Rage - Smith Wilbur - Страница 55
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This was the lobola, the marriage price, two hundred head of prime beasts, as had been agreed. The herd-boys were all of them sons of the leading warriors who had ridden in the cattle trucks with their charges during the three-hundred-mile journey from the Witwatersrand. In charge of the herd-boys were Wellington and Raleigh Tabaka and they had detrained the herd at Ladyburg railway station. Like their father, they had discarded their western-style clothing for the occasion and were dressed in loincloths, and armed with their fighting-sticks, and they danced and called to the cattle, keeping them in a tight bunch, both of them excited and filled with self-importance by the task they had been allotted.
Ahead of them rose the high escarpment beyond the little town of Ladyburg. The slopes were covered with dark forests of black wattle and all of it was Courtney land, from where the waterfall smoked with spray in the sunlight around the great curve of hills. All ten thousand acres of it belonged to Lady Anna Courtney, the relict of Sir Garrick Courtney and to Storm Anders, who was the daughter of General Sean Courtney. However, beyond the waterfall lay a hundred choice acres of land which had been left to Sangane Dinizulu in terms of the will of General Sean Courtney, for he had been a faithful and beloved retainer of the Courtney family as had his lath Mbejane Dinizulu before him.
The road descended the escarpment in a series of hairpin bend and when Moses Gama shaded his eyes and stared ahead, he so another band of warriors coming down it to meet them. They we many more in number, perhaps five hundred strong. Like Mose party they were dressed in full regimentals, with plumes of fur an feathers on their heads and war rattles on their wrists and ankle The two parties halted at the foot of the escarpment, and from hundred paces faced each other, though still they sang and stampe and brandished their weapons.
The shields of the Zulus were matched, selected from dapple cowhides of white and chocolate brown, and the brows of the wal riors that carried them were bound with strips of the same dapple hide while their kilts and their plumes were cow-tails of purest whit They made a daunting and warlike show, all big men, their bodie gleaming with sweat in the sunlight, their eyes bloodshot with din and excitement and the pots of millet beer they had already downec Facing them Moses felt his nerves crawl with a trace of the terra that these men had for two hundred years inspired in all the other tribes of Africa, and to suppress it he stamped and sang as loudly a his Buffaloes who pressed closely around him. On this his weddinl day, Moses Gama had put aside all the manners and mores of th west, and slipped back easily into his African origins and his hear pumped and thrilled to the rhythms and the pulse of this horst continent.
From the Zulu ranks opposite him sprang a champion, a magnificent figure of a man with the strip of leopard skin around hi, brow that declared his royal origins. He was one 'of Victorin Dinizulu's elder brothers, and Moses knew he was a qualified lawyel with a large practice at Eshowe, the Zululand capital, but today he was all African, fierce and threatening as he swirled in the giya, the challenge dance.
He leapt and spun and shouted his own praises and those of his family, daring the world, challenging the men who faced him, while behind him his comrades drummed with their sticks on the ravhide shields, and the sound was like distant thunder, the last sound that a million victims had ever heard, the death-knell of Swazi and Xhosa, of Boer and Briton in the days when the impis of Chaka and Dingaan and Cetewayo had swept across the land, from Isandhlawana, the Hill of the Little Hand, where seven hundred British infantry were cut down in one of the worst military reverses that England had ever suffered in Africa, to the 'Place of Weeping' which the Boers named 'Weenen' for their grief for the women and children who died to that same dreadful drum roll when the impis came swarming down across the Tugela river, to a thousand other nameless and forgotten killing grounds where the lesser tribes had perished before the men of Zulu.
At last the Zulu champion staggered back into the ranks, streaked with sweat and dust, his chest heaving and froth upon his lips, and now it was Moses' turn to giya, and he danced out from amongst his Buffaloes, and leapt shoulder-high with his leopard-skins swirling around him. His limbs shone like coal freshly cut from the face, and his eyes and teeth were white as mirrors flashing in the sunlight. His voice rang from the escarpment, magnified by the echoes, and though the men facing him could not understand the words, the force and meaning of them was clear, his haughty disdain evident in every gesture. They growled and pressed forward, while his own Buffaloes were goaded by his example, their blood coming to the boil, ready to rush forward and join battle with their traditional foe, ready to perpetuate the bloody vendetta that had already run a hundred years.
At the very last moment, when violence and inevitable death were only a heartbeat away, and rage was as thick in the air as the static electricity of the wildest summer thunderstorm, Moses Gama stopped dancing abruptly, posing like a heroic statue before them - and so great was the force of his personality, so striking his presence, that the drumming of shields and the growl of battle rage died away.
Into the silence Moses Gama called in the Zulu language. 'I bring the marriage price!" and he held his stick aloft, a signal to the herdboys who followed the marriage party.
Lowing and bawling, adding their dust to the dust of the dancers, the herd was driven forward and immediately the mood of the Zulus changed. For a thousand years, since they had come down from the far north, following the tsetse-fly-free corridors down the continent with their herds, the Nguni peoples from which the Zulu tribe would emerge under the black emperor Chaka, had been cattle men. Their animals were their wealth and their treasure. They loved cattle as other men love women and children. Almost from the day they could walk unaided, the boys tended the herds, living with them in the veld from dawn to dusk of every day, establishing with them a bond and almost mystic communion, protecting them from predators with their very lives, talking to them and handling them and coming to know them completely. It was said that King Chaka knew every individual beast in his royal herds, and that out of a hundred thousand head he would know immediately if one were missing and would ask for it with a complete description, and not hesitate to order his executioners with their knobkerries to dash out the brains of even the youngest herd-boy if there was even a suspicion of his negligence.
So it was a committee of strict and expert judges who put asi the dancing and posturing and boasting, and instead applied the selves to the serious business of appraising.the bride price. Ea animal was dragged from the herd, and amid a buzz of cornroe and speculation and argument, was minutely examined. Its lien and trunk were palpated by dozens of hands simultaneously, its ja were forced open to expose the teeth and tongue, its head twisted that its ears and nostrils could be peered into, its udders stroked or weighed in the palm, its tail lifted to estimate its calf-bearing histo: and potential. Then finally, almost reluctantly, each animal w declared acceptable by old Sangane Dinizulu himself, the father the bride. No matter how hard they tried, they could find no groun( for rejecting a single animal. The Ovambo and the Xhosa love the cattle every bit as much as the Zulu, and are as expert in their judgement. Moses and Hendrick had exercised all their skills in makin their selection, for pride and honour were at stake.
It took many hours for every one of the two hundred animals to b examined while the bridegroom's party, still keeping aloof from th Zulus, squatted in the short grass on the side of the road, pretendin indifference to the proceedings. The sun was hot and the dust aggra voted the men's thirst, but no refreshment was offered while th, scrutiny went on.
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