Bazo’s charge had been so headlong that he almost followed them over the brink; for a giddy moment he tottered there, and then he caught his balance and spun to strike underhand at one of the survivors. The blade went into the man’s belly and out the other side, cleaving his bowels and his kidneys, and crunching through his backbone; and when Bazo jerked the steel clear, the life blood sprayed hotly onto his forearm and his chest. The last sentry ran, silently and desperately, for the pathway, and Bazo let him go.
Bazo bounded along the edge of the cliff and reached the point where the top of the ladder was secured. The ropes that held it were of twisted and plaited bark, reinforced with liana and leather thongs. They were thick as Bazo’s arm, and he changed his grip on the assegai to a chopping stroke.
The ropes popped and crackled as he hacked through them. He grunted at each stroke, slitting his eyes against the flying chips of wood and bark.
Behind him he heard the babble of many voices on the pathway. The sentry would call them down like hunting dogs – but Bazo scorned to turn until the work was done. One rope gave, and the massive unwieldy ladder sagged and twisted. He cut again, reversing his grip to swing backhanded, and the other ropes went.
The ladder swung outwards and downwards, gathering momentum, and the timbers crackled and squealed, drowning out the voices of the men coming down behind him. The bottom of the ladder struck the scree below the cliff with a shattering crash, and some of the uprights snapped under the impact. The head of the ladder was still secured at Bazo’s feet, and the whole twisted mess hung down like the rigging of a dismasted ship.
Bazo stood long enough to watch Zama lead his warriors swarming up the dangling tangle of rope and timber. Then he turned.
They were coming down the pathway, a solid phalanx of black bodies and sparkling weapons; but their advance was hesitant enough for Bazo to race forward and reach the narrow gap in the wall before the leaders did. With solid rock to guard his flanks, he laughed at them, and it was a sound to stop them dead, those in front pushing back and those behind struggling forward.
One of them threw a long spear and it clashed sparks from the wall at the level of Bazo’s head. He drove forward and stabbed into the press of bodies caught in the narrow gut between the stone walls. The screams and moans goaded him – and the blood from the gaping wounds splattered his face and sprayed into his open mouth, a ghastly draught that maddened him further. They broke and fled, leaving four of their number writhing and twisting on the pathway.
Bazo glanced behind him. None of his Matabele had reached the head of the ladder yet. He looked back up the pathway and saw that the real men were coming.
These would be the picked warriors, the best spearmen – there was no mistaking their superiority over the rabble that Bazo had just scattered; they were bigger and more powerful in body, their expressions grim and determined, and their formation ordered and controlled.
They came down in massed ranks to where Bazo stood, their shields raised, their spears poised, and at their head danced a skinny wizened old man with a face ravaged by some terrible disease, his nose and ears rotted away and his cheeks and forehead covered with silver white blotches.
He was hung about the waist and neck with the accoutrements of his magical trade, and he shrieked and gibbered like an enraged ape.
‘Kill the Matabele dog.’
Bazo was naked, without a shield, but he hefted the assegai and stood to meet them and their horrid master and he laughed again, the wild joyous laughter of a man who was living a lifetime in his last few seconds.
‘Bazo!’ The cry reached him, even through his rage, and he turned.
Zama had crawled onto the platform, blown from that long scrambling climb up the swinging twisted ladder. He rose on his knees and sent the great dappled shield skimming across the platform. Like a falcon coming to the lure it settled on Bazo’s shoulder, and Bazo laughed and went springing forward.
His assegai drove through the wizard’s rotting flesh as though it were soft as a boiled yam, and Pemba screeched one last time.
‘Bazo, wait! Leave some of them for us!’ The shouts of his fifty Matabele behind him, as they scrambled onto the platform, and then Zama’s muscled shoulder was touching his as they locked shields and swept the pathway, the way the flash floods of summer scour the dry riverbeds.
