animatedly, recalling how they had worked shoulder to shoulder in the great diamond pit, and the mad diversions with which they had broken the dreadful monotony of that brutal labour.
Not understanding the language, Harry Mellow rolled in his blanket and pulled the corner of it over his head. In the shadows Tanase sat, still as a beautiful ebony carving, not smiling when the men laughed but with her eyes fastened on their lips as they spoke.
Abruptly Ralph changed the subject again. "I have a son also," he said. "He was born before the war, so he is a year or two older than yours." The laughter dried immediately, and although Bazo's expression was neutral, his eyes were wary.
"They could be friends, as we are friends," Ralph suggested, and Tanase looked protectively towards her son, but Bazo did not reply.
"You and I could work side by side once more," Ralph went on.
"Soon I will have a rich gold mine in the forests yonder, and I will need a senior and una in charge of the hundreds of men who will come to work." "I am a warrior," said Bazo, "no longer a mine labourer." "The world changes, Bazo," Ralph answered softly. "There are no longer any warriors in Matabeleland. The shields are burned. The assegai blades are broken. The eyes are no longer red, Bazo, for the wars are finished. The eyes are white now, and there will be peace in this land for a thousand years." Bazo was silent.
"Come with me, Bazo. Bring your son to learn the white man's skills. One day he will read and write, and be a man of consequence, not merely a hunter of wild honey. Forget this sad name you have given him, and find another. Call him a joyous name and bring him to meet my own son. Together they will enjoy this beautiful land, and be brothers as we once were brothers!
Bazo sighed then. "Perhaps you are right, Henshaw. As you say, the imp is are disbanded. Those who were once warriors now work on the roads that Lodzi is building! The Matabele always had difficulty in pronouncing the sound of W, thus Rhodes was "Lodzi', and Bazo was referring to the system of conscripted labour which the Chief Native Commissioner, General Mungo St. John, had introduced in Matabeleland.
Bazo sighed again. "If a man must work, it is better that he work in dignity at a task of importance with somebody whom he respects. When will you begin to dig for your gold, Henshaw?" "After the rains, Bazo.
But come with me now. Bring your woman and your son-" Bazo held up one hand to silence him. "After the rains, after the great storms, we will talk again, Henshaw," Bazo said quietly, and Tanase nodded her head and for the first time she smiled, an odd little smile of approval. Bazo was right to dissemble and to lull Henshaw with vague promises.
With her specially trained sense of awareness, Tanase recognized that despite the direct gaze of his green eyes and his open, almost childlike smile, this young white man was harder and more dangerous than even Bakela, his father.
"After the great storms," Bazo had promised him, and that had a hidden meaning. The great storm was the secret thing that they were planning.
"First there are things that I must do, but once they are done, I will seek you out," Bazo promised.
Bazo led up the steep gradient of the narrow pathway through the deep gut of the granite hills. Tanase followed a dozen paces behind him. The roll of sleeping-mats and the iron cooking pot were carried easily on her head, and her spine was straight and her step fluid and smooth to balance the load. The boy skipped at her side, singing a childish nonsense in a high piping chant. He was the only one unaffected by the brooding menace of this dark valley. The scrub on each side of the path was dense and armed with vicious thorn. The silence was oppressive, for no bird sang and no small animal rustled the leaves.
Bazo stepped lightly across the boulders in the bed of the narrow stream that crossed the trail and paused to look back as Tanase scooped a handful of the cool water and held it to the boy's lips. Then they went on.
The path ended abruptly against a sheer cliff of pearly granite, and Bazo stopped and leaned on the light throwing, spear, the only weapon that the white administrator in Bulawayo allowed a black man to carry to protect himself and his family against the predators which infested the wilderness. It was a frail thing, not an instrument of war like the broad stabbing assegai.
Leaning his weight on the spear, Bazo looked up the tall cliff.
There was a watchman's thatched hut on a ledge just below the summit, and now a quavering old man's voice challenged him.
"Who dares the secret pass?" Bazo lifted his chin and answered in a bull-bellow which sent the echoes bouncing from the cliffs.
"Bazo, son of Gandang. Bazo, Induna of the Kumalo blood royal."
Then, not deigning to await the reply, Bazo stepped through the convoluted portals of granite, into the passageway that split the cliff.
The passage was narrow, barely wide enough for two grown men to walk shoulder to shoulder, and the floor was clean white sand with chips of bright mica that sparkled and crunched like sugar under his bare feet. The passage twisted like a maimed serpent, and then abruptly debouched into a sweeping valley of lush green, bisected by a tinkling stream that spilled from the rock-face near where Bazo stood.
The valley was a circular basin a mile or so across, completely walled in by the high cliffs. In its centre was a tiny village of thatched huts, but as Tanase came out of the mouth of the secret passage and stopped beside Bazo, both of them looked beyond the village to the opposite wall of the valley.
In the base of the cliff, the low wide opening of a cavern snarled at them like a toothless mouth. Neither of them spoke for many minutes as they stared across at the sacred cave, but the memories came crowding back upon both of them. In that cavern Tanase had undergone the frightful indoctrination and initiation which had transformed her into the Umlimo, and on the rocky floor she had suffered the cruel abuse that had stripped her of her powers, and made her an ordinary woman once more.
Now in that cavern another being presided in Tanase's place as spiritual head of the nation, for the powers of the UmliMO never die, but are passed on from one initiate to another, as they had been from forgotten times when the ancients had built the great stone ruins of the Zimbabwe.
"Are you ready?" Bazo asked at last.
"I am ready, lord," she replied, and they started down towards the village. But before they reached it, they were met by a weird procession of creatures, some of them barely recognizable as human, for they crawled on all fours and whined and yapped like animals. There were ancient withered crones with empty dugs flapping against their bellies, pretty little girls with pubescent breast-buds and blank unsmiling faces, old men with deformed limbs who dragged themselves in the dust, and slim mincing youths with well formed muscular bodies and mad eyes that rolled back into their skulls, all of them decked with the gruesome paraphernalia of the necromancer and wizard, bladders of lion and crocodile, skin of python and bird, skulls and teeth of ape, of man, and of beast. They ringed Bazo and Tanase, prancing and mewling and leering, until Bazo felt his skin itching with the insects of loathing and he lifted his son high on his shoulder away from their touching, prying hands.
Tanase was unperturbed, for this fantastic throng had once been her own retinue, and she stood expressionless as one of the horrible witches crawled to her and slobbered and frothed over her bare feet.
Dancing and chanting, the guardians of the Umlimo led the two wanderers into the village, and then disappeared, slipping away into the thatched huts.
However, they were not alone. In the centre of the village stood a setenghi, an airy open-sided hut of white mopani poles, and a roof of neat thatch. In the shade of the setenghi there "were men waiting, but" these were entirely different from the strange throng which had met them at the entrance of the village.
Each of these men sat upon a low carved stool. Though some of them were grossly fat and others skinny and stooped, they were all of them surrounded by an almost palpable air of dignity and authority.
Though some were white-headed with snowy woollen beards and deeply wrinkled faces and others were in the prime of their life and powers, they all of them wore upon their heads the simple black head ring of gum and clay.
Here assembled in the secret valley of the Umlimo were what was left of the leaders of the Matabele nation, men who had once stood at the head of the fighting imp is as they formed the bull-formation of encircling horns and crushing chest. Some of them, the eldest, remembered the exodus from the south driven by the mounted Boer horsemen, they had fought as young men under great Mzilikazi himself and still wore with pride the tassels of honour which he had awarded to them.
All of them had sat upon the councils of King Lobengula, son of great Mzilikazi, and had been on the Hills of the Indunas that fateful day when the king had stood before the assembled regiments and had faced eastward, the direction from which the column of wagons and white soldiers was entering Matabeleland. They had shouted the royal salute "Bayete!" as Lobengula poised his great swollen body on gout-distorted legs and then defiantly hurled the toy spear of kingship at the invaders who were still out of sight beyond the blue horizon. These were the indunas who had led their fighting men past the king in review singing his praises and the battle hymns of the regiments, saluting Lobengula for the last time, and then going out to where the Maxim guns waited for them behind the wagon-sides and plaited thorn bush walls of the white men's laager.
In the midst of this distinguished assembly sat three men the three surviving sons of Mzilikazi, the noblest and most revered of all the indunas. Somabula, on the left, was the eldest, victor of a hundred fierce battles, the warrior for whom the lovely Somabula forests had been named. On the right was Babiaan, wise and brave. The honourable scars laced his torso and limbs. However, it was the man in the centre who rose from his ornately carved stool of wild ebony and came out into the sunlight.
"Gandang, my father, I see you and my heart sings," cried Bazo. see you, my son," said Gandang, his handsome face made almost beautiful by the joy that lit it, and when Bazo knelt before him, he touched his head in blessing, and then raised him up with his own hand.
"Babo!" Tanase clapped her hands respectfully before her face, and when Gandang nodded his acknowledgement, she withdrew quietly to the nearest hut, where she could listen from behind the thin reed wall.
It was not for a woman to attend the high councils of the nation.
In the time of the kings, a lesser woman would have been Weared to death for daring to approach an indaba such as this. Tanase, however, was the one that had once been the Umlimo, and she was still the mouth-piece of -the chosen one. Besides which, the world was changing, the kings had passed, the old customs were dying with them, and this woman wielded more power than any but the highest of the assembled indunas. Nevertheless, she made the gesture of retiring to the closed hut, so as not to offend the memory of the old ways.
Gandang clapped his hands and the slaves brought a stool and a baked clay beer pot to Bazo. Bazo refreshed himself with a long draught of the thick tart bubbling gruel and then he greeted his fellow indunas in strict order of their seniority, beginning with Somabula and going slowly down the ranks, and while he did so he found himself mourning their pitiful shrunken numbers, only twenty-six of them were left.
"Kamuza, my cousin." He looked across at the twenty sixth and most junior of the indunas. "My sweetest friend, I see you." Then Bazo did something that was without precedent, he came to his feet and looked over their heads, and went on with the formal greetings.
