‘Oh Mama, you startled me.’
Robyn felt a rush of empathy, and, strangely, of envy for her eldest daughter. She wished that she were still capable of that pure and innocent emotion, and suddenly she had the contrasting image of Mungo St John, lean and scarred and unscrupulous, and what she felt shocked her so her voice was brusque.
‘Jordan, I have made up my mind. When Mr Rudd arrives, I will go with you to Lobengula’s kraal, and I will speak for your case.’
After a prolonged and unprofitable trading expedition as far as the Zambezi, Mungo had returned with Louise to the kraal at GuBulawayo, where they were kept almost seven months. But Lobengula’s procrastinations worked in Mungo St John’s favour.
Robyn Codrington had refused to speak to the king on Mungo’s behalf, and consequently he was only one among dozens of white concession-seekers camped around Lobengula’s royal kraal.
The king would not have let Mungo leave, even if he had wanted to. He seemed to enjoy talking to him, and listened eagerly to Mungo’s accounts of the American War and of Mungo’s sea voyages. Every week or so he would summon Mungo to an audience and question him through his interpreter, for hours at a time.
The destructive power of cannon fascinated him, and he demanded detailed descriptions of sundered walls and human bodies blown to nothingness. The sea was another source of intense interest, and he tried to grasp the immensity of waters and the blast of storm and gale across it. However, when Mungo delicately hinted at a land grant and trading concession, Lobengula smiled and sent him away.
‘I will call for you again, One Bright Eye, when I have thought on it more heavily. Now is there aught you lack in food or drink? I will send my women to your camp with it.’
Once he gave Mungo permission to go out into the hunting veld so long as he stayed south of the Shangani river and killed neither elephant nor hippopotamus. On this expedition Mungo shot a huge cock ostrich and salted and dried the skin with its magnificent plumage intact.
On three other occasions the king allowed him to return to Khami Mission Station when Mungo complained that his leg was paining him. Mungo’s predatory instinct was that Robyn Codrington was disturbed and excited by these returns, and each time he was able to draw out the visit for days, gradually consolidating his position with her so that when he again asked her to intercede with Lobengula on his behalf, she actually thought about it for a full day before refusing once more.
‘I cannot set a cat upon a mouse, General St John.’
‘Madam, I freed my own slaves many years ago.’
‘When you were forced to,’ she agreed. ‘But who will control you here in Matabeleland?’
‘You, Robyn, and gladly would I submit to that.’
She had flushed and turned her face away from him to hide the colour.
‘Your familiarity is presumptuous, sir.’ And she had left him so that he could keep his revived assignations under the leadwood tree with the twins. His absence since those first encounters in his convalescence had not dimmed their fascination for him. They had become invaluable allies. Nobody else could have extracted from Juba the vital information he needed for his planning. Mungo had expressed doubts as to the existence of the diamonds, and declared that he would only be convinced if the twins could tell him where Lobengula kept the treasure.
Juba never suspected danger from such an innocent pair, and in the late afternoon, when she had drunk a gallon pot of her own famous brew, she was always genial and garrulous.
‘Ningi keeps the diamonds under her sleeping place,’ Vicky informed Mungo.
‘Who is Ningi?’
‘The king’s sister, and she is almost as fat as King Ben is.’
Ningi would be the most trusted of all Lobengula’s people – and her hut in the sanctuary of the forbidden women’s quarters was the most secure in all Matabeleland.
‘I believe you now. You are clever girls, both of you,’ Mungo told them, and they glowed with pleasure. There was nothing he could not ask of them.
‘Vicky, I need some paint. It’s for a secret thing, I will tell you about it later, if you can get the paint for me.’
‘What colour?’ Lizzie cut in. ‘I’ll get it for you.’
‘Red, white and yellow.’
In the end Lizzie stood guard while Vicky raided Cathy’s paintbox, and they delivered their offering to Mungo and basked in his extravagant praise.
In his planning, it was not enough merely to get the diamonds into his hands; even more vital was to escape the consequences. No man or woman could hope to reach the frontier without the king’s permission; it was hundreds of miles of wild country patrolled by the border impis. He could not grab and run. He had to use guile and perhaps turn the Matabele dread of darkness and witchcraft to his own advantage.
