The Angels Weep b-3 Read online

  "All men must work," the sergeant translated, "it is the law of the white men." "Tell him," Gandang retorted, "that it is not the way of Matabele. The amadoda see no dignity nor great virtue in digging in the dirt. That is for women and amahoU." "The and una-says that his men will not work," the sergeant translated maliciously, and Mungo St. John could endure no more of it. He took a swift pace forward and slashed the riding whip into the and una face.

  Gandang blinked, but he neither flinched nor raised his hand to touch the shining tumescent welt that rose swiftly across his cheek.

  He made no effort to staunch the thin trickle of blood from his crushed lip that snaked down his chin, but he let it drip onto his naked chest.

  "My hands are empty now, white man," he said, in a whisper that was more penetrating than a bellow, "but they will not always be so. "And he turned towards his hut.

  "Gandang," Mungo St. John shouted after him. "Your men will work if I have to hunt them down and chain them like animals." The two girls followed the path at a smooth swinging trot that did not disturb the balance of the large bundles they carried upon their heads. In the bundles there were special gifts for their men, salt and stamped corn, snuff and beads and lengths of trade calico for loincloths that they had wheedled out of Nomusa's store at Khami Mission. They were both in high spirits, for they had passed out of the swathe of destruction left by the locust swarms, and the acacia forests were a golden yellow haze of spring bloom murmurous with bees.

  Ahead of them rose the first pearly granite domes, and amongst them they would find the men, so they called gaily to each other, silly girlish banter, and their laughter was sweet as the tinkle of bells.

  It carried far ahead of them. They skirted the base of a tall cliff, and without pausing to rest started up the natural steps of grey stone.

  It led them upwards into a steep ravine which would eventually take them to the summit.

  Imbali was leading, her round hard haunches swaying under the short skirt as she skipped over the uneven footing, and Ruth who was every bit as eager followed her closely into the angle where the path turned sharply between two huge round boulders that had rolled down from above.

  Imbali stopped so abruptly that Ruth almost ran into her, and then she hissed with alarm.

  A man stood in the centre of the path. Although he was unmistakably a Matabele, the girls had never seen him before. The stranger wore a blue shirt, and on his upper arm sparkled a round brass disc. In his hand he carried a rifle. Quickly Ruth glanced behind her and hissed again. Another armed man had stepped out from the shaded angle of the boulder and cut off their retreat. He was smiling, but there was nothing in that smile to reassure the girls. They lowered the bundles from their heads and shrank closer to each other.

  "Where are you going, pretty little kittens?" asked the smiling kanka. "Are you going to search for a tomcat?" Neither of the girls answered. They stared at him with big frightened eyes. , "We will go with you." The smiling kanka was so broad across the chest, his legs so muscular, that he appeared to be deformed. His teeth were very white and big as those of a horse, but the smile never reached his eyes. His eyes were small and cold and dead-looking.

  "Lift your bundles, kittens, and lead us to the cats." Ruth shook her head. "We go only to search for medicine roots, we do not understand what you want of us." The kanka came closer. His thick legs were bowed, and they gave him a peculiar rolling gait. Suddenly he kicked over Ruth's bundle, and it burst open.

  "Ah!" he smiled coldly. "Why do you carry such gifts, if you go to search for mud?" Ruth dropped to her knees, and scrabbled amongst the rocks to retrieve the spilled corn and scattered beads. The kanka dropped -his hand onto her back and stroked her lustrous black skin.

  "Purr, little kitten," he grinned, and Ruth froze, crouched at his feet with her hands filled with spilled grain.

  The kanka ran his fingers lightly up and placed his hand upon the nape of her neck. His hand was huge, the knuckles enlarged, the fingers thick and powerful. Ruth began to tremble as the fingers encircled her neck.

  The kanka looked up at his companion, who still guarded the pathway, and the two of them exchanged a glance. Imbali saw and understood.

  "She is a bride," she whispered. "Her husband is the nephew of Gandang. Take care, kanka." The man ignored her. He lifted Ruth to her feet by the neck, and twisted her face towards him.

  "Take us to where the men are hiding." Ruth stared at him silently for a second, and then suddenly and explosively she spat into his face.

  The frothy spittle spattered his cheeks and dripped from his chin.

  Kanka!" she hissed. "Traitor jackal!" The man never stopped smiling. "That is what I wanted you to do," he told her, and hooked his finger into the string of her skirt and snapped it. The skirt fell around her ankles.

  He held her by the scruff and she struggled and covered her groin with both hands. The kanka looked at her naked body and his breathing changed.

  "Watch the other," he told his companion and tossed his Winchester rifle to him. The second constable caught it by the stock and prodded Imbali with the barrel until she backed up against the high granite bolder.

  "Our time will come very soon," he assured her, and turned his head to watch the other couple, at the same time holding Imbali pinned against the rock.

