"I have a gift to make your brave heart braver and your will as hard as your steel." She took something soft and grey and fluffy from her pouch, and stood before him on tiptoe, reaching high with both arms to bind the strip of fur around his forehead. "Wear this moleskin for the glory that was and that shall be again, and una of the Moles-who-burrowed under-a-hill. One day soon, we will change it for a headband of spotted gold leopard skin, with royal blue heron feathers set upon it." She took his hand and they started down from the hilltop, but they did not reach the grassy plain before Bazo stopped again and inclined his head to listen. There was a faint popping sound on the small dry. breeze, like the bubbles bursting in a pot of boiling porridge.
"Guns,"he said. "Still far away, but many of them." "It is so, Lord," Tanase replied. "Since you left, the guns of One-Bright-Eye's kanka have been busy as the tongues of the old women at a beer-drink."
There is a terrible pestilence sweeping through the land." General Mungo St. John had selected a clay anthill as a rostrum from which to address his audience. "It passes from one animal to the next, as a bushfire jumps from tree to tree. Unless we can contain it, all the cattle will die." Below the anthill, Sergeant Ezra was translating loudly, while the listening tribesmen squatted silently facing them. There were almost two thousand of them, the occupants of all the villages that had been built along both banks of the Inyati river to replace the regimental kraals of Lobengula's impi.
The men were in the foremost ranks, their faces expressionless but their eyes watchful, behind them were the youths and boys not yet admitted to the rank of warrior. These were the mujiba, the herd boys whose daily life was intimately interwoven with the herds of the tribe. The present indaba concerned them as much as it did the elders.
There were no women present, for it was a matter of cattle, of the nation's wealth.
"It is a great sin" to try to hide your cattle, as you have done.
To drive them into the hills or the thick forest. These cattle carry with them the seeds of the pestilence," Mungo St. John explained, and waited for his sergeant to translate, before going on. "Lodzi and I are very angry with these deceptions. There will be heavy fines for those villages which hide their cattle, and as further punishment, I will double the work quotas for the men, so that you will work like amah oh like slaves you will toil, if you attempt to defy the word of Lodzi Mungo St. John paused again, and lifted the black eye-patch to wipe away the sweat that trickled down from under the wide-brimmed slouch hat.
Drawn by the lowing herds in the thombush kraal, the big shiny green flies swarmed, and the place stank of cow dung and unwashed humanity.
Mungo found himself impatient with the necessity of trying to explain his actions to this silent unresponsive throng of half-naked savages, for he had already repeated this same warning at thirty other indabas across Matabeleland. His sergeant finished the translation and glanced up at him expectantly.
Mungo St. John pointed to the mass of cattle penned in the thorn kraal behind him. "As you have seen, it is of no avail to try to hide the herds. The native police track them down." Mungo stopped again, and frowned in annoyance. In the second row, a Matabele buck had risen and was facing him quietly.
He was a tall man, finely muscled, although one arm seemed deformed, for it was twisted from the shoulder at an awkward angle.
Though the body was that of a man in his full prime, the face was eroded and ravaged, as though by grief or pain, and was aged before its time. On the neat cap of dense curls, the man wore the head ring of an and una and around his forehead a headband of grey fur.
"Babo, MY father," said the and una "We hear your words, but like children we do not understand them." "Who is this fellow?" Mungo demanded of Sergeant Ezra, and nodded when he heard the reply. "I know about him. He is a troublemaker." Then to Bazo, raising his voice, "What is so strange about what I say? What is it that puzzles you?"
"You say, Babo, that the sickness will kill the cattle so before it does, you will shoot them dead. You say, Babo, that to save our cattle you must kill them for us." The quiet ranks of, Matabele stirred for the first time. Though their expressions were still impassive, here a man coughed and there another shuffled his bare feet in the dust or yet another flicked his switch at the circling flies. No man laughed, not one mocked with word or smile, but it was mockery nonetheless, and Mungo St. John sensed it. Behind those inscrutable black African faces, they were gleefully following the mock humble questions of the young and una with the old worn face.
"We do not understand such deep wisdom, Babo, please be kind and patient with your children and explain it to us. You say that if we try to hide our cattle, then you will confiscate them from us to pay the heavy fines that Lodzi demands. You say in the same breath, Babo, that if we are obedient children and bring the cattle to you, then you will" shoot them and burn them up." In the packed ranks an elderly white beard who had taken snuff sneezed loudly, and there was immediately an epidemic of sneezing and coughing. Mungo St. John knew they were encouraging the young and una in this sly impudence.
"Babo, gentle Father, you warn us that you will double our work quotas, and we will be as slaves. This is another matter which escapes from us, for is a man who works one day at another's command less a slave than he who works two days? Is not a slave merely a slave and is not a free man truly free? Babo, explain to us the degrees of slavery." There was a faint humming sound now, like the sound of a hive at noon, and though the lips of the Matabele facing Mungo St. John did not move, he saw that their throats trembled slightly. They were beginning to drum, it was the prelude and unchecked it would be followed by the deep ringing'j.eel Jee!"of the chant.
"I know you, Bazo," Mungo St. John shouted. "I hear and mark your words. Be sure that Lodzi also will hear them." "I am honoured, little Father, that my humble words will be carried to the great white father, Lodzi This time there were cunning and wicked grins on the faces of the men around Bazo.
Sergeant, "Mungo St. John shouted. "Bring that man to mei!
The big sergeant leaped forward with the brass badge of his rank glittering on his upper arm, but as he did so the ranks. of silent Matabele rose to their feet and closed up. No man raised a hand, but the sergeant's forward rush was smothered and he struggled in the crowd as though in living black quicksand, and when he reached the place where Bazo had been, the and una was gone.
"Very well," Mungo St. John nodded grimly, when the sergeant reported back to him. "Let him go. It will wait for another day, but now we have work to do. Get your men into position." A dozen armed black police trotted forward and formed a line facing the throng of tribesmen, holding their rifles at high port. At the same time the rest of the contingent climbed up onto the thorny walls of the kraal and at the command they pumped cartridges into the breeches of the repeating Winchester rifles.
"Let it begin," Mungo nodded, and the first volley of rifle fire thundered out.
The black constables were firing down into, the milling mass of cattle in the kraal, and at each shot a beast would fling its horned head high and collapse, to be hidden at once by the others. The smell of fresh blood maddened the herd and it surged wildly against the Thorn barrier, the din of the blood-bellow was deafening, and from the ranks of watching Matabele went up a mourning howl of sympathy.