‘White is the colour of slavery,’ sang a young girl’s voice, filling the air about his head, having no direction and no substance, sweet and liquid as the burble of running water.
‘She spoke in the voices of Belial and Beelzebub, the hideous voices of Azazel and Beliar, all Satan’s myriad alter-egos,’ his father had written, and Zouga felt the slow leaden spread of superstitious terror weighing down his legs.
Another voice, roaring like a bull, boomed from the mouth of the cave. ‘The white eagle has cast down the stone falcons.’
He took a long slow breath, to bring his mutinous body under control, and he cast his mind back deliberately to a childhood memory. Brighton pier on August bank holiday, the small boy clutching his Uncle William’s hand and staring up in wonder at the magician on the stage who made a doll come to life and speak in a quaint piping voice, answering the voice from the box too small to contain even a rabbit. The memory steadied him, and he laughed. It was a clear firm laugh, surprising himself even.
‘Keep your tricks for the children, Umlimo. I come in peace to speak with you as a man.’
There was no reply, though he thought he caught the silken whisper of bare feet on stone, coming from the darkness beyond the turned stone wall.
‘See me, Umlimo! I lay aside my weapons.’
He unslung the powder bag and dropped it at his feet, and then he laid the elephant gun across it and holding his empty hands before him advanced slowly into the cave.
As he reached the step in the wall, there was the crackling spitting snarl of an angry leopard from the shadows just ahead of him. It was a terrible sound, fierce and real, but Zouga had himself in hand now. He did not miss a pace but stooped under the sill through the gap, and straightened on the far side.
He waited for a minute while his eyes adjusted, and he could make out shapes and planes in the gloom. There were no other voices or animal sounds. There was a faint source of light somewhere ahead of him in the depths of the cave, and he could now make out a way amongst the scree and fallen rock that choked the cave, in some places as high as the low roof.
Zouga began to pick his way carefully forward. The light grew stronger, and Zouga realized that it was a single beam of sunlight, shining through a narrow crack in the roof.
Looking up, he stumbled and put out a hand to save himself. It was not rock that he touched but something sticklike that moved beneath his touch. There was a rattle, and a loose dry rush of debris. Zouga caught his balance and glanced down. A disembodied human skull gaped up at him from empty black eye sockets, the cheekbones still covered with a parchment of dried skin.
With a jolting little shock Zouga realized that what he had taken for loose scree and rock was instead piles of human remains, dried and desiccated corpses, lying in mounds and heaps, choking the passages and deepest recesses of the cave, here and there a single body, crouched or sprawled alone, bone shining dully from gaps in its covering of dark dried skin or through the rotting leather garments.
‘That reeking charnel house,’ Fuller Ballantyne had called it.
Instinctively Zouga wiped the hand that had touched the long-dead skeleton, and then went on towards the light. There was the smell of smoke now, and of human presence, and another sweet mousy odour that was hauntingly familiar but which Zouga could not place at that moment. The floor of the cave sloped downwards under his feet, and he turned a rocky shoulder and looked down into a small natural amphitheatre, with a floor of smooth granite.
In the centre of the floor burned a low fire of some aromatic wood, the smoke spiced the air and rose in a slow spiral towards the crack in the rocky roof, clouding the beam of sunlight with milky blue. There seemed to be other fingers of the cave leading further into the hillside, like the adits of a mine shaft, but Zouga’s attention was focused on the figure that sat across the fire from him.
Zouga went slowly down on to the floor of the stone amphitheatre without taking his eyes from the figure.
‘That foul and midnight hag,’ his father had called the Umlimo, but this was no hag. She was young, in full physical prime, and as she knelt facing him Zouga realized that he had seldom seen such a fine-looking woman, certainly not in India or Africa, and very seldom, if ever, in the northern lands.
She had a long regal neck on which her head balanced like a black lily on its stem. Her features were Egyptian, with a straight fine nose and huge dark eyes above high moulded cheekbones. Her teeth were small and perfect, her lips chiselled like the flutes of a pink seashell.
