Rage (28 page)

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Authors: Wilbur Smith

BOOK: Rage
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‘What we are going to do is practise a little more on the pigeons,' Shasa decided, after one of Garry's least successful outings. In the evenings the flocks of fat green pigeons came flighting in to feast on the wild figs in the grove beside the waterhole.
Shasa took the boys down as soon as the sun lost its heat, and placed them in the hides they had built of saplings and dried grass, each hide far enough from the next and carefully sited so that there was no danger of a careless shot causing an accident. This afternoon Shasa put Sean into a hide at the near end of the glade, with Michael, who had once again declined to take an active part in the sport, to keep him company and pick up the fallen birds for him.
Then Shasa and Garry set off together for the far side of the grove. Shasa was leading with Garry following him as the game path twisted between the thick yellow trunks of the figs. Their bark was yellow and scaly as the skin of a giant reptile, and the bunches of figs grew directly on the trunks rather than on the tips of the branches. Beneath the trees the undergrowth was tangled and thick, and the game path was so twisted that they could see only a short distance ahead. The light was poor this late in the afternoon, with the branches meeting overhead.
Shasa came around another turn and the lion was in the game path, walking straight towards him only fifty paces away. In the instant he saw it, Shasa realized that it was the man-eater. It was a huge beast, the biggest he had ever seen in a lifetime of hunting. It stood higher than his waist, and its mane was coal-black, long and shaggy and dense, shading to blue grey down the beast's flanks and back.
It was an old lion, its flat face criss-crossed with scars. Its mouth was gaping, panting with pain as it limped towards
him, and he saw that the spear wound in the shoulder had mortified, the raw flesh crimson as a rose petal and the fur around the wound wet and slicked down where the lion had been licking it. The flies swarmed to the wound, irritating and stinging, and the lion was in a vicious mood, sick with age and pain. It lifted its dark and shaggy head and Shasa looked into the pale yellow eyes and saw the agony and blind rage they contained.
‘Garry!' he said urgently. ‘Walk backwards! Don't run, but get out of here,' and without looking around he swung the sling of the rifle off his shoulder.
The lion dropped into a crouch, its long tail with the black bush of hair at the tip lashed back and forth like a metronome, as it gathered itself for the charge, and its yellow eyes fastened on Shasa, a focus for all its rage.
Shasa knew there would be time for only a single shot, for it would cover the ground between them in a blazing blur of speed. The light was too bad and the range was too far for that single shot to be conclusive, he would let it come in to where there could be no doubt, and the big 300-grain soft-nosed bullet from the Holland and Holland would shatter its skull and blow its brains to a mush.
The lion launched into its charge, keeping low to the earth, snaking in and grunting as it came, gut-shaking bursts of sound through the gaping jaws lined with long yellow fangs. Shasa braced himself and brought up the rifle, but before he could fire, there was the sharp crack of the little Winchester beside him and the lion collapsed in the middle of his charge, going down head first and cartwheeling, flopping over on its back to expose the soft butteryellow fur of its belly, its limbs stretching and relaxing, the long curved talons in its huge paws slowly retracting into the pads, the pink tongue lolling out of its open jaws, and the rage dying out of those pale yellow eyes. From the tiny bullet hole between its eyes a thin serpent of blood crawled down to dribble from its brow into the dirt beneath it.
In astonishment Shasa lowered his rifle and looked round. Beside him stood Garry, his head at the level of Shasa's lowest rib, the little Winchester still at his shoulder, his face set and deadly pale, and his spectacles glinting in the gloom beneath the trees.
‘You killed it,' Shasa said stupidly. ‘You stood your ground and killed it.'
Shasa walked forward slowly and stooped over the carcass of the man-eater. He shook his head in amazement, and then looked back at his son. Garry had not yet lowered the rifle, but he was beginning now to tremble with delayed terror. Shasa dipped his finger into the blood that dribbled from the wound in the man-eater's forehead, then walked back to where Garry stood. He painted the ritual stripes on the boy's forehead and cheeks.