"I greet you, Manonda, the brave!" he cried. "I see you hanging on the branch of the mkusi tree. Dead by your own hand, choosing death rather than to live as a slave of white men.
The assembled indunas glanced over their own shoulders, following the direction of Bazo's gaze with expressions of superstitious awe.
"Is that you, Ntabene? In life they called you the Mountain, and like a mountain you fell on the banks of the Shangani. I greet you, brave spirit." The assembled indunas understood then. Bazo was calling the roll of honour, and they took up the greeting in a deep growl.
"Sakubona, Ntabene." 41 see you, Tambo. The waters of the Bembesi crossing ran red with your blood." "Sakubona, Tambo,"growled the indunas of Kumalo. Bazo threw aside his cloak and began to dance. It was a swaying sensuous dance and the sweat sprang to gloss his skin and the gunshot wounds glowed upon his chest like dark jewels. Each time he called the name of one of the missing indunas, he lifted his right knee until it touched his chest, and then brought his bare foot down with a crash upon the hard earth, and the assembly echoed the hero's name.
At last Bazo sank down upon his stool, and the silence was fraught with a kind of warlike ecstasy. Slowly all their heads turned until they were looking at Somabula, the eldest, the most senior. The old and una rose and faced them, and then, because this was an indaba of the most weighty consequences, he began to recite the history of the Matabele nation. Though they had all heard it a thousand times since their infancy, the indunas leaned forward avidly. There was no written word, no archives to store this history, it must be remembered verbatim to be passed on to their children, and their children's children.
The story began in Zululand a thousand miles to the south, with the young warrior Mzilikazi defying the mad tyrant Chaka, and fleeing northwards with his single impi from the Zulu might. It followed his wanderings, his battles with the forces that Chaka sent to pursue him, his victories over the little tribes which stood in Mzilikazi's path.
It related how he took the young men of the conquered tribes into his imp is and gave the young women as wives to his warriors. It recorded the growth of Mzilikazi from a fugitive and rebel, to, first, a little chieftain, then to a great war chief, and at last to a mighty king.
Somabula related faithfully the terrible MJecane, the destruction of a million souls as Mzilikazi laid waste to the land between the Orange river and the Limpopo. Then he went on to tell of the coming of the white men, and the new method of waging war. He conjured up the squadrons of sturdy little ponies with bearded men upon their backs, galloping into gunshot range, then wheeling away to reload before the amadoda could carry the blade to them. He retold how the imp is had first met the rolling fortresses, the squares of wagons lashed together with trek chains, the thorn branches woven into the spokes of the wheels and into every gap in the wooden barricade, and how the ranks of Matabele had broken and perished upon those walls of wood and thorn.
His voice sank mournfully as he told of the exodus northwards, driven by the grim bearded men on horseback. He recalled how the weaklings and the infants had died on that tragic trek, and then Somabula's voice rose joyfully as he described the crossing of the Limpopo and the Shashi rivers and the discovery of this beautiful bountiful land beyond.
By then Somabula's voice was strained and hoarse, and he sank down onto his stool and drank from the beer pot while Babiaan, his half-brother, rose to describe the great days, the subjugation of the surrounding tribes, the multiplication of the Matabele cattle-herds until they darkened the sweet golden grasslands, the ascension of Lobengula, "the one who drives like the wind', to the kingship, the fierce raids when the imp is swept hundreds of miles beyond the borders, bringing home the plunder and the slaves, that made the Matabele great.
He reminded them how the regiments, plumed and be furred carrying their great colour matched war shields had paraded before the king like the endless flow of the Zambezi river, how the maidens danced at the Festival of First Fruits, bare-breasted and anointed with shiny red clay, bedecked with wild flowers and beads. He described the secret showing of the treasure, when Lobengula's wives smeared his vast body with thick fat and then stuck the diamonds to it, diamonds stolen by the young bucks from the great pit that the white men had dug far to the south.
Listening to the telling of it, the indunas remembered vividly how the uncut -stones had glowed on the king's gross body like a coat of precious mail, or like the armoured scales of some wondrous mythical reptilian monster. In those days how great had been the king, how imcountable his herds, how fierce and warlike the young men and how beautiful the girls and they nodded and exclaimed in approbation.
Then Babiaan sank down and Gandang rose from his stool. He was tall and powerful, a warrior in the late noon of his powers, his nobility unquestioned, his courage tested and proven a hundred times, and as he took up the tale, his voice was deep and resonant.
He told how the white men had come up from the south. To begin with there were only one or two of them begging small favours, to shoot a few elephant, to trade their beads and bottles for native copper and ivory. Then there were more of them, and their demands were more insistent, more worrisome. They wanted to preach a strange three-headed god, they wanted to dig holes and search for the yellow metal and the bright stones. Deeply troubled, Lobengula had come to this place in the Matopos, and the Umlimo had warned him that when the sacred bird images flew from the ruins of Great Zimbabwe, then there would be no more peace in the land.
"The stone falcons were stolen from the sacred places," Gandang reminded them, "and Lobengula knew then that he could no more resist the white men than his father, Mzilikazi, had been able to." Thus the king had chosen the most powerful of all the white petitioners, "Lodzi" the big blue-eyed man who had eaten up the diamond mines and who was the and una of the white queen across the sea. Hoping to make him an ally, Lobengula had entered into a treaty with Lodzi, in exchange for gold coins and guns, he had granted to him a charter to dig for the buried treasures of the earth exclusively in Lobengula's eastern dominions.
However, Lodzi had sent a great train of wagons with hard fighting men like Selous and Bakela, leading hundreds of young white men armed like soldiers to take possession of the Charter lands. Sorrowfully, Gandang recited the long list of grievances and the breaking of faith, which had culminated in the clatter of Maxim guns, in the destruction of the king's kraal at Bulawayo, and the flight of Lobengula towards the north.
Finally, he described Lobeng'ula's death. Broken-hearted and sick, the king had taken poison, and Gandang himself had laid the body in a secret cave overlooking the valley of the Zambezi, and he had placed all the king's possessions around him, his stool, his head-pillow of ivory, his sleeping mat and fur kaross, his beer pots and beef-bowls, his guns and his war shield, his battle-axe and stabbing-spear, and at the last the little clay pots of glittering diamonds he had laid at Lobengula's gout-distorted feet. When all was done, Gandang had walled up the entrance to the cave, and slaughtered the slaves who had done the work. Then he had led the shattered nation back southwards into captivity.
At the last words, Gandang's hands fell to his sides, his chin sank onto the broad scarred and muscled chest, and a desolate silence descended upon them. At last one of the indunas in the second rank spoke. He was a frail old man with all the teeth missing from his upper jaw. His lower lids drooped away from his watery eyeballs so that the inner flesh showed like pink velvet and his voice was scratchy and breathless.
"Let us choose another king he began, but Bazo interrupted him.
"A king of slaves, a king of captives?" He laughed abruptly, scornfully. "There can be no king until there is a nation once again."
The ancient and una sank back, and gummed his toothless mouth, blinking about him miserably, his mind altering direction in the way of old men.
"The cattle," he murmured, "they have taken our cattle." The others hummed in angry assent. Cattle were the only true wealth, gold and diamonds were white men's baubles, but cattle were the foundation of the nation's welfare.
"One-Bright Eye sends un blooded young bucks of our own people to lord it in the kraals,-" complained another. "One-Bright-Eye" was the Matabele name for General Mungo St. John, the Chief Native Commissioner of Matabeleland.
"These Company police are armed with guns, and they show no respect for the custom and the law. They laugh at the indunas and the tribal elders, and they take the young girls into the bushes.-" "One-Bright-Eye orders all our amadoda, even those of Zanzi blood, respected warriors and the fathers of warriors to labour like lowly amah oh like dirt-eating slaves, digging his roads." The litany of their wrongs, real and fancied, was recited yet again by a succession of angry indunas, while only Somabula and Babiaan and Gandang and Bazo sat aloof. "Lodzi has burned our shields and snapped the blades of the stabbing-spears. He has refused our young men the ancient right to raid the Mashona when all the world knows that the Mashona are our dogs to kill or let live as we choose." "One-Bright Eye has disbanded the imp is and now no man knows who has the right to take a wife, nobody knows which maize field belongs to which village and the people squabble like sickly children over the few scrawny beasts that Lodzi has returned to us." "What must we do?" cried one, and then another strange and unprecedented thing happened. All of them, even Somabula, looked towards the tall scarred young man they called the Wanderer, and they waited expectantly for no one knew what.
Bazo made a sign with one hand and Tanase stooped out through the entrance of the reed hut. Clad only in the brief leather apron, slim and straight and supple, she carried the roll of sleeping-mat in her arms, and she knelt before Bazo and unrolled the mat on the earth at his feet.
The nearest indunas who could see what was concealed in the roll grunted with excitement. Bazo took it up in both hands and held it high. It caught the light, and now they all gasped. The design of the blade was by King Chaka himself-, the metal had been beaten out and polished to burning silver by the -skilled smiths of the Rozwi, and the blood wood shaft had been bound with copper wire and the coarse black hairs from the tail-tuft of a bull elephant.
"Jee!" hissed one of the indunas, the deep drawn-out war chant of the fighting imp is and the others took up the cry, swaying slightly to the force of it, their faces lighting with the first ecstasy of the fighting madness, Gandang put a halt to it. He sprang to his feet and the chant broke off as he made an abrupt gesture.
"One blade will not arm the nation, one blade will not prevail against the little three-legged guns of Lodzi." Bazo rose and stood facing his father.
"Take it in your hands, Babo," he invited, and Gandang shook his head angrily, but he could not take his eyes off the weapon.
"Feel how the heft of it can make a man of even a slave," Bazo insisted quietly, and this time Gandang stretched out his right hand.
His palm was bloodless white with tension and his fingers trembled as they closed around the grip.
"Still it is only one blade, he insisted, but he could not resist the feel of the beautiful weapon and he stabbed into the air with it.
"There are a thousand like this," Bazo whispered. "Where?"
Somabula barked.
"Tell us where, clamoured the other indunas, but Bazo goaded them.
