Authors: Wilbur Smith
Standing on the wagon Mungo St John lit a cheroot without transferring his attention from the carnage which surrounded them. At last he said gravely, ‘Not less than two thousand casualties
– perhaps as many as three.’
‘Why don’t you send a party out to count the bag, Doctor?’ Zouga suggested, and Jameson did not recognize the sarcasm.
‘We cannot spare the delay – more is the pity. We can still get in a full day’s trek. That will look good in the Company report.’ He pulled the gold chain from his fob
pocket and sprang the lid of his watch with his thumbnail ‘Eight o’clock,’ he marvelled. ‘It’s only eight o’clock in the morning. Do you realize that we have won
a decisive battle before breakfast, gentlemen, and that by ten o’clock we can be on our way to Lobengula’s royal kraal? I think we have done our shareholders rather proud.’
‘I think,’ Zouga cut in gently. ‘That we still have a little more work to do. They are coming again.’
‘I don’t believe this,’ Mungo St John marvelled.
B
azo paced slowly down the sparse ranks. This was no longer an impi. It was a pathetic little band of desperate survivors. Most of them had bound
up their wounds with bloody bunches of green leaves, and their eyes had that strange fixed stare of men who had just looked into eternity. They were no longer singing, they squatted in silence
– but they were still facing towards the white men’s laager.
Bazo passed beyond the shortened line and paused under the spreading branches of a wild teak tree. He looked up.
Manonda, the commander of what had once been the glorious Insukamini impi, hung by his neck from one of the main branches. There was a thong of rawhide around his throat, and his eyes were still
open, bulging in a defiant glare towards his enemies. His right leg, shattered above the knee by machine-gun fire, was twisted at an ugly angle and hung lower than his other leg.
Bazo lifted his assegai in a salute to the dead induna.
‘I greet you, Manonda, who chose death rather than to drink the bitter draught of defeat,’ he shouted.
The Insukamini impi was no more. Its warriors lay in deep windrows in front of the wagons.
‘I praise you, Manonda, who chose death rather than to live a cripple and a slave. Go in peace, Manonda – and speak sweetly to the spirits on our behalf.’
Bazo turned back and stood before the waiting, silent ranks. The early morning sun, just clearing the tree tops, threw long black shadows in front of them.
‘Are the eyes still red, my children?’ Bazo sang out in a high clear voice.
‘They are still red, Baba!’ they answered him in a bass chorus.
‘Then let us go to do the work which still waits to be done.’
W
here ten
amadoda
had raced in that first wave, now two made the last charge across the blood-soaked clay. Only one of that pitiful band
went more than halfway between the tree lines and the wagons. The rest of them turned back and left Bazo to run on alone. He was sobbing with each stride, his mouth open, the sweat running in oily
snakes down his naked chest. He did not feel the first bullet that struck him. It was just a sudden numbness as though part of his body was missing, and he ran on, jumping over a pile of twisted
corpses, and now the sound of the guns seemed muted and far-off, and there was another greater dinning in his ears that boomed and echoed strangely like the thunder of a mighty waterfall.
He felt another sharp tug, like the curved red-tipped thorn of the ‘wait-a-bit’ tree hooking into his flesh, but there was no pain. The roaring in his head was louder, and his vision
narrowed so that he seemed to be looking down a long tunnel in the darkness.
Again he felt that irritating but painless jerk and tug in his flesh, and he was suddenly weary. He just wanted to lie down and rest, but he kept on towards the flashing white canvas of the
wagon tents. Yet again that sharp insistent pull as though he was held on a leash, and his legs buckled under him. Quite gently he toppled forward and lay with his face against the hard sun-baked
clay.
The sound of the guns had ceased, but in its place was another sound, it was the sound of cheering; behind the wall of wagons the white men were cheering themselves.
Bazo was tired, so utterly deathly tired. He closed his eyes and let the darkness come.
