The Angels Weep (6 page)

‘You are a lucky man,’ Harry said softly.

‘Without a good woman, there is no today, and without a
son there is no tomorrow,’ Ralph agreed.

T
he vultures
were still hunched in the tree-tops, although the bones of the
lions had been picked clean and scattered across the stony ground
of the ridge. They had to digest the contents of their bloated
bellies before they could soar away, and their dark misshapen
bodies against the clear winter sky guided Ralph and Harry the
last few miles to the ridge of the Harkness claims.

‘It looks promising,’ Harry gave his guarded
judgement that first night as they squatted beside the camp fire.
‘The country rock is in contact with the reef. You could
have a reef that continues to real depth, and we have traced the
strike for over two miles. Tomorrow I will mark out the spots
where you must sink your prospect holes.’

‘There are mineralized ore bodies right across this
country,’ Ralph told him. ‘The continuation of the
great gold crescent of the Witwatersrand and Pilgrims Rest and
Tati goldfields curves right across here—’ Ralph
broke off. ‘But you have the special gift, I have heard
them say you can smell gold at fifty miles.’

Harry dismissed the suggestion with a deprecating wave of his
coffee mug, but Ralph went on, ‘And I have the wagons and
capital to grubstake a prospecting venture, and to develop the
finds that are made. I like you, Harry, I think we would work
well together, the Harkness Mine first, and after that, who
knows, the whole bloody country, perhaps.’

Harry started to speak, but Ralph put a hand on his forearm to
stop him.

‘This continent is a treasure chest. The Kimberley
diamond fields and the Witwatersrand banket, side by side, all
the diamond and gold in the one bucket – who would ever
have believed it?’

‘Ralph.’ Harry shook his head. ‘I have
already thrown in my lot with Mr Rhodes.’

Ralph sighed, and stared into the flames of the fire for a
full minute. Then he relit the stump of his dead cheroot, and
began to argue and cajole in his plausible and convincing way. An
hour later as he rolled into his blanket, he repeated his
offer.

‘Under Rhodes you will never be your own man. You will
always be a servant.’

‘You work for Mr Rhodes, Ralph.’

‘I contract to him, Harry, but the profit or loss is
mine. I still own my soul.’

‘And I don’t,’ Harry chuckled.

‘Come in with me, Harry. Find out what it feels like to
bet your own cards, to calculate your own risks, to give the
orders, instead of taking them. Life is all a game, Harry, and
there is only one way to play it, flat out.’

‘I’m Rhodes’ man.’

‘When the time comes, then we will talk again,’
Ralph said and pulled the blanket over his head. Within minutes
his breathing was slow and regular.

I
n the morning
Harry marked the sites for the prospect bores with cairns of
stone, and Ralph realized how cunningly he was quartering the
extended line of the reef to pick it up again at depth. By noon
Harry had finished, and as they up-saddled, Ralph made a swift
calculation and realized it would be another two days before
Cathy’s twin sisters could arrive at the base camp from
Khami Mission.

‘Seeing that we have come so far, we should make a sweep
out towards the east before turning back. God knows what we could
find – more gold, diamonds.’ And when Harry
hesitated, ‘Mr Rhodes will have gone on to Bulawayo
already. He’ll be holding court there for the next month at
least, he won’t even miss you.’

Harry thought for a moment, then grinned like a schoolboy
about to bunk his classes to raid the orchard. ‘Let’s
go!’ he said.

They rode slowly, and at each river course they dismounted to
pan the gravel from the bottom of the stagnant green pools.
Wherever the bedrock outcropped above the overburden of earth,
they broke off samples. They searched out the burrows of ant-bear
and porcupine, and the nests of the swarming white termites to
find what grains and chip-pings they had brought up from
depth.

On the third day, Harry said, ‘We’ve picked up a
dozen likely shows of colour. I particularly liked those crystals
of beryllium, they are a good pointer to emerald
deposits.’

Harry’s enthusiasm had increased with each mile ridden,
but now they had reached the end of the outward leg of their
eastward sweep, and even Ralph realized that it was time to turn
back. They had been out five days from the base camp, they had
exhausted their coffee and sugar and meal, and Cathy would be
anxious by now.

