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

They worked swiftly, for they had done this before, and under their fingers Lobengula was transformed. He became a creature of mythology: half man, half glittering scaled fish.

The diamonds caught the beam of the fire, and sent it spinning against the thatched walls and high roof, darting insects of golden light that flashed in the eyes of the watchers and dazzled them so that they grunted with amazement, and their voices went up like a choir in praise of their king.

At last the work was done and the wives crept away and left Lobengula lying on the thick soft furs, covered from throat to wrist to ankle in a silver burning coat of scail, each link of which was a priceless diamond; and as the king's chest and belly rose and subsided to the tide of his breathing, so this immense treasure burned and flamed.

"Indunas of Matabele, Princes of Kurnalo, hail your King."

"Bayete! Bayete!" The royal salute burst from their throats. "Bayete!" Then the silence was complete but expectant, for it had become the king's custom that after this ritual display of the contents of the nation's treasury, he would dispense honours and rewards.

"Bazo," Lobengula's voice was sonorous. "Stand forward!"

The young man rose from his lowly position in the rear-most rank.

"Bayete, Nkosi,"

"Bazo, you have pleased me. I grant you a boon. What shall it be. Speak!"

"i crave only that the king should know the depth of my duty and love for him. Set me a task, I pray you, and if it should be fierce and hard and bloody, my heart and my mouth will sing the king's praises for ever."

On Chaka's royal buttocks, your pup is hungry for glory."

Lobengula looked to Gandang in the front rank of indunas. "And he shames all those who ask for trinkets and cattle and women., He thought a moment, and then chuckled.

"In the direction of the sunrise, two days" march beyond the forests of Somabula, on a high hilltop lives a Mashona dog who deems himself such a great magician and rainmaker that he is beyond the king's arm. His name is Pemba." And there was a hiss of indrawn breath from the squatting ranks of elders. Three times in the past season the king had sent impis to Pemba's hilltop, and three times they had returned empty-handed. The name Pemba mocked them all. "Take fifty men from your old regiment, Little Axe, and fetch Pemba's head so that I can see his insolent smile with my own eyes."

"Bayete!" Bazo's joy carried him in a single bound over the grey heads of the indunas. He landed lightly in the space before the fire and he whirled into the giya, the challenge dance: "Thus will I stab the traitor dog and thus will I rip out the bellies of his sons The indunas grinned and nodded indulgently, but their smiles were tinged with regret for the fury and passion of their youth which had long ago cooled in their own breasts.

Lobengula. sat on the bench of his wagon. It was a big twenty-four-foot four-wheeler built in Cape Town from good English oak, but it still showed all the marks of punishment from its long trek up from the south.

it had not moved in many years, so the grass had grown up through the wheel spokes and around the axle shafts. The canvas of the tent was bleached bone white and crusted with the dung of the hens which roosted on the hoops of the tent framework, but the canvas protected Lobengula from the sun and the seat on the box elevated his head above the level of his courtiers and guards and children and wives and supplicants who crowded the enclosed stockade.

The wagon was Lobengula's throne, and the open stockade his audience chamber. Because there would be white men and women in his audience, he had donned his European finery for this occasion. The long coat encrusted with gold lace had once belonged to a Portuguese diplomat. The lace was tarnished and one epaulette was missing, and the front could not be buttoned over the King's noble belly not by twelve inches, and the sleeves reached only halfway down his forearms. With the toy spear of kingship, the shaft of red wild mahogany and the blade of brightest silver, in his right hand, he used it to summon a boy from out of the crush.

The child was shaking with terror, and his voice so tremulous that Lobengula had to lean forward to hear him.

"i waited until the leopard entered the goat house; then I crept up and closed the door and I barricaded it with stones."

"How did you kill the beast?" Lobengula demanded.

"i stabbed him through the chinks in the wall with my father's assegai." and The boy crept forward and laid the lustrous gold dappled skin at Lobengula's feet.

"Take your choice of three cows from my black royal herds, little one, and drive them to your father's kraal and tell him that the king has given you a praise name. From this day you will be known as "The one who stares into the eyes of the leopard"."

The boy's voice cracked in an adolescent squeak as he backed away gabbling the praises.

Next was a Hollander, a big arrogant white man with a querulous voice.

"I have waited three weeks for the king to decide This was translated for Lobengula, and he mused aloud.

"See how red the man's face becomes when he is angry, like the wattles on the head of the black vulture. Tell him that the king does not count days, perhaps he will have to wait as long again, who knows?"

And he dismissed him with a flirt of the spear.

He took a pull from the bottle of champagne that stood on the wagon seat beside him. The wine fizzed and spilled onto the front of his gold-frogged jacket. Then suddenly his face lit into a beatific smile, but his voice was carping and querulous.

"I sent for you yesterday, Nomusa, Girlchild of Mercy.

I am in great pain; why did you not come sooner?"

"An eagle flies, a cheetah runs, but I am limited to the pace of a mule, oh King," said Robyn Codrington, as she picked her way through the offal that littered the earthen floor of the stockade, and with the, fly switch in her hand cleared a path through the crowd towards the wagon, even dealing a stinging cut to one of the king's black-cloaked executioners.

"Out of my way, eater of human flesh," she told him primly. "Be gone, child stabber." And the man leaped aside nimbly and scowled after her.

"What is it, Lobengula?" she asked as she reached the wagon. "What ails you this time?"

"My feet are filled with burning coals., "Gout," Robyn said as she touched the grotesquely swollen appendages. "You drink too much beer, oh King, you drink too much brandy and champagne., She opened her bag.

"You would have me die of thirst. You are not well named, Nomusa; there is no pity in your heart."

"Nor yours, Lobengula," Robyn snapped. "They tell me you have sent another impi to murder the people of Pemba."

"He is only a Mashona," Lobengula chuckled. "Save your sympathy for a king whose stomach feels as though it is filled with sharp stones."

"Indigestion," Robyn scolded. "Gluttony killed your father, and it is killing you."

"Now you would starve me also. You want me to be a skinny little man of no consequence."

"A thin live one or a fat dead one," Robyn told him.

"Open your mouth."

Lobengula choked on the draught, and rolled his eyes theatrically.

"The pain is better than the taste of your medicine."

"i will leave you five of these pills. Eat one when your feet swell and the pain becomes fierce."

"Twenty," said Lobengula. "A box full. I, Lobengula, King of Matabele, command it. Leave me a box of these little white pills."