The Angels Weep (10 page)

At the last words, Gandang’s hands fell to his sides,
his chin sank onto the broad scarred and muscled chest, and a
desolate silence descended upon them. At last one of the indunas
in the second rank spoke. He was a frail old man with all the
teeth missing from his upper jaw. His lower lids drooped away
from his watery eyeballs so that the inner flesh showed like pink
velvet and his voice was scratchy and breathless.

‘Let us choose another king,’ he began, but Bazo
interrupted him.

‘A king of slaves, a king of captives?’ He laughed
abruptly, scornfully. ‘There can be no king until there is
a nation once again.’

The ancient induna sank back, and gummed his toothless mouth,
blinking about him miserably, his mind altering direction in the
way of old men. ‘The cattle,’ he murmured,
‘they have taken our cattle.’

The others hummed in angry assent. Cattle were the only true
wealth; gold and diamonds were white men’s baubles, but
cattle were the foundation of the nation’s welfare.

‘One-Bright-Eye sends unblooded young bucks of our own
people to lord it in the kraals—’ complained another.
‘One-Bright-Eye’ was the Matabele name for General
Mungo St John, the Chief Native Commissioner of Matabeleland.

‘These Company police are armed with guns, and they show
no respect for the custom and the law. They laugh at the indunas
and the tribal elders, and they take the young girls into the
bushes—’

‘One-Bright-Eye orders all our
amadoda
, even
those of Zanzi blood, respected warriors and the fathers of
warriors to labour like lowly
amaholi
, like dirt-eating
slaves, digging his roads.’

The litany of their wrongs, real and fancied, was recited yet
again by a succession of angry indunas, while only Somabula and
Babiaan and Gandang and Bazo sat aloof.

‘Lodzi has burned our shields and snapped the blades of
the stabbing-spears. He has refused our young men the ancient
right to raid the Mashona when all the world knows that the
Mashona are our dogs to kill or let live as we choose.’

‘One-Bright-Eye has disbanded the impis, and now no man
knows who has the right to take a wife, nobody knows which maize
field belongs to which village and the people squabble like
sickly children over the few scrawny beasts that Lodzi has
returned to us.’

‘What must we do?’ cried one, and then another
strange and unprecedented thing happened. All of them, even
Somabula, looked towards the tall scarred young man they called
the Wanderer, and they waited expectantly for no one knew
what.

Bazo made a sign with one hand and Tanase stooped out through
the entrance of the reed hut. Clad only in the brief leather
apron, slim and straight and supple, she carried the roll of
sleeping-mat in her arms, and she knelt before Bazo and unrolled
the mat on the earth at his feet.

The nearest indunas who could see what was concealed in the
roll grunted with excitement. Bazo took it up in both hands and
held it high. It caught the light, and now they all gasped. The
design of the blade was by King Chaka himself; the metal had been
beaten out and polished to burning silver by the skilled smiths
of the Rozwi, and the bloodwood shaft had been bound with copper
wire and the coarse black hairs from the tail-tuft of a bull
elephant.

‘Jee!’ hissed one of the indunas, the deep
drawn-out war chant of the fighting impis, and the others took up
the cry, swaying slightly to the force of it, their faces
lighting with the first ecstasy of the fighting madness.

Gandang put a halt to it. He sprang to his feet and the chant
broke off as he made an abrupt gesture.

‘One blade will not arm the nation, one blade will not
prevail against the little three-legged guns of Lodzi.’

Bazo rose and stood facing his father.

‘Take it in your hands, Baba,’ he invited, and
Gandang shook his head angrily, but he could not take his eyes
off the weapon.

‘Feel how the heft of it can make a man of even a
slave,’ Bazo insisted quietly, and this time Gandang
stretched out his right hand. His palm was bloodless white with
tension and his fingers trembled as they closed around the
grip.

‘Still it is only one blade,’ he insisted, but he
could not resist the feel of the beautiful weapon and he stabbed
into the air with it.

‘There are a thousand like this,’ Bazo
whispered.

‘Where?’ Somabula barked.

‘Tell us where,’ clamoured the other indunas, but
Bazo goaded them.

‘By the time that the first rains fall, there will be
five thousand more. At fifty places in the hills the smiths are
at work.’

