Shaka the Great (69 page)

“He betrayed Dingiswayo. That's—”

“—preposterous!”

Her nephew's head snaps up. “Oh, yes. Of course, preposterous.”

“Ludicrous.”

“That too.”

“Do you see why I am concerned?”

A vigorous nod.

“This herd of lies cannot be allowed to reach the barbarians!”

A frown. “But this story we've heard …”

“Is just the version given to the praise singers,” she says. “At least, that's what those who spread the calumny would have us believe. And you must keep your ears open. We must stamp out this story wherever we hear it!”

“Of course, that goes without saying.”

Looking around, it was hard to believe these savages were the servants of a mighty ruler. Their kraal was little better than the homesteads of the outcasts and criminals they insisted on protecting.

The settlement that Farewell had rather optimistically named Port Natal consisted of a three-meter-square wattle-and-daub house and some other ramshackle dwellings, surrounded by a fence of thorny branches to keep out hyenas (which the traders still insist on calling “wolves”) and other predators.

To the Induna's eyes, this Port Natal was a sun-blasted, inhospitable place, plagued by mosquitoes from the nearby marshes. Drums and planks, mainstays and ropes littered the site. Over here, someone in the process of stripping the bark off a tree trunk had wandered off, leaving his saws and chisels in the dust. Over there, flies swarmed around a pile of ivory.

Hai! Zulus couldn't live like this. And where were the cattle? In an enclosure when they should be grazing in the veld. See, too, how close the ivory was to the cooking area! Even the ground, the very ground they walked on, was wrong, for these foreigners did not know how to spread dung to prevent the central areas of a kraal from becoming dusty when the wind blew, and muddy when the rain fell.

Truly, this place resembled a temporary settlement suddenly abandoned. Did these barbarians have no discipline?

Yet the spies Shaka had posted, to keep watch over the encampment, reported how every daybreak the White Men gathered around the pole outside the hut to raise their flag. Then at sunset they were back to watch the flag being lowered. They'd even taken to having those who they protected form up in lines, while they performed this bizarre ritual.

Truly, these servants of Jorgi were a strange people!

But it's partly because of this development that the Induna has been sent to the izilwane kraal, as the second phase of the First Fruits draws to a close. It annoyed Shaka when these savages took it upon themselves to harbor those fleeing his wrath, but he stayed his hand. They were of little consequence, those thieves and other rubbish; however, he could not countenance them being drawn into a ritual that seemed to involve Zulus swearing allegiance to someone other than himself. Whether they liked it or not, these izinwabo were still his subjects. They did not belong to this other king across the waters.

The first sign of human life the Induna and Njikiza discerned was a man dozing on a ship's hammock strung in the shade of some trees. It took a few gentle prods of the Induna's iklwa before the man finally came awake …

Shrieking and rolling off his hammock.

“Aiee,” chuckled Njikiza, “we have helped this one escape the net.”

“But is he worth it?” asked the Induna.

“Are you, Xhosa?” inquired Njikiza.

Jakot's answer was a sullen glare, as he picked himself up off the ground. He was wearing britches torn off at the knees, and sandals. Bending, he retrieved the straw hat that had shaded his face on the hammock, made a production of dusting it off, then carefully pushed it on to the back of his head.

“Something ails you?” asked the Induna. “You are very quiet today.”

“It is bad manners to disturb a man during his nap,” muttered the interpreter. “Especially in such a way!”

“Manners?” chuckled the Induna, turning to Njikiza. “Did you hear that? This Xhosa dog would teach us about manners.”

“Speak,” Njikiza told Jakot, “and we'll be as dung beetles collecting your words of wisdom.”

“In which case you have no need of my guidance, for a man who knows his station is truly a wise man.”

“Let my club teach you your station, Xhosa.”

“He is a wily one,” said the Induna, soothingly, “with an answer for everything. But we have a task to perform.” Addressing Jakot: “Where are your masters?”

“Aiee,” grinned Jakot, “I have looked and looked, and have yet to find the man who is master of me.”

Njikiza growled, tightened his grip on his trusty club. The Induna held up a calming hand. “Talking to you, Xhosa, is like climbing a very steep slope, and”—the Induna's hand came up again—“before you say it is true that you tower over all, let me tell you such a tedious journey is rarely worthwhile.”

Indicating the wattle-and-daub structure with his spear, the Induna told Jakot to go and fetch one of those Long Noses who were foolish enough to let him cower in their midst.

The Xhosa obeyed and, a few minutes later, Henry Fynn staggered into the sunlight. In his mid-twenties with a beard that seemed an afterthought on his youthful features, like a disguise hastily donned, he wore a pair of light-brown corduroys rolled up around his ankles, and was pulling his braces over his shoulders. To the Induna he seemed emaciated, with only a child's chest, but the White Man appeared cheerful enough. He even grinned when Jakot told him why the Zulus were there.

“Tell him they flee Shaka for good reason, for they are criminals,” added the Induna.

Wondering if he was included in this generalization, Jakot obeyed.

“Tell him they must be returned to us, so that justice can be done.”

Uhm, right,
said Fynn.
I think you should point out … er, remind him, Jakot, that Shaka has ceded the bay and, er, environs to His Majesty. And, as such, this is Crown territory and it is, uh, the King's laws … our King, that is … uhm, it's his laws we must obey. These unfortunates he speaks of have not—not yet, anyway—er, broken any of our laws.

“He says no.”

The Induna looked from Jakot to the Englishman, who was glaring at the interpreter.

