The Angels Weep Read online

  ‘Then where is the smoke coming from?’

  ‘That is what we are going to find out,’ Ralph replied, and before Harry could protest, he had started his horse, and was cantering across the plains of pale winter grass towards the high rampart of bare granite that blocked off the horizon.

  A Matabele warrior sat aloof from the men who swarmed about the earthen kilns. He sat in the meagre shade of a twisted cripple-wood tree. He was lean, so that the rack of his ribs showed through the covering of elastic muscle under his cloak. His skin was burned by the sun to the deep midnight black of carved ebony, and it was glossed with health, like the coat of a race-trained thoroughbred, blemished only by the old healed gunshot wounds on his chest and back.

  He wore a simple kilt and cloak of tanned leather, no feathers nor war rattles, no regimentals of fur nor plumes of marabou stork upon his bared head. He was unarmed, for the white men had made roaring bonfires of the long rawhide shields and carried away the broad silver assegais by the wagon-load; they had confiscated also the Martini-Henry rifles with which the Company had paid King Lobengula for the concession to all the mineral wealth beneath this land.

  On his head the warrior wore the headring of the induna; it was of gum and clay, woven permanently into his own hair and black and hard as iron. This badge of rank announced to the world that he had once been a councillor of Lobengula, the last king of the Matabele. The simple ring declared his royal bloodline, the Zanzi blood of the Kumalo tribe, running back pure and unbroken to old Zululand, a thousand miles and more away in the south.

  Mzilikazi had been this man’s grandfather; Mzilikazi who had defied the tyrant Chaka and led his people away towards the north. Mzilikazi, the little chief who had slaughtered a million souls on that terrible northward march, and in the process had become a mighty emperor, as powerful and cruel as Chaka had ever been. Mzilikazi, his grandfather, who had finally brought his nation to this rich and beautiful land, who had been the first to enter these magical hills and to listen to the myriad weird voices of the Umlimo, the Chosen One, the witch and oracle of the Matopos.

  Lobengula, son of Mzilikazi, who ruled the Matabele after the old king’s death, had been the young man’s blood uncle. It was Lobengula who had granted him the honours of the induna’s headring, and appointed him commander of one of the elite fighting impis. But now Lobengula was dead, and the young induna’s impi had been blown to nothing by the Maxim guns on the bank of the Shangani river, and the same Maxim guns had branded him with those deeply dimpled cicatrices upon his trunk.

  His name was Bazo, which means ‘the axe’, but more often now men spoke of him as ‘the Wanderer’. He had sat beneath the cripple-wood tree all that day, watching the ironsmiths perform their rites, for the birth of iron was a mystery to all but these adepts. The smiths were not Matabele, but were members of an older tribe, an ancient people whose origins were somehow interwoven with those haunted and ruined stone walls of Great Zimbabwe.

  Although the new white masters and their queen beyond the seas had decreed that the Matabele no longer own amaholi, slaves, yet these Rozwi ironsmiths were still the dogs of the Matabele, still performed their art at the behest of their warlike masters.

  The ten oldest and wisest of the Rozwi smiths had selected the ore from the quarry, deliberating over each fragment like vain women choosing ceramic beads from the trader’s stock. They had judged the iron ore for colour and weight, for the perfection of the metal it contained and for its purity from foreign matter, and then they had broken up the ore upon the rock anvils until each lump was the perfect size. While they worked with care and total preoccupation, some of their apprentices were cutting and burning the tree trunks in the charcoal pits, controlling the combustion with layers of earth and finally quenching it with clay pots of water. Meanwhile, yet another party of apprentices made the long journey to the limestone quarries and returned with the crushed catalyst in leather bags slung upon the backs of the baggage bullocks. When the master smiths had grudgingly approved the quality of charcoal and limestone, then the building of the rows of clay kilns could begin.

  Each kiln was shaped like the torso of a heavily pregnant woman, like a fat, domed belly, in which the layers of iron ore and charcoal and limestone would be packed. At the lower end of the kiln was the crotch guarded by symbolically truncated clay thighs between which was the narrow opening into which would be introduced the buckhorn nozzle of the leather bellows.

  When all was ready, the head smith chopped the head off the sacrificed rooster, and passed down the line of kilns, sprinkling them with hot blood while he chanted the first of the ancient incantations to the spirit of iron.