‘Now you are a man and I'm proud of you,' he said. Slowly the colour flushed back into Garry's cheeks and his lips stopped trembling, and then his face began to glow. It was an expression of such pride and unutterable joy that Shasa felt his throat close up and tears sting his eyelids.
Every servant came from the camp to view the man-eater and to hear Shasa describe the details of the hunt. Then, by the light of the lanterns, they carried the carcass back. While the skinners went to work, the men sang of the hunter in Garry's honour.
Sean was torn between incredulous admiration and deepest envy of his brother, while Michael was fulsome in his praises. Garry refused to wash the dried lion's blood from his face when at last, well after midnight, Shasa finally ordered them to bed. At breakfast he still wore the crusted stripes of blood on his beaming grubby face and Michael read aloud the heroic poem he had written in Garry's honour. It began:
With lungs to blast the skies with sound
And breath hot as the blacksmith's forge
Eyes as yellow as the moon's full round
And the lust on human flesh to gorge –
Shasa hid a smile at the laboured rhyming, and at the end applauded as loudly as the end applauded as loudly as the rest of them. After breakfast they all trooped out to watch the skinners dressing out the lion skin, pegging it fur-side down in the shade, scraping away the yellow subcutaneous fat and rubbing in coarse salt and alum.
‘Well, I still think it died of a heart attack.' Sean could suppress his envy no longer, and Garry rounded on him furiously.
‘We all know what a clever dick you are. But when you shoot your first lion, then you can come and talk to me, smarty pants. All you are good for is a few little old impala!'
It was a long speech, delivered in white heat, and Garry never stumbled nor stuttered once. It was the first time Shasa had seen him stand up to Sean's casual bullying, and he waited for Sean to assert his authority. For seconds it hung in the balance, he could see Sean weighing it up, deciding whether to tweak the spikes of hair at Garry's temple or to give him a chestnut down the ribs. He could see also that Garry was ready for it, his fists clenched and his lips set in a pale determined line. Suddenly Sean grinned that charming smile.
‘Only kidding,' he announced airily, and turned back to admire the tiny bullet-hole in the skull. ‘Wow! Right between the eyes!' It was a peace offering.
Garry looked bemused and uncertain. It was the first time that he had forced Sean to back down, and he wasn't able immediately to grasp that he had succeeded.
Shasa stepped up and put his arm around Garry's shoulders. ‘Do you know what I'm going to do, champ? I'm going to have the head fully mounted for the wall in your room, with eyes and everything,' he said.
For the first time, Shasa was aware that Garry had
developed hard little muscles in his shoulders and upper arms. He had always thought him a runt. Perhaps he had never truly looked at the child before.
T
hen suddenly it was over, and the servants were breaking camp and packing the tents and beds on to the trucks, and appallingly the prospect of the return to Weltevreden and school loomed ahead of them. Shasa tried to keep their spirits jaunty with stories and songs on the long drive back to H'ani Mine but with every mile the boys were more dejected.
On the last day when the hills which the Bushmen call the ‘Place of All Life' floated on the horizon ahead of them, detached from the earth by the shimmering heat mirage, Shasa asked, ‘Have you gentlemen decided what you are going to do when you leave school?' It was an attempt to cheer them up, more than a serious enquiry. ‘What about you, Sean?'
‘I want to do what we have been doing. I want to be a hunter, an elephant hunter like great-grand-uncle Sean.'
‘Splendid!' Shasa agreed. ‘Only problem I can see is that you are at least sixty years too late.'
‘Well then,' said Sean, ‘I'll be a soldier – I like shooting things.'
A shadow passed behind Shasa's eyes before he looked at Michael.
‘What about you, Mickey?'
‘I want to be a writer. I will work as a newspaper reporter and in my spare time I'll write poetry and great books.'
‘You'll starve to death, Mickey,' Shasa laughed, and then he swivelled around to Garry who was leaning over the back of the driving seat.
‘What about you, champ?'
‘I'm going to do what you do, Dad.'
‘And what is it I do?' Shasa demanded with interest.
