‘The code we have arranged is in Sindebele,’ Tungata told him. ‘She will have to repeat it.’
‘Very well. That is acceptable, but nothing else.’ He looked Tungata over critically. ‘I am delighted to see you looking so well again, Comrade, a little good food and rest have worked wonders.’
Tungata wore faded suntans, but they were freshly laundered and pressed. He was still gaunt and wasted, but his skin had lost the dusty grey look and his eyes were clear and bright. The swelling of the adder bite on his cheek had abated, and the scab covering it looked dry and healthy.
Peter Fungabera nodded to the guard captain and he passed the radio microphone to Tungata and pressed the ‘record’ button on the tape deck.
‘This is Tungata Zebiwe.’
‘My lord, this is Sarah.’ Her voice was scratchy and distorted by static, but he would have known it anywhere. The ache of longing filled his chest.
‘Are you safe?’
‘I am in Francistown. The Red Cross are caring for me.’
‘Do you have a message?’
She replied in Sindebele. ‘Your beautiful bird has flown high and swiftly.’ Then she added, ‘I have met others here. Do not despair.’
‘That is good – I want you to—’
Peter Fungabera reached across and took the microphone from his hand. ‘Excuse me, Comrade, but I am paying for the call.’ He held the microphone to his lips and depressed the transmit button. ‘Transmission ends,’ he said, and broke the connection.
He tossed the microphone casually to the guard captain. ‘Have the tape translated – by one of the Matabele trusties – and bring me a copy immediately.’ Then he turned back to Tungata.
‘Your little holiday is over, Comrade, now you and I have work to do. Shall we go?’
How long would he be able to draw out the search for Lobengula’s grave, Tungata wondered. For every hour he could gain would have value – another hour of life, another hour of hope.
‘It is almost twenty years since my grandfather took me to visit the site. My memory is unclear—’
‘Your memory is as brilliant as that sun up there,’ Peter told him. ‘You are renowned for your ability to remember places and faces and names, Comrade, you forget that I have heard you speak in the Assembly, without notes. Besides which, you will have a helicopter to ferry you directly to the site.’
‘That will not work. The first time I went was on foot. I must go back the same way. I would not recognize the landmarks from the air.’
So they went back along the dirt roads that Tungata and old Gideon had bussed over so many years before, and Tungata genuinely could not find the starting place – the fall of rocks in the old river course and the kopje shaped like an elephant’s head. They spent three days searching, with Peter Fungabera becoming more and more short-tempered and disbelieving, before they stopped at the tiny village and trading-store that was the last reference point that Tungata could remember.
‘Hau! The old road. Yes, the bridge was washed away many years ago. It was never used again. Now the new road goes so and so—’
They found the overgrown track at last and four hours later reached the dry river-bed. The old bridge had collapsed into a heap of shattered concrete already overgrown with lianas, but the rock wall upstream was exactly as Tungata had remembered it and he experienced a pang of nostalgia. Suddenly old Gideon seemed very close to him, so much so that he glanced around and made a small sign with his right hand to appease. the ancestral spirits and whispered, ‘Forgive me, Baba, that I am going to betray the oath.’
Strangely the presence that he sensed was benign and fondly indulgent, as Old Gideon had always been. ‘The path lies this way.’ They left the Land-Rover at the broken bridge and continued on foot.
Tungata led with two armed troopers at his back. He set an easy pace, that chafed Peter Fungabera who followed behind the guards. As they went, Tungata could allow his imagination to wander freely. He seemed to be part of the exodus of the Matabele people of almost a hundred years before, an embodiment of Gandang, his great-great-grand-father, faithful and loyal to the end. He felt again the despair of a defeated people and the terror of the hardriding white pursuit that might appear at any instant from the forest behind them, with their chattering three-legged machine-guns. He seemed to hear the lament of the women and the small children, the lowing of herds as they faltered and fell in this hard and bitter country.
When the last of the draught oxen were dead, Gandang had ordered the warriors of his famous Inyati regiment into the traces of the king’s remaining wagon. Tungata imagined the king, obese and diseased and doomed, sitting up on the rocking wagon box staring into the forbidding north, a man caught up in the millstones of history and destiny and crushed between them.