  Bazo watched with fascination, and a prickle of superstitious awe on his skin, as fire was introduced through the vaginal openings of the kilns, the magical moment of impregnation which was greeted with a joyous cry by the assembled smiths. Then the young apprentices pumped the leather bellows in a kind of religious ecstasy, singing the hymns which ensured the success of the smelting and set the rhythm for the work on the bellows. When each fell back exhausted, there was another to take his place and keep the steady blast of air driving deeply into the kiln.

  A faint haze of smoke hung over the workings; like sea fret on a still summer’s day, it rose to eddy slowly around the tall bald peaks of the hills. Now at last it was time to draw the smelting, and as the head smith freed the clay plug from the first kiln, a joyous shout of thanksgiving went up from the assembly at the bright glowing rush of the molten metal from the womb of the furnace.

  Bazo found himself trembling with excitement and wonder, as he had when his first son had been born in one of the caves in these self-same hills.

  ‘The birth of the blades,’ he whispered aloud, and in his imagination he could already hear the dinning of the hammers as they beat out the metal, and the sizzling hiss of the quenching that would set the temper of the edge and point of the broad stabbing spears.

  A touch on his shoulder startled him from his reverie, and he glanced up at the woman who stood over him, and then he smiled. She wore the leather skirt, decorated with beads, of the married woman, but there were no bangles nor bracelets on her smooth young limbs.

  Her body was straight and hard, her naked breasts symmetrical and perfectly proportioned. Although she had already suckled a fine son, they were not marred by stretch marks. Her belly was concave as a greyhound’s, while the skin was smooth and drum-tight. Her neck was long and graceful, her nose straight and narrow, her eyes slanted above the Egyptian arches of her cheekbones. Her features were those of a statuette from the tomb of some long-dead pharaoh.

  ‘Tanase,’ said Bazo, ‘another thousand blades.’ Then he saw her expression and broke off. ‘What is it?’ he asked with quick concern.

  ‘Riders,’ she said. ‘Two of them. White men coming from the southern forests, and coming swiftly.’

  Bazo rose in a single movement, quick as a leopard alarmed by the approach of the hunters. Only now his full height and the breadth of his shoulders were evident, for he towered a full head over the ironsmiths about him. He lifted the buckhorn whistle that hung on a thong about his neck and blew a single sharp blast. Immediately all the scurry and bustle amongst the kilns ceased and the master smith hurried to him.

  ‘How long to draw the rest of the smelting and break down the kilns?’ Bazo demanded.

  ‘Two days, oh Lord,’ answered the iron-worker, bobbing respectfully. His eyes were bloodshot from the smoke of the furnace, and the smoke seemed to have stained his cap of white woolly hair to dingy yellow.

  ‘You have until dawn—’

  ‘Lord!’

  ‘Work all night, but screen the fires from the plain.’ Bazo turned from him and strode up the steep incline to where twenty other men waited below the granite cap of the hill.

  Like Bazo, they wore only simple leather kilts, and were unarmed, but their bodies were tempered and fined down by war and the training for war, and there was the warrior’s
arrogance in their stance as they rose to acknowledge their induna and their eyes were bright and fierce. There was no doubt that these were Matabele, not amaholi dogs.

  ‘Follow!’ ordered Bazo, and led them at a trot along the lower contour of the hill. There was a narrow cave in the base of the cliff, and Bazo drew aside the hanging creepers that screened the mouth and stopped into the gloomy interior. The cave was only ten paces deep, and it ended abruptly in a scree of loose boulders.

  Bazo gestured and two of his men went up to the end wall of the cave and rolled aside the boulders. In the recess beyond there was the glint of polished metal like the scales of a slumbering reptile. As Bazo moved out of the entrance, the slanting rays of the setting sun struck deeply into the cave, lighting the secret arsenal. The assegais were stacked in bundles of ten and bound together with rawhide thongs.

  The two warriors lifted out a bundle, broke the thongs and swiftly passed the weapons down the line of men, until each was armed. Bazo hefted the stabbing spear. The shaft was of polished red heartwood of mukusi, the blood-wood tree. The blade was hand-forged, wide as Bazo’s palm and long as his forearm. He could have shaved the hair from the back of his hand with the honed edge.