They took one last look at the country that they must leave
unexplored for the time being.

‘It’s beautiful,’ Harry murmured. ‘I
have never seen a more magnificent land. What is the name of that
range of hills?’

‘That’s the southern end of the
Matopos.’

‘I have heard Mr Rhodes speak of them. Aren’t they
the sacred hills of the Matabele?’

Ralph nodded. ‘If I believed in witchcraft—’
he broke off and chuckled with embarrassment. ‘There is
something about those hills.’

There was the first rosy flush of the sunset in the western
sky, and it turned the smooth polished rock of those distant
brooding hills to pink marble, while their crests were garlanded
with fragile twists of cloud coloured by the softly slanting rays
to ivory and ashes.

‘There is a secret cave hidden in there where a witch
who presided over the tribes used to live. My father took in a
commando and destroyed her at the beginning of the war against
Lobengula.’

‘I have heard the story, it is one of the legends,
already.’

‘Well, it’s true. They say—’ Ralph
broke off and studied the tall and turreted range of rock with a
thoughtful expression. ‘Those are not clouds, Harry,’
he said at last. ‘That’s smoke. Yet there are no
kraals in the Matopos. It could be a bush-fire, but I don’t
think so, it’s not on a broad front.’

‘Then where is the smoke coming from?’

‘That is what we are going to find out,’ Ralph
replied, and before Harry could protest, he had started his
horse, and was cantering across the plains of pale winter grass
towards the high rampart of bare granite that blocked off the
horizon.

A
Matabele
warrior sat aloof from the men who swarmed about the earthen
kilns. He sat in the meagre shade of a twisted cripple-wood tree.
He was lean, so that the rack of his ribs showed through the
covering of elastic muscle under his cloak. His skin was burned
by the sun to the deep midnight black of carved ebony, and it was
glossed with health, like the coat of a race-trained
thoroughbred, blemished only by the old healed gunshot wounds on
his chest and back.

He wore a simple kilt and cloak of tanned leather, no feathers
nor war rattles, no regimentals of fur nor plumes of marabou
stork upon his bared head. He was unarmed, for the white men had
made roaring bonfires of the long rawhide shields and carried
away the broad silver assegais by the wagon-load; they had
confiscated also the Martini-Henry rifles with which the Company
had paid King Lobengula for the concession to all the mineral
wealth beneath this land.

On his head the warrior wore the headring of the induna; it
was of gum and clay, woven permanently into his own hair and
black and hard as iron. This badge of rank announced to the world
that he had once been a councillor of Lobengula, the last king of
the Matabele. The simple ring declared his royal bloodline, the
Zanzi blood of the Kumalo tribe, running back pure and unbroken
to old Zululand, a thousand miles and more away in the south.

Mzilikazi had been this man’s grandfather; Mzilikazi who
had defied the tyrant Chaka and led his people away towards the
north. Mzilikazi, the little chief who had slaughtered a million
souls on that terrible northward march, and in the process had
become a mighty emperor, as powerful and cruel as Chaka had ever
been. Mzilikazi, his grandfather, who had finally brought his
nation to this rich and beautiful land, who had been the first to
enter these magical hills and to listen to the myriad weird
voices of the Umlimo, the Chosen One, the witch and oracle of the
Matopos.

Lobengula, son of Mzilikazi, who ruled the Matabele after the
old king’s death, had been the young man’s blood
uncle. It was Lobengula who had granted him the honours of the
induna’s headring, and appointed him commander of one of
the elite fighting impis. But now Lobengula was dead, and the
young induna’s impi had been blown to nothing by the Maxim
guns on the bank of the Shangani river, and the same Maxim guns
had branded him with those deeply dimpled cicatrices upon his
trunk.

His name was Bazo, which means ‘the axe’, but more
often now men spoke of him as ‘the Wanderer’. He had
sat beneath the cripple-wood tree all that day, watching the
ironsmiths perform their rites, for the birth of iron was a
mystery to all but these adepts. The smiths were not Matabele,
but were members of an older tribe, an ancient people whose
origins were somehow interwoven with those haunted and ruined
stone walls of Great Zimbabwe.