So he planned with meticulous concentration, and waited for the right moment with the patience of the stalking leopard, for he knew that this was his last attempt. If he failed this time, then not even his white skin nor his status as a guest of the king could save him.
If he failed, the Black Ones would wield their knobkerries, crushing in his skull – and his corpse would be flung from the cliffs to the waiting vultures or into the flooded river pools where the crocodiles would rip it into chunks with their spiky yellow saurian teeth. Louise would suffer the same fate, he knew, but it was a chance he was prepared to take.
He was careful to conceal his preparations from her – and this was made easier by the distance that she had for long now been maintaining between them. Though they shared the thatched hut that Lobengula’s men had built for them in the grove beyond the royal kraal, and though they ate the same meals of beef and sour milk and stone-ground maize cakes that the king sent down to them each evening, Louise spent her days alone, riding out on one of the mules in the early morning and not returning until dusk. Her mattress of straw in the farthest recesses of the hut she had screened with the tattered canvas sunshade from the cart, and he only once tried to pass the screen.
‘Not again,’ she hissed at him. ‘Never again!’ And she showed him the knife that she kept under her skirts.
So he was able to work uninterrupted, during the day, and to hide his equipment under his own mattress each evening. He carved the mask from the naturally curved portion of a hollow tree trunk, a hideous grimacing apelike visage with staring eyes and a gaping mouth full of white fangs – and he painted it with the colours from Cathy’s paintbox.
From the plumed ostrich skin he tailored a cloak that reached from neck to ankles, and for his feet and hands he made grotesque mittens of black goatskin. In full costume he was enough to paralyse even the bravest warrior with supernatural terror. He was the very embodiment of the Tokoloshe of Matabele mythology.
Robyn Codrington had given him repeated doses of laudanum for the persisting pain in his leg, but he had saved these for the occasion. He had decided on one of the Matabele festivals, and he waited until the third night when every man and woman of the entire nation, surfeited with beer and three days and nights of wild dancing, had fallen asleep where they fell.
At nightfall he gave the laudanum to Louise in a cup of soured milk, and the tart flavour concealed the musky taste of the drug. An hour after dark he crept across the hut, drew aside the screen and listened to her even breathing for a minute before leaning over her and slapping her cheeks lightly. She did not move nor murmur, and the rhythm of her breathing did not alter.
He dressed swiftly in the feather cloak, not yet donning the mask and mittens – but blackening his face and limbs with a mixture of crushed charcoal and fat. Then with the mask and a length of rope under one arm and a heavy assegai in the other hand, he crept out of the hut.
The grove was deserted, no Matabele would venture here when the spirits were abroad, so he hurried through it – and from the treeline surveyed the stockade of the royal kraal.
There was a sliver of the old moon rising, and it gave just enough light for him to pick his way, but not enough
to betray him to watchful eyes. There would be few eyes open on this night. Even so he crouched low as he crossed the open ground; the cloak made a shaggy hyena shape that would excite no real interest.
At the outer stockade he paused to look and listen, then flicked the length of manila rope over the barrier of sharpened poles.
He climbed up carefully, favouring his bad leg, and peered into the kraal.
It was deserted, but a low watch-fire burned in front of the barred gateway.
Mungo slid down the rope and he crossed quickly to the shadows of the nearest hut, and there paused to pull on his mittens and settle the cumbersome mask over his head before creeping on again towards the inner stockade that guarded the women’s quarters.
In the preceding weeks, using his brass telescope from the vantage point of the nearest hilltop, he had been able to see over the walls and to study the layout of the wives’ quarters.
There was a double circle of huts, like the concentric rings of a target, but at the centre, the bull’s-eye, was a larger hut with intricate patterns of thatch and lacing proclaiming its greater importance. His guess that this was the king’s sister’s residence had been confirmed when he had seen, through the telescope, Ningi’s elephantine gleaming naked body, escorted by a dozen hand-maidens, emerging into the early sunlight from the low doorway.