It was a beautiful stabbing, a glory which men would sing about. The assegais seemed to hold their keen edge no matter how often they were buried and the spear arms never tired despite the heavy work. The line of Matabele swept the hilltop from end to end, roaring their frustration when the last of Pemba’s men threw down their spears and leapt out over the cliff, grudging them that easy death for the assegais were still thirsty and the madness was still on them.
Then they turned and went back through the village, ransacking the huts, throwing a toddling infant high and catching it on the point as it fell, or sending the steel full length out between the withered dugs of some scurrying crone, for the divine madness does not pass swiftly.
With his shoulder. Bazo smashed open another hut, and Zama leaped in at his side, both of them were painted from throat to knee with red running crimson, their contorted faces hideous, blood-glutted masks. Someone tried to escape from the dark interior of the hut.
‘Mine!’ roared Zama and sped his long steel, and the low early sun struck a ray through the open doorway, sparkling on Zama’s assegai and falling in the same instant on the huge slanted terrified eyes and high Egyptian cheekbones of the girl he was killing.
Zama’s steel clashed against Bazo’s great shield and was deflected past the girl’s cheek by the width of a finger, so that the stroke died in the air. Before Zama could strike again Bazo stood over the girl, spreading the shield over her the way a heron covers its chick with a wing, and he snarled at Zama like a leopard whose cub is menaced.
After the first weary day of the return march, while the long file of roped captives was settling exhausted and miserable beneath the grove of msasa trees. Bazo strode down the line and stopped beside the girl.
‘You!’ he said, and with a careless stroke of his assegai severed the thong at her neck. ‘Cook my meal!’
While she worked over the fire, Bazo joked loudly with Zama and his men, trying to prevent his eyes from straying from their faces. He ate what she cooked without showing either pleasure or displeasure, while she knelt at a respectful distance and watched every mouthful he took.
Then suddenly when he had finished eating, she came gliding to his side with that disconcerting silent grace, and she lifted the bunch of wilted leaves from the swollen and crusted spear wound in Bazo’s flank. It was an impertinence, and he lifted his hand to strike her – and then let the hand fall. She had not flinched and her manner was assured and competent.
She cleaned the wound with deft fingers and then she unstoppered two of the little buck-horn containers that she wore on her belt and with the powder they contained made a poultice. It burned like fire for a few seconds, but then felt much easier.
Bazo made no acknowledgement, but when one of his Matabele came to rope her back with the other captives, Bazo frowned, and the man passed her by.
When Bazo lay on his sleeping-mat, she curled like a puppy at his feet. He was ready for her to try to escape once the camp settled, but after midnight she had not stirred and he fell asleep.
In the hour before dawn when he rose to check the sentries, there was frost on the grass, and he heard the girl’s teeth chattering softly. He dropped his fur regimental cloak over her as he passed and she cuddled down into it quickly.
When he called for the day’s march to begin, she had his bedding roll and cooking-pot balanced on her head, and a dozen times during the march. Bazo had to go back along the winding column for no reason that he could explain to Zama, and each time his steps slowed as he came up behind the girl, and he watched the play of muscle down her back, the roll of her plump black buttocks and the joggle of her glossy sable breasts.
But when she turned her head and smiled shyly at him, his hauteur was frosty and he stalked back to the head of the column.
That night he permitted himself a nod of approval at the first taste of her cooking, and when she dressed the wound, he said, ‘The heat has gone from it.’
She did not lift her eyes.
‘Who taught you this skill?’ he insisted.
‘Pemba, the wizard,’ she whispered.
‘Why?’
‘I was his apprentice.’
‘Why you?’
‘I have the gift.’
‘So then, little witch, make me an oracle,’ Bazo laughed, and she lifted her head and he looked into those disconcerting slanted tar-bright eyes.
‘Do not scoff, lord.’
‘Nkosi – lord,’ she called him, but Bazo stopped laughing, and felt the spirits tickle the hair at the nape of his neck. That night, when he heard her shiver, he opened a fold of his kaross and she crept into it.
