The Angels Weep (7 page)

‘Two days, oh Lord,’ answered the iron-worker,
bobbing respectfully. His eyes were bloodshot from the smoke of
the furnace, and the smoke seemed to have stained his cap of
white woolly hair to dingy yellow.

‘You have until dawn—’

‘Lord!’

‘Work all night, but screen the fires from the
plain.’ Bazo turned from him and strode up the steep
incline to where twenty other men waited below the granite cap of
the hill.

Like Bazo, they wore only simple leather kilts, and were
unarmed, but their bodies were tempered and fined down by war and
the training for war, and there was the warrior’s arrogance
in their stance as they rose to acknowledge their induna and
their eyes were bright and fierce. There was no doubt that these
were Matabele, not
amaholi
dogs.

‘Follow!’ ordered Bazo, and led them at a trot
along the lower contour of the hill. There was a narrow cave in
the base of the cliff, and Bazo drew aside the hanging creepers
that screened the mouth and stopped into the gloomy interior. The
cave was only ten paces deep, and it ended abruptly in a scree of
loose boulders.

Bazo gestured and two of his men went up to the end wall of
the cave and rolled aside the boulders. In the recess beyond
there was the glint of polished metal like the scales of a
slumbering reptile. As Bazo moved out of the entrance, the
slanting rays of the setting sun struck deeply into the cave,
lighting the secret arsenal. The assegais were stacked in bundles
of ten and bound together with rawhide thongs.

The two warriors lifted out a bundle, broke the thongs and
swiftly passed the weapons down the line of men, until each was
armed. Bazo hefted the stabbing spear. The shaft was of polished
red heartwood of mukusi, the blood-wood tree. The blade was
hand-forged, wide as Bazo’s palm and long as his forearm.
He could have shaved the hair from the back of his hand with the
honed edge.

He had felt naked until that moment, but now, with the
familiar weight and balance in his hand, he was a man again. He
gestured to his men to roll the boulders back into place covering
the cache of bright new blades, and then he led them back along
the path. On the shoulder of the hill, Tanase waited for him on
the ledge of rock which commanded a wide view across the grassy
plains, and beyond them the blue forests dreamed softly in the
evening light.

‘There,’ she pointed, and Bazo saw them
instantly.

Two horses, moving at an easy canter. They had reached the
foot of the hills and were riding along them, scouting for an
easy route. The riders peered up at the tangle of boulders and at
the smooth pearly sheets of granite which offered no
foothold.

There were only two access trails to the valley of the
ironsmiths, each of them narrow and steep, with necks which could
be easily defended. Bazo turned and looked back. The smoke from
the kilns was dissipating, there were only a few pale ribbons
twisting along the grey granite cliffs. By morning there would be
nothing to lead a curious traveller to the secret place, but
there was still an hour of daylight, less perhaps, for the night
comes with startling rapidity in Africa above the Limpopo
river.

‘I must delay them until dark,’ Bazo said.
‘I must turn them before they find the path.’

‘If they will not be turned?’ Tanase asked softly,
and in reply Bazo merely altered his grip on the broad assegai in
his right hand, and then quickly drew Tanase back off the rocky
ledge, for the horsemen had halted and one of them, the taller
and broader man, was carefully sweeping the hillside with a pair
of binoculars.

‘Where is my son?’ Bazo asked.

‘At the cave,’ Tanase replied.

‘You know what to do if—’ he did not have to
go on, and Tanase nodded.

‘I know,’ she said softly, and Bazo turned from
her and went bounding down the steep pathway with twenty armed
amadoda
at his back.

At the narrow place which Bazo had marked, he stopped. He did
not have to speak, but at a single gesture of his free hand his
men slipped off the narrow trail and disappeared into the
crevices and cracks of the gigantic boulders that stood tall on
either hand. In seconds there was no sign of them, and Bazo broke
off a branch from one of the dwarfed trees that grew in a rocky
pocket, and he ran back, sweeping the trail of all sign that
might alert a wary man to the ambush. Then he placed his assegai
on a shoulder-high ledge beside the path and covered it with the
green branch. It was within easy reach if he were forced to guide
the white riders up the trail.

‘I will try to turn them, but if I cannot, wait until
they reach this place,’ he called to the hidden warriors.
‘Then do it swiftly.’