Now he reached the gateway in the inner stockade, and studied it from around the sheltering wall of the nearest hut. Again his luck held. He had been prepared to use the assegai here, but both the guards were stretched out, wrapped in their furs, and neither of them moved as Mungo stepped over their prostrate bodies.
From inside one hut he heard the low regular snores of one fat wife, and in another a woman coughed and muttered in her sleep, but though his nerves jumped, he went on swiftly.
The door to Ningi’s hut was closed. Mungo had honed the edge of the assegai to a razor edge, and with it he sawed through the fastenings of bark rope that secured the opening. The rasp and rustle of the blade sounded thunderous in his ears, and his skin prickled as he waited for a shouted challenge from within. It did not come, but he found that he was sweating as he stepped back and brought out the bladders of goats’ blood from under the cloak.
He slit the bladders and splashed the stinking, congealing blood over the portals of the doorway. He had learned from the twins, who were authorities on the supernatural, that a Tokoloshe always spurted blood on any doorway through which it passed. It was one of the creature’s more endearing characteristics.
Now with the assegai gripped in his right hand, Mungo stooped into the hut and, crouched in the doorway, he waited for his eyes to adjust to the gloom.
The fire in the centre of the large hut had burned low. There was just enough light to make out two figures curled like dogs on the sleeping-mats on each side of it – and beyond it the ponderous bulk of the princess under her furs.
Her snores started as a low grumbling like a volcano, and rose to a whistling crescendo that covered any sound Mungo might make as he slipped across to the first of the sleeping hand-maids.
Before she could stir he had slipped a gag of goat’s skin into her mouth and trussed her at the ankles and wrists with a leather thong. She did not struggle, but stared up at his horrific mask with huge white eyes in the firelight. He tied and gagged the second woman before crossing to Ningi’s sleeping platform.
That afternoon, as one of the king’s guests, Mungo had watched Ningi sitting beside her brother and swilling pot after pot of French champagne. She went on snoring and grunting as he bound her arms and legs. Only when he thrust the gag into her gaping mouth did she snuffle and moan and come out of her alcoholic slumbers.
He rolled her off the platform and she fell with a thump to the clay floor. He dragged her across to where her bound servants lay. It was heavy work, for she weighed 300 pounds or more.
He threw a log on the fire, and when it flared he pranced and capered around his captives, thrusting his hideous mask into their faces and gibbering at them in fiendish menace. In the firelight their sweat of fear burst out and ran in little rivulets down their bodies as they writhed and wriggled against their bonds.
Suddenly there was a spluttering explosive rush as Ningi voided her bowels with sheer terror, and the hot stink of faeces filled the hut. Mungo threw a fur kaross over them and immediately they were still, their grunts and muffled groans ceased.
He moved quickly then. Returning to the sleeping platform he threw the furs aside, and found a pallet of woven bamboo. It lifted like a trap door, and in the low recess below it were a dozen small clay pots.
His hands began to shake as he reached for one and lifted it out of the recess. His own sweat half blinded him – but through his blurred vision he saw the soapy gleam of reflected firelight in the mouth of the pot.
He could not take it all, there was too much for him to carry and too much for him later to conceal. Moreover, his survivor’s instinct warned him that the more he took the more remorseless would be the search and pursuit.
He spilled the contents of all twelve pots into a glittering heap beside the fire, and in its uncertain light made his choice of the biggest and brightest stones from the hundreds that teased him with their twinkling smiles. Thirty of them filled the leather drawstring bag he had brought with him. He tied it back at his waist, snatched up the assegai and slipped out of the hut.
The guards at the inner stockade still slept, and he passed them silently. Below the wall of the outer stockade he stripped off his cloak, mittens and mask and dropped them on the untended watch-fire. Then he heaped branches over them – there would be only ash by morning.
He went up the rope swiftly, hand over hand, and pulled it up after him. The royal kraal behind him was silent in heavy midnight stupor, and he climbed lightly down the outer wall of the stockade.
He bathed in the pool below the camp, washing off the charcoal and fat, and then found his shirt and breeches where he had left them in the hollow of a tree trunk beside the pool.