  The kanka dragged Ruth off the path, but for only a few paces, and the scrub that screened them was thin and leafless.

  "My man will kill you," cried Ruth. They could hear everything on the path, even the sound of the kanka's ragged breathing.

  "Then give me good value, if I must pay with my life," he chuckled, and then gasped with pain. "So kitten, you have sharp claws." And there was the clap of a blow on soft flesh, the sound of struggling, the bushes heaved and loose pebbles rolled away down the slope.

  The constable guarding Imbali strained for a glimpse of what was happening. His lips were open and he licked them. He could make out blurred movement through the leafless branches, and then there was the sound of a body falling heavily to earth and the breath being driven violently from Ruth's lungs by a crushing weight.

  "Hold still, kitten," the kanka panted. "You make me angry. Lie still," and abruptly Ruth screamed. It was the shrill ringing cry of an animal in mortal agony, repeated again and again, and the kanka grunted. "Yes. There, yes, and then snuffed like a boar at the trough, and there was a soft rhythmic slapping sound, and Ruth kept screaming.

  The man guarding Imbali propped the spare rifle against the boulder and stepped off the path, and with the barrel of his own Winchester parted the branches and stared. His face seemed to swell and darken with passion, his whole attention concentrated on what he was watching.

  With the second constable's attention so distracted, Imbali sidled along the granite, and then paused for an instant to gather herself before darting away. She had reached the angle of the pathway before the man turned and saw her.

  "Come back!" he shouted.

  "What is it?" the -kanka demanded from behind the bushes in a thick tortured voice.

  "The other one, she is running." "Stop her," the kanka bellowed, and his companion ran to the corner, Imbali was fifty paces down the hillside, flying like a gazelle over the rough ground, driven by her terror. The man thumbed back the hammer of his Winchester, flung the butt to his shoulder and fired wildly, without aiming. It was a fluke shot. It caught the girl in the small of the back and the big soft lead slug tore out through her belly. She collapsed and rolled down the steep pathway, her limbs tumbling about loosely.

  The constable lowered the rifle. His expression was shocked and unbelieving. Slowly, hesitantly, he went down to where the girl lay.

  She was on her back. Her eyes were open, and the exit wound in her flat young stomach gaped hideously, her torn entrails bulged from it.

  The girl's eyes switched to his face, the terror in them flared up for an instant, and then slowly faded into utter blankness.

  "She is dead." The kanka had left Rut
h, and come down the path.

  He had left his apron in the bushes. His blue shirt, tails flapped around his bare legs.

  Both of them stared down at the dead girl.

  "I did not mean it," said the kanka with the hot rifle in his hands.

  "We cannot let the other one go back to tell what has happened," his companion replied, and turned back up the pathway. As he passed, he picked up his own rifle from where it leaned against the rock. He stepped off the path, behind the thin screen of bushes.

  The other man was still staring into Imbali's blank eyes when the second shot rang out. He flinched to the crack of it, and lifted his head. As the echoes lapped away amongst the granite cliffs, the kanka stepped back onto the path. He ejected the spent cartridge case from the breech and it pinged against the rock.

  "Now we must find a story for One-Bright-Eye, and for the indunas," he said quietly, and strapped the fur apron back around his thick waist.

  They brought the two girls back to Gandang's kraal on the back of the police sergeant's grey horse. Their legs dangled down one side and their arms down the other. They had wrapped a grey blanket around their naked bodies, as though ashamed of the wounds upon them, but the blood had soaked through and dried black upon it, and the big metallic green flies swarmed joyously upon the stains.

  In the centre of the kraal, the sergeant gestured to the kanka who led the grey, and he turned back and cut the line that secured the girl's ankles. The corpses were immediately unbalanced and slid head-first to the swept bare earth. They fell without dignity in an untidy tumble of bare limbs, like game brought in from the hunting veld for skinning and dressing out.

  The women had been silent until then, but now they began the haunting ululation of mourning, and one of them scooped a handful of dust and poured it over her own head. The others followed her example, and their cries brought out the gooseflesh down the arms of the sergeant, though his expression remained neutral and his voice level as he spoke to Gandang.

  "You have brought this sadness on your people, old man. If you had obeyed the wishes of Lodzi and sent in your young men, as is your duty, these women would have lived to bear sons." "What crime did they commit?" Gandang asked, and watched his senior wife come forward to kneel beside the bloody dust-smeared bodies.

  "They tried to kill two of my police." "Haul" Gandang expressed his scornful disbelief, and the sergeant's voice rasped with anger for the first time. " "My men caught them and forced them to lead them to where the amadoda are hiding. At last night's camp, when my men were asleep, they would have thrust sharpened sticks into their ear holes to the brain, but my men sleep lightly, and when they awoke, the women ran into the night and my men had to stop them." For a long moment Gandang stared at the sergeant, and his eyes were so terrible that Ezra turned away to watch the senior wife as she knelt beside one of the girls. Juba closed the slack jaws, and then gently wiped the congealed blood from Ruth's lips and nostrils.