His men were spread out for two hundred paces along both sides
of the trail, but they were concentrated here at the bend. A good
ambush must have depth to it, so if a victim breaks through the
first rank of attackers, there will be others waiting for him
beyond. This was a good ambush: in bad ground on a steep narrow
trail where a horse could not turn readily nor go ahead at full
gallop. Bazo nodded to himself with satisfaction, then unarmed
and shieldless he went springing down the trail towards the
plain, agile as a klipspringer over the rough track.

‘I
t will
be dark in half an hour,’ Harry Mellow called after Ralph.
‘We should find a place to camp.’

‘There must be a path,’ Ralph rode with one fist
on his hip and the felt hat pushed back on his head, looking up
the wild cliff.

‘What do you expect to find up there?’

‘I don’t know, and that’s the devil of
it.’ Ralph grinned over his shoulder. He was unprepared and
twisted off balance, so when his horse shied violently under him,
he almost lost a stirrup and had to grab at the pommel of the
saddle to prevent himself going over, but at the same time he
yelled

to Harry.

‘Cover me!’ and with his free hand Ralph tugged
the Winchester rifle from its leather boot under his knee. His
horse was rearing and skittering in a tight circle so he could
not get the rifle up. He knew that he was blocking Harry’s
line of fire, and that for those long seconds he was completely
defenceless, and he swore helplessly, anticipating a rush of dark
spearmen out of the broken rock and scrub at the foot of the
cliff.

Then he realized there was only one man, and that he was
unarmed, and again he yelled at Harry, with even more urgency,
for he had heard the clash of the breech block behind him as the
American loaded and cocked.

‘Hold it! Don’t shoot!’

The gelding reared again, but this time Ralph jerked it down
and then stared at the tall black man who had stepped so silently
and unexpectedly out of the crevice of a fractured granite
block.

‘Who are you?’ he demanded, his voice rasping with
the shock, which still screwed his guts into a ball and charged
his veins with a quick rush of blood. ‘Damn you, I nearly
shot you.’ Ralph caught himself, and this time repeated in
fluent Sindebele, the Matabele language, ‘Who are
you?’

The tall man in the plain leather cloak inclined his head
slightly, but his body remained absolutely still, the empty hands
hanging at his side.

‘What manner of question is that,’ he asked
gravely, ‘for one brother to ask another?’

Ralph stared at him. Taking in the induna’s headring on
his brow and the gaunt features, scored and riven by the crags
and deep lines of some terrible suffering, a sorrow or an illness
that must have transported this man to the frontiers of hell
itself. It moved Ralph deeply to look upon that riven face, for
there was something, the fierce dark eyes and the tone of the
deep measured voice that was so familiar, and yet so altered as
to be unrecognizable.

‘Henshaw,’ the man spoke again, using Ralph
Ballan-tyne’s Matabele praise name. ‘Henshaw, the
Hawk, do you not know me? Have these few short years changed us
so?’

Ralph shook his head in disbelief, and his voice was full of
wonder. ‘Bazo, it is not you – surely, it is not you?
Did you not after all die with your impi at Shangani?’
Ralph kicked both feet out of the stirrups and jumped to the
ground. ‘Bazo. It is you!’ He ran to embrace the
Matabele. ‘My brother, my black brother,’ he said,
and there was the lift and lilt of pure joy in his voice.

Bazo accepted the embrace quietly, his hands still hanging at
his sides, and at last Ralph stood back and held him at
arm’s length.

‘At Shangani, after the guns were still, I left the
wagons and walked out across the open pan. Your men were there,
the Moles-that-burrow-under-a-mountain.’ That was the name
that King Lobengula himself had given to Bazo’s impi,
Izimvukuzane Ezembintaba
. ‘I knew them by their red
shields, by the plumes of the marabou stork and the headbands of
fur from the burrowing mole.’ These were the regimentals
bestowed upon the impi by the old king, and Bazo’s eyes
turned luminous with the agony of memory as Ralph went on.
‘Your men were there, Bazo, lying upon each other like the
fallen leaves of the forest. I searched for you, rolling the dead
men onto their backs to see their faces, but there were so many
of them.’

‘So many,’ Bazo agreed, and only his eyes betrayed
his emotion.