"By the time that the first rains fall, there will be five thousand more. At fifty places in the hills the smiths are at work."
"Where?" Somabula repeated. "Where are they?" "Hidden in the caves of these hills." "Why were we not told?" Babiaan demanded.
Bazo answered, "There would have been those who doubted it could be done, those who counselled caution and delay, and there was no time for talk." Gandang nodded. "We all know he is right, defeat has turned us into chattering old women. But now," he handed the assegai to the man beside him, "feel it!" he ordered.
"How will we assemble the imp is the man asked, turning the weapon in his hands. "They are scattered and broken." "That is the task of each of you. To rebuild the imp is and to make certain that they are ready when the spears are sent out." "How will the spears reach us?" "The women will bring them, in bundles of thatching grass in rolls of sleeping-mats." "Where will we attack? Will we strike at the heart, at the great kraal the white men have built at GuBulawayo?"
"No." Bazo's voice rose fiercely. "That was the madness which destroyed us before. In our rage we forgot the way of Chaka and Mzilikazi, we attacked into the strength of the enemy, we went in across good shooting ground onto the wagons where the guns waited."
Bazo broke off, and bowed his head towards the senior indunas.
"Forgive me, Babo, the puppy should not yap before the old dog barks.
I speak out of turn." "You are no puppy, Bazo," Somabula growled.
"Speak on!" "We must be the fleas," Bazo said quietly. "We must hide in the white man's clothing and sting him in the soft places until we drive him to madness. But when he scratches, we will move on to another soft place.
"We must lurk in darkness and attack in the dawn, we must wait for him in the bad ground and probe his flanks and his rear." Bazo never raised his voice, but all of them listened avidly. "Never must we run in against the walls of the laager, and when the three-legged guns begin to laugh like old women, we must drift away like the morning mist at the first rays of the sun." "This is not war," protested Babiaan.
"It is war, Babo." Bazo contradicted, "the new kind of war, the only kind of war which we can win." "He is right," a voice called from the ranks of indunas. "That is the way it must be." They spoke up, one after the other, and no man argued against Bazo's vision, until the turn came back to Babiaan. "My brother Somabula has spoken the truth, you are no puppy, Bazo. Tell us only one thing more, when will it be?"
"That I cannot tell you." "Who can?" Bazo looked down at Tanase, who still knelt at his feet. "We have assembled in this valley for good reason," Bazo told them. "If all agree, then my woman who is an intimate of the Umlimo, and an initiate of the mysteries, will go up to the sacred cavern to take the oracle." "She must go immediately." "No, Babo." Tanase's lovely head was still bowed in deep respect. "We must wait until the Umlimo sends for us." There were places where the scars had knotted into hard lumps in Bazo's flesh. The machine-gun bullets had done deep damage. One arm, fortunately not the spear arm, was twisted and shortened, permanently deformed. After hard marching or exercise with the weapons of war, or after the nervous tension of planning and arguing and persuading others to his views, the torn and lumpy flesh often seized up in agonizing spasms.
Kneeling beside him in the little reed hut, Tanase could see the cramped muscles and rigid contraction of sinews under his dark skin twisted like living black mambas trying to escape from a silken bag.
With strong tapered fingers, she worked the ointment of fat and herbs into the crested muscle down his spine and the shoulder-blades, following the rubbery contractions up his neck to the base of his skull. Bazo groaned at the sweet agony of her bone-hard fingers, but slowly he relaxed and the knotted muscles subsided.
"You are good for me in so many ways, "he murmured.
"I was born for no other reason, she answered, but Bazo sighed and shook his head slowly.
"You and I were both born for some purpose which is still hidden from us. We know that we are different, you and me." She touched his lips with her finger to still him. "We will come back to that on the morrow." She placed both hands on his shoulders and drew him backwards, until he lay flat on the reed mat, and she began to work on his chest and the rigid muscles of his flat hard belly.
"Tonight there is only us," she repeated, in the throaty purr of a lioness at the kill, delighting in the power she could wield over him with the mere pressure of her fingertips, and yet at the same time consumed by a tenderness so deep that she felt her chest crushing beneath the weight of it. "Tonight we are all the world." She leaned forward and touched the bullet-wounds with the tip of her tongue and his arousal was so massive that she could not encompass it within the span of her thumb and long pink-lined fingers.
He tried to sit up, but she held him down with a light pressure against his chest, then she slipped the drawstring of her apron and with a single movement straddled him, both of them crying out involuntarily at the heat and terrible yearning of each other's bodies.
Then they were swept away together in a sudden exquisite fury.
When it had passed, she cradled his head against her bosom, and crooned to him like an infant, until his breathing was deep and regular in the dark hut. Even then, though she was silent, she did not sleep with him but lay and marvelled that such rage and compassion could possess her at the same moment in time.
"I will never know peace again," she realized suddenly. "And nor will he. "And she mourned for the man she loved, and for the need to goad and drive him on towards the destiny that she knew awaited both of them.
On the third day the messenger of the Umlimo came down from the cavern to where the indunas waited in the village.
The messenger was a pretty girl-child with a solemn expression and old wise eyes. She was on the very edge of puberty with the hard little stones already forming in her mulberry-dark nipples and the first light fuzz shading the deep cleft in the angle of her thighs.
Around her neck she wore a talisman that only Tanase recognized. It was a sign that one day this child in her turn would take on the sacred mantle of the Umlimo and preside in the gruesome cavern in the cliff above the village.
Instinctively the child looked to Tanase where she squatted to one side of the ranks of men, and with her eyes and a secret hand sign of the initiates, Tanase indicated Somabula, the senior and una The child's indecision was merely a symptom of the swift degeneration of Matabele society. In the time of the kings no one, child nor adult, would have been in any doubt as to the order of precedence.
When Somabula rose to follow the messenger, his half brothers rose with him, Babiaan on one hand and Gandang on the other.
"You also, Bazo," Sornabula said, and though Bazo was younger and more junior than some of them, none of the other indunas protested at his inclusion in the mission.
The child-witch took Tanase's hand, for they were sisters of the dark spirits, and the two of them led the way up the steep path. The mouth of the cavern was a hundred paces wide, but the roof was barely high enough to clear a man's head. Once long ago the opening had been fortified with blocks of dressed stone, worked in the same fashion as the walls of Great Zimbabwe, but these had been tumbled into rough piles, leaving gaps like those in an old man's teeth.
The little party halted involuntarily. The four indunas hung back and drew closer together, as though to take comfort from each other.
Men who had wielded the assegai in a hundred bloody battles and run onto the guns of the white men's laager were fearful now as they faced the dark entrance.
In the silence a voice spoke suddenly from above them, emanating from the bare cliff-face of smooth lichen-streaked granite. "Let the indunas of royal Kumalo enter the sacred place!" They were the quavering discordant tones of an ancient bedlam, and the four warriors looked up fearfully, but there was no living thing to be seen, and none of them could summon the courage to reply.
Tanase had felt the child's hand quiver slightly in her grip at the ventriloquist effort of projection, and only Tanase was so attuned to the ways of the witches that she knew how the art of the voices was taught to the apprentices of the Umlimo. The child was already highly skilled, and Tanase shuddered involuntarily as she realized what other fearful skills she must have mastered, what other gruesome ordeals and terrible agonies she must already have endured. In a moment of empathy she squeezed the child's narrow cool hand, and together they stepped through the ruined portals.
Behind them the four noble warriors crowded with the temerity of children, peering around them anxiously and stumbling on the uneven footing. The throat of the cavern narrowed, and Tanase thought with a flash of grim humour that it was as well that the light was too bad for the indunas to make out clearly the walls on either hand, for even their warlike courage might have been unequal to the horror of the catacombs.
In a bygone age that the verbal history of the Rozwi and the Karanga tribes could no longer recount, generations before bold Mzilikazi led his tribe into these hills, another plundering marauder had passed this way. It might have been Manatassi, the legendary conquering queen, at the head of her merciless hordes, laying waste to the land and slaughtering everything in her path, sparing neither woman nor child nor even the domestic animals.
The threatened tribes had taken refuge in this valley, but the marauders had burst through the narrow pass- and the miserable host had fled into their final sanctuary in this cavern. The roof overhead was still coated with soot, for the marauders had not deemed it worthwhile to lay siege to the cavern. They had pulled down the protecting wall and blocked the entrance with piles of green brush and wood. Then they had put in fire. The entire tribe had perished, and smoke had mummified their remains. So they had lain down the years in banks and heaps, piled as high as the low roof.
As Tanase's party went forward, from somewhere ahead of them a faint bluish light grew in intensity, until Bazo exclaimed suddenly and pointed to the wall of human debris beside him. In places, the parchment-like flesh had peeled away so that the ivory skulls grinned at them, and the contorted skeletal arms seemed to wave a macabre salutation as they passed. The indunas were bathed in sweat, despite the cool gloom, and their expressions were awed and sickly.
Tanase and the child followed the twisting pathway with unerring familiarity, and came out at last" above a deep natural amphitheatre.
A single ray of sunlight burned down from a narrow crack in the domed cavern roof. On the floor of the amphitheatre was an open fireplace, and a tendril of pale blue smoke twisted slowly upwards towards the opening high above. Tanase and the child led them down the rock steps to the smooth sandy floor of the amphitheatre, and at her gesture the four indunas sank down gratefully and squatted facing the smouldering fire.
Tanase released the child's hand, and sat a little to one side and behind the men. The child crossed to the far wall and took a handful of herbs from one of the big round clay pots that stood there. She threw the handful upon the fire and immediately a great yellow cloud of acrid smoke billowed upwards, and as it slowly cleared, the indunas started and exclaimed with superstitious dread.
A grotesque figure faced them from across the flames. It was an albino, with silver-white leprous skin. It was a woman, for the great pale breasts were massively pendulous, the nipples a painful boiled pink colour. She was stark naked and her dense public bush was white as frost-struck winter grass, and above it her belly hung in loose balconies of fat. Her forehead was low and sloped backwards, her mouth was wide and thin so that she appeared toadlike. Across her broad and flattened nose and her pale cheeks, the un pigmented skin had erupted in a tender raw rash. Her thickened forearms were folded across her belly and her thighs, splotched with large ginger-coloured freckles, were wide-spread as she knelt on a mat of zebra skin and regarded the men before her fixedly.
