She had expected his anger. She could have weathered that, as she had a hundred times before, but she saw in his eyes something that had never been there before. It was contempt, and she did not know how she could bear it. When Gandang stood up without another word and stalked away towards the river, she wanted to run after him and throw herself at his feet, but then she remembered the words of Nomusa.
‘He is a gentle God, but the way He sets for us is hard beyond the telling of it.’
And Juba found that she could not move. She was trapped between two worlds and two duties, and she felt as though it was tearing her soul down the middle.
Juba sat alone under the bare wild fig tree the rest of the day. She sat with her arms folded across her great glossy breasts, and she rocked herself silently, as though the movement might comfort her as it would a fretful child, but there was no surcease in either movement or thought, so it was with relief that at last she looked up and saw her two attendants kneeling before her. She did not know how long they had been there. She had not even heard them come up, so rapt had she been in her sorrow and confusion.
‘I see you, Ruth,’ she said, nodding at the Christian girl and her companion, ‘and you too, Imbali, my little Flower. What is it that makes you look so sad?’
‘The men have gone into the hills,’ whispered Ruth.
‘And your hearts have gone with them,’ Juba smiled at the two young women. It was a fond yet sad smile, as though she remembered her own youthful bodily passions and regretted that the flames had burned so low.
‘I have dreamed of nothing but my beautiful man, every lonely night we have been away,’ murmured Ruth.
‘And of the fine son he will make with you,’ Juba chuckled. She knew the girl’s desperate need, and teased her lovingly. ‘Lelesa, the lightning stroke, your man is well named.’
Ruth hung her head. ‘Do not mock me, Mamewethu,’ she murmured pitifully, and Ruth turned to Imbali.
‘And you, little Flower, is there no bee to tickle your petals either?’
The girl giggled and covered her mouth and squirmed with embarrassment.
‘If you need us, Mamewethu,’ Ruth said earnestly, ‘then we will stay with you.’
Juba kept them in an agony of suspense for a few seconds longer.
How firm and nubile was their young flesh, how sweetly shaped their young bodies, how eager were their great dark eyes, how vast their hunger for all that life had to offer. Juba smiled again and clapped her hands.
‘Be gone,’ she said, ‘both of you. There are those that need you more than I do. Away with you both, follow your men into the hills.’
The girls squealed with delight, and throwing aside all ceremony, they embraced Juba joyously.
‘You are the sunshine and the moon,’ they told her, and then they fled to their huts to prepare for the journey, and for a little while Juba’s own sorrow was lightened. But at the fall of night when no young wife came to summon her to Gandang’s hut, it returned in full strength, and she wept alone on her sleeping-mat until at last sleep came over her, but then there were dreams – dreams full of the glow of flames and the smell of rotting flesh, and she cried out in her sleep, but there was no one to hear and awaken her.
General Mungo St John reined in and looked around him at the devastated forests. There was no cover, the locusts had seen to that, and it would make his task more difficult.
He lifted the slouch hat from his head and mopped his forehead. This was the suicide month. The great cumulus cloud banks heaved up heaven high along the horizon and the heat shivered and wavered in mirage above the bare baked earth. Mungo carefully readjusted the black patch over his empty eye-socket, and turned in the saddle to look back at the file of men that followed him.
There were fifty of them, all Matabele, but wearing a bizarre motley of traditional and European dress. Some wore patched moleskin breeches, and others tasselled fur aprons. Some were barefoot, others wore rawhide sandals and a few even sported hobnailed boots without socks or puttees. Most of them were bare-chested, though a few wore cast-off tunics or tattered shirts. There was, however, one single item of uniform that was common to them all. It was worn on a chain around the left arm above the elbow, a polished brass disc engraved with the words: ‘BSA Co. Police.’
They were each of them armed with a new repeating Winchester rifle, and a bandolier of brass cartridges. Their legs were dusty to the knees, for they had made a hard fast march southwards, keeping up easily with Mungo St John’s trotting mount. Mungo looked them over with grim satisfaction. Despite the lack of cover, he believed that the speed of their advance must take the kraals by surprise.
