The Angels Weep (49 page)

‘
Inkunzi Nkulu
!’ he hailed his creation.
‘Great Bull!’

Grinning with delight, he carried the clay beast to the
antheap, and set it on its bark base to dry in the sun. Then he
hurried back to begin making the cows and calves for his herd. As
he worked, he mocked the creations of the other boys, comparing
them to his own great herd bull, and grinning cheekily at their
retorts.

Tanase watched him from the shadows. She had come silently
down the path through the thick riverine bush, led on by the
tinkling of child-laughter, and the happy banter. Now she was
reluctant to interrupt this magical moment.

In the sadness and striving, in the menace and smoke of war,
it seemed that all joy and laughter had been forgotten. It needed
the resilience and vision of a child to remind her of what had
once been – and what might be again. She felt a suffocating
weight of love overwhelm her, followed almost immediately by a
formless dread. She wanted to rush to the child and take him in
her arms, to hold him tightly to her bosom and protect him from
– she was not sure what.

Then Tungata looked up and saw her, and came to her carrying
the clay bull with shy pride.

‘See what I have made.’

‘It is beautiful.’

‘It is for you, Umame, I made it for you.’

Tanase took the offering. ‘He is a fine bull, and he
will breed many calves,’ she said, and her love was so
strong that the tears scalded her eyelids. She did not want the
child to see it.

‘Wash the clay off your legs and arms,’ she told
him. ‘We must go up to the cave.’

He skipped beside her on the path, his body still wet from the
river, his skin glistening with a velvety black sheen, laughing
delightedly when Tanase set the clay bull upon her head, walking
straight-backed and hips swinging, to balance the load.

They came up the path to the base of the cliff. It was not
truly a cave, but a long low overhang of the cliff face. They
were not the first to use it as a home. The rocky roof was
blackened with the soot of innumerable cooking-fires, and the
back wall was decorated with the ancient paintings and engravings
of the little yellow Bushmen who had hunted here long before
Mzilikazi led his impis into these hills. They were wonderful
pictures of rhinoceros and giraffe and gazelle, and of the little
stick figures, armed with bows and outsized genitalia, who hunted
them.

There were almost five hundred persons living in this place,
one of the secret safe places of the tribe, where the women and
the children were sent when war or some other catastrophe
threatened the Matabele. Though the valley was steep and narrow,
there were five escape routes, hidden paths scaling the cliffs or
narrow clefts through the granite, which made it impossible for
an enemy to trap them in the gut of the valley.

The stream provided fresh clear water for drinking, thirty
milch cows that had survived the rinderpest provided
mass
,
the soured milk which was one of the tribe’s staples. And
when they marched in, every woman had borne upon her head a
leather grain-bag. The locusts had depleted the harvest, but with
careful planning they could exist here for many months.

The women were spread out down the length of the rock shelter,
busy with their separate tasks. Some of them were stamping the
corn in mortars carved from a dried tree-trunk, using a heavy
wooden pestle that they swung up with both hands above their head
and then let drop of its own weight into the cup of the mortar,
clapping their hands and then seizing the club to lift it for the
next stroke. Others were plaiting bark cloth for sleeping-mats,
or tanning wild animals’ skins, or stringing ceramic beads.
Over it all hung the faint blue mist of the cooking-fires, and
the sweet hum of women’s voices, interspersed with the
gurgling and chirping of black babes who crawled naked on the
rocky floor, or hung like fat limpets from their mothers’
breasts.

Juba was at the far end of the shelter, imparting to two of
her daughters and the new wife of one of her middle sons the
delicate secrets of beer-brewing. The sorghum grain had been
soaked and had germinated, now came the drying and grinding of
the yeast. It was an absorbing task, and Juba did not become
aware of the presence of her senior daughter-in-law and her
eldest grandson until they stood over her. Then she looked up,
and her smile split the great round of her face.

‘My mother,’ Tanase knelt before her respectfully.
‘I must speak with you.’

Juba struggled to rise, but was pinned by her own vast weight.
Her daughters took an elbow each and heaved her upright. Once she
was on her feet, she moved with surprising agility, swept Tungata
onto her hip and carried him easily along the pathway. Tanase
fell in beside her.

