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

"Five," said Robyn firmly. "Or you will eat them all at one time, as you did before."

The king rocked with gargantuan laughter, and almost fell from the wagon seat.

"I think I will command you to leave those little white huts of yours at Khami, and come to live closer to me."

"I should not obey."

"That's why I do not command it," Lobengula agreed, with another shout of laughter.

"This kraal is a disgrace, the dirt, the flies-' "A few old bones and a little dog shit never killed a Matabele," the king told her, and then was serious and motioned her closer, dropping his voice-so that only she could hear.

"The Dutchman with the red face, you know he wishes to build a trade post at the ford of the Hunyani river "The man is a cheat. The goods he brings are shoddy, and he will deceive your people."

"A runner has brought this book." He handed the folded and wafered sheet to Robyn. "Read it for me."

"It is from Sir Francis Good. He wishes--! For almost an hour, whispering hoarsely so that no other could hear, Lobengula consulted Robyn on fifty different matters ranging from the British Commissioner's letter to the menstrual problems of his youngest wife. Then at last he said, "Your coming is like the first sweet rain at the end of the long dry. Is there aught I can do for your happiness?"

"You can let your people come to worship in my church."

This time the king's chuckle was rueful. "Nomusa, you are as persistent as the termites that gnaw away the poles of my hut." He frowned with thought and then smiled again. "Very well, I will let you take one of my people, as long as it is a woman, the wife of an induna of royal blood, and the mother of twelve sons. If you can find one of my people who meets all those conditions, you may take her and splash water on her and make your sign on her forehead; and she may sing songs to your three white gods if she so wishes."

This time Robyn had to answer his sly and mischievous grin. "You are a cruel man, Lobengula, and you eat and drink too much. But I love you."

"And I love you also, Nomusa."

"Then I will ask one more favour."

"Ask it,"he commanded.

"There is a lad, son of my brother "Henshaw."

"The king knows all."

"What of this boy?"

,"will the king listen to his petition?"

"Send him to me."

Even from where he stood Bazo could see that the grain bins were overflowing with corn that had been sundried still on the cob. There was enough to feed an army, he decided bitterly. There was no chance of starving them out.

The grain bins were cylindrical in shape, their walls of plaited green saplings plastered with clay and cow dung. They stood on stilts of mopani poles to allow the air to circulate below them, and to keep out bush rats and other vermin.

They were perched on the very edge of the precipice.

The dog has brought good rains to his own fields," murmured Zama, Bazo's lieutenant. "He is fat with corn.

Rain-doctor as he claims."

Perhaps he is "Water," Bazo mused, staring up the sheer cliff.

Beyond the grain bins he could make out. the thatched roofs of the tribal huts. "Can we drive them out with thirst?" he asked advice, for Zama had been a member of one of the previous abortive raids upon the stronghold. "The three other indunas tried that at first," Zama pointed out. "But then one of the Mashona. that they captured told them that there is a running spring from which they draw all the water they wish."

The sun was beyond the summit of the hill, so Bazo squinted his eyes against it. "There is lush green growth there He pointed to a narrow gulley that cleft the top of the cliff like an axe stroke but was choked with growth. "That would be it."

As if to confirm his words the tiny distant figure of a girl appeared suddenly out of the gulley. She was foreshortened by her height above them, and the ledge along which she climbed was not apparent from where they stood.

She had a calabash gourd balanced on her head, with green leaves stuffed into its mouth to stop the water splashing out of it as she moved.

She disappeared over the top of the cliff.

"So," grunted Bazo. "We must climb up to them., "It would be easier to fly," Zama grunted. "That rock would daunt a baboon, or a klipspringer."

The rock was pearly grey and marble smooth. There were streaks of lichen dashed across it, green and blue and red, like dry paint on an artist's palette.

"Come," Bazo ordered, and they began a slow measured circuit of the hill, and as they went so the armed guards on the clifftop above kept pace with them, watching every move they made, and if they approached too close to the foot of the cliff, a hail of rocks fell upon them, striking sparks from the scree slope and caroming viciously past their heads, forcing them to shelve their dignity as they retired in haste.

"It is always the Mashona. way," Zama grumbled, "Stones instead of spears."

In places the cliff was riven by vertical cracks, yet none of these reached from base to crest, none of them offered a route to the summit. Bazo looked for a place that had been polished by the paws of wild baboon or marked by the hooves of the tiny little chamois-like klipspringer which might reveal a way up the rock face, but there was none. The cliff girded the entire hill, and transformed it into a fortress.

"There!"Zama pointed to a tiny irregularity in the face.

"That is where two warriors of the swimmers" impi tried to force a road to the top. They climbed as far as that little bush." It grew in a crack in the face a hundred feet from the base of the cliff. "And there the ledge narrowed and gave out. They could not go on, nor could they return. They hung there two days and three nights until their strength failed and they fell, one after the other, to be crushed like beetles on the rocks here where we stand."

They went on, and as the sun was setting they came back to where they had started, the bivouac below the ladderway. Pemba's people had built a ladder of long straight mopani poles, bound together with bark rope, and they had used it to span the lowest point in the cliff a place where a deep gully descended from the summit to within fifty feet of the surrounding plain. Like a drawbridge, the massive ladder was cunningly counter-weighted with round ironstone boulders, so that it had only to be drawn up on its ropes, as it was now, and the mountain stronghold was impregnable.

When the sun set, Bazo was still leaning on his long shield staring up the cliff, seemingly oblivious to the faint shouted insults of the Mashona that just reached him in the evening silence.

"Pustules on Lobengula's fat buttocks."

"Puppies of the rabid dog Lobengula."

"Dried turds of the spavined Matabele elephant."

only when it was too dark to make out the top of the cliff did Bazo turn away, but even then he sat late beside the watch-fire, and rolled into his kaross only after the rise of the big white star over the top of the kopje.

Even then his sleep was troubled with dreams. He dreamed of water, of streams and lakes and waterfalls.

He woke again before light and checked that his sentries were alert before he slipped from the camp and under cover of the darkness crept up to the base of the cliff, at the point directly below the gulley choked with green growth where they had seen the girl carry water the day before.

Bazo heard the liquid chuckling, and his spirits soared.