The Covenant: A Novel

by James A. Michener

  Those of Nxumalo’s brothers who remained at the kraal wished him well in his quest for the rhinoceros horns but showed no interest in joining him. The tribe was essentially sedentary, with fixed villages, sturdy wattled huts and a settled agriculture. The women knew how to cultivate fields, the men how to manage cattle and tend the fat-tailed sheep. One brother directed the metalworkers who provided tools for the region and another was gaining a reputation in the district as a herbalist and diviner.

  But it was Nxumalo who championed the ancient arts of hunting and tracking in the wild, and because of this he seemed the more regal figure, the young man who best preserved the historical merits of the tribe. He was the only one with much chance of tracking down eight rhinoceroses and delivering the sixteen aphrodisiac horns to Zimbabwe, so on a warm summer morning he and six helpers moved eastward toward the heavily wooded area leading to the sea.

  He was an imposing lad, not yet full height but taller than most men, and the principal characteristic that struck those who saw him for the first time was power: his arms and legs were well-muscled and his torso much broader than his hips. His face was large and placid, as if he knew no anger, and when he smiled all his features participated and his shoulders moved forward, creating the impression that his entire body was enjoying whatever sensation had evoked the smile; and when his lips parted, his white teeth punctuated the grin. It was obvious that when he reached the age of eighteen he would be able to marry whom he pleased, for he was not only the chief’s son but also a young prince among men.

  He was so totally different from the small brown hunters who had once inhabited this area that he seemed unrelated to them, and in a way he was. Earliest man, Australopithecus, had once flourished over a large part of Africa, and as he developed into modern man, one branch settled close to the equator, where the sun placed a premium on black skin, which adjusted to its punishing rays; no primitive tribe of pale-white complexion could have prospered long in those blazing regions which produced Nxumalo’s people, just as his heavily pigmented skin would have been at a severe disadvantage in the cold north, where the sun’s parsimonious rays had to be carefully hoarded.

  Slowly, over many centuries, Nxumalo’s black ancestors, herding cattle before them and carrying seeds in their skin bags and baskets, had migrated southward, reaching the lake about four centuries after the birth of Christ. They arrived not as conquering heroes but as women and men seeking pasturage and safe enclaves; some had continued southward, but Nxumalo’s tribe had fancied the encompassing hills about the lake.

  As they lingered they came into contact with the small brown people, and gradually these had been pushed south or into the mountain ranges to the east. From these places the insatiable little hunters raided the kraals of Nxumalo’s people, and there had to be confrontations. Some did live in peace with the invaders, trading the spoils of their hunt for tools and sanctuary, but thousands of others were turned into serfs or put to work at the mines. Association continued over centuries, and occasionally at Nxumalo’s kraal some woman of his tribe would have enormous buttocks, signaling her inheritance from the small people. There were fierce clashes between the two groups but never a pitched battle; had there been, the end result might have been more humane, because as things turned out, the little brown people were being quietly smothered.

  It was an able group that had moved south in this black migration: skilled artisans knew the secrets of smelting copper and making fine tools and weapons tipped with iron. In certain villages women wove cloth, sometimes intermixing threads of copper. And every family owned earthenware pots designed and crafted by clever women and fired in kilns in the ground.

  Their language bore no resemblance to that of the small people. A few tribes, moving south along the shores of the eastern ocean, would pick up the click sounds, but Nxumalo’s people had acquired none. Their speech was pure, with an extensive vocabulary capable of expressing abstract thought and a lively aptitude for tribal remembrance.

  Two special attributes set these tribes ahead of any predecessors: they had developed sophisticated systems of government, in which a chief provided civil rule and a spirit-medium religious guidance; and they had mastered their environment, so that cattle herding, agriculture and the establishment of permanent villages became practical. And there was one more significant addition: over the vast area trade flourished, so that communities could socialize; Chief Ngalo’s people could easily import iron ingots from the great mines of Phalaborwa, one hundred and seventy miles away, and then send fabricated spearheads to villages that lay two hundred miles southwest, beyond the Ridge-of-White-Waters.