Bazo feigned sleep, but his body was tense and he was aware of each tiny movement that the girl made as she settled to sleep. It would have been so easy to reach out and hold her down with his arm across her chest while he forced his knee between hers. The thought made him twitch and grunt.
‘Lord?’ she whispered. ‘Something troubles you.’
‘What is your name?’ he asked, for want of a reply, and found that he was whispering also.
‘Tanase.’
‘Tanase.’ He measured it on his tongue, and it fitted well enough, although he recognized it was a Rozwi name, one of the splinter tribes of the Mashona, and he did not know the meaning.
‘I know your name – everyone speaks it with respect,’ she said. ‘Bazo, the Axe.’
‘I killed your master, Pemba. I struck him down with my own hand.’ He did not know what compelled him to say that.
‘I know,’ she whispered.
‘Do you hate me for that, little witch?’
‘I praise you for that!’ Her voice shook with quiet vehemence, and her hip touched his under the kaross.
‘Praise? Did you not love Pemba as a dog loves its master?’
‘I hated him, and when I foresaw his death in the magic calabash, I was filled with joy.’
‘You saw his death?’
‘I saw his death – as I saw your face, long before you came to take me.’
Bazo shuddered involuntarily, and she felt it.
‘You are cold, lord.’ She pressed a little closer to him. Her flesh was hot and soft, he felt his own flesh respond to its touch.
‘Why did you hate Pemba?’
‘He was evil beyond the telling. The things he forced me to do I will never forget.’
‘He used your body?’ There was a rough edge to Bazo’s question.
‘Not even Pemba would dare tamper with the body of one of the chosen ones, for to tear the veil of maidenhood is to destroy the gift.’
‘The gift?’
‘The gift of foresight which the likes of Pemba value so highly.’
‘What then did he force upon you?’
‘Dark things, midnight things, torture not of the body but of the spirit.’
Now it was her turn to shudder, and she turned towards him and clung to his broad smooth chest, hiding her face against it so that her voice was muffled and he could hardly catch her next words.
‘I did not wish to be chosen, I hate and fear what still lies ahead of me if I follow that road.’
‘Pemba is dead.’
‘You do not understand. Pemba was but a little wizard, already he had taught me almost all he knew. Then I would have been called by the one whose name I dare not speak aloud. That call will still come – and I shall not be able to deny it.’
‘You are under my protection.’
‘There is only one way you can protect me, Bazo Lord.’
‘How?’
‘Make me worthless to them. Destroy this gift which is such a terrible burden.’
‘How?’
‘As you destroyed Pemba with the stabbing spear of steel, destroy it with your great spear of flesh, tear my veil and let this thing pass from me.’
She felt him, hot and fierce, pressing against her, and her body seemed to melt and become pliant and yielding.
‘Ah yes. Lord. Make me as other women, so that I may feel your noble belly on mine in the nights, that I may feel your son kick in my womb and tug at my breast when I give him suck.’
‘All these things you will have, Tanase.’ Bazo’s voice was hoarse with his wanting. ‘When we reach GuBulawayo the king will reward me, and give me leave to go in to the women, and take a wife.’
‘Lord, it is dangerous to wait.’
‘I will not rut on you like a slave girl. You will be the first and senior of all my wives.’
‘Lord—’
‘Enough, Tanase, tempt me no further, for what you feel, hard though it may be, is not stone but flesh only.’
‘Nkosi, you do not know the power of the wizards. Save me from them.’
‘I know the law and custom of Matabele, and that is all a man should know and heed.’
Bazo’s scout came in at a dead run, the sweat snaking down his back and chest, and he shouted his report the moment he came up to the head of the column.
Bazo whirled and barked three sharp orders. Immediately the column closed up, and the captives were forced to squat with a dozen warriors standing guard over them. The rest of the Matabele formed up behind Bazo and he led them away at that gait between a trot and a run which lifted the dust to their knees.
Bazo picked his ambush with an unerring eye. He chose a place where broken ground and thick bush allowed only one passage through, and the single horseman rode into it. The long shields were suddenly all around him, fencing him in as his dun-coloured pony snorted and skittered.