T
he wind had swung suddenly and unseasonably into the east, and there was a cold dank mist lying on the hills, the fine
guti
which made
the trees drip dismally and chilled every bone in Tanase’s body as she trudged up a narrow path that led to a saddle between two pearly grey granite peaks. Over her shoulders was a leather
cloak and on her head she balanced a bundle of possessions which she had salvaged from the cave of the Umlimo.
She reached the saddle and looked down into yet another valley choked with dense, dark green undergrowth. She searched it eagerly, but then her spirits slowly fell again. Like all the others, it
was devoid of any human presence.
Since she had left the secret valley, the moon had reached its full, and waned to nothingness, and was once again a curved yellow sliver in the night sky. All that time she had searched for the
women and children of the Matabele nation. She knew they were here, hiding somewhere in the Matopos, for it was always the way. When a powerful enemy threatened the nation, the women and children
were sent into the hills – but it was such a vast area, so many valleys and deep labyrinthine caves that she might search a lifetime without finding them.
Tanase started slowly down into the deserted valley. Her legs felt leaden, and another spasm of nausea brought saliva flooding from under her tongue. She swallowed it down, but when she reached
the floor of the valley, she sank down onto a moss-covered rock beside the little stream.
She knew what was the cause of her malady; though she had missed her courses by only a few days, she knew that the loathsome seed that her pale, hairy, balloon-bellied ravisher had pumped into
her had struck and taken hold, and she knew what she must do.
She laid aside her load and searched for dry kindling under the trees where the
guti
had not yet dampened it. She piled it in the protected lee of a sheltering rock, and crouched over
it.
For many long minutes she concentrated all her will upon it. Then at last she sighed, and her shoulders slumped. Even this minor power, this small magic of fire making, had gone from her. As the
white man with the golden beard had warned her, she was Umlimo no longer. She was just a young woman, without strange gifts or terrible duties, and she was free. The spirits could make no demands
upon her, she was free at last to seek out the man she loved.
As she prepared to make fire in the conventional manner, with the tiny bow for twirling the dry twig, two passions gave her strength to face the ordeal ahead of her – her love and her
equally fierce hatred.
When the contents of the little clay pot boiled, she added the shreds of dried bark of the tambooti to it, and immediately the sweet odour of the poisonous steam cloyed upon the back of her
throat.
The straight sharp black horn of the gemsbuck had been clipped off at the tip so that it could be used for cupping blood, or as a funnel for introducing fluids into the body.
Tanase spread the leather cloak below the rock shelter and lay on it, flat upon her back, with her feet braced high against rough granite. She had lubricated the horn with fat, and she took a
deep breath, clenched her jaw upon it, and then slid the horn into herself. When it met resistance, she manipulated it carefully, but firmly, and then her breath burst from her in a gasp of agony
as the point found the opening and forced its way still farther into her secret depths.
The pain gave her a strange unholy joy, as though she were inflicting it upon the hated thing that had taken root within her. She lifted herself on one elbow, and tested the contents of the
little clay pot. It was just cool enough for her to be able to bear the heat when she plunged her forefinger into it.
She took up the pot and poured it into the mouth of the long black funnel, and this time she moaned, and her back arched involuntarily, but she poured until the pot was empty. There was the
coppery salt taste of blood in her mouth, and she realized that she had bitten through her own lip. She seized the horn and plucked it out of herself, and then she curled up on the leather cloak
and hugged her knees to her bosom, shuddering and moaning at the fire in her womb.
In the night the first terrible cramps seized her, and she felt her belly muscles spasm up hard as a cannon ball under her clutching hands.
She wished there had been something formed, a tiny replica of that white animal that had rutted upon her, so that she could have wreaked a form of vengeance upon it. She would have delighted in
mutilating and burning it, but there was nothing substantial on which to expend her hatred. So despite the purging of her body, she carried her hatred with her still, fierce and unabated, as she
toiled on deeper and deeper into the Matopos.
T
he joyful cries and sweet laughter of children at play guided her, and Tanase crept along the river verge, using the tall cotton-tipped reeds as
a screen until she over looked the green pool between its sugary sandbanks. They were girls sent to fetch water. The big, black clay pots stood in a row on the white sand with green leaves stuffed
in the mouths to stop them slopping over when carried balanced on the girls’ heads.
