Authors: Wilbur Smith
‘Gentle Jesus meek and mild—’
Cathy was already in her own bed, hair ribboned for the night, writing the day’s entry in her diary by the light of the guttering candle made from buffalo fat and cloth wick.
‘Pity my simplicity—’ gabbled the twins, at such a speed that it came out as, ‘Pretty mice, and pretty me!’
Arriving at the ‘Amen’ in a dead heat, the twins leaped into the bed that they shared, pulled the blanket to their chins and watched with fascination as Salina began to brush her
hair, one hundred strokes with each hand, so that it rippled and flamed with white fire in the candlelight. Then she came to kiss them, blew out the candle, and the thongs of her bed squeaked from
across the small thatched hut as she climbed into it.
‘Lina?’ whispered Victoria.
‘Vicky, go to sleep.’
‘Just one question, please.’
‘All right then, just one.’
‘Does God allow a girl to marry her own cousin?’
The silence that followed the question seemed to hum in the darkened bedroom like a copper telegraph wire struck by a sword.
Cathy broke the silence.
‘Yes, Vicky,’ she answered quietly. ‘God does allow it. Read the Table of Kindred and Affinity on the last page of your prayer book.’
The silence was contemplative now.
‘Lina?’
‘Lizzie, go to sleep.’
‘You allowed Vicky to ask a question.’
‘All right then, just one.’
‘Does God get cross if you pray for something just for yourself – not for Daddy or Mama or your sisters, but just for you alone?’
‘I don’t think so,’ Salina’s voice was becoming drowsy. ‘He might not give it to you but I don’t think He will be cross.
Now
go to sleep, both of
you.’
Cathy lay very still, on her back with her hands clenched at her sides, staring at the lighter oblong across the hut where the moon defined the single window.
‘Please God,’ she prayed. ‘Let him look at me the way he looks at Salina, just once. Please.’
‘W
hat do you think of Zouga’s boy?’ Robyn took Clinton’s arm as they stood together on the darkened stoep and looked out
at the star-pricked black velvet curtain of the African night.
‘He’s a powerful lad – and I don’t mean merely muscle.’ Clinton took his pipe from between his teeth and peered into the bowl. ‘His wagon is loaded with
cases, long wooden cases from which the markings have been burned with a hot iron.’
‘Guns?’ Robyn asked.
‘I think so.’
‘There is no law against trading guns north of the Limpopo,’ Robyn reminded him. ‘And Lobengula needs all the power he can get to defend himself.’
‘Still, guns! I mean, it does go against the grain.’ Clinton sucked at his pipe, and each puff of smoke he exhaled was denser and ranker. They were both silent for a while.
‘He has a hard and ruthless streak, like his father,’ Robyn judged at last.
‘A man needs that to survive in this land.’
Robyn shivered suddenly, and hugged her own arms.
‘Are you cold?’ Clinton was immediately solicitous.
‘No. A grey goose walked over my grave.’
‘Let’s go off to bed.’
‘A moment longer, Clinton. The night is so beautiful.’
Clinton put his arm about her shoulders.
‘Sometimes I am so happy that it frightens me,’ he said. ‘So much happiness cannot go on for ever.’
His words seemed to precipitate the thick but formless dread that had hung over Robyn all this day like the pall of smoke above the winter bush fires. It weighed her down with the premonition
that something had changed in all their lives.
‘May God save us all,’ she whispered.
‘Amen to that,’ said Clinton as softly, and took her in out of the night.
T
he interior of the thatched hall was domed and darkened, so that the patterns of latticed branches and lovingly knotted bark rope disappeared
into the gloom above their heads like the arches of a medieval cathedral.
The only light was from the small fire on the clay hearth in the centre of the floor. One of the king’s wives threw another handful of dried herbs upon it and oily blue tendrils of smoke
twisted upwards towards the unseen roof.
Across the fire, on a low platform of dried clay covered with a thick mattress of furs, silver-backed jackal and blue monkey, bat-eared fox and spotted civet, sat the king.