‘Bazo has sent for me,’ Tanase told her.
‘There is dissension amongst the indunas, Bazo needs the
words of the Umlimo made clear. Without that the struggle will
fall into vacillation and talk. We will lose all that we have won
so dearly.’

‘Then you must go, my child.’

‘I must go swiftly, I cannot take Tungata with
me.’

‘He is safe here, I will look after him. When do you
leave?’

‘Immediately.’

Juba sighed and nodded. ‘So be it.’

Tanase touched the child’s cheek. ‘Obey your
grandmother,’ she said softly, and like a shadow was gone
around the bend of the narrow pathway.

T
anase passed
through the granite portals that guarded the valley of the
Umlimo. She had only her memories of this place for travelling
companions, and they were not good company. Yet when she went
down the path, she walked straight, with a kind of antelope
grace, her long limbs swinging freely and her head held high on
the long heron’s neck.

As soon as she entered the little cluster of huts in the
bottom of the valley, her trained senses were immediately aware
of the tensions and angers that hung over the place like a sickly
miasma over a fever swamp. She could feel the anger and
frustration in Bazo when she knelt before him, and made her
dutiful obeisance. She knew so well what those knots of tense
muscle at the points of his clenched jaw and the reddish glaze in
his eyes meant.

Before she rose, she had noted how the indunas had drawn into
two separate groups. On one side the elders, and facing them the
young and headstrong were ranged about Bazo. She crossed the
space between them and knelt before Gandang and his white-headed
brothers, Somabula and Babiaan.

‘I see you, my child.’ Gravely Gandang
acknowledged her greeting, and then the abruptness with which he
broached the real reason for her summons warned Tanase of its
dire import.

‘We wish you to speak to us on the meaning of the
Umlimo’s latest prophecy.’

‘My lord and father, I am no longer an intimate of the
mysteries—’

Impatiently Gandang brushed aside her disclaimer. ‘You
understand more than anyone outside that dreadful cave. Listen to
the words of the Umlimo, and discourse faithfully upon
them.’

She bowed her head in acquiescence, but at the same time
turned slightly so that she had Bazo at the very edge of her
vision.

‘The Umlimo spake thus: “Only a foolish hunter
blocks the opening of the cave from which the wounded leopard
seeks to escape.”’ Gandang repeated the prophecy, and
his brothers nodded at the accuracy of his rendition.

Veiling her eyes behind thick black lashes, Tanase turned her
head the breadth of a finger. Now she could see Bazo’s
right hand as it rested on his bare thigh. She had taught him the
rudiments of the secret sign language of the initiates. His
forefinger curled and touched the first joint of his thumb. It
was a command.

‘Remain silent!’ said that gesture. ‘Speak
not!’ She made the signal of comprehension and
acknowledgement, with the hand that hung at her side. Then she
raised her head.

‘Was that all, Lord?’ she asked of Gandang.

‘There is more,’ he answered. ‘The Umlimo
spake a second time: “The hot wind from the north will
scorch the weeds in the fields, before the new corn can be
planted. Wait for the north wind.”’ All the indunas
leaned forward eagerly, and Gandang told her, ‘Speak to us
of the meaning.’

‘The meaning of the Umlimo’s words is never clear
at once. I must ponder on it.’

‘When will you tell us?’

‘When I have an answer.’

‘Tomorrow morning?’ Gandang insisted.

‘Perhaps.’

‘Then you will spend the night alone, that your
meditation be not disturbed,’ Gandang ordered.

‘My husband,’ Tanase demurred.

‘Alone,’ Gandang repeated sharply. ‘With a
guard on the door of your hut.’

The guard that was set upon her hut was a young warrior, not
yet married, and because of it he was that much more susceptible
to the wiles of a beautiful woman. When he brought the bowl of
food to Tanase, she smiled in such a way that he lingered at the
door of the hut. When she offered him a choice morsel, he glanced
outside guiltily and then came to take it from her hand.