  He had felt naked until that moment, but now, with the familiar weight and balance in his hand, he was a man again. He gestured to his men to roll the boulders back into place covering the cache of bright new blades, and then he led them back along the path. On the shoulder of the hill, Tanase waited for him on the ledge of rock which commanded a wide view across the grassy plains, and beyond them the blue forests dreamed softly in the evening light.

  ‘There,’ she pointed, and Bazo saw them instantly.

  Two horses, moving at an easy canter. They had reached the foot of the hills and were riding along them, scouting for an easy route. The riders peered up at the tangle of boulders and at the smooth pearly sheets of granite which offered no foothold.

  There were only two access trails to the valley of the ironsmiths, each of them narrow and steep, with necks which could be easily defended. Bazo turned and looked back. The smoke from the kilns was dissipating, there were only a few pale ribbons twisting along the grey granite cliffs. By morning there would be nothing to lead a curious traveller to the secret place, but there was still an hour of daylight, less perhaps, for the night comes with startling rapidity in Africa above the Limpopo river.

  ‘I must delay them until dark,’ Bazo said. ‘I must turn them before they find the path.’

  ‘If they will not be turned?’ Tanase asked softly, and in reply Bazo merely altered his grip on the broad assegai in his right hand, and then quickly drew Tanase back off the rocky ledge, for the horsemen had halted and one of them, the taller and broader man, was carefully sweeping the hillside with a pair of binoculars.

  ‘Where is my son?’ Bazo asked.

  ‘At the cave,’ Tanase replied.

  ‘You know what to do if—’ he did not have to go on, and Tanase nodded.

  ‘I know,’ she said softly, and Bazo turned from her and went bounding down the steep pathway with twenty armed amadoda at his back.

  At the narrow place which Bazo had marked, he stopped. He did not have to speak, but at a single gesture of his free hand his men slipped off the narrow trail and disappeared into the crevices and cracks of the gigantic boulders that stood tall on either hand. In seconds there was no sign of them, and Bazo broke off a branch from one of the dwarfed trees that grew in a rocky pocket, and he ran back, sweeping the trail of all sign that might alert a wary man to the ambush. Then he placed his assegai on a shoulder-high ledge beside the path and covered it with the green branch. It was within easy reach if he were forced to guide the white riders up the trail.

  ‘I will try to turn them, but if I cannot, wait until they reach this place,’ he called to the hidden warriors. ‘Then do it swiftly.’

  His men were spread out for two hundred paces along both sides of the trail, but they were concentrated here at the bend. A good ambush must have depth to it, so if a victim breaks through the first rank of attackers, there will be others waiting for him beyond. This was a good ambush: in bad ground on a steep narrow trail where a horse could not turn readily nor go ahead at full gallop. Bazo nodded to himself with satisfaction, then unarmed and shieldless he went springing down the trail towards the plain, agile as a klipspringer over the rough track.

  ‘It will be dark in half an hour,’ Harry Mellow called after Ralph. ‘We should find a place to camp.’

  ‘There must be a path,’ Ralph rode with one fist on his hip and the felt hat pushed back on his head, looking up the wild cliff.

  ‘What do you expect to find up there?’

  ‘I don’t know, and that’s the devil of it.’ Ralph grinned over his shoulder. He was unprepared and twisted off balance, so when his horse shied violently under him, he almost lost a stirrup and had to grab at the pommel of the saddle to prevent himself going over, but at the same time he yelled

  to Harry.

  ‘Cover me!’ and with his free hand Ralph tugged the Winchester rifle from its leather boot under his knee. His horse was rearing and skittering in a tight circle so he could not get the rifle up. He knew that he was blocking Harry’s line of fire, and that for those long seconds he was completely defenceless, and he swore helplessly, anticipating a rush of dark spearmen out of the broken rock and scrub at the foot of the cliff.

  Then he realized there was only one man, and that he was unarmed, and again he yelled at Harry, with even more urgency, for he had heard the clash of the breech block behind him as the American loaded and cocked.

  ‘Hold it! Don’t shoot!’

  The gelding reared again, but this time Ralph jerked it down and then stared at the tall black man who had stepped so silently and unexpectedly out of the crevice of a fractured granite block.