However, once the pots were filled, they had not been able to resist the temptation of the cool, green waters, and they had thrown off their skirts and were shrieking and sporting in the pool.
The eldest girls were pubescent with swelling breast buds, and one of them spotted Tanase in the reeds and screamed a warning.
Tanase was just able to catch the youngest and slowest child as she was disappearing over the far bank, and she held the wriggling little body, glossy black and wet from the river, against her
bosom while the child wailed and struggled with terror.
Tanase cooed reassurances and stroked the little girl with gentling hands until she quietened.
‘I am of the people,’ she whispered. ‘Don’t be afraid, little one.’
Half an hour later the child was chattering gaily and leading Tanase by the hand.
The mothers came swarming out of the caves at the head of the valley to greet Tanase, and they crowded about her.
‘Is it true that there have been two great battles?’ they begged her.
‘We have heard that the impis were broken at Shangani and again those that remained were butchered like cattle on the banks of the Bembesi.’
‘Our husbands and our sons are dead – please tell us it is not so,’ they pleaded.
‘They say the king has fled from his royal kraal, and that we are children without a father. Is it true, can you tell us if it is true?’
‘I know nothing,’ Tanase told them. ‘I come to hear news, not to bear it. Is there not one amongst you who can tell me where I may find Juba, senior wife of Gandang, brother of
the king?’
They pointed over the hills, and Tanase went on, and found another group of women hiding in the thick bush. These children did not laugh and play, their limbs were thin as sticks, but their
bellies were swollen little pots.
‘There is no food,’ the women told Tanase. ‘Soon we will starve.’ And they sent her stumbling back northwards, seeking and questioning, trying to blind herself to the
agonies of a defeated nation, until one day she stooped in through the entrance of a dim and smoky cave, and a vaguely familiar figure rose to greet her.
‘Tanase, my child, my daughter.’
Only then did Tanase recognize her, for the abundant flesh had melted off the woman’s frame and her once bounteous breasts hung slack as empty pouches against her belly.
‘Juba, my mother,’ Tanase cried, and ran into her embrace. It was a long time after that before she could speak through her sobs.
‘Oh my mother, do you know what has become of Bazo?’
Juba pushed her gently to arm’s length and looked into her face. When Tanase saw the devastating sorrow in Juba’s eyes, she cried out with dread.
‘He is not dead!’
‘Come, my daughter,’ Juba whispered, and led her deeper into the cave, along a natural passageway through the living rock – and there was a graveyard smell on the cool dark
air, the odour of corruption and rotting flesh.
The second cavern was lit only by a burning wick floating in a bowl of oil. There was a litter against the far wall. On it lay a wasted skeletal body, and the smell of death was
overpowering.
Fearfully Tanase knelt beside the litter and lifted a bunch of leaves off one of the stinking wounds.
‘He is not dead,’ Tanase repeated. ‘Bazo is not dead.’
‘Not yet,’ agreed Juba. ‘His father and those of his men who survived the white men’s bullets, carried my son to me on his shield. They bid me save him – but nobody
can save him.’
‘He will not die,’ said Tanase fiercely. ‘I will not let him die.’ And she leaned over his wasted body and pressed her lips to the fever-hot flesh. ‘I will not let
you die,’ she whispered.
T
he Hills of the Indunas were deserted; no beast grazed upon them for the herds had long ago been driven afar to try to save them from the
invaders. There were no vultures or crows sailing high above the hills, for the Maxim guns had laid a richer feast for them barely twenty-five miles eastwards at the Bembesi crossing.
The royal kraal of GuBulawayo was almost deserted. The women’s quarters were silent. No child cried, no young girl sang, no crone scolded. They were all hiding in the magical Matopos
hills.
The barracks of the fighting regiments were deserted. Two thousand dead on the Shangani, three thousand more at Bembesi – and nobody would ever count those who had crawled away to die like
animals in the caves and thickets.
The survivors had scattered, some to join the women in the hills, the others to cower, bewildered and demoralized, wherever they could find shelter.