In the hut he knelt beside Louise and placed one hand, still icy cold from the pool, upon her cheek. She sighed and rolled over onto her side. He felt like laughing and shouting his triumph out loud. Instead, he hid the bag of precious stones under his mattress and rolled into his blanket. He did not sleep for the rest of the night, and in the dawn he heard the hubbub of superstitious fear from the king’s kraal, the screams of women and the shouts of men, loudly bolstering their courage against the spirits and the demons.
‘This is a cruel thing for a good king to do,’ Robyn told Lobengula bitterly.
‘Nomusa, you are a wise woman, the wisest that I have ever known – but you do not understand the spirits and demons of Matabeleland.’
‘I understand that the world is full of evil men, but that there are very few evil spirits.’
‘The thing that entered my sister’s hut came from the air. All the gates to the kraal were guarded by men unsleeping; they have sworn to me that they stood at their posts from dusk to dawn, with eyes wide and spears in their hands. Nothing passed them.’
‘Even your best men can doze, and then lie to protect themselves.’
‘Nobody dare lie to the king. It came from air, and it sprayed rotten stinking blood upon the portals of Ningi’s hut.’ Lobengula shuddered despite himself. ‘On Chaka’s scrawny buttocks, that is a Tokoloshe trick. No man can do that.’
‘Except if he carry blood in a pot to hurl on the doorway.’
‘Nomusa—’ Lobengula shook his head sorrowfully. ‘My sister and her servants saw this great hairy thing, black as midnight and stinking of the grave, with blood and not sweat oozing from its skin. Its eyes were like the full moon, and its voice that of lion and eagle, it had no hands and no feet, just hairy pads.’ Lobengula shuddered again.
‘And it stole diamonds,’ Robyn told him. ‘What does a demon want with diamonds?’
‘Who knows what a demon needs for his spells or his magic, or to please his dark mas
ter?’
‘Men lust after diamonds.’
‘Nomusa, to black men diamonds have no value, so it could not have been a black man. On the other hand, if a white man had entered my sister’s hut he would not have been satisfied with a few stones. A white man would have taken them all, for that is their way. So it could not have been either a white man or a black man – what is left but a demon?’
‘Lobengula, Great King, you cannot allow this thing to happen.’
‘Nomusa, there has been a terrible witchcraft perpetrated within the royal kraal. An evil person or many evil persons have conjured up a black demon, and I would be no king at all if I allowed them to live. The evil ones must be smelled out, and my birds must feast before we are cleansed of this filthy thing.’
‘Lobengula—’
‘Say no more, Girlchild of Mercy, words cannot divert my purpose, for you and your family and all the guests at my kraal are summoned to see justice done.’
It took ten days for the Matabele people to come in to GuBulawayo; they came in their regiments, warriors and maidens, ringed indunas and fruitful matrons – the toddlers and the greyheaded toothless old droolers – in their thousands and tens of thousands; and on the morning that Lobengula had appointed, the nation assembled, rank upon rank, regiment upon regiment, a black ocean of humanity that overflowed the great cattle stockade.
There was a peculiar stillness over such an immense gathering, only the plumed headdresses moved softly in the small restless breeze, and a pall of fear hung over them, so palpable that it seemed to take the heat from the sun and dim its very rays.
The silence was oppressive; it seemed to crush the breath from their lungs. Only once when a black crow flew low over the serried ranks and screeched its raucous cry into the silence, all their heads lifted and a soft sigh shook them, like the wind through the top branches of the forest.
Before the gates of the royal kraal, facing this huge concourse, were drawn up the senior indunas of the Matabele, Somabula and Babiaan and Gandang and the lesser princes of Kumalo, while behind them again, their backs to the poles of the stockade, were Lobengula’s white guests, almost one hundred of them, Germans and Frenchmen, Dutchmen and Englishmen, hunters and scholars and businessmen and adventurers, petitioners and missionaries and traders. Soberly clad in broadcloth, wearing hunting leathers and bandoliers or dressed in spangled and gaudy uniform, they waited in the sweltering silence.