The food had a strange bitter taste, but he did not want to
give offence, so he swallowed it manfully. The woman’s
smile promised things that the young warrior could barely believe
possible, but when he tried to answer her provocative sallies,
his voice slurred strangely in his own ears, and he was overcome
with a lassitude such that he had to close his eyes for a
moment.

Tanase replaced the stopper on the buckhorn bottle she had
concealed in her palm, and stepped quietly over the guard’s
sleeping form. When she whistled, Bazo came swiftly and silently
to where she waited by the stream.

‘Tell me, Lord,’ she whispered, ‘that which
you require of me.’

When she returned to the hut, the guard still slept deeply.
She propped him in the doorway with his weapon across his lap. In
the morning his head would ache, but he would not be eager to
tell the indunas how he had spent the night.

‘I
have
thought deeply on the words of the Umlimo,’ Tanase knelt
before the indunas, ‘and I read meaning into the parable of
the foolish hunter who hesitates in the entrance of the
cave.’

Gandang frowned as he guessed the slant of her reply, but she
went on calmly.

‘Would not the brave and skilled hunter go boldly into
the cave where the animal lurks, and slay it?’ One of the
elder indunas hissed with disagreement, and sprang to his
feet.

‘I say that the Umlimo has warned us to leave the road
to the south open, so that the white men with all their women and
chattels may leave this land for ever,’ he shouted, and
immediately Bazo was on his feet facing him.

‘The white men will never leave. The only way to rid
ourselves of them is to bury them.’ There was a roar of
approval from the younger indunas grouped around Bazo, but he
lifted his hand to silence them.

‘If you leave the south road open, it will certainly be
used – by the soldiers who march up it with their little
three-legged guns.’

There were angry cries of denial and encouragement.

‘I say to you that we are the hot wind from the north,
that the Umlimo prophesied, we are the ones who will scorch the
weeds—’

The shouts that drowned him out showed just how deeply the
nation’s leaders were divided, and Tanase felt the
blackness of despair come down upon her. Gandang rose to his
feet, and such was the weight of tradition and custom that even
the wildest and fiercest of the young indunas fell silent.

‘We must give the white men a chance to leave with their
women. We will leave the road open for them to go, and we will
wait in patience for the hot wind, the miraculous wind from the
north that the Umlimo promises to blow our enemies
away—’

Bazo alone had not squatted respectfully to the senior induna,
and now he did something that was without precedent. He
interrupted his father, and his voice was full of scorn.

‘You have given them chance enough,’ said Bazo.
‘You have let the woman from Khami and all her brats go
free. I ask you one question, my father, is what you propose
kindness or is it cowardice?’

They gasped, for when a son could speak thus to his father,
then the world that once they all had known and understood was
now changed. Gandang looked at Bazo across the small space that
separated them, which was a gulf neither of them would ever be
able once again to bridge. Though he was still tall and erect,
there was such sorrow in Gandang’s eyes that made him seem
as old as the granite hills that surrounded them.

‘You are no longer my son,’ he said simply.

‘And you are no longer my father,’ Bazo said, and
turning on his heel, strode from the hut. First Tanase, and then,
one after another, the young indunas stood up and followed Bazo
out into the sunlight.

A
n outrider
came in at full gallop and brought his horse up so sharply that
it reared and sawed its head against the bit.

‘Sir, there is large party of rebels coming up the road
ahead,’ he shouted urgently.

‘Very well, trooper.’ The Honourable Maurice
Gifford, officer commanding troops B and D of the Bulawayo field
force, touched the brim of his slouch hat with a gloved hand in
acknowledgement. ‘Go forward and keep them under
observation.’ Then he turned in the saddle. ‘Captain
Dawson, we will put the wagons into laager under those trees,
there will be a good field of fire for the Maxim from there
– I will take out fifty mounted men to engage the
enemy.’

It really was a piece of astonishing good luck to run into a
group of rebels so close to Bulawayo. After weeks of scouring the
countryside, Gifford and his 160 troopers had managed to gather
in thirty or so survivors from the isolated villages and
trading-posts, but so far they had not had even a chance of a
scrap with the Matabele. Leaving Dawson to prepare the laager,
Gifford spurred down the Bulawayo road at the head of fifty of
his best men.