She was naked, her body slim, her limbs long and fine, her hands and feet narrow and delicately shaped with tapered fingers and pale pink palms. Her small breasts rode high and were perfectly round, her waist narrow but flaring into tight hard buttocks and hips like the curve of a Venetian vase. Her sex was a wide triangle, deeply cleft, the inner lips bursting out unashamedly, like the wings of a dark exotic butterfly emerging from its woolly chrysalis.
She was watching him with those huge dark eyes, and when he stopped across the fire from her, she made a slow gracious gesture with those delicately long fingers. Obediently Zouga squatted down opposite her and waited.
The woman took up one of the calabash gourds from the array beside her, holding it between the palms of her hands and poured from it into a shallow earthen bowl. It was milk. She set the calabash aside, and Zouga expected her to offer him the bowl, but she did not. She continued to watch him inscrutably.
‘I come from the north,’ Zouga said at last. ‘Men call me Bakela.’
‘Your sire slew the one before me,’ said the woman. Her voice was compelling, for although the fluted lips barely moved, it was thrown with the power and timbre of the skilled ventriloquist. The sound of it seemed to quiver in the air long after she finished speaking and he knew now with certainty who had spoken in the voice of child and maid, of warrior and wild animal.
‘He was a sick man,’ Zouga replied, not questioning the source of her knowledge. Not querying how she had known that he was the son of the father.
Her words explained much to Zouga, and it was logical that the Umlimo was a hereditary duty, the office of high priestess being passed on down the years. This magnificent woman was the latest bearer of the title.
‘My father was driven mad by the sickness in his blood. He did not know what he did,’ Zouga explained.
‘It was part of the prophecy.’ The Umlimo’s statement shimmered against the cave walls, but she did not stir while the silence spun out over many minutes.
‘These,’ Zouga spoke at last, indicating the dusty, crumbling piles of dead, ‘who were they, and how did they die?’
‘They are the people of the Rozwi,’ said the woman, ‘and they died by fire and smoke.’
‘Who laid the fire?’ Zouga persisted.
‘The black bull from the south. The Angoni.’
Zouga was silent again imagining the tribe fleeing here, to their holy place, their refuge, the women carrying the children, running like driven game ahead of the beaters, looking back over their shoulders for a glimpse of the waving tufts on the crowns of the war shields and the plumed headdresses of the Angoni amadoda.
He imagined them lying here in the darkness listening to the ring of axes and shouts of the besieging warriors as they cut the timber and piled it in the mouth of the cave, and then the crackle of the flames as they put fire to it and the first choking acrid clouds of smoke boiled into the cave.
He could hear again in his imagination the screams and cries of the choking, dying victims, and the shouts and the laughter of the men beyond the flaming, smoking barricade of timber.
‘That too was part of the prophecy,’ said the Umlimo and was silent. In the silence there was a soft rustling sound like a leaf blown by the breeze across the tiles at midnight, and Zouga’s eyes turned towards the sound.
A dark thing flowed out of the shadows at the back of the cave, like a trickle of spilt blood, black in the gloom but catching the firelight in pinpricks of reflec
ted light. It rustled softly across the stone floor, and Zouga felt his skin crawl and his nostrils flare at the sweetish mousy odour which he had noticed before, but which he recognized now.
It was the smell of snake.
Zouga stared at it, frozen with fascinated horror, for the reptile was as thick as his wrist and the full length of it was lost in the recesses of the cave. The head slid into the circle of orange firelight. The scales glittered with a marble lustre, the lidless eyes fixed Zouga with an unblinking stare and from the slyly grinning lipless mouth the silken black tongue vibrated as it tasted his scent upon the air.
‘Sweet Christ!’ Zouga whispered hoarsely and dropped his hand to the hilt of his hunting-knife on his belt, but the Umlimo did not move.
The snake lifted its head from the stone and dipped it over the bowl of milk. It began to drink.
It was a mamba, a black mamba, the most venomous of all the reptiles, the death it could inflict was swift but agonizing beyond all nightmares of pain. Zouga had not believed that a mamba could grow to such dimensions, for as he watched it drink half its length was still lost in the shadows.
