Leopard Hunts in Darkness b-4

by Wilbur A. Smith

"A true Matabele does not kill a blood brother of the tribe." It took Craig an enormous effort to keep his voice steady, devoid of any trace of his terror. His Sindebele was so flawless and easy that it was the leader of the guerrillas who blinked.

  "Haul" he said, which is an expression of amazement.

  "You speak likea man but who is this blood brother you boast of?"

  "Comrade Minister Tungata Zebiwe," Craig answered, an saw the instant shift in the man's gaze, and the sudden discomfiture of his two companions. He had hit a chord that had unbalanced them, and had delayed his own execution for the moment, but the leader's rifle was still cocked and on fully automatic, still pointed at his belly.

  It was the youngster who broke the silence, speaking too loudly, to cover his own uncertainty. "It is easy for a baboon to shout the name of the black-maned lion from the hilltop, and claim his protection, but does the lion recognize the baboon? Kill him, I say, and have done with it."

  "Yet he speaks likea brother," murmured the leader, "and Comrade Tungata is a hard man-" Craig realized that his life was still at desperate risk, a little push either way was all that was needed.

  "will show you, , he said, still without the slightest quaver in his voice. "Let me go to my pack." The leader hesitated.

  "I am naked," Craig told him. "No weapons not even a knife and you are three, with guns."

  "Go! the Matabele agreed. "But go with care. I have not killed a man for many moons and I feel the lack." Craig stood up carefully from the water and saw the interest in their eyes as they studied his leg foreshortened halfway between knee and ankle, and the compensating muscular development of the other leg and the rest of his body. The interest changed to wary respect as they saw how quickly and easily Craig moved on one leg. He reached his pack with water running down the hard flat muscles of chest and belly. He had come prepared for this meeting, and from the front pocket of his pack he pulled out his wallet and handed a coloured snapshot to the guerrilla leader.

  In the photograph two men sat on the bonnet of an ancient Land-Rover. They had their arms around each other's shoulders, and both of them were laughing. Each of them held a beer can in his free hand and with it was saluting the photographer. The accord and camaraderie between them was evident.

  The scarred guerrilla studied it for a long time and then slipped the selector on his rifle to lock. "It is Comrade Tungata," he said, and handed the photograph to the others.

  "Perhaps," conceded the youngster reluctantly, "but a long time ago. I still think we should shoot him." However, this opinion was now more wistful than determined.

  "Comrade Tungata would swallow you without chewing," his companion told him flatly, and slung his rifle over his shoulder.

  Craig picked up hi leg and in a moment had fitted it to the stump and instantly all three guerrillas were intrigued, their murderous intentions set aside as they crowded around Craig to examine this marvelous appendage.

  Fully aware of the African love of a good joke, Craig clowned for them. Heldanced a jig, pirouetted on the leg, cracked himself across the shin without flinching, and finally took the hat of the youngest, most murderous guerrilla from his head, screwed it into a ball and with a cry of "Pele!" drop-kicked it into the lower branches of the wild fig with the artificial leg. The other two hooted with glee, and laughed until tears ran down their cheeks at the youngster's loss of dignity as he scrambled up into the wild fig to retrieve his hat.

  judging the mood finely, Craig opened his pack and brought out mug and whisky bottle. He poured a generous dram and handed the mug to the scar-faced leader.

  "Between brothers," he said.

  The guerrilla leaned his rifle against the trunk of the tree and accepted the mug. He drained it at one swallow, and blew the fumes ecstatically out of his nose and mouth. The other two took their turn at the mug with as much gusto.

  When Craig pulled on his trousers and sat down on his pack, placing the bottle in front of him, they all laid their weapons aside and squatted in a half circle facing him.

  "My name is Craig Mellow,"he said.

  "We will call you Kuphela," the leader told him, "for the leg walks on its own." And the others clapped their hands IJ in approbation, and Craig poured each of them a whisky to celebrate his christening.

  "My name is Comrade Lookout," the leader told him.

  Most of the guerrillas had adopted noyw-de-gue7Te. "This is Comrade Peking." A tribute to his Chinese instructors, Craig guessed. "And this," the leader indicated the young, est, "is Comrade Dollar." Craig had difficulty remaining straight-faced at this unlikely juxtaposition of ideologies.

  "Comrade Lookout, "Craig said, "the kanka marked you." The kanka were the jackals, the security forces, and Craig guessed the leader would be proud of his battle scars.

  Comrade Lookout caressed his cheek. "A bayonet. They thought I was dead and they left me for the hyena."

  "Your leg?" Dollar asked in return. "From the war also?" An affirmative would tell them that he had fought against them. Their reaction was unpredictable, but Craig paused only a second before he nodded. "I trod on one of our own mines."

  "Your own mine!" Lookout crowed with delight at the joke. "He stood on his own mine!" And the others thought it was funny, but Craig detected no residual resentment.