  ‘Who are you?’ he demanded, his voice rasping with the shock, which still screwed his guts into a ball and charged his veins with a quick rush of blood. ‘Damn you, I nearly shot you.’ Ralph caught himself, and this time repeated in fluent Sindebele, the Matabele language, ‘Who are you?’

  The tall man in the plain leather cloak inclined his head slightly, but his body remained absolutely still, the empty hands hanging at his side.

  ‘What manner of question is that,’ he asked gravely, ‘for one brother to ask another?’

  Ralph stared at him. Taking in the induna’s headring on his brow and the gaunt features, scored and riven by the crags and deep lines of some terrible suffering, a sorrow or an illness that must have transported this man to the frontiers of hell itself. It moved Ralph deeply to look upon that riven face, for there was something, the fierce dark eyes and the tone of the deep measured voice that was so familiar, and yet so altered as to be unrecognizable.

  ‘Henshaw,’ the man spoke again, using Ralph Ballan-tyne’s Matabele praise name. ‘Henshaw, the Hawk, do you not know me? Have these few short years changed us so?’

  Ralph shook his head in disbelief, and his voice was full of wonder. ‘Bazo, it is not you – surely, it is not you? Did you not after all die with your impi at Shangani?’ Ralph kicked both feet out of the stirrups and jumped to the ground. ‘Bazo. It is you!’ He ran to embrace the Matabele. ‘My brother, my black brother,’ he said, and there was the lift and lilt of pure joy in his voice.

  Bazo accepted the embrace quietly, his hands still hanging at his sides, and at last Ralph stood back and held him at arm’s length.

  ‘At Shangani, after the guns were still, I left the wagons and walked out across the open pan. Your men were there, the Moles-that-burrow-under-a-mountain.’ That was the name that King Lobengula himself had given to Bazo’s impi, Izimvukuzane Ezembintaba. ‘I knew them by their red shields, by the plumes of the marabou stork and the headbands of fur from the burrowing mole.’ These were the regimentals bestowed upon the impi by the old king, and Bazo’s eyes turned luminous with the agony of memory as Ralph went on. ‘Your men were there, Ba
zo, lying upon each other like the fallen leaves of the forest. I searched for you, rolling the dead men onto their backs to see their faces, but there were so many of them.’

  ‘So many,’ Bazo agreed, and only his eyes betrayed his emotion.

  ‘And there was so little time to look for you,’ Ralph explained quietly. ‘I could only search slowly, with care, for some of your men were fanisa file.’ It was an old Zulu trick to sham dead on the battlefield and wait for the enemy to come out to loot and count the kill. ‘I did not want an assegai between my shoulder-blades. Then the laager broke up and the wagons rolled on towards the king’s kraal. I had to leave.’

  ‘I was there,’ Bazo told him, and drew aside the leather cloak. Ralph stared at the dreadful scars, and then dropped his gaze, while Bazo covered his torso again. ‘I was lying amongst the dead men.’

  ‘And now?’ Ralph asked. ‘Now that it is all over, what are you doing here?’

  ‘What does a warrior do when the war is over, when the impis are broken and disarmed, and the king is dead?’ Bazo shrugged. ‘I am a hunter of wild honey now.’ He glanced up the cliff at where the last smoke wisps were blending into the darkening sky as the sun touched the tops of the western forest. ‘I was smoking a hive when I saw you coming.’

  ‘Ah!’ Ralph nodded. ‘It was that smoke that led us to you.’

  ‘Then it was fortunate smoke, my brother Henshaw.’

  ‘You still call me brother?’ Ralph marvelled gently. ‘When it might have been I who fired the bullets—’ He did not complete the sentence, but glanced down at Bazo’s chest.

  ‘No man can be held to account for what he does in the madness of battle,’ Bazo answered. ‘If I had reached the wagons that day,’ he shrugged, ‘you might be the one who carried the scars.’

  ‘Bazo,’ Ralph gestured to Harry to ride forward, ‘this is Harry Mellow, he is a man who understands the mystery of the earth, who can find the gold and the iron which we seek.’

  ‘Nkosi, I see you.’ Bazo greeted Harry gravely, calling him ‘Lord’ and not allowing his deep resentment to show for an instant. His king had died and his nation had been destroyed by the weird passion of the white men for that accursed yellow metal.