After a minute the monstrous reptile lifted its head from the bowl and turned towards the Umlimo, it began to slide forward, the muscles under the glittering scales convulsing in little waves that came running down its length towards the broad spatulate head.
It touched the woman’s bare knee with the flickering black tongue, seeming to use the tongue like a blind man uses his cane to grope its way along her thigh, licking briefly at the lips of her bulging sex, and then lifting itself up over her belly, over her breasts, still licking at her smoothly oiled skin, it rose up around her neck and then slid down over the other shoulder until it came to rest at last suspended around her neck, the head reaching out the length of a man’s arm ahead of her at the level of her breasts; swaying slightly, it fixed Zouga once more with that cold ophidian stare.
Zouga licked his lips, and relaxed his grip on the hilt of the knife.
‘I have come to seek wisdom,’ he said hoarsely.
‘I know what you seek,’ replied the Umlimo. ‘But you will find more than you seek.’
‘Who will lead me?’
‘Follow the little seeker of sweetness in the treetops.’
‘I do not understand.’ Zouga frowned, still watching the huge snake, and the Umlimo did not reply. Her silence was clearly an invitation to ponder the reply, and Zouga did so in silence, but found no explanation. He memorized the words, and would have asked another question but there was a silken rush out of the darkness near him, and he started half to his feet as a second snake slid swiftly past him.
It was another mamba, but a smaller snake, not much thicker than his thumb, and as long as twice the stretch of his arms. Half its length was raised arrow-straight in the air, and it sailed on its tail up to the kneeling woman with her grotesque living necklace.
The woman did not move, and the smaller snake stood before her, swaying gently from side to side, lowering itself gradually until it touched tongue to darting black tongue with the thick reptile around her neck.
Then it slid forward and began to roll itself around the body of the other snake, throwing turn after turn like a sailor lashing a sheet about a mast, and each time it rolled, it showed its soft white pulsating underbelly with the narrow scales reaching from flank to flank.
Neither the woman nor the bigger snake moved, nor removed their steadfast gaze from Zouga’s fascinated pale face. The thinner lighter-coloured body of the second snake began a slow rhythmical and sensual movement, expanding and contracting about the thicker and darker body of the other and Zouga realized that they were a mating pair.
Two-thirds of the way down the underbelly of the male were the elongated scales that guarded the genital sac. As the male’s excitement mounted so the scales gaped apart and the penis began to extrude. It was the colour and shape of the bloom of a night-flowering cactus, a pale lilac belled flower that gleamed like wet satin.
Insistently the male caressed the thick, dark body, and gradually his ardour was rewarded. The female rolled a portion of her own length, the white belly throbbing softly in acquiescence, exposing the scaled genital purse.
With a long shuddering movement the male slid his length down hers, white belly pressed to belly, and the swollen lilac flower prised open the female sexual purse, distorting the lips. The female mamba opened her mouth wide, and her throat was a lovely buttercup yellow. In her top jaw the small bony needles of her fangs were erect, each tipped with a pearly drop of venom, and she emitted a low sibilant hiss of ecstasy or pain as the male locked his penis deeply into her.
Zouga found he was sweating. A droplet slid down from his temple into his beard. The bizarre courtship and copulation had taken only minutes during which neither he nor the Umlimo had moved, but now she spoke.
‘The white eagle has stooped on the stone falcons, and cast them to earth.’ She paused. ‘Now the eagle shall lift them up again and they will fly afar.’
Zouga leaned forward, listening intently,
‘There shall be no peace in the kingdoms of the Mambos or the Monomatapa until they return. For the white eagle will war with the black bull until the stone falcons return to roost.’
While she spoke, the slow convulsing copulation of those interlocked bodies continued, giving to her words an obscene and evil weight.
‘Generation will war with generation, the eaglet will strive against the bull calf – white against black, and black against black, until the falcons return. Until the falcons return.’
The Umlimo raised her narrow pink-palmed hands, and lifted the garland of intertwined serpents from off her own neck. She laid them gently on the stone floor of the cave and with a single flowing movement, she stood erect, and the firelight glinted upon her oiled satin body.