The rifle was half-way drawn from the leather boot at the horseman’s knee when Bazo stopped him with a shout.
‘Too late for that. You were dead, and the jackals feasting already. You grow careless, despite all that I taught you, Henshaw.’
Ralph let the rifle slide back into its scabbard, and he threw up his hands, pleasure and chagrin warring on his face.
‘Shake any tree and a Matabele falls out of it.’ His voice was mock-mournful, and he swung down off Tom’s sturdy back and strode to meet Bazo.
‘I expected to see the induna’s ring on your forehead already, oh mighty slayer of Mashona,’ he laughed as they embraced.
‘Soon, Little Hawk, very soon. But you, I thought your wagon would be heavy with ivory—’
‘Done, Little Axe, already done.’ Ralph stepped back and looked at him. In the months since they had parted, both men had changed.
In Bazo there remained no trace of the young mine labourer who had worked his shifts in the pit and eaten Zouga Ballantyne’s rations. Here was a warrior and a prince, tall and plumed and proud.
Ralph was no longer the callow lad, his every action ordered by his father. Instead he was a grown man, with a jaunty lift to his chin and a self-assured set to his shoulder. Yet though his clothes were travel-worn and stained the training of Zouga Ballantyne still showed, for they were recently washed and his jaws had been clean shaven that very morning. They looked at each other and the affection between them was tempered and hardened with respect.
‘I shot a young buffalo cow, not two hours ago.’
‘Yes,’ Bazo nodded. ‘It was the shot which brought us.’
‘Then I am glad of it. The buffalo meat is fat, and there is enough even for a hungry Matabele.’
Bazo glanced at the sun. ‘Though I am in haste, on the king’s business, my prisoners are in need of rest. We will help you eat your buffalo, Henshaw, but in the dawn we will go on.’
‘Then there is much to talk about – and little time to do so.’
There was the pop of a trek-whip, and Bazo glanced beyond Ralph’s shoulder to see the oxen come plodding between the trees and the wagon lurching and wallowing
behind them.
‘You still keep bad company,’ Bazo scolded with a grin as he recognized Umfaan at the head of the span and Isazi, the little Zulu, on the flank, ‘but the load you carry is welcome.’
From the wagon box hung the raw quarters and shoulders of the freshly-butchered buffalo carcass.
‘We have not tasted fresh meat since we left the king’s kraal.’
Ralph and Bazo sat at a separate fire apart from their retinues, where they could talk freely.
‘The king agreed to buy the guns and bottles that I carried up from Kimberley,’ Ralph told Bazo, ‘and he paid me generously.’
He did not go on to describe to Bazo the currency in which be had been paid. He did not describe his own astonishment when Lobengula had offered him an uncut diamond, a big bright first-water stone.
His surprise had immediately been tempered by conscience; he had no doubts about where that stone had come from. His conscience lasted about as long as his surprise, and he haggled with gusto, forcing up the price to six stones, which he had picked with an eye trained by many years on the diggings. He knew they would be worth £10,000 when he got them back to civilization.
Thus in a single stroke he had paid for the wagon and team, his entire debt to Diamond Lil – interest and all – and was already many thousands of pounds in profit.
‘Then I asked Lobengula to let me hunt elephant, and he laughed and said I was too young and that the elephant would eat me up. He kept me waiting outside his kraal for ten days.’
‘If he kept you such a short time, then you have found favour with the king,’ Bazo interrupted. ‘Some white men have waited from the beginning of the dry season to the middle of the wet, merely for permission to take the road out of Matabeleland.’
‘Ten days was long enough for me,’ Ralph grunted. ‘But when I asked him in which part of his lands I was allowed to hunt, he laughed again and said, “The elephant will be in so little danger from you, Little Hawk, that you may go where you wish, and kill as many as are stupid or lame enough to let you.”’
Bazo chuckled delightedly. ‘And how many lame stupid elephant have you found so far, Henshaw?’