He was a mountainous figure, stark naked, and his skin polished with fat so that he gleamed like an enormous Buddha carved from a solid block of washed anthracite. His head was round as a cannon
ball, surmounted by the induna’s ring. His arms were massive, bulging with muscle and fat, but the hands in his lap were strangely dainty, narrow across the pink palms, with long tapered
fingers.
His trunk was thickened, his breasts pendulous. All this was flesh which he had carefully cultivated. The beer pots and beef dishes stood close at hand. The thick millet beer bubbled softly and
the cuts of beef each had a thick rind of yellow fat. Every few minutes one of his wives responded to a nod or a small movement of one graceful hand by proffering a dish. Weight and size were the
mark of a king. Not for nothing was Lobengula called the Great Black Elephant of Matabeleland.
His manner was slow, imbued with the vast dignity of his size and rank. Yet his eyes were thoughtful and deeply intelligent, his features despite the burden of fat which blurred them were
handsome, lacking outward traits of the hideous cruelties which any Matabele king had to make part of his life.
‘My people expect me to be strong and harsh. There are always those who look for the smallest weakness in me – as the young lions watch the black-maned leader of the pride,’
Mzilikazi had explained to his son. ‘See how my chickens follow me to be fed.’ He had pointed with the toy spear of kingship at the high wheel of tiny specks turning slowly in the sky
above the hills of Thabas Indunas. ‘When my vultures desert me, I will be as dust.’
Lobengula, his son, had learned the lesson well – but it had not brutalized him. Indeed, there was a line to his mouth that was almost diffident, and a shadow behind the light of
intelligence in his eyes that was hesitant, the confusion of a man tugged at by too many currents and winds – a man caught up by his destiny, and uncertain as to how he could break away from
its remorseless toils.
Lobengula had never expected to take up his father’s spear of kingship. He was never the heir apparent, there had been older brothers from mothers of higher rank and nobler blood.
He stared now across the fire at the man that squatted there. A magnificent warrior, his body tempered to black steel by long marches and savage warfare, his understanding and compassion
expanded by close and intimate daily contact with common men, his courage and loyalty proven to all the world ten thousand times so there could be no doubts, not even in his own midnight watches,
which is the time of doubts – and Lobengula found himself longing to rid himself of this fearsome burden of kingship and place it on the other man’s shoulders. He found himself wishing
for that quiet and secret cave in the Matopos hills where he had known the only happy days of his life.
The man opposite him was a half-brother; his blood line, like that of Lobengula himself, reaching back unsullied to the Zanzi of Zululand. He was a prince of the House of Kumalo, wise and brave
and untroubled by doubts.
‘Such a one should have been king,’ Lobengula thought, and his love for his half-brother choked his throat so that he coughed. He moved one little finger, and a wife held the beer
pot to his lips and he swallowed once and then signed for it to be taken away.
‘I see you, Gandang.’ His voice was throaty and low, the sadness still in it for he knew that he could not escape that way. He felt like a man on a solitary journey through the
forest where the lions are hunting. His recognition released Gandang from his respectful silence. The induna clapped his hands softly and began to recite his half-brother’s ritual praises,
and Lobengula’s mind wandered back across the years.
His earliest memory was of the road, the hard road up from the south – driven by the mounted men dressed all in brown, riding brown ponies. He remembered the popping sound of the guns,
which he learned only later to fear, and the smell of gunsmoke, spicy and sour as the wind brought it down to where he clung to his mother, and he remembered the wailing of the women as they
mourned the dead.
He remembered the heat and the dust, trotting naked as a puppy at his mother’s heels. How tall she had seemed, the muscles of her back gleaming with sweat, and Ningi, his sister, in the
sling upon her hip, clinging to one of his mother’s fat jostling breasts with mouth and tiny determined fists.
He remembered toiling up the stony hills with his father’s single wagon rolling and pitching along ahead of them. On it rode Mzilikazi’s senior wife, and her son Nkulumane, three
years older than Lobengula and heir apparent to the kingship of the Matabele. They were the only ones who did not walk.
He remembered how his mother’s back had withered, the beautiful gleaming skin becoming loose and baggy, the ribcage beginning to show through as the famine wasted her substance, and Ningi
screaming with hunger as the rich creamy flow from her teats dried up.