‘And there was so little time to look for you,’
Ralph explained quietly. ‘I could only search slowly, with
care, for some of your men were
fanisa file
.’ It was
an old Zulu trick to sham dead on the battlefield and wait for
the enemy to come out to loot and count the kill. ‘I did
not want an assegai between my shoulder-blades. Then the laager
broke up and the wagons rolled on towards the king’s kraal.
I had to leave.’

‘I was there,’ Bazo told him, and drew aside the
leather cloak. Ralph stared at the dreadful scars, and then
dropped his gaze, while Bazo covered his torso again. ‘I
was lying amongst the dead men.’

‘And now?’ Ralph asked. ‘Now that it is all
over, what are you doing here?’

‘What does a warrior do when the war is over, when the
impis are broken and disarmed, and the king is dead?’ Bazo
shrugged. ‘I am a hunter of wild honey now.’ He
glanced up the cliff at where the last smoke wisps were blending
into the darkening sky as the sun touched the tops of the western
forest. ‘I was smoking a hive when I saw you
coming.’

‘Ah!’ Ralph nodded. ‘It was that smoke that
led us to you.’

‘Then it was fortunate smoke, my brother
Henshaw.’

‘You still call me brother?’ Ralph marvelled
gently. ‘When it might have been I who fired the
bullets—’ He did not complete the sentence, but
glanced down at Bazo’s chest.

‘No man can be held to account for what he does in the
madness of battle,’ Bazo answered. ‘If I had reached
the wagons that day,’ he shrugged, ‘you might be the
one who carried the scars.’

‘Bazo,’ Ralph gestured to Harry to ride forward,
‘this is Harry Mellow, he is a man who understands the
mystery of the earth, who can find the gold and the iron which we
seek.’

‘Nkosi, I see you.’ Bazo greeted Harry gravely,
calling him ‘Lord’ and not allowing his deep
resentment to show for an instant. His king had died and his
nation had been destroyed by the weird passion of the white men
for that accursed yellow metal.

‘Bazo and I grew up together on the Kimberley diamond
fields. I have never had a dearer friend,’ Ralph explained
quickly, and then turned impetuously back to Bazo. ‘We have
a little food, you will share it with us, Bazo.’ This time
Ralph caught the shift in Bazo’s gaze, and he insisted.
‘Camp with us here. There is much to talk about.’

‘I have my woman and my son with me,’ Bazo
answered. ‘They are in the hills.’

‘Bring them,’ Ralph told him. ‘Go quickly,
before darkness falls, and bring them down into camp.’

B
azo alerted
his men with the dusk call of the francolin, and one of them
stepped out of the ambush onto the path.

‘I will hold the white men at the foot of the hills for
tonight,’ Bazo told him quietly. ‘Perhaps I can send
them away satisfied, without trying to find the valley. However,
warn the ironsmiths that the kilns must be quenched by dawn
tomorrow, there must be no shred of smoke.’

Bazo went on giving his orders, the finished weapons and
freshly smelted metal to be hidden and the paths swept clear of
spoor, the ironsmiths to retreat along the secret path deeper
into the hills, the Matabele guards to cover their retreat.
‘I will follow you when the white men have gone. Wait for
me at the peak of the Blind Ape.’

‘Nkosi.’ They saluted him, and slipped away,
silent as the night-prowling leopard, into the failing light.
Bazo took the fork in the path, and when he reached the rocky
spur on the prow of the hill, there was no need for him to call.
Tanase was waiting for him with the boy carried on her hip, the
roll of sleeping-mats upon her head and the leather grain-bag
slung on her back.

‘It is Henshaw,’ he told her, and heard the
serpentine hiss of her breath. Though he could not see her
expression, he knew what it must be.

‘He is the spawn of the white dog who violated the
sacred places—’

‘He is my friend,’ Bazo said.

‘You have taken the oath,’ she reminded him
fiercely. ‘How can any white man still be your
friend?’

‘He was my friend, then.’

‘Do you remember the vision that came to me, before the
powers of divination were torn from me by this man’s
father?’

‘Tanase,’ Bazo ignored the question, ‘we
must go down to him. If he sees my wife and my son are with me,
then there will be no suspicions. He will believe that we are
indeed hunting the honey of wild bees. Follow me.’ He
turned back down the trail, and she followed him closely, and her
voice sank to a whisper, of which he could clearly hear every
word. He did not look back at her, but he listened.