  "Yes" Gandang advised Ezra. "Look well, white man's jackal, remember this thing for all the days that are left to you. "Dare you threaten me, old man?" the sergeant blustered. "All men must die," Gandang shrugged, "but some die sooner and more painfully than others."

  And Gandang turned and walked back to his hut.

  Gandang sat alone by the small smoky fire in his hut. Neither the broiled beef nor white maize cakes in Gthe platter at his side had been touched. He stared into the flames, and listened to the wailing of the women and the beat of the drums.

  He knew that Juba would come to tell him when the girls" bodies had been bathed and wrapped in the green skin of the freshly slaughtered ox. As soon as it was light, it would be his duty to supervise the digging of the grave in the centre of the cattle kraal, so he was not surprised when there was a soft scratching at the doorway and he called softly to Juba to enter.

  She came to kneel at his side. "All is ready for the morning, my husband." He nodded, and they were silent for a while, and then Juba said, "I wish to sing the Christian song that Nomusa has taught me when the girls are put into the earth." He inclined his head in acquiescence, and she went on.

  "I wish also that you would dig their graves in the forest so that I may place crosses over them." "If that is the way of your new god," he agreed again, and now he rose and crossed to his sleeping-mat in the far corner.

  "Nkosi," Juba remained kneeling. "Lord, there is something else." "what is it?" He looked back at her. His beloved features remote and cold.

  "I, and my women, will carry the steel as you bid me," she whispered. "I made an oath with my finger in the wound in Ruth's flesh. I will carry the assegais to the amadoda." He did not smile, but the coldness went out of his eyes, and he held out one hand to her.

  Juba rose and went to him, and he took her hand and led her to the sleeping-mat.

  Bazo came down out of the hills three days after the girls had been placed in the earth, under the bare Bspreading branches of a giant mimosa at a place which overlooked the river. There were two young men with him, and the three of them went directly to the graves with Juba guiding them. After a while, Bazo left the two young bridegrooms to mourn their women and he went back to where his father waited for him under the fig tree.

  After he had made his dutiful greetings, they drank from the same beer pot passing it back and forth between them in silence, and when it was empty Gandang sighed.

  "It is a terrible thing." Bazo looked up at him sharply.

  "Rejoice, my father. Thank the spirits of your ancestors," he said.

  "For they have given us a greater bargain than we could ever have wished for." "I do not understand this." Gandang stared at his son.

  "For two lives lives of no importance, lives that would have been spent in vain and empty-headed frivolity for this insignificant price, we have kindled a fire in the belly of the nation. We have steeled even the weakest and most cowardly of our amadoda. Now when the time comes, we know that there will be no hesitating. Rejoice, MY father, at the gift we have been given." "You have become a ruthless man," Gandang whispered at last.

  "I am proud that you should find me so," Bazo replied. "And if I am not ruthless enough for the work, then my son or his son, in their time, will be." "You do not trust the oracle of the Umlimo?" Gandang demanded. "She has promised us success." "No, my father." Bazo shook his head. "Think carefully on her words. She has told us only to make the attempt. She promised us nothing. It is with us alone to succeed or fail. That is why we must be hard and relentless, trusting nobody, looking for any advantage, and using it to the full." Gandang thought about that for a while, then sighed again.

  "It was not like this before." Nor will it ever be again. It has changed, Babo, and we must change with it." "Tell me what else there is to be done," Gandang invited. "What way can I help to bring success?"

  "You must order the young men to come down out of the hills and to go in to work as the white men are bidding." Gandang considered the question without speaking. "From now until the hour, we must become fleas. We must live under the white men's cloak, so close to the skin that he does not see us, so close that he forgets we are there waiting to sting." Gandang nodded at the sense of it, but there was a fathomless regret in his eyes. "I liked it better when we formed the bull, with the horns outflung to surround the enemy and the veterans massed in the centre to crush them. I loved the closing in when we went in singing the praise song of the regiment, when we made our killing in the sunlight with our plumes flying." "Never again, Babo," Bazo told him. "Never again will it be like that. In the future we will wait in the grass like the coiled puff-adder. We may have to wait a year or ten, a lifetime or more perhaps we may never see it, my father. Perhaps it will be our children's children who strike from the shadows with other weapons than the silver steel that you and I love so well, but it. is you and I that will open the road for them to follow, the road back to greatness." Gandang nodded, and there was a new light in his eyes, like the first glow of the dawn. "You see very clearly, Bazo. You
know them so well, and you are right. The white man is strong in every way except patience. He wants it all to happen today.