  In other words, when Nxumalo set forth to find the rhinoceros horns that would carry him to Zimbabwe, he was the inheritor of a substantial culture, which he intended, even at his early age, to augment and protect. He knew that when his father died, his older brother would inherit the chieftainship, at which time he himself would take a wife and move farther west to establish a frontier village of his own, and this prospect pleased him. His impending excursion to Zimbabwe was an exploration, not a removal.

  On the sixth day of their march, after passing great herds of buffalo and wildebeest, Nxumalo told his companions, ‘There must be rhinos among those trees,’ but when they reached the area where the savanna gave way to real forest, they found nothing, and an older man suggested, ‘I’ve never seen rhinos where the trees were so many,’ and he pointed back toward the sparser savanna.

  Nxumalo was about to rebuke the man, for he had once been with hunters who had found their rhino in heavy woods, but he restrained himself and asked, ‘You found rhinos back there?’

  ‘We did.’

  ‘Then let’s look there.’ And when they did, they saw unmistakable signs of the mighty beast. But these blacks were not Bushmen, and the mastery the brown people had shown in tracking animals was little known; it was obvious that rhinos had been here, but where they had gone, the hunters could not determine. They hunted, therefore, in a hit-or-miss way, moving about in large circles and with such noise that a Bushman would have been shocked. But they were fortunate, and in time they came upon a black, pointed-snout rhino with two massive horns, one behind the other.

  Killing so formidable a beast required both skill and courage. The former would be contributed by the six huntsmen with iron-tipped spears, the latter by Nxumalo as leader of the expedition. Placing his men along the route he intended the animal to follow, he moved quietly into position somewhat ahead of the beast, leaped suddenly from the grass and exposed himself to the startled animal, which, with instant impulse to destroy, lunged madly at the boy like some enormous juggernaut launched upon an undeviating course.

  Horns low to impale, little legs pumping, snout ablaze and throat uttering deep growls, the rhinoceros charged with enormous power, while the boy ran backward with beautiful deftness. It was a moment no hunter could forget, that grand relationship of beast and man, when a single mistake on the part of the latter meant immediate death. And since the animal could run much faster than the boy, it was obvious that the latter must be killed unless some other force intervened, and this occurred just when it seemed that the powerful horns must catch the lad, for then the six hunters rose up and thrust their spears to turn the animal aside.

  Four of the iron-tipped spears found their mark, and the great beast began to thrash at the low bushes in his path, forgetting the boy and wheeling to face his new adversaries, one of whom was stooping to recover his weapon. With a wild charge the beast bore down upon the man, who leaped aside, abandoning his spear, which the rhinoceros broke into many pieces. Then Nxumalo closed in with an axe, taking a mighty swipe at the beast’s back legs. As he did so, another man thrust his spear with great force into the animal’s neck.

  The battle was not over, but its outcome was certain, and instead of trailing the damaged beast for days, as the Bushmen would have done, these determined men, with their superior weapons, closed in and brought him down with stabs and thrus
ts and tormentings. The great black beast tried to defend himself, kicking and goring, but in the end the seven men were too persistent, and he died.

  ‘Two of our horns,’ Nxumalo said as his men hacked the precious item from the carcass. They were curious, these horns, not horn at all but heavily compacted masses of hair, and their presence doomed this magnificent animal to near-extinction, for silly old men in distant China believed that rhinoceros horn, properly administered in powder form, restored virility, and China in these days was rich enough to search the world for horn. Nxumalo’s men, so prudent in so many ways, cut from this dead rhinoceros only the two horns, cached them beneath a tree blazed with many cuts, and abandoned the ton or more of choice meat as they set out to find their next quarry.

  They killed three additional rhinos on this hunt, driving them into pits lined with jagged stakes. The eight horns they carried back to the village, leaving the carcasses to the vultures, hyenas and ants, and in each of the killings young Nxumalo had run in the shadow of those piercing horns and those thundering feet. ‘He is a skilled huntsman,’ the men told the chief. ‘He can do anything.’ And when the boy heard this report he smiled, and his handsome black body glistened as he leaned forward to show his appreciation.

