The Angels Weep - Smith Wilbur - Страница 69

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"Do you not hear the widows of Shangani and Bembesi crying aloud, ""Our father Lobengula is gone, we are orphans with no one to protect us." Do you not see the men of Matabeleland with empty hands entreat the spirits? "Give us a king," they cry. "We must have a king."" "Babiaan," whispered Bazo. "Somabula and Gandang. They are Lobengula's brothers." "They are old men, and the stone has fallen out of their bellies, the fire has gone out in their eyes." "Tanase, do not speak so." "Bazo, my husband, my king, do you not see to whom the eyes of all the indunas turn when the nation is in council?" "Madness," Bazo shook his head.

"Do you not know whose word they wait upon now, do you not see how even Babiaan and Somabula. listen when Bazo speaks?". She laid the palm of her hand over his mouth to still his protests, and then in one swift movement she had mounted and straddled him again, and miraculously he was ready and more than ready for her, and she cried out fiercely. "Bayete, son of kings! Bayete, father of kings, whose seed will nile when the white men have been swallowed again by the ocean which spewed them up." And with a shuddering cry he -felt as though she had drawn the very life force from his guts, and left in its place a dreadful haunting longing, a fire in his blood, that would not be assuaged until he held in his hand the little redwood spear that was the symbol of the Nguni monarch. " They went side by side, hand in hand, which was a curious thing, for a Matabele wife always walks behind her husband with the roll of the sleeping mat balanced upon her head. But they were like children caught up in a kind of delirious dream, and when they reached the crest of the pass, Bazo took her in his arms and held her to his breast in an embrace that he had never used before. if I am the axe, then you are the cutting edge, for you are a part of me, but the sharpest part." "Together, Lord, we will hack through anything that stands in our way" she answered fiercely, and then she pulled out from the circle of his arms and lifted the flap of the beaded pouch upon her belt.

"I have a gift to make your brave heart braver and your will as hard as your steel." She took something soft and grey and fluffy from her pouch, and stood before him on tiptoe, reaching high with both arms to bind the strip of fur around his forehead. "Wear this moleskin for the glory that was and that shall be again, and una of the Moles-who-burrowed under-a-hill. One day soon, we will change it for a headband of spotted gold leopard skin, with royal blue heron feathers set upon it." She took his hand and they started down from the hilltop, but they did not reach the grassy plain before Bazo stopped again and inclined his head to listen. There was a faint popping sound on the small dry. breeze, like the bubbles bursting in a pot of boiling porridge.

"Guns,"he said. "Still far away, but many of them." "It is so, Lord," Tanase replied. "Since you left, the guns of One-Bright-Eye's kanka have been busy as the tongues of the old women at a beer-drink."

There is a terrible pestilence sweeping through the land." General Mungo St. John had selected a clay anthill as a rostrum from which to address his audience. "It passes from one animal to the next, as a bushfire jumps from tree to tree. Unless we can contain it, all the cattle will die." Below the anthill, Sergeant Ezra was translating loudly, while the listening tribesmen squatted silently facing them. There were almost two thousand of them, the occupants of all the villages that had been built along both banks of the Inyati river to replace the regimental kraals of Lobengula's impi.

The men were in the foremost ranks, their faces expressionless but their eyes watchful, behind them were the youths and boys not yet admitted to the rank of warrior. These were the mujiba, the herd boys whose daily life was intimately interwoven with the herds of the tribe. The present indaba concerned them as much as it did the elders.

There were no women present, for it was a matter of cattle, of the nation's wealth.

"It is a great sin" to try to hide your cattle, as you have done.

To drive them into the hills or the thick forest. These cattle carry with them the seeds of the pestilence," Mungo St. John explained, and waited for his sergeant to translate, before going on. "Lodzi and I are very angry with these deceptions. There will be heavy fines for those villages which hide their cattle, and as further punishment, I will double the work quotas for the men, so that you will work like amah oh like slaves you will toil, if you attempt to defy the word of Lodzi Mungo St. John paused again, and lifted the black eye-patch to wipe away the sweat that trickled down from under the wide-brimmed slouch hat.

Drawn by the lowing herds in the thombush kraal, the big shiny green flies swarmed, and the place stank of cow dung and unwashed humanity.

Mungo found himself impatient with the necessity of trying to explain his actions to this silent unresponsive throng of half-naked savages, for he had already repeated this same warning at thirty other indabas across Matabeleland. His sergeant finished the translation and glanced up at him expectantly.

Mungo St. John pointed to the mass of cattle penned in the thorn kraal behind him. "As you have seen, it is of no avail to try to hide the herds. The native police track them down." Mungo stopped again, and frowned in annoyance. In the second row, a Matabele buck had risen and was facing him quietly.

He was a tall man, finely muscled, although one arm seemed deformed, for it was twisted from the shoulder at an awkward angle.

Though the body was that of a man in his full prime, the face was eroded and ravaged, as though by grief or pain, and was aged before its time. On the neat cap of dense curls, the man wore the head ring of an and una and around his forehead a headband of grey fur.

"Babo, MY father," said the and una "We hear your words, but like children we do not understand them." "Who is this fellow?" Mungo demanded of Sergeant Ezra, and nodded when he heard the reply. "I know about him. He is a troublemaker." Then to Bazo, raising his voice, "What is so strange about what I say? What is it that puzzles you?"

"You say, Babo, that the sickness will kill the cattle so before it does, you will shoot them dead. You say, Babo, that to save our cattle you must kill them for us." The quiet ranks of, Matabele stirred for the first time. Though their expressions were still impassive, here a man coughed and there another shuffled his bare feet in the dust or yet another flicked his switch at the circling flies. No man laughed, not one mocked with word or smile, but it was mockery nonetheless, and Mungo St. John sensed it. Behind those inscrutable black African faces, they were gleefully following the mock humble questions of the young and una with the old worn face.

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