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

After he had reviewed the might of his nation, Mzilikazi took the little ceremonial spear of his kingship, and he poised before his impis and then hurled the toy-like weapon towards the banks of the Gariep river on which the white men had outspanned their wagons.

They took them in the hour before dawn, at the time of the horns, when the horns of the cattle can first be seen against the lightening sky. The front ranks of racing black warriors received the first volley of the long muzzle-loading guns, absorbing it as though it were a handful of pebbles thrown into a stormy black sea.

Then they stabbed the bearded men as they worked frantically with powderhom and ramrod. They stabbed the white women as they ran from the wagons in their rughtdresses, trying to carry the second gun to their men.

They snatched the infants from their cradles on the wagonbed, and dashed out their brains against the tall steel-shod wheels of the wagons.

Oh, it was a rare feast that they set for Mzilikazi's chickens, the grotesque naked-headed vultures. They believed it was an ending, but it was only a beginning, for the Matabele were about to learn of the persistence and the dour courage of these strange pale people.

The next wave of white men came out of the south, and when they found the abandoned wagons and the jackal-chewed bones on the banks of the Gariep, theirs was a fury such as the Matabele had never encountered in all their wars.

So the buni met the impis on the open ground, refusing to be drawn into the ravines and thorn scrub. They came in pitifully small squadrons on shaggy ponies to dismount and discharge their volleys in a thunder of blue powder smoke. Then they went up into the saddle to wheel away from under the wall of charging rawhide shields and reload and circle back to let loose the thunder again into the mass of half-naked bodies glistening with oil and sweat.

The buni built fortresses on the open plain, fortresses with their wagons" bodies which they lashed wheel to wheel; and they let the impis come to die upon the wooden walls of the fortress, while their womenfolk stood close behind them to take the gun while the barrel was still hot and pass up the second gun, charged and primed.

Then when the impis drew back, mauled and shaken, the wagons uncoiled from their circle, like a slow but deadly puffadder, and crawled forward towards the kraal of Mzilikazi. And the dreadful horsemen galloped ahead of them, firing and circling, firing and circling.

Sadly Mzilikazi counted his dead and the price was too high, the red mud through which the iron-shod wheels churned was puddled with the blood of Zanzi, the blood of Heaven.

So he called his nation, and the herd boys brought in the herds, and the women rolled the sleeping-mats, and the little girls balanced the clay cooking-pots upon their heads, and Mzilikazi put fire into his kraals and led the Matabele nation away. A vast throng of people and animals were guarded by the depleted impis, while the white men on their sturdy ponies drove them and pointed them the way the sheepdog works the flock.

Mzilikazi led them northwards until they crossed the great river into a new land.

"Now the white birds are gathering again," Kamuza told the young men about the watch fire. "Each day they come up the road to Thabas Indunas, and they bring their dry gifts and the little green bottles of madness.

Their words are sweet as honey on the tongue, but they catch in the throat of those who try to swallow them as though they were the green bile of the crocodile."

"What is it they seek from the king?" Bazo asked the question for all those who listened, and Kamuza shrugged.

"This one asks for the right to hunt elephant and take the teeth, this one asks for the young girls to be sent to his wagon, another wants to tell the nation of a strange white god that has three heads, another wishes to dig a hole and look for the yellow iron, yet another wishes to buy cattle. One says he wants only this, and another only that, but they want it all. These people are consumed by a hunger that can never be appeased, they burn with a thirst that can never be assuaged. They want thing they see, and even that is never enough for them. They take the very earth, but that is not enough, so they tear it open like a man tearing a child from the mother's womb. They take the rivers, and that is not enough, so they build walls across them and turn them into lakes. They ride after the elephant herds and shoot them down, not just one or two, not just the big bulls, but all of them, the breeding cows and the calves with ivory no longer than your finger. Everything they see they take; and they see everything, for they are always moving and searching and looking."

"Lobengula must eat them up,"Bazo said. "He must eat them up as Mzilikazi his father would have eaten them."

"Hau!"Kamuza smiled his thin twisted smile. "Such wisdom from my brother. He recalls how Mzilikazi ate the white men on the banks of the Gariep, and lost a land. Listen to Bazo, my children. He counsels the King Lobengula to throw the war spear and loose his impis as Cetewayo the King of Zulu did at the Hill of the Little Hand. How many Englishmen did Cetewayo slay? There was no counting, for their red jackets lay one upon the other like the snows of the Dragon Mountains when the sunset turns them to fire, and their blood fed the land so that the grass still grows greener and thicker and sweeter upon the slopes of the Little Hand to this day. Oh a fine killing, my children, a great and beautiful stabbing , and afterwards Cetewayo paid for it with the spear of his kingship. He paid for it with his royal herds, he paid for it with the liver and heart of his young men, with the grassy hills of Zululand. For after the avengers had made the great slaughter at Ulundi they took it all, and they placed chains of iron upon Cetewayo's wrists and ankles and they chained his indunas and his war captains and led them away. Now Bazo, the wise, would have you know what a good bargain King Cetewayo made, and he urges Lobengula to make the same bargain with these white men."

Bazo's expression remained grave and dignified while Kamuza chided and mocked him but he twisted the snuff-horn between his fingers and once he glanced to the dark corner of the thatched hut where the long war shields and the broad assegai were stacked.

But when Kamuza finished, Bazo shook his head. "No one here dares counsel the king; we are his dogs only.

No one here doubts the might and resolve of the white men, we who live each day with their strange and wonderful ways. All we ask is this: what is the king's word?

Tell us what Lobengula wishes, for to hear is to obey."

Kamusa nodded. "Hear then the king's voice, for the king has travelled with all his senior indunas, Babiaan and Somabula and Gandang, all the indunas of the house of Kurnalo, they have gone into the hills of "Matopos to the place of the Umlimo A superstitious tremor shook the group, a little shiver as though the name of the wizard of the Matopos had crawled upon their skins like the sickle-winged tsetse fly.

"The Umlimo has given the oracle," Kamuza told them, and then was silent, the pause theatrical, to pique their attention, to dramatize the effect of his next words.

"On the first day the Umlimo repeated the ancient prophecy, the words that have come down from the time of Monomatapa. On the first day the Umlimo spoke thus: "The. stone falcons will fly afar. There shall be no peace in the kingdoms of the Marnbos or the Monornatapas until they return. For the white eagle will war with the black bull until the stone falcons return to roost.

They had all of them heard the prophecy before, but now it had a new and sinister impact.