"I see you, oh Chosen One," Somabula greeted her. Despite an enormous effort of will, his voice trembled.
The Umlimo made no response, and Somabula. rocked back on his heels and was silent. The girl-child was busy amongst the pots, and now she came forward and knelt beside the gross albino, proffering the clay pipe she had prepared.
The Umlimo took the long reed stem between her thin silvery lips, and the girl lifted a live coal from the fire with her bare hands and placed it on the vegetable ball in the bowl of the pipe. It began to glow and splutter and the Umlimo drew a slow lungful and then let the aromatic smoke trickle out of her simian nostrils. Immediately the heavy sweetish odour of insanghu carried to the waiting men.
The oracle was induced in different ways. Before Tanase had lost the power, it had descended spontaneously upon her, throwing her into convulsive fits, while the spirit voices struggled to escape from her throat. However, this grotesque successor had to resort to the wild hemp pipe. The seeds and flowers of the Cannabis sativa plant, crushed in the green and moulded into sun-dried balls, were her key to the spirit world.
She smoked quietly, a dozen short inhalations without allowing the smoke to escape, holding it in until her pale face seemed to swell and the pink pupils of her eyes glazed over. Then she expelled the smoke with an explosive exhalation, and started again. The indunas watched her with such fascination that they did not at first notice the soft scratching sound on the cavern floor. It was Bazo who at last started and grunted with shock, and involuntarily grasped his father's forearm. Gandang exclaimed and began to rise in horror and alarm, but Tanase's voice arrested him.
"Do not move. It is dangerous," she whispered urgently, and Gandang sank back and froze into stillness.
From the dark recesses in the back of the cavern a lobster-like creature scuttled across the pale sandy floor towards where the Umlimo squatted. The firelight glinted on the glossy armoured carapace of the creature as it reached the Umlimo, and then, began to climb up her bloated silver white body. It paused in her lap, with the long segmented tail lifting and pulsing, its spiderlike legs hooked into the Umlimo's coarse white pubic curls, before it began climbing again, up over her bulging belly, hanging from one drooping pale breast like some evil fruit on the bough, upwards it climbed, onto her shoulder and then it reached the angle of her jaw below the, ear.
The Umlimo remained unperturbed, sipping little puffs of the narcotic smoke from the mouthpiece of her pipe, her pink eyes staring blindly at the indunas. The huge glittering insect crawled up her temple and then sideways until it stopped in the centre of her crusted and scabbed forehead, where it hung upside down, and the long scorpion tail, longer than a man's forefinger, arched up over its horny back.
The Umlimo began to mutter and mumble and a rime of white froth bubbled onto her raw lips. She said something in a strange language, and the scorpion on her forehead pulsed its long segmented tail, and from the point of the red fang at the tip a clear drop of venom welled and sparkled like a jewel in the dim light.
The Umlimo spoke again, in a hoarse strained voice and an unintelligible language.
"What does she say?" Bazo whispered, turning his head towards Tanase. "What language does she use?" "She speaks in the secret tongue of the initiates," Tanase murmured. "She is inviting the spirits to enter and take control of her body." The albino reached up slowly and took the scorpion off her forehead. She held the head and body within her closed fist, only the long tail whipped furiously from side to side, and she brought it down slowly and held it to her own breast.
The scorpion struck, and the rigid thorn fang buried itself deeply in her obscene pink flesh. The Umlimo's face did not alter, and the scorpion struck again and again, leaving little red punctures in the soft breast.
"She will die! "gasped Bazo.
"Let her be," hissed Tanase. "She is not like other women. The poison will not harm her it serves only to open her soul to the spirits." The albino lifted the scorpion from her bosom, and dropped it into the flames of the fire where it writhed and withered into a little charred speck, and suddenly the Umlimo uttered an unearthly shriek.
"The spirits enter,"Tanase whispered.
The Umlimo's mouth gaped open, and little glassy strings of saliva drooled from her chin, while three or four wild voices seemed to issue from her throat simultaneously, each trying to drown out the others, voices of men and women and animals, until at last one rose above them, and silenced the others. It was a man's voice, and it spoke in the mystical tongue, even its modulation and cadence were totally alien, but Tanase quietly translated for them.
"When the noon sun goes dark with wings, and the trees are bare of leaves in the springtime, then, warriors of Matabele, put an edge to your steel." The four indunas nodded. They had heard this prophecy before, for the Umlimo was often repetitious and always she was obscure. They had puzzled over the same words before. It was this message that Bazo and Tanase had carried to the scattered peoples of the Matabele during their wandering from kraal to kraal.
The gross albino seer grunted and threshed her am-is, as though struggling with an invisible adversary. The pale pink eyes jerked in her skull, out of kilter with each other, so that she squinted and leered, and she ground her teeth together with a sound like a hound worrying a bone.
The girl-child rose quietly from where she squatted amongst the pots, and she leaned over the Umlimo and dashed a pinch of pungent red powder into her face. The Umlimo's paroxysm eased, the clenched jaw fell open and another voice spoke, a guttural, bluffed sound, barely human, using the same weird dialect, and Tanase strained forward to catch each syllable and then repeated calmly. "When the cattle lie with their heads twisted to touch their flank, and cannot rise, then warriors of Matabele take heart, for the time will be nigh." This time there was a slight difference in the wording of the prophecy from the one that they had heard before, and all of them pondered it silently as the Umlimo fell forward onto her face and flopped limply as a boneless. jellyfish. Slowly all movement of the albino's body ceased, and she lay like death.
Gandang made as if to rise, but Tanase hissed a warning, and he arrested the movement and they waited, the only sound in the cavern was the click and rustle of the fire and the flirt of bats" wings high against the domed roof.
Then another convulsion ran down the Umlimo's back, and her spine arched, her hideous face lifted, but this time her voice was childlike and sweet, and she spoke in the Matabele language for all of them to understand.
"When the hornless cattle are eaten up by the great cross, let the storm begin." Her head sagged forward, and the child covered her with a kaross of fluffy jackal furs.
"It is over," said Tanase. "There will be no more." Thankfully the four indunas rose, and crept back along the gloomy pathway through the catacombs, but as they saw the glimmer of sunlight through the entrance ahead, so their steps quickened, until they burst out in the valley with such indecent and undignified haste that they avoided each other's eyes.
That night, sitting in the open-sided setenghi on the floor of the valley, Somabula repeated the prophecies of the Umlimo to the assembled indunas. They nodded over the first two familiar riddles, and as they had a hundred times before, they delved inconclusively for the meaning, and then agreed. "We will find the meaning when the time is appointed it is always the way." Then Sornabula went on to relate the third prophecy of the Umlimo, the new and unfamiliar riddle. "When the hornless cattle are eaten up by the great cross." The indunas took snuff and passed the beer pots from hand to hand, as they talked and argued the hidden meaning, and only when they had all spoken did Somabula look beyond them to where Tanase sat holding the child under her leather cloak to protect him from the night chill. "What is the true meaning, woman? "he asked.
"Not even the Umlimo herself knows that," Tanase replied, "but when our ancestors first saw the white man riding up from the south, they believed that their mounts were hornless cattle." "Horses?"
Gandang asked thoughtfully.
"It may be so," Tanase agreed. "Yet a single word of the Umlimo may have as many meanings as there are crocodiles in the Limpopo river." "What is the cross, the great cross, of the prophecy?" Bazo asked.
"The cross is the sign of the white men's three-headed god," Gandang answered. "My senior wife, Juba, the little Dove, wears that sign about her neck, given to her by the missionary at Khami when she poured water on her head." "Is it possible that the white men's god will eat up the white men's horses?" doubted Babiaan. "Surely he is their protector, not their destroyer." And the discussion passed from elder to elder, while the watch fire burned low and over the valley the vast shining firmament of the heavens turned with weighty dignity.
To the south of the valley, amongst the other heavenly bodies, burned a group of four great white stars that the Matabele called the "Sons of Manatassi'. They told how Manatassi, that terrible queen, had strangled her offspring with her own hands, so that none of them might ever challenge her monarchy. According to the legend, the souls of the little ones had ascended to shine on high, eternal witness to the cruelty of their dam.
Not one of the indunas knew that the name by which the white men knew these same stars was the Southern Cross.
Ralph Ballantyne was wrong when he predicted to Harry Mellow that by the time they returned to the Rbase camp Mr. Rhodes and his entourage would have moved on to Bulawayo. For as they rode in through the gates of the stockade, he saw the magnificent mule coach still parked where he had last seen it, and beside it were a dozen other decrepit and travel-worn vehicles. Cape carts and surreys, even a bicycle with worn tyres replaced by strips of buffalo-hide.
"Mr. Rhodes has set up court here," Cathy explained furiously, as soon as she and Ralph were alone in the bath tent. "I have made the camp too comfortable by half, and he has taken it over from me." "As he does everything else," Ralph remarked philosophically, as he stripped off his stinking shirt, and flung it into the far corner. "I've slept in that for five nights, by God, the laundry boy will have to beat it to death with a club before he gets it into the tub." "Ralph, you aren't taking it seriously," Cathy stamped her foot in frustration.
"This is my home. The only home I have, and now do you know what that what Mr. Rhodes told me?" "Have we got any more soap?" Ralph demanded as he hopped on one leg to free his breeches. "One bar will not be enough." "He said, "Jordan will be in charge of the kitchens while we are here, Mrs. Ballantyne, he knows my tastes." What do you think of that?" "Jordan is a damned fine cook." Ralph lowered himself gingerly into the bath, and grunted as his naked buttocks touched the nearly boiling surface.
"I have been forbidden my own kitchen." "Get in!" Ralph ordered, and she broke off and stared at him incredulously. "What did you say?" she demanded, but in reply he seized her ankle and toppled Cathy shrieking her protests on top of himself.