‘You are the Chairman of Courtney Mining and Finance, and you tell everybody else what to do. That's what I want to be one day, Chairman of Courtney Mining and Finance.'
Shasa stopped smiling and was silent for a moment, studying the child's determined expression, then he said lightly, ‘Well then, it looks as though it's up to you and me to support the elephant hunter and the poet.' And he ran his hand over Garry's already unruly hair. It no longer required any effort to make an affectionate gesture towards his ugly duckling.
T
hey came singing across the rolling grasslands of Zululand, and they were one hundred strong. All of them were members of the Buffaloes and Hendrick Tabaka had carefully picked them for this special honour guard. They were the best, and all of them were dressed in tribal regalia, feathers and furs and monkey-skin capes, kilts of cow-tails. They carried only fighting-sticks, for the strictest tradition forbade metal weapons of any kind on this day.
At the head of the column Moses Gama and Hendrick Tabaka trotted. They also had set aside their European clothing for the occasion, and of all their men they alone wore leopard-skin cloaks, as was their noble right. Half a mile behind them rose the dust of the cattle herd. This was the lobola, the marriage price, two hundred head of prime beasts, as had been agreed. The herd-boys were all of them sons of the leading warriors who had ridden in the cattle trucks with their charges during the three-hundred-mile journey from the Witwatersrand. In charge of the herd-boys were Wellington and Raleigh Tabaka and they had detrained the herd at Ladyburg railway station. Like their
father, they had discarded their Western-style clothing for the occasion and were dressed in loincloths and armed with their fighting-sticks, and they danced and called to the cattle, keeping them in a tight bunch, both of them excited and filled with self-importance by the task they had been allotted.
Ahead of them rose the high escarpment beyond the little town of Ladyburg. The slopes were covered with dark forests of black wattle and all of it was Courtney land, from where the waterfall smoked with spray in the sunlight around the great curve of hills. All ten thousand acres of it belonged to Anna, Lady Courtney, the relict of Sir Garrick Courtney, and to Storm Anders, who was the daughter of General Sean Courtney. However, beyond the waterfall lay a hundred choice acres of land which had been left to Sangane Dinizulu in terms of the will of General Sean Courtney, for he had been a faithful and beloved retainer of the Courtney family as had his father Mbejane Dinizulu before him.
The road descended the escarpment in a series of hairpin bends, and when Moses Gama shaded his eyes and stared ahead, he saw another band of warriors coming down it to meet them. They were many more in number, perhaps five hundred strong. Like Moses' party they were dressed in full regimentals, with plumes of fur and feathers on their heads and war rattles on their wrists and ankles. The two parties halted at the foot of the escarpment, and from a hundred paces faced each other, though still they sang and stamped and brandished their weapons.
The shields of the Zulus were matched, selected from dappled cowhides of white and chocolate brown, and the brows of the warriors that carried them were bound with strips of the same dappled hide while their kilts and their plumes were cow-tails of purest white. They made a daunting and warlike show, all big men, their bodies
gleaming with sweat in the sunlight, their eyes bloodshot with dust and excitement and the pots of millet beer they had already downed.
Facing them Moses felt his nerves crawl with a trace of the terror that these men had for two hundred years inspired in all the other tribes of Africa, and to suppress it he stamped and sang as loudly as his Buffaloes who pressed closely around him. On this his wedding day, Moses Gama had put aside all the manners and mores of the West, and slipped back easily into his African origins and his heart pumped and thrilled to the rhythms and the pulse of this harsh continent.
From the Zulu ranks opposite him sprang a champion, a magnificent figure of a man with the strip of leopard skin around his brow that declared his royal origins. He was one of Victoria Dinizulu's elder brothers, and Moses knew he was a qualified lawyer with a large practice at Eshowe, the Zululand capital, but today he was all African, fierce and threatening as he swirled in the giya, the challange dance.
