The Angels Weep - Smith Wilbur. Страница 16

"Come with me, Bazo. Bring your son to learn the white man's skills. One day he will read and write, and be a man of consequence, not merely a hunter of wild honey. Forget this sad name you have given him, and find another. Call him a joyous name and bring him to meet my own son. Together they will enjoy this beautiful land, and be brothers as we once were brothers!

Bazo sighed then. "Perhaps you are right, Henshaw. As you say, the imp is are disbanded. Those who were once warriors now work on the roads that Lodzi is building! The Matabele always had difficulty in pronouncing the sound of W, thus Rhodes was "Lodzi', and Bazo was referring to the system of conscripted labour which the Chief Native Commissioner, General Mungo St. John, had introduced in Matabeleland.

Bazo sighed again. "If a man must work, it is better that he work in dignity at a task of importance with somebody whom he respects. When will you begin to dig for your gold, Henshaw?" "After the rains, Bazo.

But come with me now. Bring your woman and your son-" Bazo held up one hand to silence him. "After the rains, after the great storms, we will talk again, Henshaw," Bazo said quietly, and Tanase nodded her head and for the first time she smiled, an odd little smile of approval. Bazo was right to dissemble and to lull Henshaw with vague promises.

With her specially trained sense of awareness, Tanase recognized that despite the direct gaze of his green eyes and his open, almost childlike smile, this young white man was harder and more dangerous than even Bakela, his father.

"After the great storms," Bazo had promised him, and that had a hidden meaning. The great storm was the secret thing that they were planning.

"First there are things that I must do, but once they are done, I will seek you out," Bazo promised.

Bazo led up the steep gradient of the narrow pathway through the deep gut of the granite hills. Tanase followed a dozen paces behind him. The roll of sleeping-mats and the iron cooking pot were carried easily on her head, and her spine was straight and her step fluid and smooth to balance the load. The boy skipped at her side, singing a childish nonsense in a high piping chant. He was the only one unaffected by the brooding menace of this dark valley. The scrub on each side of the path was dense and armed with vicious thorn. The silence was oppressive, for no bird sang and no small animal rustled the leaves.

Bazo stepped lightly across the boulders in the bed of the narrow stream that crossed the trail and paused to look back as Tanase scooped a handful of the cool water and held it to the boy's lips. Then they went on.

The path ended abruptly against a sheer cliff of pearly granite, and Bazo stopped and leaned on the light throwing, spear, the only weapon that the white administrator in Bulawayo allowed a black man to carry to protect himself and his family against the predators which infested the wilderness. It was a frail thing, not an instrument of war like the broad stabbing assegai.

Leaning his weight on the spear, Bazo looked up the tall cliff.

There was a watchman's thatched hut on a ledge just below the summit, and now a quavering old man's voice challenged him.

"Who dares the secret pass?" Bazo lifted his chin and answered in a bull-bellow which sent the echoes bouncing from the cliffs.

"Bazo, son of Gandang. Bazo, Induna of the Kumalo blood royal."

Then, not deigning to await the reply, Bazo stepped through the convoluted portals of granite, into the passageway that split the cliff.

The passage was narrow, barely wide enough for two grown men to walk shoulder to shoulder, and the floor was clean white sand with chips of bright mica that sparkled and crunched like sugar under his bare feet. The passage twisted like a maimed serpent, and then abruptly debouched into a sweeping valley of lush green, bisected by a tinkling stream that spilled from the rock-face near where Bazo stood.

The valley was a circular basin a mile or so across, completely walled in by the high cliffs. In its centre was a tiny village of thatched huts, but as Tanase came out of the mouth of the secret passage and stopped beside Bazo, both of them looked beyond the village to the opposite wall of the valley.

In the base of the cliff, the low wide opening of a cavern snarled at them like a toothless mouth. Neither of them spoke for many minutes as they stared across at the sacred cave, but the memories came crowding back upon both of them. In that cavern Tanase had undergone the frightful indoctrination and initiation which had transformed her into the Umlimo, and on the rocky floor she had suffered the cruel abuse that had stripped her of her powers, and made her an ordinary woman once more.

Now in that cavern another being presided in Tanase's place as spiritual head of the nation, for the powers of the UmliMO never die, but are passed on from one initiate to another, as they had been from forgotten times when the ancients had built the great stone ruins of the Zimbabwe.

"Are you ready?" Bazo asked at last.

"I am ready, lord," she replied, and they started down towards the village. But before they reached it, they were met by a weird procession of creatures, some of them barely recognizable as human, for they crawled on all fours and whined and yapped like animals. There were ancient withered crones with empty dugs flapping against their bellies, pretty little girls with pubescent breast-buds and blank unsmiling faces, old men with deformed limbs who dragged themselves in the dust, and slim mincing youths with well formed muscular bodies and mad eyes that rolled back into their skulls, all of them decked with the gruesome paraphernalia of the necromancer and wizard, bladders of lion and crocodile, skin of python and bird, skulls and teeth of ape, of man, and of beast. They ringed Bazo and Tanase, prancing and mewling and leering, until Bazo felt his skin itching with the insects of loathing and he lifted his son high on his shoulder away from their touching, prying hands.

Tanase was unperturbed, for this fantastic throng had once been her own retinue, and she stood expressionless as one of the horrible witches crawled to her and slobbered and frothed over her bare feet.