‘Where?’ Somabula repeated. ‘Where are
they?’

‘Hidden in the caves of these hills.’

‘Why were we not told?’ Babiaan demanded.

Bazo answered, ‘There would have been those who doubted
it could be done, those who counselled caution and delay, and
there was no time for talk.’

Gandang nodded. ‘We all know he is right, defeat has
turned us into chattering old women. But now,’ he handed
the assegai to the man beside him, ‘feel it!’ he
ordered.

‘How will we assemble the impis?’ the man asked,
turning the weapon in his hands. ‘They are scattered and
broken.’

‘That is the task of each of you. To rebuild the impis,
and to make certain that they are ready when the spears are sent
out.’

‘How will the spears reach us?’

‘The women will bring them, in bundles of
thatching-grass, in rolls of sleeping-mats.’

‘Where will we attack? Will we strike at the heart, at
the great kraal the white men have built at
GuBulawayo?’

‘No.’ Bazo’s voice rose fiercely.
‘That was the madness which destroyed us before. In our
rage we forgot the way of Chaka and Mzilikazi, we attacked into
the strength of the enemy, we went in across good shooting ground
onto the wagons where the guns waited.’ Bazo broke off, and
bowed his head towards the senior indunas. ‘Forgive me,
Baba, the puppy should not yap before the old dog barks. I speak
out of turn.’

‘You are no puppy, Bazo,’ Somabula growled.
‘Speak on!’

‘We must be the fleas,’ Bazo said quietly.
‘We must hide in the white man’s clothing and sting
him in the soft places until we drive him to madness. But when he
scratches, we will move on to another soft place.

‘We must lurk in darkness and attack in the dawn, we
must wait for him in the bad ground and probe his flanks and his
rear.’ Bazo never raised his voice, but all of them
listened avidly. ‘Never must we run in against the walls of
the laager, and when the three-legged guns begin to laugh like
old women, we must drift away like the morning mist at the first
rays of the sun.’

‘This is not war,’ protested Babiaan.

‘It is war, Baba,’ Bazo contradicted, ‘the
new kind of war, the only kind of war which we can
win.’

‘He is right,’ a voice called from the ranks of
indunas. ‘That is the way it must be.’

They spoke up, one after the other, and no man argued against
Bazo’s vision, until the turn came back to Babiaan.

‘My brother Somabula has spoken the truth, you are no
puppy, Bazo. Tell us only one thing more, when will it
be?’

‘That I cannot tell you.’

‘Who can?’

Bazo looked down at Tanase, who still knelt at his feet.

‘We have assembled in this valley for good
reason,’ Bazo told them. ‘If all agree, then my woman
who is an intimate of the Umlimo, and an initiate of the
mysteries, will go up to the sacred cavern to take the
oracle.’

‘She must go immediately.’

‘No, Baba.’ Tanase’s lovely head was still
bowed in deep respect. ‘We must wait until the Umlimo sends
for us.’

T
here were
places where the scars had knotted into hard lumps in
Bazo’s flesh. The machine-gun bullets had done deep damage.
One arm, fortunately not the spear arm, was twisted and
shortened, permanently deformed. After hard marching or exercise
with the weapons of war, or after the nervous tension of planning
and arguing and persuading others to his views, the torn and
lumpy flesh often seized up in agonizing spasms.

Kneeling beside him in the little reed hut, Tanase could see
the cramped muscles and rigid contraction of sinews under his
dark skin twisted like living black mambas trying to escape from
a silken bag. With strong tapered fingers, she worked the
ointment of fat and herbs into the crested muscle down his spine
and the shoulder-blades, following the rubbery contractions up
his neck to the base of his skull. Bazo groaned at the sweet
agony of her bone-hard fingers, but slowly he relaxed and the
knotted muscles subsided.

‘You are good for me in so many ways,’ he
murmured.

‘I was born for no other reason,’ she answered,
but Bazo sighed and shook his head slowly.

‘You and I were both born for some purpose which is
still hidden from us. We know that – we are different, you
and I.’

She touched his lips with her finger to still him. ‘We
will come back to that on the morrow.’

She placed both hands on his shoulders and drew him backwards,
until he lay flat on the reed mat, and she began to work on his
chest and the rigid muscles of his flat hard belly.

