Men of Men b-2

by Wilbur Smith

  Dinners at Khami usually finished by the fall of dark, and the family was abed an hour later, but after Jordan's arrival, the talk and laughter sometimes lasted until midnight.

  "Jordan, there is no doubt that if we want Mashonaland, we shall have to square your aunt. I hear that Lobengula will not make a major decision without Doctor Codrington. I want you to go on ahead of Rudd and the others. Go to Khami and talk to your aunt." That had been mister Rhodes" parting injunction to him, and Jordan's conscience found no conflict between this duty and his family loyalties.

  Again and again in that week Jordan returned to extol mister Rhodes to Robyn, his integrity and sincerity, his vision of a world at peace and united under one sovereign power.

  Instinctively he knew which areas of Rhodes" character to emphasize to Robyn, patriotism, charity, his sympathetic treatment of his black workers, his opposition to the Stropping Act in the Cape Parliament which, if passed, would have given employers the right to lash their black servants, and only when he judged that she was swayed to his views, did Jordan mention the concession to her. Yet, despite his preparations, her opposition was immediate and ferocious.

  "Not another tribe robbed of its lands," she cried.

  "We do not want Matabeleland, Aunty. mister Rhodes would guarantee Lobengula's sovereignty and protect him "I read the letter you wrote to the Cape Times, Aunty, expressing your concern over the Matabele raids into Mashonaland. With the British flag flying over the Shona tribes, they would be protected by British justice."

  "The Germans and Portuguese and Belgians are gathering like vultures, you know, Aunty, that there is only one nation fit to take on the sacred trust."

  Jordan's arguments were calculated and persuasive, his manner without guile and his trust in Cecil John Rhodes touching and infectious, and he kept returning to his most poignant argument.

  "Aunty, you have seen the Matabele bucks returning from Mashonaland with the blood caked on their blades and the captured Shona girls roped together. Think of the havoc that they have left behind them, the burned villages, the murdered infants and grey heads, the slaughtered Shona warriors. You cannot deny the Shona people the protection that we will offer."

  That night she spoke to Clinton, lying beside him in the darkness in the narrow cot on the hard straw-filled mattress; and his reply was immediate and simple: "My dear, it has always been clear to me as the African sun that God has prepared this continent for the protection of the only nation on earth that has the public virtue sufficient to govern it for the benefit of its native peoples."

  "Clinton, mister Rhodes is not the British nation."

  "He is an Englishman."

  "So was Edward Teach, alias Blackbeard the pirate."

  They were silent for many minutes and then Robyn said suddenly: "Clinton, have you noticed anything wrong with Salina?"

  His concern was immediate. "Is she sickening?"

  "I'm afraid so, incurably. I think she is in love."

  "Good gracious." He sat abruptly upright in the bed.

  "Who on earth is she in love with?"

  "How many young men are there at Khami at the present time?"

  In the morning, on the way to her clinic in the church, she stopped at the kitchen. The previous evening Clinton had slaughtered a pig, and now Salina and Jordan were making sausages. He was turning the handle of the mincing machine while she forced lumps of pork into the funnel. They were so absorbed, chatting so gaily together, that while Robyn stood in the doorway watching them they were unaware of her presence.

  They made a beautiful couple, so beautiful indeed, that Robyn felt a sense of unreality as she watched them, and it was followed immediately by uneasiness, nothing in life was that perfect.

  Salina saw her, and started, and then unaccountably blushed so that her pixie pointed ears glowed.

  "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 Sint 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 mister 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 Sint 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 Sint 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 thtee days and nights of wild dancing, had fallen asleep where they fell.

  At nightfall he gave the laudanurn 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 infront 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, thrustin 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 splutte
ring 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 but through his blurred vision he saw the soapy him 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.