This was where the memory of Saala began; it was mixed up at first with the shouting and singing as a band of raiding Matabele returned to the fleeing column. He had first seen Saala in the
firelight, as the warriors slaughtered the captured cattle, and Lobengula could almost still feel the hot grease and the bloody juices of the beef running down his chin and dripping onto his naked
chest as they feasted, breaking the long days and months of starvation on cattle taken from the white men, the
buni.
Once his belly was bulging tightly with meat, Lobengula had joined the circle of curious Matabele princelings and princesses who surrounded the captives; but he had stood back from the teasing
and jeering and prodding of the other children.
Saala was the eldest of the two little girls. It was only long afterwards that Lobengula learned that her name was Sarah, but even now he could not pronounce that sound. The Matabele raiding
party had surprised a small caravan of Boer wagons, and had killed everybody except these two small white children.
Her whiteness was the first thing that had struck Lobengula. How white her face was in the firelight, as white as an egret’s wing, and she had not wept as her younger sister wept.
After that the memories grew stronger, Saala walking ahead of him as the slow column wound through thick thorn forest. Saala taking the infant Ningi from his mother when she slipped and fell
with weakness in the black mud of the swamps while the mosquitoes formed a dark whining cloud over them.
Exactly where Saala’s little sister died, Lobengula could not recall. It might have been in the swamps. They left her small naked white body unburied, and the column marched on.
At last Lobengula’s own mother fell and could not rise again, and with her last strength handed little Ningi to Saala; then she curled up quietly and died. All the weak ones died like
that, and their infants died with them, for no other women would take the orphans, for each of them had her own infants to care for.
However, Saala strapped little Ningi on her own thin white back in the way that the Matabele carry their babies, then she took Lobengula’s hand in hers and they toiled on after the fleeing
nation.
By now Saala’s clothing had long ago fallen off her thin white body, and she was as the other Matabele girls who had not yet reached puberty, completely naked. She had half forgotten her
own language, and spoke only the language of the tribe. The sun had darkened her skin, and the soles of her bare feet had grown a thick covering, hard as rhinoceros skin, so she could march over
razor flint and needle thorns.
Lobengula came to love Saala, transferring everything he had ever felt for his mother to her, and she stole extra food for him and protected him from the bullying of his older brothers –
from Nkulumane the cruel one, and from Nkulumane’s mother, who hated all that might one day stand in the way of her son’s claim to the kingship of the Matabele.
Then the Matabele crossed the Limpopo, the River of Crocodiles, and the land beyond was fair, thick with game and running with sweet rivers. The wandering nation followed Mzilikazi into the
magical hills of the Matopos. There on a lonely hilltop the king met the wizard of the Matopos, face to face.
Mzilikazi saw fire spring up at the Umlimo’s bidding, and he heard the spirits speak from the very air about the Umlimo, a hundred different voices – voice of infant and crone, of
man and of beast, the cry of the fish eagle, the snarl of the leopard – and from that day the Umlimo had the reverence and superstitious awe of the king and all his people.
The Umlimo pointed the way north again, and as the Matabele emerged from the broken hills of the Matopos, they saw spread before them a beautiful land, rich with grass and tall trees.
‘This is my land,’ said Mzilikazi, and built his kraal under the Hills of the Indunas.
However, the Matabele had lost nearly all their cattle and many of the women and children had died on that cruel journey northwards.
At Thabas Indunas Mzilikazi left his senior wife, mother of Nkulumane, as his regent, and he took five thousand of his finest warriors and went out against the tribes – for women and for
cattle.
He went westwards into the land ruled by great Khama, and there was no word from him. The seasons came and changed, the rains followed the long dryness, the heat followed the frosts, and still
there was no word of Mzilikazi.
Slowly the strict order of Matabele society began to break up, for the regent, Mzilikazi’s senior wife, was unrestrained in her intercourses, and she rutted shamelessly with her
lovers.
Some of the lesser wives followed her example, and then the common people took sexual licence, the youths, unblooded and without the royal permission to go into the women, lay in wait for the
young girls on the path to the water-hole, and dragged them giggling into the bushes.