He leapt and spun and shouted his own praises and those of his family, daring the world, challenging the men who faced him, while behind him his comrades drummed with their sticks on the rawhide shields, and the sound was like distant thunder, the last sound that a million victims had ever heard, the death-knell of Swazi and Xhosa, of Boer and Briton in the days when the impis of Chaka and Dingaan and Cetewayo had swept across the land, from Isandhlwana, the Hill of the Little Hand, where one thousand seven hundred British infantry were cut down in one of the worst military reverses that England had ever suffered in Africa, to the ‘Place of Weeping' which the Boers named ‘Weenen' for their grief for the women and children who died to that same dreadful drum roll when the impis came swarming down across the Tugela River, to a thousand other nameless and forgotten killing grounds where the lesser tribes had perished before the men of Zulu.
At last the Zulu champion staggered back into the ranks, streaked with sweat and dust, his chest heaving and froth upon his lips, and now it was Moses' turn to giya, and he danced out from amongst his Buffaloes, and leapt shoulder-high with his leopard skins swirling around him. His limbs shone like coal freshly cut from the face, and his eyes and teeth were white as mirrors flashing in the sunlight. His voice rang from the escarpment, magnified by the echoes, and though the men facing him could not understand the words the force and meaning of them was clear, his haughty disdain evident in every gesture. They growled and pressed forward, while his own Buffaloes were goaded by his example, their blood coming to the boil, ready to rush forward and join battle with their traditional foe, ready to perpetuate the bloody vendetta that had already run a hundred years.
At the very last moment, when violence and inevitable death were only a heartbeat away, and rage was as thick in the air as the static electricity of the wildest summer thunderstorm, Moses Gama stopped dancing abruptly, posing like a heroic statue before them – and so great was the force of his personality, so striking his presence, that the drumming of shields and the growl of battle rage died away.
Into the silence Moses Gama called in the Zulu language, ‘I bring the marriage price!' and he held his stick aloft, a signal to the herd-boys who followed the marriage party.
Lowing and bawling, adding their dust to the dust of the dancers, the herd was driven forward and immediately the mood of the Zulus changed. For a thousand years, since they had come down from the far north, following the tsetse-fly-free corridors down the continent with their herds, the Nguni peoples from which the Zulu tribe would emerge under the black emperor Chaka had been cattle men. Their animals were their wealth and their treasure.
They loved cattle as other men love women and children. Almost from the day they could walk unaided the boys tended the herds, living with them in the veld from dawn to dusk every day, establishing with them a bond and almost mystic communion, protecting them from predators with their very lives, talking to them and handling them and coming to know them completely. It was said that King Chaka knew every individual beast in his royal herds, and that out of a hundred thousand head he would know immediately if one was missing and would ask for it with a complete description, and not hesitate to order his executioners with their knobkerries to dash out the brains of even the youngest herd-boy if there was even a suspicion of his negligence.
So it was a committee of strict and expert judges who put aside the dancing and posturing and boasting, and instead applied themselves to the serious business of appraising the bride price. Each animal was dragged from the herd, and amid a buzz of comment and speculation and argument, was minutely examined. Its limbs and trunk were palpated by dozens of hands simultaneously, its jaws were forced open to expose the teeth and tongue, its head twisted so that its ears and nostrils could be peered into, its udders stroked and weighed in the palm, its tail lifted to estimate its calf-bearing history and potential. Then finally, almost reluctantly, each animal was declared acceptable by old Sangane Dinizulu himself, the father of the bride. No matter how hard they tried, they could find no grounds for rejecting a single animal. The Ovambo and the Xhosa love their cattle every bit as much as the Zulu, and are as expert in their judgement. Moses and Hendrick had exercised all their skills in making their selection, for pride and honour were at stake.
It took many hours for every one of the two hundred animals to be examined while the bridegroom's party, still
keeping aloof from the Zulus, squatted in the short grass on the side of the road, pretending indifference to the proceedings. The sun was hot and the dust aggravated the men's thirst, but no refreshment was offered while the scrutiny went on.
Then at last Sangane Dinizulu, his silver pate shining in the sun, but his body still upright and regal, called his herd-boys. Joseph Dinizulu came forward. As the senior herdsman, the old man gave the herd into his care. Although his exhortations were severe and he scowled most ferociously, the old man's affection for his youngest son was ill-concealed, as was his delight at the quality of the stock which made up the marriage price. So when he turned and for the first time greeted his future son-in-law, he was having great difficulty in suppressing his smiles, they kept shooting out like beams of sunlight through cloud holes and were just as swiftly extinguished.
