Shaka the Great (88 page)

“Nduna, over here!”

Hiding his frustration, the Induna leads Njikiza over to where Mnkabayi and Ndlela are standing. They've seen the Watcher force his way through the circle of torches, and reemerge with the Induna, and now, when time is so crucial, they want to know what is going on.

The Induna tells them how the boy had recognized the assassin and set off after him.

“Good,” says Mnkabayi. Njikiza is to follow him, bringing as many Fasimbas as he can, while Ndlela will organize a more orderly hunt.

The Induna is about to follow Njikiza, when Mnkabayi grabs his hand. He is to wait, for she has a special task for him.

“Ma?” asks the Induna, with annoyance in his voice.

Mnkabayi calmly waits until Ndlela and the Njikiza have moved on, then she pulls the Induna further away from the cluster of men surrounding Shaka.

She knows that he would follow his udibi, she says, speaking softly and urgently, hoping to outpace the Induna's growing anger, but she has a more important commission for him.

“Dingane,” she hisses before he can risk showing her outright disrespect by demanding what could be more important than capturing the one who tried to kill the Bull Elephant. “You must go find your friend.”

“Dingane?” asks the Induna incredulously. Does she think the Needy One … ?

“No, no,” she says, waving his question away like a bothersome fly. “I think nothing of the sort.” But that is precisely why he must go find Dingane. “It's for his own safety.”

And the Induna had better take a moment to collect some water-skins and cloaks because, if she knows her nephew, he will be somewhere far off when the Induna catches up with him.

“And it has to be you,” she says, “because I trust you to keep him safe. And you are the one most likely to know where he will have fled to.”

Running through the dark. Free! Invincible! Was he a coward at the very end? He doesn't think so. The ancestors have protected him, shown him he needn't die along with the monster. Better to live and see all these creatures completely annihilated.

He stops. Turns again to orientate himself. Things are still so quiet! Where is everyone? He's seen torches moving five or six huts away, but no one approaching any closer.

A few deep breaths and he sets off again, but he doesn't get far. A shadow flies at him from the side, and fire enters his gut. Then, even as he's spinning away, the spear strikes again, a glancing blow
that scores a furrow across his chest. And he's on his back, and the shadow is on top of him, and the spear is raised again …

And then it's lowered.

“You!” hisses the udibi. “I thought”—sharp stones inside his throat—“you …”—wetness, he's swaddled in wetness—“were dead!”

The spear laughs. The spear slaps against his cheek, touches his lips.

“You are dying, Zulu! But I'll leave you be, because I want you to tell them who I am. With your dying breath, I want you to tell them who killed their precious king. They know me as Vala, but you know me as Lungelo. And they told you I was his nephew, or some such thing.”

“Beja!” A hiss of pain.

“Yes! So you knew who he was. Now know who I am. Beja was just one of many I used to get here. Now know me! I am Khanzijana, son of Zwide.”

And, seated on the log adjacent to the Induna, Shaka says, “Yes, that's it!” Squeezing the Induna's knee: “We will both forget this, but let it be known in case one of us remembers.” Pointing to the sleeping boy, he tells the Induna of visiting Gqokli Hill and seeing the udibi there.

“Something will happen to me. Yes, that's it! He will come for me, and your udibi will know who.”

“You mean someone will try to …”

“Kill me? Yes! But why Gqokli Hill? Why was I there?”

“And the boy will know who …”

“Yes,” says Shaka, then he half rises. “He will know who it is, and it will be a Mthetwa.
That's
why I was taken to Gqokli Hill.”

“But, Majesty, surely …”

“We can do something?”

“Yes, Majesty, you've had a premonition, so surely we can move to prevent this thing from coming to pass.”

Shaka chuckles. The Induna still doesn't understand.

“No, because we will forget this. And you are not real, anyway.”

And then the King is gone.

And the udibi is lying on his back, staring at the stars. The only
sound he can hear is his own labored breathing, every gasp a grasp at life, and it's as if he's floating in a pool of blood.

And he's back in the hut. And he watches the ranks close in on Shaka, then withdraw …

And he's crouching alongside Mbopa, staring at two wounds. And the prime minister still has the murder weapon in his hand, had the forethought to pick it up, keep it secure and safe from those who wanted to do the King further harm.