Steaming water and suds splattered the canvas walls of the tent, and when he released her at last, she was sodden to the waist.
"Your dress is soaked," he pointed out complacently, "now you have no choice take it off!" Naked, she sat with her back to -him in the galvanized bath with her knees drawn up under her chin, and her damp hair piled on top of her head, but still she continued her protest.
"Even Louise could bear the man's arrogance and misogyny no longer. She made your father take her back to King's Lynn, so now I have to bear him on my own!" "You always were a brave girl," Ralph told her and ran the soapy flannel cares singly down her smooth back.
"And now the word has gone out to every dead-beat and drifter in Matabeleland that he is here and they are riding in from every direction for the free whisky." "Mr. Rhodes is a generous man," Ralph agreed, and tenderly slid the soapy flannel over her shoulder and down the front.
"It is your whisky," said Cathy, and caught his wrist before the flannel could reach its obvious destination.
"The man has an infernal nerve." For the first time Ralph showed some emotion. "We will have to get rid of him. That whisky is worth 10 pounds a bottle in Bulawayo." Ralph managed to slip the flannel a little further south.
"Ralph, that tickles." Cathy wriggled.
"When are your twin sisters arriving?" He ignored her protest.
"They sent a runner ahead, they should be here before nightfall.
Ralph, give me that flannel immediately!" "We will see how steely Mr. Rhodes" nerves really are-" "Ralph I can do that myself, thank you kindly, give me the flannel!" "And we will also see how sharp Harry Mellow's reflexes are-" "Ralph, are you crazy? We are in the bath!"
"We will take care of both of them with one stroke." "Ralph, you can'd You can't not in the bath!" "We will have Jordan out of your kitchen, Harry Mellow overseer of the Harkness Mine and Mr. Rhodes on his way to Bulawayo an hour after those two arrive "Ralph, darling, do stop talking. I can't concentrate on two things at once," Cathy murmured.
The tableau at the trestle-table in the dining tent seemed unaltered since Ralph had last seen it, rather like one of the productions at Madame Tussaud's Waxworks. Mr. Rhodes even wore the same clothing as he dominated the tent with his expansive charisma.
Only the bit players seated in the position of petitioners facing the long table had changed. These were a motley bunch of out-of-luck prospectors, concession-seekers, and impecunious promoters of ambitious ventures, who had been attracted by Mr. Rhodes" reputation and millions like jackal and hyena to the lion's kill.
It was the mode in Matabeleland to display one's individuality by adopting eccentric headgear, and the selection which faced Mr. Rhodes across the table included a Scottish bonnet with an eagle feather pinned to the brim by a yellow cairngorm, a tall brushed beaver girl with a green St. Patrick's ribbon, and a magnificent embroidered Mexican sombrero, the owner of which was relating a meandering tale of woe which Mr. Rhodes cut short. He did not enjoy listening as much as he did talking.
"So then, you've had enough of Africa, have you? But you haven't the passage money? "he asked brusquely.
"That's it exactly, Mr. Rhodes, you see my old mother-" "Jordan, give the fellow a chi tty to see him home, and charge it to me personally." He waved away the man's thanks, and looked up as Ralph came into the tent.
"Harry tells me your trip was a great success. He panned your crushings from the Harkness reef at thirty ounces a ton, that's thirty times richer than the best ban ket reef of the Witwatersrand. I think we should open a bottle of champagne. Jordan, don't we have a few bottles of the Pommery'87 left?" "At least I'm not providing the champagne as well as the whisky," Ralph thought cynically, as he lifted his glass to the toast. "The Harkness Mine." He joined the dutiful chorus and the moment he had drunk he turned on Dr. Leander Starr Jameson.
"What is this about the mining laws?" he demanded. "Harry tells me you are adopting the American mining code." "Do you have any objection?" Jameson flushed, and his sandy moustache bristled.
"That code was drawn up by lawyers to keep themselves in fat fees in perpetuity. The new Witwatersrand laws are simpler and a million times more workable. By God, isn't it enough that your Company royalty will rob us of fifty per cent of our profits?" As Ralph said it, it dawned upon him that the American mining code would be a smoke-screen behind which the artful Rhodes could manoeuvre at will.
"Remember, young Ballantyne," Jameson stroked his moustache, and blinked piously. "Remember who the country belongs to. Remember who paid the costs of the occupation of Mashonaland and who financed the Matabele war." "Government by a commercial company." Despite himself, Ralph felt his anger rising again and he clenched his hands on the table in front of him. "A company that owns the police force and the courts. And if I have a dispute with your Company, who will decide it surely not the BSA Company's own magistrate?" "There are precedents."
Mr. Rhodes" tone was reasonable and placatory, but his eyes were not.
"The British East India Company-"And Ralph's reply crackled. "The British government eventually had to take India away from those pirates Clive, Hastings and that ilk, for corruption and oppression of the natives. The sepoy rising was the logical outcome of their administration." "Mr. Ballantyne." Mr. Rhodes" voice always went shrill when he was excited or angry. "I am going to ask you to withdraw those remarks, they are historically inaccurate, and by implication insulting." "I withdraw, unreservedly." Ralph was angry with himself now, he was usually much too cool-headed to allow himself to be provoked. There was no possible profit to be gained from a head-on collision with Cecil John Rhodes. His smile was easy and friendly as he went on. "I am sure we will have no need of the services of a Company magistrate." Mr. Rhodes answered his smile with the same ease, but there was a steely blue flicker in his eyes as he raised his glass.
"To a deep mine and a deeper relationship," he said, and only one other person in the tent recognized it as a challenge.
Jordan moved restlessly in his camp chair at the back of the tent.
He knew these two men so well, loved both so dearly. Ralph his brother had been with him through all that lonely and tempestuous childhood, his protector and his comfort in the bad times and his joyous friend through the good.
Looking at his brother now, and comparing Ralph to himself, it seemed impossible that two brothers could be so different. Where Jordan was blond and slim and graceful, Ralph was dark and muscled and powerful, where Jordan was gentle and self-effacing, Ralph was hard and bold and as hawk, fierce as his Matabele praise-name implied. Instinctively Jordan looked from him to the big burly figure facing him across the camp table.
Here Jordan's feelings went beyond love itself to a kind of religious fervour. He did not really see the physical changes that a few short years had wrought in this godhead of his existence. the thickening of Mr. Rhodes" already bulky body, the bloating and coarsening of features already mottled with cyanosis caused by the labouring of the damaged heart, the reddish-blond curls receding swiftly now and slashed with grey at the temples. The way a loving woman places little store on the appearance of the man she has chosen as her own, so Jordan saw far beyond the marks of suffering and sickness and the racing years. He saw to the steely core of the man, the ultimate source of his immense power and brooding presence.
Jordan wanted to cry out to his beloved brother, to run to him and physically restrain him from the folly of turning this giant of a soul into an enemy. He had seen other men do just that, and be ruthlessly crushed.
Then with a sickening slide in the pit of his stomach, he knew which side he would cast his lot if that dreaded confrontation ever forced a choice upon him. He was Mr. Rhodes" man, beyond brotherly ties and family loyalties, to the very end of life itself, he was Mr. Rhodes" man.
He sought desperately for some plausible excuse to break the tension between the two most-important persons in his life, but relief came, from beyond the stockade, in the delighted cries of the servants, the hysterical barking of the camp dogs, the crunch of cartwheels and the excited shrieks of more than one woman. Jordan was the only one watching Ralph's face, so he caught the sly and smug expression as his brother rose.
"It seems we have more visitors," Ralph said, and the twins came into the inner stockade. Victoria came first, as Ralph had expected that she would. She came on long shapely legs, outlined beneath the whirl and boil of her thin cotton skirts, barefoot in defiance of all ladylike pretensions, carrying her shoes in one hand, and Jonathan riding on her hip. The child was squeaking like a wart hog piglet that has lost the teat.
"Vicky! Vicky, did you bring me anything?" "A kiss on the cheek and a slap on the behind." Vicky laughed, and hugged him. Her laughter was loud and gay and unaffected, her mouth was a little too large, but her lips were velvety as rose petals and sweetly shaped, her teeth were large and square and white as bone-china porcelain, and as she laughed her tongue, furry pink as that of a cat, curled between them. Her eyes were green and wide-spaced, her skin was that lustrous silky English perfection that neither sun nor massive doses of anti-malarial quinine could mar. She would have been striking, even without the dense tresses of copper-blonde hair, ruffled by the wind, and wild as the sea, that tumbled about her face and shoulders.
She riveted the attention of every man there, even Mr. Rhodes, but it was to Ralph she ran, holding his son on her hip still, and she threw her free arm around his neck. She was so tall that she had only to stand on her toes to reach his lips. The kiss was not long held, but her lips were soft and wet, the pressure of her breasts through her cotton blouse was springy and elastic and warm against his chest, and her thighs against his sent a shock up his spine, so that Ralph broke the embrace, and for an instanter green eyes mocked him, dared him to something that she did not fully understand, revelling in this heady sense of power over all mankind that she had not yet tested to its limits.
Then she tossed Jonathan to Ralph and whirled away to run barefoot down the tent and launched herself into Jordan's arms.
"Darling Jordan, oh, how we have missed you!" She forced him into a prancing jig around the stockade, shaking out her shining hair and carolling joyously.
Ralph glanced at Mr. Rhodes, and when he saw his expression of shock and unease, he grinned and released Jonathan, letting him race across to cling to Vicky's skirt and add his shrill voice to the uproar, then he turned to greet the second twin.
Elizabeth was as tall as Vicky, but darker. Her hair was polished mahogany, shot through with sparks of burgundy and her skin was sun-kindly, gilded to the colour of a tiger's eyes. She was slim as a dancer, with a narrow waist and shoulders supporting a long heron neck, and her breasts were smaller than Vicky's, yet elegantly pointed, and though her voice was soft and her laughter a throaty purr, yet there was a mischievous quirk to her lips, a jaunty tilt to her head and a measured sexual candour and awareness to the gaze of her wild honey eyes.