‘Tonight there is only us,’ she repeated, in the
throaty purr of a lioness at the kill, delighting in the power
she could wield over him with the mere pressure of her
fingertips, and yet at the same time consumed by a tenderness so
deep that she felt her chest crushing beneath the weight of it.
‘Tonight we are all the world.’ She leaned forward
and touched the bullet-wounds with the tip of her tongue and his
arousal was so massive that she could not encompass it within the
span of her thumb and long pink-lined fingers.

He tried to sit up, but she held him down with a light
pressure against his chest, then she slipped the drawstring of
her apron and with a single movement straddled him, both of them
crying out involuntarily at the heat and terrible yearning of
each other’s bodies. Then they were swept away together in
a sudden exquisite fury.

When it had passed, she cradled his head against her bosom,
and crooned to him like an infant, until his breathing was deep
and regular in the dark hut. Even then, though she was silent,
she did not sleep with him but lay and marvelled that such rage
and compassion could possess her at the same moment in time.

‘I will never know peace again,’ she realized
suddenly. ‘And nor will he.’ And she mourned for the
man she loved, and for the need to goad and drive him on towards
the destiny that she knew awaited both of them.

O
n the third
day the messenger of the Umlimo came down from the cavern to
where the indunas waited in the village.

The messenger was a pretty girl-child with a solemn expression
and old wise eyes. She was on the very edge of puberty with the
hard little stones already forming in her mulberry-dark nipples
and the first light fuzz shading the deep cleft in the angle of
her thighs. Around her neck she wore a talisman that only Tanase
recognized. It was a sign that one day this child in her turn
would take on the sacred mantle of the Umlimo and preside in the
gruesome cavern in the cliff above the village.

Instinctively the child looked to Tanase where she squatted to
one side of the ranks of men, and with her eyes and a secret hand
sign of the initiates, Tanase indicated Somabula, the senior
induna. The child’s indecision was merely a symptom of the
swift degeneration of Matabele society. In the time of the kings
no one, child nor adult, would have been in any doubt as to the
order of precedence.

When Somabula rose to follow the messenger, his half-brothers
rose with him, Babiaan on one hand and Gandang on the other.

‘You also, Bazo,’ Somabula said, and though Bazo
was younger and more junior than some of them, none of the other
indunas protested at his inclusion in the mission.

The child-witch took Tanase’s hand, for they were
sisters of the dark spirits, and the two of them led the way up
the steep path. The mouth of the cavern was a hundred paces wide,
but the roof was barely high enough to clear a man’s head.
Once long ago the opening had been fortified with blocks of
dressed stone, worked in the same fashion as the walls of Great
Zimbabwe, but these had been tumbled into rough piles, leaving
gaps like those in an old man’s teeth.

The little party halted involuntarily. The four indunas hung
back and drew closer together, as though to take comfort from
each other. Men who had wielded the assegai in a hundred bloody
battles and run onto the guns of the white men’s laager
were fearful now as they faced the dark entrance.

In the silence a voice spoke suddenly from above them,
emanating from the bare cliff-face of smooth lichen-streaked
granite. ‘Let the indunas of royal Kumalo enter the sacred
place!’ They were the quavering discordant tones of an
ancient bedlam, and the four warriors looked up fearfully, but
there was no living thing to be seen, and none of them could
summon the courage to reply.

Tanase had felt the child’s hand quiver slightly in her
grip at the ventriloquist effort of projection, and only Tanase
was so attuned to the ways of the witches that she knew how the
art of the voices was taught to the apprentices of the Umlimo.
The child was already highly skilled, and Tanase shuddered
involuntarily as she realized what other fearful skills she must
have mastered, what other gruesome ordeals and terrible agonies
she must already have endured. In a moment of empathy she
squeezed the child’s narrow cool hand, and together they
stepped through the ruined portals.

Behind them the four noble warriors crowded with the temerity
of children, peering around them anxiously and stumbling on the
uneven footing. The throat of the cavern narrowed, and Tanase
thought with a flash of grim humour that it was as well that the
light was too bad for the indunas to make out clearly the walls
on either hand, for even their warlike courage might have been
unequal to the horror of the catacombs.