It was like one of his slaving expeditions on the west coast, so long ago, before that damned Lincoln and the Royal bloody Navy had cut off the multi-million-dollar trade. By God, those had been the days. The swift approach march, the encirclement of the village and the dawn rush with the slavers’ clubs cracking against woolly black skulls. Mungo roused himself. Was it a sign of age to hark back so often to the long-ago? he wondered.
‘Ezra,’ he called his sergeant to come up to him. He was the only other mounted man in the column. He rode a swaybacked grey with a rough coat.
Ezra was a hulking Matabele with a scarred cheek, memento of a mining accident in the great diamond pit at Kimberley, six hundred miles to the south. It was there that he had adopted his new name and learned his English.
‘How far ahead is Gandang’s kraal?’ Mungo asked him in that language.
‘That far,’ Ezra swept his arm through an arc of the sky, indicating two hours or so of the sun’s passage.
‘All right,’ Mungo nodded. ‘Send the scouts out. But I want no mistakes. Explain to them again that they must cross the Inyati river upstream of the kraal and circle out to wait in the foothills.’
‘Nkosi,’ Ezra nodded.
‘Tell them they must seize anybody who runs from the kraal, and bring them in.’
The business of translating every command irked Mungo, and for the hundredth time since he had crossed the Limpopo, he resolved to study the Sindebele language.
Ezra saluted Mungo with an exaggerated flourish, an imitation of the British soldiers he had watched from the barred window of his cell while he was serving his sentence for diamond theft, and turned in the saddle to shout the orders to the men who followed the two horsemen.
‘Warn them that they must be in position before dawn. That is when we will ride in.’
Mungo unstrapped the felt-covered water-bottle from the pommel of his saddle and unscrewed the stopper.
‘They are ready, Nkosi,’ the sergeant reported.
‘Very well, Sergeant, send them away,’ said Mungo, and raised the water-bottle to his lips.
For many seconds after waking, Juba believed that the screams of the women and the whimpering of the children were all part of her nightmares, and she pulled the fur kaross over her head.
Then there was a crash as the door to the hut was broken open, a rush of bodies into the dark interior, and Juba came fully awake and threw off the kaross. Rough hands seized her and though she screamed and struggled, she was dragged naked into the open. The sky was paling with the dawn and the constables had piled fresh logs on the fire, so that Juba recognized the white man immediately, and she shrank back into the safety of the crowd of sobbing, wailing women before he could notice her.
Mungo St John was in a fury, bellowing at his sergeant, striding backwards and forwards beyond the fire, slapping his riding-whip against his glossy boot. His face was flushed a dark crimson like the wattles of the waddling black singisi, the grotesque turkey buzzard of the veld, and his single eye blazed in the firelight.
‘Where are the men? I want to know where the men have gone!’
Sergeant Ezra came hurrying down the rank of cringing women, peering into their faces. He stopped in front of Juba, recognizing her instantly, one of the grandes dames of the tribe; as she drew herself to her full height, even in her to
tal and massive nudity she was dignified and queenly. She expected some mark of respect, some gesture of courtesy from him, but instead the sergeant seized her wrist and twisted her arm up so viciously that she was forced to her knees.
‘Where are the amadoda?’ he hissed at her. ‘Where have the men gone?’
Juba choked down the sob of agony in her throat, and croaked, ‘It is true there are no men here, for certainly the ones who wear the little brass bangles of Lodzi on their arms are not men—’
‘Cow,’ hissed the sergeant, ‘fat black cow.’ And he jerked her arm upwards, forcing her face into the dirt.
‘Enough, kanka!’ A voice cut through the hubbub, and the tone and power of it commanded instant silence. ‘Let the woman be.’
Involuntarily the sergeant released Juba and stepped back, and even Mungo St John halted his furious pacing.
Gandang stalked into the firelight, and though he wore only his headring and a short loincloth, he was as menacing as a prowling lion, and the sergeant fell back in front of him. Juba struggled to her feet, rubbing her wrist, but Gandang did not even glance at her. He strode to Mungo St John and asked:
‘What is it that you seek, white man, coming into my kraal like a thief in the night?’