  "Where?" Peking wanted to know.

  "On the river, between Kazungula and Victoria Falls."

  "Ah, yes," they nodded at each other. "That was a bad place. We crossed there often, Lookout remembered. "That is where we fought the Scouts." The Ballantyne Scouts had been one of the elite units of the security forces, and Craig had been attached to them as an armourer.

  "The day I trod on the mine was the day the Scouts followed your people across the river. There was a terrible fight on the Zambian side, and all the Scouts were wiped out."

  "Haul Haul" they exclaimed with amazement. "That was the day! We were there we fought with Comrade Tungata on that day."

  "What a fight what a fine and beautiful killing when we trapped them," Dollar remembered with the killing light in his eyes again.

  "They fought! Mother of Nkulu kulu how they fought!

  Those were real men!" Craig's stomach churned queasily with the memory. His own cousin, Roland Ballantyne, had led the Scouts across the river that fateful -day. While Craig lay shattered and bleeding on the edge of the minefield, Roland and all his men had fought to the death a few miles further on. Their bodies had been abused and desecrated by these men, and now they were discussing it likea memorable football match.

  Craig poured morel whisky for them. How he had loathed d-iem and their fellows terrs', they called them, terrorists loathed them with the special hatred reserved for something that threatens your very existence and all that you hold dear. But now, in his turn, he saluted them with the mug, and drank. He had heard of R.A.F and Luftwaffe pilots meeting after the war and reminiscing as they were doing, more like comrades than deadly enemies.

  "Where were you when we rocketed the storage tanks in Harare and burned the fuel?" they asked.

  "Do you remember when the Scouts jumped from the sky onto our camp at Molingushi? They killed eight hundred of us that day and I was there!" Peking recalled with pride. "But they did not catch me!" Yet now Craig found that he could not sustain that hatred any longer. Under the veneer of cruelty and savagery imposed upon them by war, they were the true Matabele that he had always loved, with that irrepressible sense of fun, that deep pride in themselves and their tribe, that abounding sense of personal honour, of loyalty and their own peculiar code of morals. As they chatted, Craig warmed to them, and they sensed it and responded to him in turn.

  "So what makes you come here, Kuphela? A sensible man like you, walking without even a stick into the leopard's cave? You must have heard about us and yet you came here?"

  "Yes, I have heard about you. I heard that you were hard men, like old Mzilikazi's warriors." They preened a little at the compliment.

  "But I came here to meet you and t
alk with you," Craig went on.

  "Why?"demanded Lookout.

  41 will write a book, and in the book I will write truly the way you are and the things for which you are still fighting."

  "A book?" Peking was suspicious immediately.

  "What kind of book?" Dollar backed him.

  "Who are you to write a book?" Lookout's voice was openly scornful. "You are too young. Book-writers are great and learned people." Like all barely literate Africans, he had an almost superstitious awe of the printed word, and reverence for the grey hairs of age.

  "A one-legged book-writer," Dollar scoffed, and Peking giggled and picked up his rifle. He placed it across his lap and giggled again. The mood had changed once more. "If he lies about this book, then perhaps he lies about his friendship with Comrade Tungata," Dollar suggested with relish.

  Craig had prepared for this also. He took a large manila envelope from the flap of his pack and shook from it a thick sheaf of newspaper cuttings. He shuffled through them slowly, letting their disbelieving mockery change to interest, then he selected one and handed it to Lookout.

  The serial of the book had been shown on Zimbabwe television two years previously, before these guerrillas had returned to the bush, and it had enjoyed an avid following throughout its run.

  "Haul" Lookout exclaimed. "It is the old king, Mzilikazi!" The photograph at the head of the article showed Craig on the set with members of the cast of the production. The guerrillas immediately recognized the black American actor who had taken the part of the old Matabele king. He was in a costume of leopard-skin and heron-feathers.

  "And that is you with the king." They had not been as impressed, even by the photograph of Tungata.

  There was another cutting, a photo taken in Doubleday's bookstore on Fifth Avenue, of Craig standing beside a huge pyramid of the book, with a blowup of his portrait from the back cover riding atop the pyramid.

  "That is you!" They were truly stunned now. "Did you write that book?"

  "Now do you believer" Craig demanded, but Lookout studied the evidence o " are fully before committing himself.

  His lips moved as he read slowly through the text of the articles, and when he handed them back to Craig, he said, seriously, "Kuphela, despite your youth, you are indeed an important book-writer." Now they were almost pathetically eager to pour out their grievances to him, like petitioners at a tribal indaba where cases were heard and judgement handed down by the elders of the tribe. While they talked, the sun rose up LA

  across a sky as blue and unblemished as a heron's egg, and reached its noon -and started its stately descent towards its bloody death in the sunset.