‘And now the final betrayal,’ Tungata thought, bitterly. ‘I am leading these Shona animals to disturb his rest once again.’
Three times, deliberately, he took the wrong path, drawing it out to the very limit of Peter Fungabera’s patience. The third time, Peter Fungabera ordered him stripped naked and his wrists and ankles bound together, then he had stood over him with a cured hippo-hide whip, the vicious kiboko that the Arab slave-traders had introduced to Africa, and he thrashed Tungata like a dog until his blood dripped into the sandy grey earth.
It was the shame and humiliation of the beating rather than the pain that had made Tungata turn back and pick up his landmarks again. When he reached the hill at last, it appeared ahead of them with all the suddenness that Tungata recalled so vividly from his first visit.
They had been following a deep gorge of black rock, polished by the roaring torrential spates of the millennia. The depths were studded with stagnant green pools in which giant whiskered catfish stirred the scummy surface as they rose to feed, and lovely swallow-tailed butterflies floated in the heated air above, gems of scarlet and iridescent blue.
They came around a bend in the gorge, clambering over boulders the size and the colour of elephants, and abruptly the surrounding cliffs opened and the forest fell back. Before them, like a vast monument to dwarf the pyramids of the pharaohs, the hill of Lobengula rose into the sky.
The cliffs were sheer and daubed with lichens of twenty different shades of yellow and ochre and malachite. There was a breeding colony of vultures in the upper ledges, the parent birds sailing gracefully out over the heated void, tipping their wings in the rising thermals as they banked and spiralled.
‘There it is,’ Tungata murmured. ‘Thabas Nkosi, the hill of the king.’
The natural pathway to the summit followed a fault in the rock face where limestone overlaid the country rock. At places it was steep and daunting and the troopers, weighted with packs and weapons, glanced nervously over the drop and hugged the inner wall of rock as they edged upwards, but Peter Fungabera and Tungata climbed easily and sure-footed over even the worse places, leaving the escort far below.
‘I could throw him over the edge,’ Tungata thought, ‘if I can take him unawares.’ He glanced back and Peter was ten paces below him. He had the Tokarev pistol in his right hand and he smiled like a mamba.
‘No,’ he warned, and they understood each other without further words. For the moment Tungata put away the thought of vengeance and went on upwards. He turned a corner in the rock and they came out onto the crown of the hill, five hundred feet above the dark gorge.
Standing a little apart, both of them sweating lightly in the white sunlight, they looked down into the deep wide valley of the Zambezi. On the edge of their vision, the wide waters of the man-made lake of Kariba glinted softly through the haze of heat and blue smoke from the first bush-fires of the dry season. The troopers came off the path with transparent relief, and Peter Fungabera looked expectantly at Tungata.
‘We are ready to go on, Comrade.’
‘There is not much further to go,’ Tungata answered him.
Over the crest of the cliff the rock formation had eroded and broken up into buttress and
tumbled ramparts, the trees that had found purchase in the cracks and crevices had intertwined their root systems over the rock-face like mating serpents, while their stems were thickened and deformed by the severe conditions of heat and drought.
Tungata led them through the broken rock and tortured forest, into the mouth of a ravine. At the head of the ravine grew an ancient ficus Natalensis, the strangler fig tree, its fleshy limbs of blotched yellow loaded with bunches of bitter fruit. As they approached it a flock of brown parrots, green wings flagged with bright yellow, that had been feasting on the wild figs, exploded into flight. At the base of the ficus tree, the cliff was segmented, and the roots had found the cracks and forced them apart.
Tungata stood before the cliff and Peter Fungabera, suppressing an exclamation of impatience, glanced at him and saw his lips were moving silently, in a prayer or entreaty. Peter Fungabera began to examine the cliff-face more carefully, and realized with rising excitement that the cracks in the rock were too regular to be natural.
‘Here!’ he shouted to his troopers, and when they hurried forward, he pointed out one of the blocks in the face, and they set to work on it with bayonets and bare hands.