Now, see here, old chap,
said Fynn, when it became clear Jakot wasn't going to say anything more,
I have to ask if you have conveyed what I have said in toto, er, and in a proper manner …

“He berates you,” chuckled the Induna, “and so he should, for his words were many and yours were few. But tell him this, too: our King would discuss these matters with him in person. He and the other Long Noses
will be attending the First Fruits. Tell him it is a great honor. And tell him that messengers will arrive when it is time for them to come and sit at the King's feet!”

This Imithi Emnyama is dangerous stuff. It's the stick thrust into the hornet's nest. If it protects, it's also meant to provoke; it's both shield and spear. Part of the way it works is to make the King aggressive, sharpening his mind with anger, so he can face his forebears, and move among those who have passed on. Because the ancestors can be cantankerous and capricious, the King needs to watch himself with them, needs to be as careful with them as he is in avoiding the evil forces that prey on those who move through the fragile bubble-skin that separates our here-and-now from the spirit world.

Aiee! They have scarcely begun, and see how morose the King has become!

He is the purple darkness that weighs down on the mountains when the lightning bird comes. He is the distant rumble that precedes the flash flood, when the Thukela, the Frightening Suddenness, lives up to its name.

He is Sitting Thunder, sitting naked on a tree stump. With his back straight and feet firmly planted flat on the ground, he's barely conscious of the inyangas working around him, smearing the odor over his body with trembling hands.

He is narrowed eyes beneath a lowering brow, but it's not the clamor of the spirit world that has him scowling, or the thought of possibly meeting old adversaries he's helped to make the Great Journey sooner than they might have expected …

Palms skating across his skin … sticky stench … trembling fingers raising his left arm … these are discomforts experienced by someone else.

He is angry because last night, for the first time in his wanderings, he saw her.

Hearing the rustle of anxious whispers—intense, insistent, inveigling—he'd turned around in the hut of his seclusion, and found himself in his private compound in the old Bulawayo.

Enraged because of his inability to find
them
, those whose gullets he would see, whose thoughts he would listen to and use as incantations to see further (across the waters), he had wheeled round, ready to spew his rage, and there she was.

Nandi standing with her hands clasped in front of her skirt, her eyes fixed on him.

His frustration forgotten, he had let his tears flow freely.

Here was the balm he needed to still the pounding in his skull, and the tempest raging in his ears. Not even Pampata, his beloved Pampata, had that power, for he would have heard the anxiety and fear behind her soothing words. And they would have become fingers biting into his arms from behind, trying to hold and control him, but only causing him to thrash about even more violently.

Nandi's gaze, by contrast, was a gentle but firm hand against his chest, which said
Easy!

No judgment, no watching and waiting for a chance to pounce and chastise. It was patient and understanding: a mother's gaze. And, when he spoke, his words were a son's plea: “What am I to do, Mother?”

A pause in the wiping and polishing, a discreet clearing of a throat to his right. If his Majesty wouldn't mind raising his arm just a little higher …

This muthi, it covers him like a second skin, slick and oily the way he imagines a snake's skin feels to the reptile itself, after it's shed its old covering.

“I did it,” he had told her.

And so he had: he had showed the tamboti seed to the people, and sent out the messengers who'd been standing by for several days.

He'd issued the decree.

When the seeds have been sown …

When you have had to search for the paths …

When you have seen your labors rewarded with the emergence of the crops at the time of the Umasingana moon …

When these things have come to pass, let the Umkhosi be held at KwaBulawayo, and only at KwaBulawayo.

For is he not the embodiment of the tribe? Is he not the Father of the Sky, the King of Kings, the unifying force? Who better to intercede with the ancestors?

“Are we not one nation now? That is what I told them, Mother. We are the fist, its fingers clenched together, power and strength. We are the fist that defends and strikes back. That is what I told them.”

Standing with his hands on his hips, that day, knowing his words would be relayed around the isibaya: “But do not delude yourselves, my Children. We cannot lower our guard, enemies surround us. Whereas once they thought they could crush us, without blinking, now they covet our wealth and bide their time.”

Knowing his messengers were well on their way, he reaffirmed his decree: just as there is one Inkosi, one King, let there be one Umkhosi—one First Fruits!

“I issued the decree, Mother, knowing there would be dissent, grumbling, fear even, for there are always those who are terrified of change.”

And there
was
discord. From the usual quarters, of course. No surprise there. That was one of the good things about such potentially unpopular rulings—they gave your informants a chance to pick out the malcontents whose momentary sense of outrage overcame their discretion. And the army remained behind him, as always.

But now this: roaming the night, unable to reach them, unable to bring the next phase of his campaign to fruition, the White Men eluding him … always eluding him.

He had been with the Induna that day; they had traveled to Ethekwini incognito. Moving into place just before sunrise, he'd witnessed their
strange flag-raising ceremony. And when the Induna and Njikiza returned later, they had lingered to watch the flag being lowered at sunset. It was just as Mnkabayi had told him, but was she right in claiming this was a sign that Jorgi's men worshipped the sun? When he pointed out that Fynn had tried to explain to him their beliefs, and how it had seemed to him the izilwane worshipped an entity akin to the Great Spirit, she'd diplomatically suggested perhaps they were ruled by more than one deity. Mnkabayi was, of course, basing her assumptions on reports made to her by Ndlela, so Shaka had resolved to go and see for himself. And after doing so—and seeing the peremptory nature of their ceremonies—he wasn't sure that “worshipped” was the right word. It was more a simple acknowledgment of the sun's coming, he decided. Greeting its arrival and then, later, saluting its passing. But did such a distinction really counter Mnkabayi's claims? And why should this business about the sun concern her so much?