  What they related was the tragedy of Africa, the barriers that divided this mighty continent and which contained all the seeds of violence and disaster, the single incurable disease that infected them all tribalism.

  Here it was Matabele against Mashona.

  "The dirt-eaters," Lookout called them, "the lurkers in caves, the fugitives on the fortified hilltops, the jackals i who will only bite when your back is turned to them." It was the scorn of the warrior for the merchant, of the man of direct action for the wily negotiator and politician.

  "Since great Mzilikazi first crossed the river Limpopo, the Mashona have been our dogs amahob, slaves and sons of slaves." This history of displacement and domination of one group by another was not confined to Zimbabwe, but over the centuries had taken place across the entire continent.

  Further north, the lordly Masai had raided and terrorized the Kikuyu who lacked their warlike culture; the giant Watutsi, who considered any man under six foot six to be a dwarf, had taken the gentle Hutu as slaves and in every case, the slaves had made up for their lack of ferocity with political astuteness, and, as soon as the white colonialists" protection was withdrawn, had either massacred their tormentors, as the Hutu had the Watutsi, or had bastardized the doctrine of Westminster government by discarding the checks and balances that make the system equitable, and had used their superior numbers to place their erstwhile masters into a position of political subjugation, as the Kikuyu had the Masai.

  Exactly the same process was at work here in Zimbabwe.

  The white settlers had been rendered inconsequential by the bush war, and the concepts of fair play and integrity that the white administrators and civil servants had imposed upon all the tribes had been swept away with them.

  "There are five dirt-eating Mashona for every one Matabele indo da Lookout told Craig bitterly, "but why should that give them any right to lord it over us? Should five slaves dictate to a king? If five baboons bark, must the black-maned lion tremble?"

  "That is the way it is done in England and America," Craig said mildly. "The will of the majority must prevail-"

  "I piss with great force on the will of the majority," Lookout dismissed the doctrine of democracy airily. "Such things might work in England and America but this is Africa. They dd not work here I will not bow down to the will of five dirt-eaters. No, not to the will of a hundred, nor a thousand of them.

  I am Matabele, and only one man dictates to me a Matabele king." Yes, Craig thought, this is Africa. The old Africa awakening from the trance induced in it by a hundred years of colonialism, and reverting immediately to the old ways.

  He thought of the -tens of thousands of fresh-faced une Enelishmen who for very little financial reward had YO come out to spend their lives in the Colonial Service, labouring to inst il into their reluctant charges their respect for the Protestant work-ethic, the ideals of fair play and Westminster government. young men who had returned to England prematurely ted and broken in health, to eke out their days on a. pittance of a pension and the belief that they had given their lives to something that was valuable and lasting. Did they, Craig wondered, ever suspect that it might all have been in vain?

  The borders that the colonial system had set up had been neat and orderly. They followed a river, or the shore of a lake, the spine of a mountain range, and where these did not exist, a white surveyor with a theodolite had shot a line across the wilderness. "This side is German East Africa, this side is British." But they took no cognizance of the tribes that they were splitting in half as they drove in their pegs.

  "Many of our people live across the river in South P Africa eking complained. "If they were with us, then things would be different. There would be more of us, but now we are divided."

  "And the Shana is cunning, as cunning as the baboons that come down to raid the maize fields in the night. He knows that one Matabele warrior would eat a hundred of is, so w1en t we rose against dlem, usec die w-lite soldiers of Smith's government who had stayed on--2 Craig remembered the delight of the embittered white soldiers who considered they had not been defeated but had been betrayed, when the Mugabe government had turned them loose on the dissenting Matabele faction.

  "The white pilots came in their aeroplanes, and the white troops of the Rhodesian Regiment-" After the fighting the shunting, yards at Bulawayo station had been crowded with refrigerated trucks each packed from floor to roof with the bodies of the Matabele dead.

  "The white soldiers did their work for them, while Mugabe and his boys ran back to Harare and climbed shaking and snivelling under their women's skirts. Then, after the white soldiers had taken our weapons, they crawled out again, shook off the dust of their retreat, and came strutting back like conquerors."

  "They have dishonoured our leaders,-2 Nkomo, the Matabele leader, had been accused of harbouring rebels and accumulating caches of weapons, and driven in disgrace by Mashona,dominated government into enforced retirement.

  "They have secret prisons in the bush where they take our leaders," Peking went on. "There they do things to our men that do not bear talking of."

  "Now that we are deprived of weapons, their special units move through the villages. They beat our old men and women, they rape our young women, they take our young men away, never to be seen or heard of again." Craig had seen a photograph of men in the blue and khaki of th
e former British South Africa police, so long the uniform of honour and fair play, carrying out interrogations in the villages. In the photograph they had a naked Matabele spreadeagled on the earth, an armed and uniformed constable standing with both booted feet and his full weight on each ankle and wrist to pin him, while two other constables wielded clubs as heavy as baseball bats.