  In almost no respect did Nxumalo’s village resemble the dwelling place of the little brown men which had preceded it: now there were substantial rondavels instead of open space on the ground, and carefully nurtured grains and vegetables instead of chance gatherings; now there was a fixed community. But in one regard life was much the same: women and men wore almost no clothes.

  So it was remarkable that one of the principal industries of the village was the weaving of cotton cloth, and when young Nxumalo returned with his eight rhinoceros horns, to be hailed a hero, it was natural that he take notice of one of the girls who sat in a low grass-roofed building by the lake, throwing their shuttles and shifting their looms.

  Often as they spun their cotton they would pause to watch the animals grazing on the far side of the lake, and if a zebra kicked its heels or a gazelle danced in the air, the girls would applaud. And if a troop of elephants chanced to move in, or a flight of cranes, there would be cries of pleasure and not much would be accomplished.

  Among the weavers was Zeolani, fifteen years old and daughter of the man who knew how to make copper wire from ingots brought south from the Limpopo River. From bits and pieces left over from the consignment, her father had made her the seven slim bracelets she wore upon her left wrist, so that when she threw the shuttle in her weaving she created soft music, which pleased her and set her apart from the others.

  The work was not onerous; nothing that the tribe did demanded sustained effort, and there were long periods when the girls spent most of their days in idleness. Zeolani used these times to slip back to the looms and weave for herself cloth made of second-grade cotton adorned with bits of copper taken from her father’s hoard. This cloth was not pure white, like that woven for trading; it was a honeyed tan, well-attuned to her blackness, and when its copper flecks caught the sun, the cloth seemed to dance.

  Of it she made herself a skirt, the first seen in this village, and when she wrapped it about her slim waist and pirouetted by the lake, her dark breasts gleaming in the sunlight, she made herself a girl apart.

  ‘They say you were brave at the hunt,’ she said to Nxumalo as she danced by when he lingered at the silent weaving shelter.

  ‘Rhinos are hard to find.’

  ‘And hard to kill?’ As she posed this question, she swung away from him, aware that as her skirt flared outward it showed to fine advantage.

  ‘The others did the killing,’ he said, entranced by her gentle movements.

  ‘I kept watching to the east,’ she said. ‘I was afraid.’

  He reached for her hand, and they sat looking across the lake at the desultory animals who wandered down for a midday drink: a few antelope, two or three zebra, and that was all. ‘At dusk,’ he said, ‘that shore will swarm.’

  ‘Look!’ she cried as a lazy hippopotamus half rose from the waters, jawed mightily, then submerged.

  ‘I wish the strangers in far lands wanted hippo teeth instead of rhino horns,’ Nxumalo said. ‘Much easier to do.’ Zeolani said nothing, and after a while he touched her skirt, and then, almost as if he were driven to speak, he blurted out: ‘When I am gone I’ll remember this cloth.’

  ‘It’s true, then? You’ve decided to go?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The old man talked and talked … and you believed him?’

  ‘I’ll go. I’ll see the city. And I’ll come back.’

  Taking her by the hands, he said fervently, ‘When I traveled with the Old Seeker we came upon a fine land and I thought, “We’ll leave the lake to my brothers … to tend their cattle and their fields. Zeolani and I will find a few good hunters and we …” ’

  She did not coyly repeat the we, for she knew well what Nxumalo had been thinking, because she, too, had contemplated moving away from this village and starting a new one with her hunter-husband. Instead of speaking, she took his hand, drew it close to her naked breast, and whispered, ‘I shall wait for you, Nxumalo.’

  After the next hunt, in which Nxumalo brought down four more rhinos, the young lovers found many opportunities to discuss their uncertain future. ‘Can’t I go to Zimbabwe with you?’ Zeolani asked.

  ‘So far! The way uncertain. No, no.’