And his eyes roam across the ranks until he spots a familiar face. One he should have recognized that same day he met the Induna outside KwaBulawayo.

And Shaka waits until Fynn's eyes meet his—and at last, with the Night Muthi still strong in him, there is the connection he has been so eagerly seeking …

It is as if Fynn's wearing a mask, but a mask that's like the mirrors the white men have brought Shaka. (Farewell's offering was in an ornate faux-gold frame, the looking-glass itself shattered in transit, the remaining jagged shards bigger than iklwa blades, but still usable. King, who had arrived later, had presented Shaka with a smaller mirror. About the size of three hand-widths, it had a humbler wooden frame, painted black, but on the glass itself was a second frame, providing a red border. Along the top, in that newspaper's venerable old typeface, ran the legend
The Times
; and across the bottom, just above the red border, in the same font the publication used for its banner headlines, was:
Man Of The Year
.) Yet it's also transparent, this rectangular mask that Fynn wears. Shaka can see himself and Fynn, with his own features, strangely quiescent now, superimposed on Fynn's anxious visage: a man looking through a window and seeing his own reflection and also the face beyond the glass (this amorphous fusion of silica, soda-lime, magnesium oxide and other ingredients that is one of their achievements, yet perhaps not of their invention) and other images—
other images
—flowing upward.

