And Gandang turned and walked back to his hut.
Gandang sat alone by the small smoky fire in his hut. Neither the broiled beef nor white maize cakes in Gthe platter at his side had been touched. He stared into the flames, and listened to the wailing of the women and the beat of the drums.
He knew that Juba would come to tell him when the girls" bodies had been bathed and wrapped in the green skin of the freshly slaughtered ox. As soon as it was light, it would be his duty to supervise the digging of the grave in the centre of the cattle kraal, so he was not surprised when there was a soft scratching at the doorway and he called softly to Juba to enter.
She came to kneel at his side. "All is ready for the morning, my husband." He nodded, and they were silent for a while, and then Juba said, "I wish to sing the Christian song that Nomusa has taught me when the girls are put into the earth." He inclined his head in acquiescence, and she went on.
"I wish also that you would dig their graves in the forest so that I may place crosses over them." "If that is the way of your new god," he agreed again, and now he rose and crossed to his sleeping-mat in the far corner.
"Nkosi," Juba remained kneeling. "Lord, there is something else." "what is it?" He looked back at her. His beloved features remote and cold.
"I, and my women, will carry the steel as you bid me," she whispered. "I made an oath with my finger in the wound in Ruth's flesh. I will carry the assegais to the amadoda." He did not smile, but the coldness went out of his eyes, and he held out one hand to her.
Juba rose and went to him, and he took her hand and led her to the sleeping-mat.
Bazo came down out of the hills three days after the girls had been placed in the earth, under the bare Bspreading branches of a giant mimosa at a place which overlooked the river. There were two young men with him, and the three of them went directly to the graves with Juba guiding them. After a while, Bazo left the two young bridegrooms to mourn their women and he went back to where his father waited for him under the fig tree.
After he had made his dutiful greetings, they drank from the same beer pot passing it back and forth between them in silence, and when it was empty Gandang sighed.
"It is a terrible thing." Bazo looked up at him sharply.
"Rejoice, my father. Thank the spirits of your ancestors," he said.
"For they have given us a greater bargain than we could ever have wished for." "I do not understand this." Gandang stared at his son.
"For two lives lives of no importance, lives that would have been spent in vain and empty-headed frivolity for this insignificant price, we have kindled a fire in the belly of the nation. We have steeled even the weakest and most cowardly of our amadoda. Now when the time comes, we know that there will be no hesitating. Rejoice, MY father, at the gift we have been given." "You have become a ruthless man," Gandang whispered at last.
"I am proud that you should find me so," Bazo replied. "And if I am not ruthless enough for the work, then my son or his son, in their time, will be." "You do not trust the oracle of the Umlimo?" Gandang demanded. "She has promised us success." "No, my father." Bazo shook his head. "Think carefully on her words. She has told us only to make the attempt. She promised us nothing. It is with us alone to succeed or fail. That is why we must be hard and relentless, trusting nobody, looking for any advantage, and using it to the full." Gandang thought about that for a while, then sighed again.
"It was not like this before." Nor will it ever be again. It has changed, Babo, and we must change with it." "Tell me what else there is to be done," Gandang invited. "What way can I help to bring success?"
"You must order the young men to come down out of the hills and to go in to work as the white men are bidding." Gandang considered the question without speaking. "From now until the hour, we must become fleas. We must live under the white men's cloak, so close to the skin that he does not see us, so close that he forgets we are there waiting to sting." Gandang nodded at the sense of it, but there was a fathomless regret in his eyes. "I liked it better when we formed the bull, with the horns outflung to surround the enemy and the veterans massed in the centre to crush them. I loved the closing in when we went in singing the praise song of the regiment, when we made our killing in the sunlight with our plumes flying." "Never again, Babo," Bazo told him. "Never again will it be like that. In the future we will wait in the grass like the coiled puff-adder. We may have to wait a year or ten, a lifetime or more perhaps we may never see it, my father. Perhaps it will be our children's children who strike from the shadows with other weapons than the silver steel that you and I love so well, but it. is you and I that will open the road for them to follow, the road back to greatness." Gandang nodded, and there was a new light in his eyes, like the first glow of the dawn. "You see very clearly, Bazo. You know them so well, and you are right. The white man is strong in every way except patience. He wants it all to happen today.
While we know how to wait." They were silent again, sitting with their shoulders just touching, and the fire had burned low before Bazo stirred.
"I will be gone by daylight, "he said. "Where?"Gandang asked.
"East to the Mashona." "For what reason?" "They also must prepare for the day." "You seek aid from Mashona dogs, from the very eaters of dirt? "I seek aid wherever it can be found," said Bazo simply.
"Tanase says that we will find allies beyond our borders, beyond the great river. She speaks even of allies from a land so cold that the waters there turn hard and white as salt." "Is there such a land?"
"I do not know. I know only that we must welcome any ally, from wherever they may come. For Lodzi's men are hard, fierce fighters. You and I both have learned that well." "the windows of the mule coach were open and the shutters were lowered so that Mr. Rhodes could converse freely with the men who rode in close A attendance upon each side.
They were the aristocracy of this new land, only a dozen or so of them, but between them they owned vast tracts of fertile, virgin country, sprawling herds of native cattle, and blocks of mineral claims beneath which lay dreams of uncountable wealth.
The man in the luxurious carriage, drawn by a team of five matched white mules, was their head. In his capacity as a private citizen, he enjoyed such wealth and power as was usually only commanded by kings.
His Company owned a land which was bigger than the United Kingdom and Ireland put together, which he administered by decree as a private estate. He controlled the world's production of diamonds through a cartel that he had made as powerful as an elected government. He owned outright the mines that produced ninety-five per cent of the world's diamonds. On the fabulous Witwatersrand gold fields, his influence was not as great as it might have been, for he had passed up many opportunities to acquire claims along the strike, where the gold-rich ban ket reef had once stood proud, above the surrounding grassland, sharp and black as a shark's dorsal fin, before the miners had whittled it away.
"I do not sense the power in this reef," he had said once, as he stood on the outcrop, staring at it moodily with those pale Messianic blue eyes. "I can sit on the lip of the great hole at Kimberley and I know just how many carats- are coming up with each load, but this-2 He had shaken his head and gone back to his horse, turning his back on 100 million pounds in pure gold.