  They decided upon a course fraught with danger, but their love had matured at such a dizzy speed that they were eager to risk the penalties. At Zeolani’s signaling they wandered by different routes into the savanna east of the village to a spot hidden by the two small hills shaped like a woman’s breasts, and there they made love repeatedly, even though it could mean the end of his trip to Zimbabwe if she became pregnant. If word of such condition circulated, the tribe would condemn her for having known a man without sanction and everyone would know who the man must have been, and they would be severely punished.

  There, between the hills, they kept their trysts, and fortune was with them, for there was no pregnancy. Instead, there developed a deepening love, and as the day approached when Nxumalo must march north with the tribute, their last meetings assumed a mournful cast that could not be dispelled.

  ‘I will walk behind you,’ the girl said, ‘and come into Zimbabwe as if by accident.’

  ‘No, it’s man’s work,’ said this boy of sixteen.

  ‘I will wait for you. You are the only one I will ever live with.’

  They went boldly to one of the hills south of the village and looked west toward the spot that Nxumalo had chosen many months ago. ‘It lies far beyond. There’s a small stream and many antelope. When I was sleeping there I heard a rustle, so I opened one eye. It could have been an enemy. What do you suppose it was?’

  ‘Baboons?’

  ‘Four sable antelope. Their horns were wider than this,’ and when he extended his arms to their maximum, Zeolani slipped into them and they embraced for the last time. Tears came to her eyes as her slim fingers traced the muscles in his arm.

  ‘We were intended,’ she said. ‘By every sign we were intended.’ And she counted the omens that should have brought them together, and each knew that never in this life could another mate be found so inevitably right.

  ‘I shall wait for you,’ the girl said, and with this childish and futile promise ringing in his ears, Nxumalo set forth.

  It was a journey any young man would want to make, five hundred miles due north across the heart of Africa, crossing wide rivers, sharing the pathway with animals innumerable, and heading for a city known only in legend or the garbled reports of the Old Seeker. Sixteen men would accompany their young leader, and since only the guide Sibisi had made the first part of this trip before, the others were at least as excited as Nxumalo.

  He was surprised at how lightly the men were burdened; on one of his hunting trips his helpers would carry three times the weight, but Sibisi explaine
d, ‘Much safer if travel light. Use the first days to tighten muscles. Enjoy the freedom and make yourselves strong, because on the twenty-seventh day …’ He dropped his voice ominously. ‘Then we reach the Field of Granite.’

  The loading would have been simpler if the rhinoceros horns could have been reduced to powder and adjusted to the men’s other cargo, but this was forbidden. The horns had to be intact upon delivery at Sofala to the waiting dhows that would carry them thus to China, so that apothecaries could be assured they were getting true horn and not some admixture of dust to make the packages larger.

  The file set forth at dawn on a clear autumn day, when the swollen rivers of spring and summer had receded and when animals born earlier in the year were large enough to be eaten. Sibisi set a pace that would not tire the men at the beginning, but would enable them to cover about twenty miles each day. For two weeks they would travel through savanna much as they had known at home, with no conspicuous or unusual features.

  Two men who carried nothing proved invaluable, for it was they who ranged ahead, providing meat for the travelers. ‘I want you to eat a lot and grow strong,’ Sibisi said, ‘because when we reach the Field of Granite we must be at our best.’

  On the morning of the sixth day the march speeded considerably, and the file covered at least twenty-five miles a day until they approached the first notable site on their journey. ‘Ahead lies the gorge,’ Sibisi said, and he regaled the novices with accounts of this spectacular place: ‘The river hesitates, looks at the wall of rock, then leaps forward shouting, “It can be done!” And mysteriously it picks its way through the red cliffs.’

  Sibisi added, ‘Mind your steps. You’re not clever like the river.’

  The gorge was so extremely narrow, only a few yards across, that the river rushed through with tremendous force, its turbulence well suited to the towering red flanks. The transit required the better part of a day, the porters following a precipitous footpath that clung to the eastern edge of the river and carried them at times down into the river itself. At the midpoint of the gorge the tops of the walls seemed to close in, so that the sky was obliterated, and here birds of great variety and color flashed through, playing a game of missing the cliffs as they darted about.