Within fifteen minutes of sweaty labour, they had worked the block free, and it was now clear that the face was in reality a wall of carefully fitted masonry. In the depths of the aperture left by the block, they could make out a second wall of masonry.
‘Bring the prisoner,’ Peter ordered. ‘He will work in the front rank.’
By the time it was too dark to go on, they had opened an aperture just wide enough for two men to work shoulder to shoulder in the outer wall, and had begun on the inner wall. In the forefront, Tungata was able to confirm what he had guessed on his first visit to the tomb so long ago – the signs that he had noticed then and concealed from old grandfather Gideon were even more apparent on the inner wall of the tomb. They helped salve his conscience and ease the pain of oath-breaking.
Reluctantly Peter Fungabera called a halt on the work for the night. Tungata’s hands were raw from contact with the rough blocks and he had lost a fingernail where it had been trapped and torn off in a slide of masonry. He was handcuffed to one of the Third Brigade troopers for the night, but even this could not keep him from dreamless exhaustion-drugged sleep. Peter Fungabera had to kick both him and his guard awake the next morning.
It was still dark and they ate their meagre rations of cold maize cake and sweet tea in silence. They had barely gulped it down before Peter Fungabera ordered them back to the masonry wall.
Tungata’s torn hands were clumsy and stiff. Peter Fungabera stood behind him in the opening and when he faltered slashed him with the kiboko around the ribs, in the soft and sensitive flesh below the armpit. Tungata growled like a wounded lion and lifted a hundredweight block out of the wall.
The sun cleared the crown of the hill, and its golden rays illuminated the cliff-face. With a branch of dead wood, Tungata and one of the Shona troopers levered up another lump of rock, and as it began to move, there was a rumble and a harsh grating and the inner wall collapsed towards them. They jumped clear and stood coughing in the swirl of dust, peering into the aperture that they had made.
The air from the cave stank like a drunkard’s mouth, stale and sour, and the darkness beyond was forbidding and menacing.
‘You first,’ Peter Fungabera ordered, and Tungata hesitated. He was overcome with a superstitious awe. He was an educated and sophisticated man, but beneath that, he was African. The spirits of his tribe and his ancestors guarded this place. He looked at Peter Fungabera and knew that he was experiencing the same dread of the supernatural, even though he was armed with a flashlight, whose batteries he had conserved zealously for this moment.
‘Move!’ Fungabera ordered. His harsh tone could not disguise his disquiet, and Tungata, to shame him, stepped cautiously over the rock fall into the cave.
He stood for a while until his eyes adjusted to the gloom and he could make out the configuration of the cave. The floor beneath his feet was smooth and worn, but it sloped downwards at a steep angle. Obviously this cave had been the lair of animals and the home of primitive man for tens of thousands of years before it became the tomb of a king.
Peter Fungabera, standing behind Tungata, played the beam of his flashlight over walls and roof. The roof was crusted with the soot of ancient cooking-fires, and the smooth walls were rich with the art of the little yellow Bushmen who had lived here. There were depictions of the wild game that they had hunted and observed so minutely: herds of black buffalo, and tall, dappled giraffe, rhinoceros and homed antelope in glowing colours, all delightfully caricatured. With them the pygmy artist had drawn his own people, sticklike figures with buttocks as pronounced as a camel’s hump and imperial erections to boast of their manhood. Armed with bows, they pursued the herds across the rock wall.
Peter Fungabera flicked the torch beam over this splendid gallery and then held it steady into the inner recesses of the cave where the throat narrowed and the rocky passage turned upon itself and was shrouded in darkness and mysterious shadow far below them.
‘Forward!’ he ordered, and Tungata moved cautiously down the sloping floor of the chamber.
They reached the throat of the cave and were forced to stoop under the low roof. Tungata turned the corner of the rocky passage and went on for fifty paces before he stopped short.
He had come out into a capacious cavern with a domed roof twenty feet above their heads. The floor was level, but cluttered with rock fallen from above. Peter Fungabera flashed his beam around the cavern. Against the far wall was a ledge the height of a man’s shoulder and he held the beam on a jumble of objects that were stacked upon it.