‘When the falcons return,’ she spread her arms, and the round breasts changed shape at the movement, ‘when the falcons return, then once again the Mambos of Rozwi and the Monomatapa of Karanga will hold sway in the land.’ She lowered her arms and her breasts sagged weightily. ‘That is the prophecy. That is the whole prophecy,’ she said, and turned away from the fire and, with a gliding walk, moved across the irregular stone floor, her back straight and her naked buttocks swaying in stately rhythm.
She disappeared into the dark shadows that shrouded one of the fingers of the cave beyond the amphitheatre.
‘Wait!’ Zouga called after her, scrambling to his feet and starting after her.
The huge female mamba hissed sharply, like the steam of a boiling kettle, and rose up as high as Zouga’s head. The butter yellow mouth gaped again, and a crest of dark glittering scales came angrily erect down the length of her neck.
Zouga froze, and the snake hissed again and flared a little higher, the raised body arching gently into a taut ‘S’ shape. Zouga backed off, one pace and then another. The crest of scales subsided a little. He took another step backwards and the tense bow of the serpentine body relaxed, the head lowered a few inches. He moved steadily backwards towards the entrance of the cave, and before the amphitheatre was obscured by the shoulder of rock he saw the huge snake coiled in a knee-high pile of glinting scales still locked in sexual congress with her deadly consort.
The prophecy of the Umlimo, cryptic and unrevealed, stayed with Zouga during the long march back to where Jan Cheroot waited with his porters.
That night, by the firelight, Zouga copied it word for word into his journal, and afterwards the sweet smell of snakes haunted his nightmares – and lingered in his nostrils for long days after.
Now the wind turned fickle, sometimes completely still in the enervating hush and heat of noon, at other times dancing in the tall swaying vortex of the ‘dust devils’ across the plains, lifting leaves and dried blades of grass hundreds of feet in the yellow columns of dust, then again it gushed in turn from every point of the compass, one minute firm out of the north and the next as firmly from out of the south.
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It was impossible to come up with elephant while the wind played so loosely. Often when the spoor was hot and true, and they had already laid aside their heavy traps and stripped down to light running order, Zouga would feel the cool touch of the breeze upon the back of his sweating neck and almost immediately afterwards hear the alarm squeal of an elephant ahead of them in the forest, and after that first alert, it was impossible to close with the herd, for they went into that long sloping gait that they could keep up for mile upon mile, hour upon hour, day upon night, that would kill a man who tried to match it for more than a few miles.
Thus they killed no elephant in the days following Zouga’s meeting with the Umlimo, and once, when they had a good spoor which would have led them back into the north, away from the direction in which Zouga was convinced lay his quest, it was Zouga himself who called off the hunt. Jan Cheroot muttered bitterly for the rest of that day and the next while they made those seemingly aimless casts, eastward and then westward again, through the unmarked and uncharted wilderness.
Each day now the heat became fiercer, for the suicide month that ushers in the rains was upon them. Not even Zouga could march during the hours before and after noon. They would find the best shade and throw themselves down under it, sweating out the worst of the heat, trying to sleep when the buffalo flies would let them, but it was an effort to speak, an effort to wipe away the sweat that welled up on their bodies, and dried in white crystals on their skin and clothing. The salt rotted the fabric of Zouga’s shirt and breeches so they tore like paper at the first touch of thorn or rock, and Zouga was gradually reduced to a beggar’s rags, patched and stitched until little of the original material remained.
His boots had been resoled more than once with the rawhide peeled from the inner surface of an elephant’s ear, and his belt and webbing, the sling of his elephant gun renewed with uncured buffalo hide.
He made a strange gaunt figure, for hard hunting had burned all the fat and loose flesh from his body and limbs. His height was enhanced by his leanness and the breadth of his bony shoulders tapering sharply to his waist. The sun had burned his skin dark, yet bleached his hair and beard to white gold. His pale hair hung to his shoulders, and he tied it at the back of his neck with a leather thong. He kept his beard and whiskers trimmed neatly, using scissors to cut and the heated blade of his hunting knife to singe them.