The Angels Weep by Wilbur Smith Page B

head-pillow of ivory, his sleeping-mat and fur
kaross, his beerpots and beef-bowls, his guns and his war shield,
his battle-axe and stabbing-spear, and at the last the little
clay pots of glittering diamonds he had laid at Lobengula’s
gout-distorted feet. When all was done, Gandang had walled up the
entrance to the cave, and slaughtered the slaves who had done the
work. Then he had led the shattered nation back southwards into
captivity.
    At the last words, Gandang’s hands fell to his sides,
his chin sank onto the broad scarred and muscled chest, and a
desolate silence descended upon them. At last one of the indunas
in the second rank spoke. He was a frail old man with all the
teeth missing from his upper jaw. His lower lids drooped away
from his watery eyeballs so that the inner flesh showed like pink
velvet and his voice was scratchy and breathless.
    ‘Let us choose another king,’ he began, but Bazo
interrupted him.
    ‘A king of slaves, a king of captives?’ He laughed
abruptly, scornfully. ‘There can be no king until there is
a nation once again.’
    The ancient induna sank back, and gummed his toothless mouth,
blinking about him miserably, his mind altering direction in the
way of old men. ‘The cattle,’ he murmured,
‘they have taken our cattle.’
    The others hummed in angry assent. Cattle were the only true
wealth; gold and diamonds were white men’s baubles, but
cattle were the foundation of the nation’s welfare.
    ‘One-Bright-Eye sends unblooded young bucks of our own
people to lord it in the kraals—’ complained another.
‘One-Bright-Eye’ was the Matabele name for General
Mungo St John, the Chief Native Commissioner of Matabeleland.
    ‘These Company police are armed with guns, and they show
no respect for the custom and the law. They laugh at the indunas
and the tribal elders, and they take the young girls into the
bushes—’
    ‘One-Bright-Eye orders all our amadoda , even
those of Zanzi blood, respected warriors and the fathers of
warriors to labour like lowly amaholi , like dirt-eating
slaves, digging his roads.’
    The litany of their wrongs, real and fancied, was recited yet
again by a succession of angry indunas, while only Somabula and
Babiaan and Gandang and Bazo sat aloof.
    ‘Lodzi has burned our shields and snapped the blades of
the stabbing-spears. He has refused our young men the ancient
right to raid the Mashona when all the world knows that the
Mashona are our dogs to kill or let live as we choose.’
    ‘One-Bright-Eye has disbanded the impis, and now no man
knows who has the right to take a wife, nobody knows which maize
field belongs to which village and the people squabble like
sickly children over the few scrawny beasts that Lodzi has
returned to us.’
    ‘What must we do?’ cried one, and then another
strange and unprecedented thing happened. All of them, even
Somabula, looked towards the tall scarred young man they called
the Wanderer, and they waited expectantly for no one knew
what.
    Bazo made a sign with one hand and Tanase stooped out through
the entrance of the reed hut. Clad only in the brief leather
apron, slim and straight and supple, she carried the roll of
sleeping-mat in her arms, and she knelt before Bazo and unrolled
the mat on the earth at his feet.
    The nearest indunas who could see what was concealed in the
roll grunted with excitement. Bazo took it up in both hands and
held it high. It caught the light, and now they all gasped. The
design of the blade was by King Chaka himself; the metal had been
beaten out and polished to burning silver by the skilled smiths
of the Rozwi, and the bloodwood shaft had been bound with copper
wire and the coarse black hairs from the tail-tuft of a bull
elephant.
    ‘Jee!’ hissed one of the indunas, the deep
drawn-out war chant of the fighting impis, and the others took up
the cry, swaying slightly to the force of it, their faces
lighting with the first ecstasy