She and Cathy were arm in arm, but now she slipped out of her elder sister's embrace and presented herself to Ralph. "My favourite brother-in-law," she murmured, and looking into her eyes Ralph was reminded that though her voice was softer, and her manner seemingly more restrained than that of her twin, yet Elizabeth was always the instigator and prime mover in any mischief that the pair conjured up.
This close, her true beauty was apparent, less flamboyant than Vicky's perhaps, but the balance of her features and the depths beyond those golden-brown eyes were more disturbing.
She kissed Ralph, and the contact was as brief but even less sisterly than had been the elder twin's embrace, and as she drew back from it, she slanted her eyes with a pretence of innocence, that was more deadly than any brazening. Ralph broke the electric contact, and looked to Cathy, making a comical moue of resignation, and hoping that she still believed his studied avoidance of the twins was because he found them boisterous and childish.
Flushed and panting, Vicky released Jordan, placed her hands on her hips and asked Ralph, "Ralph, are you not going to present us to the company?" "Mr. Rhodes, may I present my sisters-in-law," said Ralph with relish.
"Oh, the famous Mr. Rhodes," Vicky gushed theatrically, but there were little green sparks in her eyes. "It is such an honour to meet the conqueror of the Matabele nation, because, you see, King Lobengula was a personal friend of our family." "Please excuse my sister, Mr. Rhodes." Elizabeth curtsied, and her expression was demure. "She intends no discourtesy, but our parents were the first missionaries to the Matabele, and our father sacrificed his life trying to help Lobengula while your troops were pursuing him to his death. My mother-" "Young lady, I am fully aware who your mother is," Mr. Rhodes forestalled her sharply.
"Oh good," Vicky chimed sweetly. "Then you will appreciate the gift that she asked me to present to you." Vicky reached into the deep pocket of her long skirt and brought out a thin volume. It was bound in cardboard, not morocco leather, and the quality of the yellow paper was coarse and matt. She laid it on the trestle-table in front of Mr. Rhodes, and when he saw the title his heavy jaw clamped closed. Even Ralph quailed slightly. He had counted on the twins providing an unsettling influence, but he had not expected them to be so instantly explosive.
The book was entitled Trooper Hackett of Matabeleland, by Robyn Ballantyne, for the twins" mother wrote and published under her maiden name. There was probably not a man in the stockade who had not already read the slim volume, or at least heard of its contents, and if Vicky had thrown a live mamba on the table, their consternation could not have been more intense.
The contents of the book were so dangerous that three reputable London publishers had rejected it, and finally Robyn St. John had published it privately and created an immediate sensation. In six months it had sold almost two hundred thousand copies, and had been treated to extensive reviews in almost every influential newspaper both at home in England and abroad in the colonies.
The frontispiece of the book set the tone for the text that followed. It was a murky photograph that depicted a dozen white men in BSA Company uniform standing under the spreading branches of a tall wild teak tree and looking up at the corpses of four semi-naked Matabele hanging by their necks from the topmost branches. There was no caption to the photograph, and the faces of the white men were too indistinct to be recognizable.
Now Mr. Rhodes reached out and opened the book at the gruesome illustration. "Those are four Matabele indunas who were wounded at the battle of Bembesi, and who committed suicide by hanging, rather than surrender to our forces," he growled. "They are not the victims of some atrocity as this scurrilous piece of offal implies." Mr. Rhodes closed the book with a snap, and Elizabeth exclaimed sweetly, "Oh, Mr. Rhodes, Mama will be so disappointed that you did not enjoy her little story." The book described the fictional adventures of Trooper Hackett of the BSA Company expeditionary force, and his whole-hearted participation in the slaughter of the Matabele with machine-gun fire, the pursuit and shooting down of the fleeing survivors, the burning of the kraals, the looting of Lobengula's cattle and the rape of the young Matabele girls. Then Trooper Hackett is separated from his squadron and spends the night alone on a wild kopje, and while huddled over his camp-fire a mysterious white stranger comes out of the night and joins him at the fire. Hackett remarks, "Ah, you have been in the wars, too, I see," leaning forward and inspecting the stranger's feet. "By God!
Both of them! And right through you must have had a bad time of it!"
And the stranger replies, "It all happened a very long time ago, then the reader is left in no doubt as to whom he is dealing with, especially when the author describes his beautiful gentle countenance and his all-seeing blue eyes. Abruptly the stranger breaks into a florid injunction to young Hackett.
"Take a message to England. Go to that great people and demand of them. "Where is the sword that was given into your hand, that with it you might enforce justice and deal out mercy? How came you to give it up into the hands of men whose search is gold, whose thirst is wealth, to whom the souls and bodies of their fellow men are counters in a game, men who have transformed the sword of a great people into a tool to burrow for gold, as the snouts of swine for earth nuts?"" It was little wonder, Ralph smiled to himself, that Mr. Rhodes pushed the book away and wiped the hand that had touched it on the lapel of his rumpled Norfolk jacket.
"Oh, Mr. Rhodes," murmured Vicky, angel-faced and wide-eyed. "At the least you must read the inscription that Mama dedicated to you."
She retrieved the , discarded volume, opened the flyleaf and read aloud, "For Cecil John Rhodes, without whose endeavours this book would never have been written."" Mr. Rhodes rose from his seat with ponderous dignity. "Ralph," he said quietly. "Thank you for your hospitality. Dr. Jim and I will be getting on to Bulawayo, I think. We have spent too long here as it is." Then he looked across at Jordan.
"The mules are well rested. Jordan, is there a moon tonight?" "There will be a good moon tonight," Jordan replied promptly, "and there are no clouds so we will have a good light for the road." "Can we be ready to leave by this evening, then?" It was a command, and Mr. Rhodes did not wait for a reply, but stalked out of the stockade towards his own tent, and the little doctor followed him stiffly. The moment they were gone, the twins burst into merry tinkling laughter and hugged each other ecstatically.
"Mama would have been proud of you, Victoria Isabel.-" "Well, I am not." Jordan's voice cut through their hilarity.
He was white-faced and shaking with anger. "You are ill mannered and silly little girls." "Oh Jordan," Vicky wailed and seized his hands. "Don't be cross. We love you so." "Oh yes, we do. Both of us." Elizabeth took his other hand, but he pulled away from them.
"You do not have any idea in those giddy little heads how dangerous a game you are playing, not only for yourselves." He strode away from them, but paused for a moment in front of Ralph. "Nor do you, Ralph." His expression softened, and he placed his hand on Ralph's shoulder. "Please be more careful for my sake, if not for your own."
Then he followed his master from the stockade.
Ralph pulled the gold hunter from the inner pocket of his waistcoat and made a show of inspecting it.
"Well," he announced to the twins, "sixteen minutes to clear the camp. That must be a new record even for you two." He returned the watch to his pocket and put one arm around Cathy's shoulders. "There you are, Katie my love, there is your home again without a single stranger." "That is not quite the case," murmured a soft Kentucky accent, and Harry Mellow rose from the log he had been using as a seat and removed the slouch hat from his curly head. The twins stared at him for a startled instant, then -flashed each other a look of complete accord and a remarkable transformation came over them. Liza smoothed her skirts and Vicky pushed back the dense dangling tresses from her face and their expressions became grave and their comportment ladylike.
"You may, present the young gentleman. cousin Ralph," said Vicky in accents so refined as to make Ralph glance at her to confirm it was the same girl speaking.
When the mule coach drove through the outer gates of the stockade, there was one member of Mr. Rhodes" party who was not aboard.
"What did- you tell Mr. Rhodes?" Cathy asked, hanging onto Ralph's arm as they watched the coach rolling away, a dark shadow on the moon-silver road.
"I told him that I needed Harry for a day or two more to help me lay out the development for the Harkness." Ralph lit his last cheroot of the day and they began the leisurely stroll around the camp that was a little ritual of their life together. It was their time of contentment and delicious anticipation, the time when they talked over the events of the day just past and planned for the one ahead, at the same time touching each other as they walked, her hand in the crook of his arm, their hips sliding against each other, a closeness which would soon lead naturally and sweetly to the wide soft cot in the bell tent.
"Was that true?" Cathy asked.
"Semi-true," he admitted. "I need him for longer than a day or two, more like ten or twenty years." "If you succeed, you will be one of the few men to get the better of Mr. Rhodes, and he will not like it." Ralph stopped her and commanded. "Listen!" From the inner stockade there was the orange glow of the fire and the sound of a banjo being played with such rare skill that the limpid notes shimmered and ran into each other, like some exotic birdsong, it rose to an impossible crescendo and then ceased so abruptly that the utter stillness trembled in the air for many seconds before the night chorus of the cicadas in the trees,) which had been shamed to silence by the vaunting instrument, hesitantly recommenced. With it mingled the patter of soft palms and the twins" unfeigned exclamations of delight.
"He is a man of many talents, your Harry Mellow." "The chief of them is that he can spot gold in a filled tooth across a polo field.
However, I have no doubt your little sisters will come to cherish others of his accomplishments." "I should send them to bed," Cathy murmured.
"Don't be the wicked elder sister," Ralph admonished, and the music started again, but this time Harry Mellow's soaring baritone led and the twins picked up the refrain in their true clear voices.
"Leave the poor creatures alone, they have enough of that at home." Ralph led her away.
"It's my duty," Cathy protested halfheartedly.
"If it's duty you are after," Ralph chuckled, "then, by God, woman, I have another more pressing duty for you to perform!" He lay stretched out on his back on the cot, and watched her prepare for bed in the lamplight. It had taken her a long time to forget her upbringing as the child of Christian missionaries and to allow him to watch her, but now she had- come to enjoy it, and she had flaunted a little before him, until he grinned and leaned out of the cot to crush out the cheroot, then lifted both hands towards her.
"Come here, Katie!" he ordered, but she hung back provocatively.