Mungo looked to the sergeant for a translation.
‘He says you are a thief,’ the sergeant told him, and Mungo jerked up his chin and glared at Gandang.
‘Tell him he knows what I come for, tell him I want two hundred strong young men.’
And Gandang retreated immediately into the studied defensive obtuseness of Africa, which few Europeans know how to counter, and which infuriated a man like St John who could not even understand the language, and who had to submit to the laborious process of translation. The sun was well up when Gandang repeated the question he had first asked almost an hour before.
‘Why does he want my young men to come to him? They are content here.’
And Mungo’s clenched fists shook with the effort of restraint.
‘All men must work,’ the sergeant translated, ‘it is the law of the white men.’
‘Tell him,’ Gandang retorted, ‘that it is not the way of Matabele. The amadoda see no dignity nor great virtue in digging in the dirt. That is for women and amaholi.’
‘The induna says that his men will not work,’ the sergeant translated maliciously, and Mungo St John could endure no more of it. He took a swift pace forward and slashed the riding whip into the induna’s face.
Gandang blinked, but he neither flinched nor raised his hand to touch the shining tumescent welt that rose swiftly across his cheek. He made no effort to staunch the thin trickle of blood from his crushed lip that snaked down his chin, but he let it drip onto his naked chest.
‘My hands are empty now, white man,’ he said, in a whisper that was more penetrating than a bellow, ‘but they will not always be so.’ And he turned towards his hut.
‘Gandang,’ Mungo St John shouted after him. ‘Your men will work if I have to hunt them down and chain them like animals.’
The two girls followed the path at a smooth swinging trot that did not disturb the balance of the large bundles they carried upon their heads. In the bundles there were special gifts for their men, salt and stamped corn, snuff and beads and lengths of trade calico for loincloths that they had wheedled out of Nomusa’s store at Khami Mission. They were both in high spirits, for they had passed out of the swathe of destruction left by the locust swarms, and the acacia forests were a golden yellow haze of spring bloom murmurous with bees.
Ahead of them rose the first pearly granite domes, and amongst them they would find the men, so they called gaily to each other, silly girlish banter, and their laughter was sweet as the tinkle of bells. It carried far ahead of them. They skirted the base of a tall cliff, and without pausing to rest started up the natural steps of grey stone. It led them upwards into a steep ravine which would eventually take them to the summit.
Imbali was leading, her round hard haunches swaying under the short skirt as she skipped over the uneven footing, and Ruth who was every bit as eager followed her closely into the angle where the path turned sharply between two huge round boulders that had rolled down from above.
Imbali stopped so abruptly that Ruth almost ran into her, and then she hissed with alarm.
A man stood in the centre of the path. Although he was unmistakably a Matabele, the girls had never seen him before. The stranger wore a blue shirt, and on his upper arm sparkled a round brass disc. In his hand he carried a rifle. Quickly Ruth glanced behind her and hissed again. Another armed man had stepped out from the shaded angle of the boulder and cut off their retreat. He was smiling, but there was nothing in that smile to reassure the girls. They lowered the bundles from their heads and shrank closer to each other.
‘Where are you going, pretty little kittens?’ asked the smiling kanka. ‘Are you going to search for a tomcat?’
Neither of the girls answered. They stared at him with big frightened eyes.
‘We will go with you.’ The smiling kanka was so broad across the chest, his legs so muscular, that he appeared to be deformed. His teeth were very white and big as those of a horse, but the smile never reached his eyes. His eyes were small and cold and dead-looking.
‘Lift your bundles, kittens, and lead us to the cats.’
Ruth shook her head. ‘We go only to search for medicine roots, we do not understand what you want of us.’
The kanka came closer. His thick legs were bowed, and they gave him a peculiar rolling gait. Suddenly he kicked over Ruth’s bundle, and it burst open.
‘Ah!’ he smiled coldly. ‘Why do you carry such gifts, if you go to search for muti?’
