He smiled down at her fondly, nodding comfortably at her protestations of duty and devotion. Then as an extraordinary mark of his feeling for her, he lifted her with his own hand and seated her on the mat which one of his junior wives spread before him. He waited while she refreshed herself from the big clay beer pot that another wife knelt to hand her.
Then he waved the women and children away, and alone at last the two of them leaned their heads together and talked like the beloved companions that they were. "Nomusa is well?" Gandang asked. He did not share Juba's deep love for the woman doctor at Khami Mission, in fact he viewed with deep suspicion this alien religion that his senior wife had adopted. It was Gandang's impi that had caught Wilson's little patrol on the banks of the Shangani river during the war and slain them to a man. Amongst the corpses, stripped naked by his warriors so that the shocking mulberry-coloured assegai wounds in their white flesh were exposed, had lain the body of the woman missionary's first husband. There could never be love where there had been blood. However, Gandang respected the white woman. He had known her as long as he had known Juba, and he had watched her unflagging efforts to champion and protect the Matabele people. She had been friend and adviser to the old King Lobengula, and she had brought comfort to thousands of sick and dying Matabele, so now his concern was genuine. "Has she thrown aside the evil spirits that she brought upon herself by drinking the girl's blood?" It was inevitable that the accounts of Robyn's experiment with the transference of malaria would become garbled and take on the aura of witchcraft.
"She did not drink the girl's blood." Juba tried to explain that the taking of blood had been for the good of the Matabele nation, but because she did not understand it completely herself, her explanation was unconvincing. She saw the doubt in Gandang's eyes, and she abandoned the effort.
"Bazo, the Axe?" she asked instead. "Where is he?" Her first-born son was also her favourite.
"In the hills with all the other young men," Gandang answered.
The Matopos Hills were always the refuge of the Matabele in time of danger and trouble, and Juba leaned forward anxiously to ask, "There has been trouble?" Gandang shrugged in reply. "In these times there is always trouble." "From whence does it come?" "One-Bright-Eye sent word with his kanka with his jackals that we must provide two hundred young men to work on the new gold mine in the south that belongs to Henshaw, the Hawk." "You did not send the men?" "I told his kanka." The derogatory name for the Company native police likened them to the little scavengers that followed the lion for the scraps, and expressed the hatred that the Matabele felt for these traitors. "I told them that the white men had deprived me of my shield and assegai and my honour as an and una therefore I had lost the right to command my young men to dig the white men's holes for them or to build their roads." "And now One-Bright-Eye comes?" Juba spoke with resignation. She knew all the moves that must be made. the command, the defiance, the confrontation.
She had watched it all before, and now she was sick of men's pride and men's wars and the death and maiming and suffering.
"Yes," Gandang agreed. "Not all the kanka are traitors and one has sent word that One-Bright Eye is on the road, with fifty men and so the young men have gone into the hills." "But you stay here to meet him?" Juba asked. "Unarmed and alone, you wait for One-Bright-Eye and fifty armed men?" "I have never run from any man," Gandang said simply, never in my life." And Juba felt her pride and her love choke her as she looked into the stern handsome face, and noticed as if for the first time the hoar-frost sparkling on the dark cap of his hair above the head ring
"Gandang, my lord, the old times have passed. Things change. The sons of Lobengula work as house-boys in the kraal of Lodzi far away in the south beside the great water. The imp is are scattered, and there is a new and gentle god in the land, the god Jesus. Everything has changed, and we must change with it." Gandang was silent a long time, staring out across the river as though he had not heard her speak.
Then he sighed and took a little red snuff from the buckhom that hung on a thong around his neck. He sneezed and wiped his eyes, and looked at her.
"Your body is part of my body," he said. "Your first-born son is my son. If I do not trust you, then I cannot trust myself. So I tell you, that the old times will come again." "What is this, Lord?" Juba asked. "What strange words are these?" "The words of the Umlimo. She has called forth an oracle. The nation will be free and great again.-" "The Umlimo sent the imp is onto the guns at Shangani and Bembesi,".
Juba whispered bitterly. "The Umlimo preaches war and death and pestilence. There is a new god now. The god Jesus of peace." "Peace?"
Gandang asked bitterly. "If that is the word of this god, then the white men do not listen very well to their own. Ask the Zulu of the peace they found at Ulundi, ask the shade of Lobengula of the peace they brought with them to Matabeleland." Juba could not reply, for again she had not fully understood when Nomusa explained, and she bowed her head in resignation. After a while, when Gandang was certain that she had accepted what he had said, he went on. "The oracle of the Umlimo is in three parts and already the first has come to pass. The darkness at noon, the wings of the locust, and the trees bare of leaves in the springtime. It is happening and we must look to our steel."
"The white men have broken the assegais." "In the hills there has been a new birthing of steel." Involuntarily Gandang lowered his voice to a whisper. "The forges of the Rozwi smiths burn day and night and the molten iron runs copiously as the waters of the Zambezi." Juba stared at him. "Who has done this?" "Bazo, your own son." "The wounds of the guns are still fresh and bright upon his body." "But he is an and una of Kumalo," Gandang whispered proudly, "and he is a man." "One man," Juba replied. "One man only, where are the imp is "Preparing in secret, in the wild places, re-learning the skills and arts which they have not yet forgotten." "Gandang, my lord, I feel my heart beginning to break again, I feel my tears gathering like the rainstorms of summer. Must there always be war?" "You are a daughter of Matabele, of pure Zanzi blood from the south. Your father's father followed Mzilikazi, your father spilled his blood for him, as your own son did for Lobengula do you have to ask that question?" She was silent, knowing how futile it was to argue with him when there was that glitter in his eyes. When the fighting madness was in him, there was no room for reason.
"Juba, my little Dove, there will be work for you when the prophecy of the Umlimo comes to full term." "Lord?" she asked.
"The women must carry the blades. They will be bound up in rolls of sleeping-mats and in bundles of thatching grass and carried on the heads of the women to where the imp is are waiting." "Lord." Her voice was neutral, and she dropped her eyes from his hard glittering gaze.
"The white men and their kanka will not suspect the women, they will let them pass freely upon the road," Gandang went on. "You are the mother of the nation now that the king's wives are dead and scattered. It will be your duty to assemble the young women, to train them in their duty, and to see them place the steel in the hands of the warriors at the time that the Umlimo has foreseen, the time when the hornless cattle are eaten up by the cross." Juba was reluctant to reply, afraid to conjure up his wrath. He had to demand her answer.