For a moment Tungata was puzzled, and then he recognized the shape of a wagon wheel of a design from a hundred years before, a wheel taller than the oxen that drew it; then he made out the wagon bed and the frames. The vehicle had been broken down into its separate parts and carried up to the cave.
‘Lobengula’s wagon,’ he whispered. ‘His most cherished possession, the one his warriors pulled when the oxen failed—’
Peter Fungabera prodded him with the barrel of the Tokarev and they picked their way forward through the litter of fallen rock.
There were rifles, stacked like wheat-sheaves, old Lee-Enfields, part of the payment that Cecil Rhodes had made to Lobengula for his concessions. Rifles and a hundred gold sovereigns every month – the price of a land and a nation sold into slavery, Tungata recalled bitterly. There were other objects piled upon the ledge, salt-bags of leather, stools and knives, beads and ornaments and snuff-horns and broad-bladed assegais.
Peter Fungabera exclaimed with avarice and impatience. ‘Hurry. We must find his corpse, the diamonds will be with the body.’
Bones! They gleamed in the torchlight. A pile of them below the ledge.
A skull! It grinned mirthlessly up at them, a cap of matted wool still covering the pate.
‘That’s him!’ cried Peter jubilantly. ‘There is the old devil.’ He dropped to his knees beside the skeleton.
Tungata stood aloof. After the first pang of alarm, he had realized that it was the skeleton of a small and elderly man, not much larger than a child, with teeth missing in the front upper jaw. Lobengula had been a big man with fine flashing teeth. Everyone who had met him in life had commented on his smile. This skeleton was still decked in the gruesome paraphernalia of the witch-doctor’s trade: beads and shells and bones, plugged duiker-horns of medicine and skulls of reptiles belted about the bony waist. Even Peter recognized his mistake, and he jumped to his feet.
‘This isn’t him!’ he cried anxiously. ‘They must have sacrificed his witch-doctor and placed him here as a guardian.’ He was playing the torch wildly about the cave.
‘Where is he?’ he demanded. ‘You must know. They must have told you.’
Tungata remained silent. Above the skeleton of the witch-doctor, the ledge jutted out, rather like a large pulpi
t of rock. The king’s possessions were laid out neatly around this prominence, the human sacrifice laid below it. The entire focus of the cavern was on this spot. It was the logical and natural position in which to place the king’s corpse. Peter Fungabera sensed that also and slowly turned the beam back to it.
The rock pulpit was empty.
‘He isn’t here,’ Peter whispered, his voice tense with disappointment and frustration. ‘Lobengula’s body is gone!’
The signs that Tungata had noticed at the outer wall, the place where the masonry wall had been opened and resealed with less meticulous workmanship, had led him to the correct conclusion. The old king’s tomb had obviously been robbed many years previously. The corpse had long ago been spirited away and the tomb resealed to hide the traces of this desecration.
Peter Fungabera clambered up onto the rock pulpit, and searched it frantically on his hands and knees. Standing back impassively, Tungata marvelled at how ludicrous greed could render even such a dangerous and impressive man as Peter Fungabera. He was muttering incoherently to himself as he strained the dusty detritus from the floor through his hooked fingers.
‘Look! Look here!’ He held up a small dark object, and Tungata stepped closer. In the torchlight he recognized that it was a shard from a clay pot, a piece of the rim decorated in the traditional diamond pattern used on the Matabele beer-pots.
‘A beer-pot.’ Peter turned it in his hands. ‘One of the diamond pots – broken!’ He dropped the fragment and scratched in the dirt, stirring up a soft cloud of dust that undulated in the torch beam.
‘Here!’ He had found something else. Something smaller. He held it up between thumb and forefinger. It was the size of a small walnut. He turned the torch beam full upon it, and immediately the light was shattered into the rainbow hues of the spectrum. Shafts of coloured light were reflected into Peter Fungabera’s face, like sunlight off water.
‘Diamond,’ he breathed with religious awe, turning it slowly in his fingers so that it shot out arrows and blades of light.