Ruth dropped to her knees, and scrabbled amongst the rocks to retrieve the spilled corn and scattered beads. The kanka dropped his hand onto her back and stroked her lustrous black skin.
‘Purr, little kitten,’ he grinned, and Ruth froze, crouched at his feet with her hands filled with spilled grain.
The kanka ran his fingers lightly up and placed his hand upon the nape of her neck. His hand was huge, the knuckles enlarged, the fingers thick and powerful. Ruth began to tremble as the fingers encircled her neck.
The kanka looked up at his companion, who still guarded the pathway, and the two of them exchanged a glance. Imbali saw and understood.
‘She is a bride,’ she whispered. ‘Her husband is the nephew of Gandang. Take care, kanka.’
The man ignored her. He lifted Ruth to her feet by the neck, and twisted her face towards him.
‘Take us to where the men are hiding.’
Ruth stared at him silently for a second, and then suddenly and explosively she spat into his face. The frothy spittle spattered his cheeks and dripped from his chin.
‘Kanka!’ she hissed. ‘Traitor jackal!’
The man never stopped smiling. ‘That is what I wanted you to do,’ he told her, and hooked his finger into the string of her skirt and snapped it. The skirt fell around her ankles.
He held her by the scruff and she struggled and covered her groin with both hands. The kanka looked at her naked body and his breathing changed.
‘Watch the other,’ he told his companion and tossed his Winchester rifle to him. The second constable caught it by the stock and prodded Imbali with the barrel until she backed up against the high granite boulder.
‘Our time will come very soon,’ he assured her, and turned his head to watch the other couple, at the same time holding Imbali pinned against the rock.
The kanka dragged Ruth off the path, but for only a few paces, and the scrub that screened them was thin and leafless.
‘My man will kill you,’ cried Ruth. They could hear everything on the path, even the sound of the kanka‘s ragged breathing.
‘Then give me good value, if I must pay with my life,’ he chuckled, and then gasped with pain. ‘So kitten, you have sharp claws.’ And there was the clap of a blow on soft flesh, the sound of struggling, the bush
es heaved and loose pebbles rolled away down the slope.
The constable guarding Imbali strained for a glimpse of what was happening. His lips were open and he licked them. He could make out blurred movement through the leafless branches, and then there was the sound of a body falling heavily to earth and the breath being driven violently from Ruth’s lungs by a crushing weight.
‘Hold still, kitten,’ the kanka panted. ‘You make me angry. Lie still,’ and abruptly Ruth screamed. It was the shrill ringing cry of an animal in mortal agony, repeated again and again, and the kanka grunted. ‘Yes. There, yes,’ and then snuffed like a boar at the trough, and there was a soft rhythmic slapping sound, and Ruth kept screaming.
The man guarding Imbali propped the spare rifle against the boulder and stepped off the path, and with the barrel of his own Winchester parted the branches and stared. His face seemed to swell and darken with passion, his whole attention concentrated on what he was watching.
With the second constable’s attention so distracted, Imbali sidled along the granite, and then paused for an instant to gather herself before darting away. She had reached the angle of the pathway before the man turned and saw her.
‘Come back!’ he shouted.
‘What is it?’ the kanka demanded from behind the bushes in a thick tortured voice.
‘The other one, she is running.’
‘Stop her,’ the kanka bellowed, and his companion ran to the corner.
Imbali was fifty paces down the hillside, flying like a gazelle over the rough ground, driven by her terror. The man thumbed back the hammer of his Winchester, flung the butt to his shoulder and fired wildly, without aiming. It was a fluke shot. It caught the girl in the small of the back and the big soft lead slug tore out through her belly. She collapsed and rolled down the steep pathway, her limbs tumbling about loosely.
The constable lowered the rifle. His expression was shocked and unbelieving. Slowly, hesitantly, he went down to where the girl lay. She was on her back. Her eyes were open, and the exit wound in her flat young stomach gaped hideously, her torn entrails bulged from it. The girl’s eyes switched to his face, the terror in them flared up for an instant, and then slowly faded into utter blankness.