Although the new white masters and their queen beyond the seas
had decreed that the Matabele no longer own
amaholi
,
slaves, yet these Rozwi ironsmiths were still the dogs of the
Matabele, still performed their art at the behest of their
warlike masters.

The ten oldest and wisest of the Rozwi smiths had selected the
ore from the quarry, deliberating over each fragment like vain
women choosing ceramic beads from the trader’s stock. They
had judged the iron ore for colour and weight, for the perfection
of the metal it contained and for its purity from foreign matter,
and then they had broken up the ore upon the rock anvils until
each lump was the perfect size. While they worked with care and
total preoccupation, some of their apprentices were cutting and
burning the tree trunks in the charcoal pits, controlling the
combustion with layers of earth and finally quenching it with
clay pots of water. Meanwhile, yet another party of apprentices
made the long journey to the limestone quarries and returned with
the crushed catalyst in leather bags slung upon the backs of the
baggage bullocks. When the master smiths had grudgingly approved
the quality of charcoal and limestone, then the building of the
rows of clay kilns could begin.

Each kiln was shaped like the torso of a heavily pregnant
woman, like a fat, domed belly, in which the layers of iron ore
and charcoal and limestone would be packed. At the lower end of
the kiln was the crotch guarded by symbolically truncated clay
thighs between which was the narrow opening into which would be
introduced the buckhorn nozzle of the leather bellows.

When all was ready, the head smith chopped the head off the
sacrificed rooster, and passed down the line of kilns, sprinkling
them with hot blood while he chanted the first of the ancient
incantations to the spirit of iron.

Bazo watched with fascination, and a prickle of superstitious
awe on his skin, as fire was introduced through the vaginal
openings of the kilns, the magical moment of impregnation which
was greeted with a joyous cry by the assembled smiths. Then the
young apprentices pumped the leather bellows in a kind of
religious ecstasy, singing the hymns which ensured the success of
the smelting and set the rhythm for the work on the bellows. When
each fell back exhausted, there was another to take his place and
keep the steady blast of air driving deeply into the kiln.

A faint haze of smoke hung over the workings; like sea fret on
a still summer’s day, it rose to eddy slowly around the
tall bald peaks of the hills. Now at last it was time to draw the
smelting, and as the head smith freed the clay plug from the
first kiln, a joyous shout of thanksgiving went up from the
assembly at the bright glowing rush of the molten metal from the
womb of the furnace.

Bazo found himself trembling with excitement and wonder, as he
had when his first son had been born in one of the caves in these
self-same hills.

‘The birth of the blades,’ he whispered aloud, and
in his imagination he could already hear the dinning of the
hammers as they beat out the metal, and the sizzling hiss of the
quenching that would set the temper of the edge and point of the
broad stabbing spears.

A touch on his shoulder startled him from his reverie, and he
glanced up at the woman who stood over him, and then he smiled.
She wore the leather skirt, decorated with beads, of the married
woman, but there were no bangles nor bracelets on her smooth
young limbs.

Her body was straight and hard, her naked breasts symmetrical
and perfectly proportioned. Although she had already suckled a
fine son, they were not marred by stretch marks. Her belly was
concave as a greyhound’s, while the skin was smooth and
drum-tight. Her neck was long and graceful, her nose straight and
narrow, her eyes slanted above the Egyptian arches of her
cheekbones. Her features were those of a statuette from the tomb
of some long-dead pharaoh.

‘Tanase,’ said Bazo, ‘another thousand
blades.’ Then he saw her expression and broke off.
‘What is it?’ he asked with quick concern.

‘Riders,’ she said. ‘Two of them. White men
coming from the southern forests, and coming swiftly.’

Bazo rose in a single movement, quick as a leopard alarmed by
the approach of the hunters. Only now his full height and the
breadth of his shoulders were evident, for he towered a full head
over the ironsmiths about him. He lifted the buckhorn whistle
that hung on a thong about his neck and blew a single sharp
blast. Immediately all the scurry and bustle amongst the kilns
ceased and the master smith hurried to him.

‘How long to draw the rest of the smelting and break
down the kilns?’ Bazo demanded.