"Do you know what I want?" "No, but I know what I want." "I want a home-" "You have a home." "With thatch and brick walls, and a real garden." "You have a garden, the most beautiful garden in the world, and it stretches from the Limpopo to the Zambezi." "A garden with roses and geraniums." She came to him, and he lifted the sheet. "Will you build me a home, Ralph?" "Yes." "When?" "When the railroad is finished." She sighed softly. He had made the same promise while he was laying the telegraph line, and that was before Jonathan was born, but she knew better than to remind him. Instead, she slipped under the sheet, and strangely his arms, as they closed around her, became home for that moment.
In the southern springtime on the shores of one of the great lakes that lie in the hot depths of the Rift Valley, that mighty geological fault that splits the shield of the African continent like the stroke of an axe, there occurred at that time a bizarre hatching.
The egg masses of Schistocerca greg aria the desert locust, that were buried in the loose earth along the edge of the lake, released their flightless nymphs. The eggs had been laid in unusually propitious conditions of weather and environment. The swarms of breeding insects had been concentrated by unseasonable winds upon the papyrus banks of the lake, a vast food supply that heightened their fecundity. When the time came for them to spawn, another chance wind pushed them en masse onto a dry friable terrain of the correct acidity to protect the egg masses from fungus infection while the mild humidity drifting up from the lake ensured perfectly elastic egg-casings from which the hatching nymphs were able to escape readily.
In other less fortuitous seasons the loss and wastage might be as high as ninety-nine per cent, but this year the kindly earth rendered up such a multitude of nymphs that it could not contain them. Though the hatching ground was almost fifty square miles, the insects were forced to crawl upon each other's backs in layers and drifts and banks ten and twenty deep, so that the surface of the desert seemed to become a single seething organism, monstrous and terrifying.
The constant agitation and stimulation of contact with their siblings wrought a miraculous change in this teeming tide of nymphs.
Their colour turned from the drab desert brown of their kind to a vivid orange and metallic midnight black. Their metabolic rate surged and they became hyperactive and nervous. Their hind legs grew longer and more powerful, their wings developed with start-ling rapidity, and they entered the gregarious phase. When they had moulted for the last time and their newly fledged wings had dried, the last chance fluke of weather occurred. The tropical clouds along the valley escarpment blew away, and a terrible sun beat down upon the crawling mass of insects, the valley became an oven, and the entire swarm of mature locusts took spontaneously to the air.
In that baptism to flight, the heat that their bodies had sucked up from the baking earth of the valley was increased even further by their muscular activity. They could not stop, and they winged southwards in a cloud that eclipsed the sun, and stretched from horizon to horizon.
In the cool of the evening this mighty cloud sank to earth and the trees of the forest could not bear their weight. Branches as thick as a man's waist snapped off under the clinging masses of insects. In the morning the rising heat spurred them into flight once more, and they rose to darken the heavens and left the forest stripped bare of its tender spring foliage, so that the empty twisted branches looked like the limbs of cripples in a strange dead landscape.
Southwards the endless flights poured across the sky, until far below them the silver ribbon of water that was the Zambezi river glinted dully in the shadow of their passing.
The whitewashed walls of Kharni Mission Station burned in the noon sunlight with the eye-aching brilliance of bleached bone. The family dwelling, surrounded by wide shaded verandas, and roofed with thick dark thatch, stood a little apart from the church and its attendant buildings, but all of them seemed to crouch below the line of wooded hills, the way that chickens huddle below the hen when there is a hawk in the sky.
From the front steps of the house, the gardens stretched down past the well to the little stream. At first, nearer the house, there were roses and bougainvillaea, poinsettia and banks of phlox, that formed bright bold slashes of colour, against a veld still brown from the long dry winter just passed, but nearer the stream the fields of maize were tended by convalescents from the mission clinic, and soon on the tall green plants the immature cobs would begin to set. Between the "rows of corn the earth was hidden beneath the dark green umbrella leaves of new pumpkin plants. These fields fed the hundreds of hungry mouths, the family and servants and sick and converts who came from all over Matabeleland to this tiny oasis of hope and succour.
On the veranda of the main house, at a bare hand-planed table of heavy mukwa wood, the family was seated at the midday meal. It was a meal of steaming salted maize bread baked in the leaves and washed down with moos, the cool thick soured milk from a stone jug, and, in the opinion of the twins, the grace that preceded it was disproportionately long for such frugal fare. Vicky fidgeted and Elizabeth sighed at a volume that was carefully calculated not to exceed the knife edge beyond which it would attract her mother's wrath.
Doctor Robyn St. John, the doyerme of Khami Mission, had dutifully thanked the Almighty for His bounty but was going on, in conversational tones, to point out to Him that a little rain soon would help pollination of the immature cobs in the field and ensure a continuation of that bounty. Robyn's eyes were closed, and her features were relaxed and serene, her skin was almost as unlined as that of Victoria's. Her dark hair had the same russet highlights as Elizabeth's, but there was just a fine silver mist at her temples to betray her age.
"Dear Lord," she said, "in Your wisdom You have allowed our best cow, Buttercup, to lose her milk. We submit to Your will which surpasses all understanding, but we do need milk if this little mission is going to continue to work to Your glory.-" Robyn paused to let that sink in. "Amen!" said Juba from the far end of the table.
Since her conversion to Christianity, Juba had taken to covering her huge black melon-sized breasts with a high buttoned man's under-vest, and amongst the necklaces of ostrich shell and bright ceramic trade beads around her neck hung a simple crucifix of rolled gold on a fine chain. Apart from that she was still dressed in the traditional costume of a high-ranking Matabele matron.
Robyn opened her eyes and smiled at her. They were companions of many years, since Robyn had rescued her from the hold of the Arab slaving dhow in the Mozambique channel, long before the birth of any of the children, when both of them had been young and unmarried, but it had only been shortly before his destruction by the Company forces that King Lobengula had at last given his permission for Juba's conversion to, the Christian faith.
Juba, the little Dove how she had changed since those far-off days. Now she was the senior wife of Gandang, one of the great indunas "of the Matabele nation, brother of King Lobengula himself, and she had borne him twelve sons, the eldest of whom was Bazo, the Axe, himself an and una Four of her younger sons had died in front of the Maxim machine guns at the Shangani river and the Bembesi crossing.
Nevertheless, as soon as that brief cruel little war had ended, Juba had returned to Khami Mission and to Robyn.
Now she smiled back at Robyn. Her face was a glossy full moon, the silky black skin stretched tightly over the layers of fat. Her dark eyes sparkled with a lively intelligence, and her teeth were a perfect and unblemished white. On her vast lap, within the circle of her arms, each as thick as a man's tigh, she held Robyn St. John's only son.
Robert was not quite two years old, a thin child, without his father's rugged bone structure but with the same strange yellow-flecked eyes. His skin was sallow from regular doses of anti-malarial quinine.
Like many infants born of a mother on the verge of menopause, there was a quaint old-fashioned solemnity about him, like a little old gnome who had already lived a hundred years. He watched his mother's face as though he had understood each word she uttered.
Robyn closed her eyes again, and the twins who had perked up at the prospect of a final amen glanced at each other, and slumped with resignation.
"Dear Lord, Thou know est of the great experiment upon which Thy humble servant will embark before this day ends, and we are certain of Your understanding and protection during the dangerous days ahead."
Juba's understanding of the English language was just sufficient to follow this injunction, and the smile faded from her face. Even the twins looked up again, both of them so troubled and unhappy that when Robyn sounded the long awaited "Amen', neither of them reached for the platters or jugs.
"Victoria, Elizabeth, you may begin," Robyn had to prompt them, and they chewed dismally for a while.
"You never told us it was to be today," Vicky spoke up at last.
"The young girl from Zama's kraal is a perfect subject, she started her chills an hour ago, I expect her fever to peak before sundown." "Please, Mama." Elizabeth jumped up from her seat and knelt beside Robyn with both arms around her waist, her expression stricken.
"Please don't do it." "Now don't be a silly girl, Elizabeth," Robyn told her firmly. "Return to your seat and eat your food." "Lizzie is right." Vicky had tears in her green eyes. "We don't want you to do this. It's so dangerous, so horrible." Robyn's expression softened a little, and she placed one narrow but strong brown hand on Elizabeth's head. "Sometimes we have to do things that frighten us. It's God's test of our strength and faith." Robyn stroked the lustrous dark hair back from Elizabeth's forehead. "Your grandfather, Fuller Ballantyne-" "Grandfather was touched," Vicky cut in quickly. "He was crazy mad."
Robyn shook her head. "Fuller Ballantyne was a great man of God, there were no limits to his vision and courage. It is only the mean little people who call- such men mad. They doubted him, as they now doubt me, but as he did, I shall prove the truth," she said firmly.
The previous year Robyn had, in her professional capacity as Medical Superintendent of Khami Mission, submitted a paper to the British Medical Association in which she set out the conclusions of twenty years" study of tropical malarial fever.
At the beginning of the paper she had scrupulously acknowledged the work of Charles Louis Alphonse Laveran who was the first to isolate the malarial parasite under microscopic examination, but then Robyn had gone on to postulate that the periodic paroxysms of chill and fever that characterized the disease were coincident with the segmentation of these parasites in the patient's bloodstream.
The august members of the British Medical Association were well aware of Robyn's reputation as a political trouble stirrer a radical who flew in the face of their conservative convictions. They had never forgiven nor forgotten that she had impersonated a man to attend medical school and had desecrated their exclusive masculine preserve by obtaining her medical qualification under false colours. They recalled with.pain the furore and scandal that she had conjured up when the governors of St. Matthew's Hospital, London, where she had received her training, had attempted, quite reasonably, to revoke her doctorate.
Sourly they had looked on as she published a series of highly successful books, culminating in the infamous Trooper Hackett of Matabeleland, a vicious attack on the Company in which a great deal of the association's funds were invested.
Naturally the honourable members of such an august body were above such mundane emotions as envy and malice, so none of them had grudged her the princely royalties from her publications, and when some of Robyn's outrageous theories on tropical diseases had finally been proven accurate, and after they had been brought under pressure by Oliver Wicks who was Robyn's champion and editor of the Standard, they had magnanimously retracted their previous refutations. Nevertheless, when Dr. Robyn St. John, previously Codrington, nee Ballantyne, finally succeeded in hoisting and hanging herself on her own audacity and presumption, the members of the British Medical Association would not be numbered amongst the company of her mourners.
