The Angels Weep - Smith Wilbur - Страница 57

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These three animals were moving in single file across the vlei.

The old stink-bull leading them was almost black with age, the cow that followed was splotched with reddish fawn, and the half-grown calf was a lovely soft beige.

The calf was dancing. Ralph had never seen anything like it. It was swaying, and turning in slow and elegant pirouettes, the neck twisting and untwisting, swinging first to one side then to the other.

Every few paces the mother turned back anxiously to watch its offspring, and then torn between duty and maternal love, swung again to follow the old bull. At last, quite slowly, with a kind of weary grace, the calf slumped to the grassy earth, and lay in a tangle of long limbs. The mother hovered for a minute or two, and then in the way of the wilderness, deserted the weak and went on after her mate.

Ralph and Harry rode up, slowly, almost reluctantly, to where the calf lay. Only when they reached it were they aware of the fatal mucous discharge from jaws and nostrils, and the diarrhoea painting the dappled hind-quarters. They stared at the corpse in disbelief, until suddenly Harry wrinkled his nose and sniffed.

"That smell, the same as the oxen-" he started, and suddenly realization dawned upon him. "A murrain," he whispered. "By the sweet name of the Virgin, Harry, it's some kind of plague. It is wiping out everything, game and oxen." Under his deep tan, Ralph had turned a muddy colour. "Two hundred wagons, Harry," he whispered, "almost four thousand bullocks. If this thing goes on spreading, I'm going to lose them all." He reeled in the saddle so that he had to clutch at the pommel for his balance. "I'll be finished. Wiped out all of it."

His voice trembled with self-pity, and then a moment later he shook himself like a wet span iO sloughing off despair, and colour rushed back into his darkly handsome face.

"No, I'm not," he said fiercely. "I'm not finished yet, not without a fight anyway." And he whirled to face Harry. "You'll have to bring the women back to Bulawayo alone," he ordered. "I'm taking the four best horses." "Where are you going?" Harry asked. "Kimberley."

"What for?" But Ralph had pivoted his horse like a polo pony, and was lying along its neck as he raced back towards the single wagon that had just come out of the forest behind them. Even as he reached it, one of the lead oxen collapsed and lay convulsed in the traces.

Isazi did not go to the kraal the following dawn. He was afraid of what he would find. Bazo went in his place.

They were all dead. Every single bullock. They were already stiff and cold as statues, locked in that dreadful final convulsion.

Bazo shivered, and pulled his monkeys king cloak more closely around his shoulders. It was not the dawn chill, but the icy finger of superstitious awe that had touched him.

"When the cattle lie with their heads twisted to touch their flank, and cannot rise-" he repeated aloud the exact, words of the Umlimo, and his dread was carried away by the jubilant rush of his warlike spirits. "It is happening, just as it was prophesied." Never before had the Chosen One's words been so unequivocal. He should have seen it immediately, but the whirlwind of events had confused him so that it was only now that the true significance of this fatal plague had come upon him. Now he wanted to leave the laager, and run southwards, day and night, without stopping, until he reached that secret cavern in the sacred hills.

He wanted to stand "before the assembled indunas and tell them.

"You who doubted, believe now the words of the Umlimo. You with milk and beer in your bellies, put a stone in their place." He wanted to go from mine to farm to the new villages the white men were building where his comrades now laboured with pick and shovel instead of the silver blade, wearing the ragged cast-offs of their masters rather than the plumes and kilts of the regiment.

He wanted to ask them, "Do you remember the war song of the 1zimvukuzane Ezembintaba, the Moles-that-burrow under-a-mountain? Come, you diggers of the other men's dirt, come rehearse the war song of the Moles with me." But it was not yet full term, there was the third and final act of the Umlimo's prophecy to unfold, and until then Bazo, like his old comrades, must play the white man's servant. With an effort, he masked his savage joy, withdrawing behind the inscrutable face of Africa. Bazo left the kraal of dead bullocks and went to the remaining wagon. The white women and the child were asleep within the body of the vehicle, and Harry Mellow was lying wrapped in his blanket under the chassis where the dew could not wet him.

Henshaw had deserted them late the previous afternoon, before they had even reached the bank of the Lupani river. He had -chosen four horses, the swiftest and strongest. He had charged Bazo most strictly with the task of leading the little party back to Bulawayo on foot, then he had kissed his wife and son, shaken hands briefly with Harry Mellow, and galloped away southwards towards the drift on the Lupani, leading the three spare horses on a long rein and riding like a man chased by wild dogs.

Now Bazo stooped beside the wagon and spoke slowly and clearly to the blanket-wrapped figure beneath it. Though Harry Mellow's grasp of Sindebele improved each day, it was still equivalent to that of a five-year-old. and Bazo had to be sure he understood.

"The last of the oxen is dead. One horse was killed by the buffalo, and Henshaw has taken four." Harry Mellow sat up quickly and made the decision. "That leaves one mount each for the women, and Jon-Jon can ride up behind one of them. The rest of us will walk. How long back to Bulawayo, Bazo?" Bazo shrugged eloquently. "If we were an impi, fast and fit, five days. But at the pace of a white man in boots.--" They looked like refugees, each servant carrying bundles of only the most essential stores upon his head, and strung out in a long straggling line behind the two horses. The women were hampered by their long skirts whenever they walked to rest the horses, and Bazo could not contain himself to this pace. He ranged far ahead of the others and once he was out of sight and well beyond earshot, he pranced and stamped, stabbing with an imaginary assegai at a non-existent adversary, and accompanying the giya, the challenge dance, with the fighting chant of his old impi.

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