A moment of queasiness, until Shaka's eyes adjust to these palimpsests …

Lemon yellow deserts. Violet skies. Fractured barrens. Gorges and kloofs. Monoliths and hoodoos in the distance. A lonely tor standing sentinel over orange sand beneath a pink sky. A frown, then his brows rise in comprehension.
She was right! Curse her, but she was right!
A frantic, hunched-over scurrying, three crooked, ungainly limbs fighting the sand, while the fourth clutches the baby to her chest. Wide eyes, desperate whimpering, as the predator lopes across the dunes in long, easy strides, its tawny muscles bringing those fetid fangs ever closer. Then suddenly she swerves, crashes into the waves and, to keep the baby clinging to her chest, to keep his head out of the water, she walks upright. The gentle waves help her stay erect, and she turns to watch the befuddled beast, suddenly timid as it draws back to escape the breakers smoothing the shore. Lurid swirls across the sky, the passing of time, the loss of hair, footprints in the dust, tiny beads on a thread: this mother, returning to womb-warm waters, and teaching us to straighten our spines, had three daughters. Their names are letters and numbers, like the designations given to some stars, a barbaric tongue beyond Shaka's ken … But he knows that these three daughters became the mothers of Humanity. A myriad of threads leading back to one of just these three, nurtured in the bosom of Mother Africa. And some stayed and some walked away, following the cracks in the world that continue to race across Fynn's face, across his own face. Some stayed and some walked away, and she was right, curse her, because he sees it now. With the Night Muthi still singing through his veins and Fynn's fingers forming the umbilicus he has sought these many sweaty nights, he sees deep into the White Man's gullet, where his umxwele reside, his innermost feelings, some of which will be hidden even to Fynn. He sees how far they walked, the trails of their travails still visible in Fynn's throat (just as they would be in the gullets of others of his tribe, for these are the ancestors of his ancestors): faint markings of thirst and despair
and the determination to endure, like the cave drawings left behind by the Ancient Ones. Some found the Great Waters and friendly winds and boats that responded to hands expert with sail and oar to speed them further away. Salubrious oases where the more weary chose to settle. Cities rising and falling, deceit and betrayal picking at their foundations. Horsemen on the tundra. War, Pestilence, Famine—and the most potent, most iniquitous of all, Ennui. Oh, how well he has come to know this invincible conqueror of late, who rides with Decadence and Depravity. A heap of broken images (potsherds and ostraca) and somewhere along the way, probably without even realizing it, time measured in generations, those who continued on their way entered the whiteness of cooler climes. Shaka has seen such whiteness on distant mountaintops, but here it was everywhere, a blaze that hurt the eyes. And Mnkabayi was right: for those who walked away—lines in the dust beyond the savannah becoming something more enduring, becoming a lineage—the sun eventually ceased to be a foe. Shaka:
But we do not see it as an enemy
. Mnkabayi:
Except in times of drought. But you are right, the sun is not an enemy to us, for do we not allow it a summer house and a winter house? It is the eye of our day. We respect it, but we do not seek it out, because we know we cannot trust it
. Shaka had nodded at this, for their crops are very much slaves to the vagaries of the sun.
It is the moon that guides us
, continued Mnkabayi. Yet those who moved away shunned the moon as they entered forests thicker, denser than fog. In the icy shadows, they became as larvae, maggots. The sun's presence was to be sought out as a palliative to the whiteness. It was to be flattered, appeased.
You know this
, Mnkabayi had hissed.
Look deeply enough, beloved Nephew, and you will see I speak the truth
. (What Fynn had told him, the reversal he should have paid more attention to. How ironic it was, said Fynn, that the People Of The Sky should welcome the full moon, when his own people feared it as a time of madness.) And they turned to the sun, and the sun showed them how to build armor to protect their puny bodies, the stout weapons needed to ward off the monsters who howled in the vastness of the forests. They turned to the sun, those who walked away and have now
returned, but the sun exacted a price: it burned off their Humanity. (
And do we not say albinos are cursed?
she had asked.)
We are the same, yes
, his eyes now on Fynn's sweaty brow and worried countenance,
we have the same mothers, but you are of the sun, while we are of the moon
. This is where the difference lies. This magnificent difference you have been seeking, Shaka, and which now might as well be a bone hurled high, high into the sky—because what does this difference truly mean? See how the sun, which they salute every morning, fills the land. Our moon changes, providing cycles that order our lives. But see what changes with the sun: only the shadows, always shifting. Mnkabayi:
And that means the ones you would idolize, place so much faith in, will always be changeable! You'll never be able to trust them
. Moments of valor, great deeds, then the shifting shadows bringing deceit and betrayal. Because it fills the world, this sun of Man has led them to believe all is knowable and can be known and if there are shadows they will shift, patience being the obverse of faith. They will believe this and fight the night (Mnkabayi speaking of the lowering of the Union Flag at sunset, urging Shaka to go and see for himself:
See how they protect their precious talisman
.) They will always think they can and should see clearly (for the sun fills the world). Her voice becoming his, becoming hers:
They will think this is their birthright. And that is why they fear the mysteries of the night, why they will bring monstrous machines to decimate us and yet still continue to fear us
. She was right, but so was he. In a way that's scarcely any consolation at all—he would smile if he could feel his lips—but there you go. Throw it out. Throw that bone high, watch it spin: these savages are unaware of this divide, unaware of the way the sun has ordered their minds and shaped their lives. Instead, as he knows from listening to Jakot and Fynn, this knowledge has been lost behind a welter of beliefs, so many of them it seems there's been a conscious effort to disguise the sun's influence not only from outsiders, but from others of these tribes living across the Great Water. So he was right about them possessing a knowledge they aren't aware of. But driven to his knees, bleeding under Fynn's fingers, yet as calm as a man enjoying a meal by himself, his day done, he still sees more …
An old man on his deathbed reaching out to his younger self through tears of regret. She is right: they are of the sun, we are of the moon, but how different are we really? Bored … so bored. Why? The truth a lesser ruler might never have the courage to face:
Because from now on all is repetition
. All. Another battle. All. Another betrayal. Another sangoma (or brother) rising up to challenge him. Repetition! The path to the stone houses on the plain continues past them. The journey continues. It was there all along. I needed no muthi. I needed only to look.
Oh Mother, Mother, beloved Mother, please help me!
Is it so? Can it really be? But it can and it is. All is and will be now and forever more
repetition
. I have reached and grabbed—and held. I have fought and grappled and won.
Now what? What now?
He thought he had an answer, when the White Men came; thought he saw glimpses of a difference behind the similarities. It's like those layers he noticed just now: first the difference—the skin color, the hair, the language, the way of dressing—which proved illusory as contact was established and the similarities came to the fore—but then, as he got to know them, he saw or thought he saw, hidden like an ancient temple in a screaming jungle, another kind of difference. It was strength, a source of power, he thought that even they didn't know they possessed. (Saw or thought he saw.) He'd thought they were both the gateway and the path, these savages—these aliens. A new realm and a new road for the King to follow. Layers? A mask like a mirror? Overlaid faces? What is this nonsense going going gone, leaving him surrounded by blackness, the penumbra of isifile, the dead moon, and ngolu mnyama namhla, the dark day thereafter, consciousness now trickling away from him like sand.