Thus, they read the first part of Robyn's latest paper on malarial fever with mild alarm. Her theory on the coincidence of parasite segmentation and patient temperature-change could only add lustre to her reputation. Then, with mounting joy, they came to the second part, and realized that once more she had placed herself and her reputation in jeopardy. Since Hippocrates had first described the disease, in the fifth century Bc, it had been an uncontested fact that malaria, as its name applied, was transmitted by the foul airs of swampy ground and poisonous nights. Robyn St. John postulated that this was fallacy, and that it was transmitted from a sufferer to a healthy victim by the physical transfer of blood. Then, incredibly, her paper went on to suggest that the carrier agents were the flying mosquitoes that were usually associated with the swamps and marshy ground where the disease proliferated. As proof, Robyn cited her discovery, by microscopic examination, of the malarial parasite in the stomach contents of the insects.
Offered such an opportunity, her peers in the British Medical Association had been unable to resist the temptation to embark on an orgy of derision. "Doctor St. John should not allow her penchant for lurid fiction to intrude upon the sacred grounds of medical research," wrote one of her more charitable critics. "There is not the remotest shred of evidence that any disease can be transferred in the blood, and to look to the agency of flying insects to affect this mischief is not far removed from belief in vampires and werewolves." "They scoffed at your grandfather also." Robyn's chin was up now as she addressed her family, and in this mood the strength and determination of her features were daunting. "When he refuted their belief that yellow jack was an infectious or a contagious disease, they challenged him to provide proof." The twins had heard this piece of family history a dozen times before, so they both paled in anticipatory nausea.
"He went into that fever hospital where all those eminent surgeons were gathered, and he collected a crystal glass of the yellow vomit from one of the patients who was dying of the disease, and he toasted his fellow surgeons with the glass and then he quaffed it down in front of them all." Vicky covered her own mouth, and Elizabeth gagged softly and turned icy pale.
"Your grandfather was a courageous man, and I am his daughter," Robyn said simply. "Now eat up your lunch. I expect you both to assist me this afternoon." Behind the church stood the new ward that Robyn had built since the death of her first husband in the BMatabele war. It was an open-sided go down with low waist-high walls. The thatched roof was supported on upright poles of mopani. In hot weather the breeze could blow through the structure unhindered, but in the rains or when it turned cold, then woven grass mats could be unrolled to close in the walls.
The sleeping-mats were laid out in rows upon the clay floor, no attempt being made to separate families, so that healthy spouses and offspring were camped with the sick and suffering. Robyn had found it better to turn the ward into a bustling community rather than have her patients pine to death. However, the arrangement was so congenial and the food so good, that it had been difficult to persuade patients to leave after their cure had been effected, until Robyn had hit upon the ruse of sending all convalescents, and their families, to work in the fields or at building the new wards. This had dramatically reduced the clinic's population to manageable proportions.
Robyn's laboratory stood between the church and the ward. It was a small rondavel with adobe walls, and a single window. Shelves and a workbench ran around the entire curved inside wall. In pride of place stood Robyn's new microscope, purchased with the royalties of Trooper Hackett, and beside it her working journal, a thick leather-bound volume in which she was now noting her preliminary observations.
"Subject. Caucasian female at present in good health. she wrote in her firm neat hand, but she looked up irritably with pen poised at Juba's tragic tone and mournful expression.
"You swore on oath to the great King Lobengula that you would care for his people after he was gone. How can you" honour that promise if you are dead, Nomusa?" Juba asked in Sindebele, using Robyn's Matabele praise name "Nomusa Girl Child of Mercy".
"I am not going to die, Juba," Robyn snapped irritably. "And for the love of all things holy, take that look off your face." "It is never wise to provoke the dark spirits, Nomusa." "Juba is right, Mama," Vicky supported her. "You have deliberately stopped taking quinine, not a single tablet in six weeks, and your own observations have shown the danger of blackwater fever is increased-" "Enough!" Robyn slapped the table with the flat of her hand. "I will listen to no more." "All right," Elizabeth agreed. "We won't try and stop you again, but if you become dangerously ill, should we ride into Bulawayo to fetch General St. John?" Robyn threw her pen onto the open page so the ink splattered and she leaped to her feet.
"You will do no such thing, do you hear me, girl? You will not go near that man." "Mama, he is your husband," Vicky pointed out reasonably.
"And he is Bobby's father," Elizabeth said quickly.
"And he loves you," Vicky gabbled it out before Robyn could stop her.
Robyn was white-faced and shaking with anger and some other emotion that prevented her speaking for a moment, and Elizabeth took advantage of her uncharacteristic silence. "He is such a strong-2
"Elizabeth!" Robyn found her voice, and it rang like steel from the scabbard. "You know I have forbidden discussion of that man." She sat back at the desk, picked up the pen and for a long minute the scratching of her nib was the only sound in the room, but when she spoke again, Robyn's voice was level and businesslike. "While I am incapacitated, Elizabeth will write up the journal she has the better handwriting. I want hourly entries, no matter how grave the situation." "Very well, Mama." "Vicky, you will administer treatment, but not before the cycle has been established beyond any chance of refutation. "I have prepared a written list of instructions for you to follow, should I become insensible." "Very well, Mama." "And me, Nomusa?"Juba asked softly. "What must I do?" Robyn's expression softened then, and she laid her hand on the other woman's forearm.
"Juba, you must understand that I am not reneguing on my promise to take care of your people. What I will accomplish with this work is a final understanding of a disease that has ravaged the Matabele and all people of Africa since the beginning of time. Trust me, dear friend, this is a long step towards freeing your people and mine of this terrible scourge." "I wish there was another way, Nomusa." "There is not." Robyn shook her head. "You asked what you should do to help, will you stay with me, Juba, to give me comfort?" "You know I will," Juba whispered, and hugged Robyn to her. Robyn seemed slim and girlish in that vast embrace, and Juba's sobs shook them both.
The black girl lay on her sleeping-mat against the low wall of the ward. She was of marriageable age, for when she cried out in delirium and threw aside the fur kaross, her naked body was fully matured, with a wide fertile spread of hips and hard-thrusting nipples to her breasts, but the heat of fever was burning her up. Her skin looked as brittle as parchment, her lips were grey and cracked, and her eyes glittered with the unnatural brilliance of the fever that was rushing down upon her.
Robyn pressed her hand into the girl's armpit, and exclaimed, "She is like a furnace, the poor child is at the climax," and she pulled her hand away and covered her with the thick soft kaross. "I think this is the moment. Juba, take her shoulders. Vicky, hold her arm, and you, Elizabeth, bring the bowl." The girl's bare arm protruded from under the kaross, and Vicky held her at the elbow while Robyn slipped a tourniquet of whiplash leather over her forearm and twisted it up until the blood vessels in the Matabele girl's wrist swelled" up, purple black and hard as unripe grapes.
"Come on, child," Robyn snapped at Elizabeth, and she prof erred the white enamel basin and drew back the cloth that covered it. Her hand was trembling.
Robyn picked up the syringe. The barrel of brass had a narrow glass inset running down its length. Robyn detached the hollow needle from the nipple at the end, and at the same time with the thumb of her free hand she pumped up the veins in the girl's wrist with a stroking motion, and then pierced the skin with an angled stab of the thick needle. She found the vein almost immediately, and a thin jet of dark red venous blood shot from the open end of the needle and pattered onto the clay floor. Robyn fitted the syringe nipple into the needle, and slowly withdrew the plunger, watching intently as the fever-hot blood flowed into the brass barrel and showed through the glass inset.
"I am taking two cubic centimetres," she murmured, as the line of moving red reached the graduation stamped in the brass, and she jerked the needle from the girl's skin and staunched the blood that followed it with the pressure of her thumb, dropped the syringe back into the bowl, and released the loop of the tourniquet.
"Juba," she said, "give her the quinine now and stay with her until she starts to sweat." Robyn rose with a swirl of skim, and the twins had to run to keep up with her as she crossed to her laboratory.
As soon as they were in the circular room, Robyn slammed the door. "We must be quick," she said, unbuttoning the cuff of her leg-of mutton sleeve, and rolling it high. "We must not allow any organisms in the blood to deteriorate." And she offered her arm to Vicky who looped the tourniquet around it and began twisting it up tightly.
"Make a-note of the time" Robyn ordered.
"Seventeen minutes past six," said Elizabeth, standing beside her and holding the enamel basin, while she stared with a controlled horror at the blue veins under the pale skin of her mother's arm.
"We will use the basilic vein," Robyn said in a matter-of fact tone, and took a fresh needle from the case on the desk. Robyn bit her lip at the prick, but went on probing gently down towards her own swollen vein until suddenly there was an eruption of blood from the open end of the needle, and Robyn grunted with satisfaction and reached for the charged syringe.
"Oh Mama!"cried Vicky, unable to restrain herself longer. "Do be quiet, Victoria." Robyn fitted the syringe into the needle, and without any dramatic pause or portentous words, expelled the still hot blood from the fever struck Matabele girl into her own vein.
She withdrew the needle, and rolled down her sleeve in businesslike fashion.
"All right," she said. "If I am right and I am we can expect the first paroxysm in forty-eight hours." The full-sized billiard table was the only one in Africa north of the Kimberley Club, and south of Shepheard's Hotel in Cairo. It had been transported in sections three hundred miles from the railhead, and Ralph Ballantyne's bill for cartage had been 1112. pounds However, the proprietor of the Grand Hotel had recouped his costs a dozen' times over since he had set up the massive slate top on its squat teak legs in the centre of his saloon bar.
The table was a'source of pride to every citizen of Bulawayo.
Somehow it seemed to symbolize the transition from barbarism to civilization, that subjects of Queen Victoria should be striking the ivory balls across the green baize on the same spot where a few short years previously a pagan black king had conducted his grisly "smelling-out" ceremonies and gruesome executions.