Men of Men - Smith Wilbur (книги бесплатно без txt) 📗

"The birds, Henshaw. The stone birds."

"I do not know what you speak of," Ralph challenged angrily, pushing himself away from the tree trunk and staring arrogantly at Bazo.

"You know, Henshaw. You know about the birds, for we have spoken about them many times. You know also the king's warning that to despoil the ancient places is death to any man, for I myself have told you of it., Still Ralph glared his defiance.

"Your spoor led straight to the burial place of the kings and straight away from it, and the birds are gone. Where are they, Henshaw?"

A moment longer Ralph continued his show, and then he shrugged and smiled and sank back against the tree.

"They are gone, Bazo, flown afar where you cannot follow them. it was the prophecy of the Umlimo, beyond the powers of mortal men to prevent."

At the mention of the prophetess, a shadow of sorrow passed over Bazo's face.

"Yes, it was part of the prophecy," he agreed. "And now it is time to carry out the orders of the king." He stood up and addressed the squatting ranks of Matabele.

"All of you heard the king's word," he said. "What must be done, must be done in secret; it must be done by me alone, and no other may witness it, nor speak of it after, even in a whisper, on pain of slow and lingering death.

You have all heard the king's word. "We have heard the king's word," they agreed in deep sonorous chorus.

"Go!" Bazo commanded. "Wait for me at great Zimbabwe, and wipe from your eyes the things you have seen this day."

His warriors sprang up and saluted him. They shouldered the body of the man that Ralph had slain, using their shields as a litter, and they bore him away.

The double column of running warriors snaked away across the glade and into the forest.

Bazo watched them go, leaning on his own shield, and then he turned back to Ralph, heavily and unwillingly.

"i am the king's man," he said softly. "Strictly charged with your death. What I have to do today will leave a deep scar in my heart for all my life, though I live to be an old greyhead. The memory of this thing will keep me from sleep, and turn the food sour and heavy in my belly." Slowly he paced to where Ralph lay and stood over him. "I will never forget this deed, Henshaw, though I will never be able to speak of it, not to my father or my favourite wife. I must Jock it in the darkness of my soul."

"If you must do it, then do it swiftly," Ralph challenged him, trying to show no fear, trying to keep his gaze steady.

"Yes," Bazo nodded, and shifted his grip on the shaft of the spear.

"Intercede for me with your God, Henshaw," he said, and struck.

Ralph cried out at the stinging burn of razor steel, and his blood burst from the wound and spilled into the dry earth.

Bazo dropped to his knee beside him and scooped up [ the blood in his cupped hands. He splashed it on his arms and chest. He smeared it on the haft and blade of his spear, until the bright steel was dulled.

Then Bazo leapt up and ripped a strip of bark from the mopani tree. He plucked a bunch of green leaves and came back to Ralph's side. He held together the lips of the deep wound in Ralph's forearm, then he placed the bunch of leaves over it and bound it up with the strip of bark.

The bleeding slowed and stopped, and Bazo hacked the rawhide bonds from Ralph's ankles and wrists and stood back.

He gestured at his own blood-sullied arms and weapon.

"Who, seeing me thus, would believe that I am a traitor to my king?" he asked softly. "Yet the love of a brother is stronger than the duty to a king."

Ralph dragged himself upright against the mopani trunk, holding his wounded arm against his chest and staring at the young induna.

"Go in peace, Henshaw," whispered Bazo. "But pray to your God for me, for I have betrayed my king and forfeited my honour."

Then Bazo whirled and ran back across the glade of yellow grass. When he reached the trees on the far side he neither paused nor looked back, but plunged into them with a kind of reckless despair.

Ten days later, with his boots scuffed through the uppers and the legs of his breeches ripped to tatters by arrow grass and thorn, with his inflamed and infected left arm strapped to his chest by a sling of bark, his face gaunt with starvation and his body bony and wasted, Ralph staggered into the circle of wagons that were outspanned beside the Bushman wells, and Isazi shouted for Umfaan and ran to catch Ralph before he fell.

"Isazi," Ralph croaked, "the birds, the stone birds?"

"I have them safe, Nkosi."

Ralph grinned wickedly, so that his dried lips cracked and his bloodshot eyes slitted.

"By your own boast, Isazi, you are a wise man. Now I tell you also, that you are beautiful to behold, as beautiful as a falcon in flight," Ralph told him, and then reeled so that he had to catch his balance with an arm around the little Zulu's shoulders.

Lobengula sat cross-legged on his sleeping-mat, alone in his great hut. Before him was a gourd of clear spring water. He stared into it fixedly.

Long ago, when he had lived in the cave of the Matopos with Saala, the white girl, the mad old witchdoctor had instructed him in the art of the gourd. Very occasionally, after many hours" staring into the limpid water, and after the utmost exercise of his concentration and will, he had been able to see snatches of the future, faces and events, but even then they had been murky and unclear, and soon after he left the Matopos this small gift had gone from him. Sometimes still, in desperation, he resorted to the gourd, although, as it was this night, nothing moved or roiled darkly beneath the still surface of the spring water, and his concentration slipping away. Tonight he kept toying with the words of the Umlimo.

Always the oracle spoke obliquely, always her counsel was shrouded in imagery and riddles. Often it was repetitive, on at least five previous visits to the cavern the witch had spoken of "the stars shining on the hills" and the sun that burns at midnight". No matter how doggedly Lobengula and his senior indunas had picked at the words, and tried to unravel the meaning that was tied up in them, they had found no answer.

Now Lobengula set aside the fruitless gourd, and lay back upon his kaross to consider the third prophecy, made in the croaking raven's voice from the cliff above the cavern.

"Heed the wisdom of the vixen before that of the dogfox."

He took each word and weighed it separately, then he considered the whole, and twisted it and studied it from every angle.

In the dawn there remained only one possible solution that had survived the night. For once the oracle seemed to have given advice that was unequivocal. It was only for him to decide which female was the "vixen" of the oracle.

He considered each of his senior wives, and there was not one of them that had any interest in anything beyond the begetting and suckling of infants, or the baubles and ribbons that the traders brought to Gubulawayo.

Ningi, his full-blooded sister, he loved still as his one link with the mother he barely remembered. Yet now when Ningi was sober she was elephantine and slowwitted, bad-tempered and cruel. When she was filled with the traders" champagne and cognac, she was giggling and silly to begin with, and then incontinent and comatose at the end. He had spoken with her for an hour and more the previous day. Little that she had said was sensible and nothing she had said could possibly bear on the terrible pressures of Lodzi and his emissaries.

So at last Lobengula returned to what he had known all along must be the key to the riddle of the Umlimo.