With dignity he embraced Moses Gama, and though he was a tall man, he had to reach up to do so. Then he stepped back and clapped his hands, calling to the small party of young women who were sitting a little way off.
Now they rose and helped each other to settle the enormous clay pots of beer upon each other's heads. Then they formed a line and came forward, singing and undulating their hips, although their heads remained steady and not a drop slopped over the rims of the pots. They were all unmarried girls, none of them wore the high clay headdress or the matron's leather cloak, and above their short beaded skirts their bodies were oiled and stark naked so their pert young breasts joggled and bounced to the rhythm of the song of welcome and the wedding guests murmured and smiled appreciatively. Although deep down old Sangane Dinizulu disapproved of marriage outside the tribe of Zulu, the lobola had been good and his future son-in-law was, by all accounts, a man of stature and importance. None could
reasonably object to suitors of this calibre, and as there might be others like him in the bridegroom's party Sangane was not loath to show off his wares.
The girls knelt in front of the guests, hanging their heads and averting their eyes shyly. Giggling in response to the knowing looks and sly sallies of the men, they proffered the brimming beer-pots, and then withdrew swinging their hips so their skirts swirled up and pert young buttocks peeked provocatively from beneath them.
The beer-pots were so heavy that they required both hands to lift, and when they were lowered, there were thick white moustaches on the upper lips of the guests. Noisily they licked them away and the laughter became more relaxed and friendly.
When the beer-pots were empty, Sangane Dinizulu stood before them and made a short speech of welcome. Then they formed up again and started up the road that climbed the escarpment, but now Zulu ran shoulder to shoulder with Ovambo and Xhosa. Moses Gama had never believed he would see that happen. It was a beginning, he thought, a fine beginning, but there remained to be scaled a range of endeavour as high as the peaks of the Drakensberg Mountains which rose out of the blue distances before them as they topped the escarpment.
Sangane Dinizulu had set the pace up the slope, although he must be all of seventy years of age, and now he led the cavalcade of men and animals down to his kraal. It was sited on a grassy slope above the river. The huts of his many wives were arranged in a circle, beehives of smooth thatch each with an entrance so low that a man must stoop to enter. In the centre of the circle was the old man's hut. It also was a perfect beehive, but much grander than the others, and the thatch had been plaited into intricate patterns. It was the home of a chieftain of Zulu, a son of the heavens.
On the grassy slope was assembled a multitude, a
thousand or more of the most important men of the tribe with all their senior wives. Many of them had travelled for days to be here, and they squatted in clumps and clusters down the slope, each chieftain surrounded by his own retainers.
When the bridegroom's party came over the crest they rose as one man, shouting their greetings and drumming their shields, and Sangane Dinizulu led them down to the entrance of the kraal where he paused and spread his arms for silence. The wedding guests settled down again comfortably in the grass. Only the chieftains sat on their carved stools of office, and while the young girls carried the beer-pots amongst them Sangane Dinizulu made his wedding speech.
First he related the history of the tribe, and particularly of his own clan of Dinizulu. He recited their battle honours and the valiant deeds of his ancestors. These were many and it took a long time, but the guests were well content for the black beer-pots were replenished as swiftly as they were emptied, and although the old ones knew the history of the tribe as intimately as did Sangane Dinizulu, its repetition gave them endless satisfaction, as though it were an anchor in the restless sea of life. As long as the history and the customs persisted, the tribe was secure.
At last Sangane Dinizulu was done, and in a voice that was hoarse and scratchy, he ended, ‘There are those amongst you who have queried the wisdom of a daughter of Zulu marrying with a man of another tribe. I respect these views, for I also have been consumed by doubts and have pondered long and seriously.'
Now the older heads in the congregation were nodding, and a few hostile glances were shot at the bridegroom's party, but Sangane Dinizulu went on.

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