1972 - A Story Like the Wind (33 page)

‘Massarwa!’ François exclaimed, his heart beating faster. Immediately he thought of Xhabbo and wondered if, after all, some poor Bushmen had fallen into the hands of their traditional enemies and were being held as prisoners.

‘Yes, they could be Massarwa, although I am not sure. But if they are Massarwa,’

!#grave;Bamuthi replied, ‘they are strange Massarwa because they appeared to be in command of these men.’

‘But who possibly could such men be, Old Father?’

‘I fear, Little Feather, that they are ‘men of the spear’,’

!#grave;Bamuthi answered sombrely.

‘Men of the spear? Who are men of the spear, Old Father?’

!#grave;Bamuthi, normally so frank, was suddenly reluctant to go into this aspect of his mission. He merely answered rather apologetically that if François had not heard of the ‘men of the spear’, he had better wait until Chief Mopani or his Ouwa could come and tell him about them. They knew far more about these things than an ignorant old man of the bush did. All that it was necessary for François to know was that !#grave;Bamuthi knew them to be the most dangerous of men.

‘But what could such men be doing in such a place at such a time?’ François pressed.

!#grave;Bamuthi answered that the men certainly were not there in order to go to uLangalibalela. He explained that close by that outcrop of rock, another historical track crossed the one along which they were travelling. It was the track which led from the Great Water to the far-away junction of the Chobe and Zambezi rivers, where there was a secret ford into a country called Caprivi. Across Caprivi lay the great hinterland of Angola where, as everyone in the bush knew, fighting had begun between black and the ‘red strangers’.

Beyond that !#grave;Bamuthi refused to go, and soon the relief of having him safely back and sitting, tired and hungry, grilling Ousie-Johanna’s delicious sausages directly on the flames of their fire drove all sense of danger and curiosity from François’s mind.

While he had been waiting, a great full moon had slowly climbed into the sky and although it had not cancelled any of the bright, urgent stars of the African sky, it provided them with an immense phosphorescent foreground for their light to dance upon, that was as exciting as it was beautiful. It was indeed so provocative a moon that Francis felt rather sad that for Hintza’s sake he had no music to go with it, for tired as he was Hintza obviously endured a severe temptation to serenade the moon. From time to time he made little moaning noises, as if in protest to his musical self, and he would press against François’s side, so that François had to stroke him constantly to comfort him. Even the two heifers appeared similarly afflicted because they too suddenly stopped eating and came to lie down immediately behind !#grave;Bamuthi and François, all of which in the end was very reassuring to François, for it gave him a warm feeling that the barriers between man and animal were downed by the moon and that they were all a single unit of life made one with the mystery of the bush full upon them. The animals came even closer when, from all around them, lion after lion started roaring.

Remarking, ‘The lion who roars is never the lion that kills’ (the Sindabele dismissal of men who boast), !#grave;Bamuthi told François that he was certain that that night they should fear nothing from either lion or leopard. On his way to the mound of rock he had seen the carcases of so many dead animals killed in the outburst of shooting before sundown, that he was convinced that there were no lions, leopards, jackals, or hyenas that would need to hunt for food that night.

Then something of !#grave;Bamuthi’s reassurance seemed to communicate itself to the animals. The signs of alarm they had first shown when the great chorus of lions, joined subsequently by the coughing of leopards and the snorting of hippopotami who had emerged from the river to come grazing right up to the edge of the bush, soon vanished; all the fierce night sounds seemed to-become a lullaby for sending the tired little group of humans and animals to sleep.

Nevertheless, some unease must have gone on working in the depths of François’s mind while he slept because many hours later he woke and instantly sat up, his mind alert. He stretched out his hand to feel if Hintza, too, was similarly uneasy but, apart from a contented little whimper at his touch, Hintza went on sleeping. Then François knew that the cause of anxiety was not in the bush around them but in himself; and suddenly it came to him. It was the word ‘Massarwa’ (Bushman) which !#grave;Bamuthi had used to describe the men held in charge by that group on the rock. The thought of Xhabbo, of Koba, and his love for the Bushmen, together with a child-like desire to make amends for their pitiful fate, all combined to make him feel that he had no choice but to go to the rock and discover what terrible cause had driven them to keep the dangerous company that !#grave;Bamuthi had described.

He looked at !#grave;Bamuthi lying fast asleep on the other side of Night and Day, just next to Little Finger. There was no indication that !#grave;Bamuthi was troubled. Yet François knew that if !#grave;Bamuthi had an inkling of what was going on in his own mind just then, he would be instantly awake and making sure that François had no chance of following his overwhelming impulse.

Getting up quietly, he took some wood and put it on the fire which had sunk low on to its coals. This was a task he normally shared with !#grave;Bamuthi throughout the night. The fire flared up high and showed up their little group clearly. Neither the light nor the noise he had made had disturbed !#grave;Bamuthi’s sleep.

That strange, new cunning self of François one has mentioned before, suddenly took command of him again. He went quietly to collect !#grave;Bamuthi’s and his own haversack; the old muzzle-loader and veld ankle boots. He arranged them underneath his one blanket, his bush hat at the head, to make it all look to any casual glance that he lay there inert with sleep. He woke Hintza and whispered in his ear repeatedly in Bushman, ‘Stay and watch until my return.’

Then, taking up his own ·22 rifle in hand, his heart beating faster with fear but driven on by something more powerful that was utterly beyond his comprehension, he made his way silently to their track and proceeded barefoot along it until he came once more to the edge of the bush.

There he was startled to see that the moon was rapidly expanding and becoming a deeper orange the nearer it dropped to the horizon. Soon it would set altogether, Dawn’s Heart must be close to rising, and the day near, so that he did not have much time to do what he felt he had to do. The whole depression before him, moreover, was covered with a thick, ghost mist, no doubt the ‘mist of death’ of which !#grave;Bamuthi had spoken. It was an awesome sight. Yet François, in spite of the fear of the mist and its consequences that !#grave;Bamuthi had impressed upon him, did not find it as unwelcome as might have been expected, because there could have been no better cover for him. He walked swiftly and silently, straight into it. He was surprised and relieved that, thick as the mist was, he could see through it some of the brightest stars to take his bearings should the unknown track ahead fail him. It was an alarming walk because all round him were the sounds of lions, leopards, hyenas and jackals quarrelling for their food over some dead animal, and he drew heavily on !#grave;Bamuthi’s assurance that the shooting of the evening before had left more than enough meat for the carnivorous-animals of that world to swing the balance of his spirit away from fear in favour of courage. Happily, in spite of the heaviness of the mist, the track was so clearly defined to the feel of his bare feet that he managed to go silently much faster than he would have thought possible. Within twenty minutes he was at the foot of the mound of rock.

He stopped there for several minutes, listening carefully for any sound that might indicate whether the men above had left a guard on watch. When he heard nothing, as if stalking game, he crawled on his stomach right up to the top. He had hardly got into position among the boulders, in a place clear of the mist where, at last, he could see the coals of an almost dead fire, when all sorts of dark shapes rose up from the earth round about it. People started stretching, yawning loudly, and then to chatter curiously enough not in a Bantu tongue but in a broken sort of English that he could not follow. They did all this very loudly as if they were convinced they were the only people in the land. Somebody must have been seeing to the fire for soon an immense spire of flame soared up into the sky showing François every detail of the scene. He saw the men themselves and, as they crowded round the fire, every line of the expressions of bitter, determined, unhappy if not utterly tragic faces of men of many different tribes.

Yet it was not the faces of the Africans which caught François’s attention but that of one man squatting calmly and serenely in an Oriental fashion beside the fire. There was something reminiscent of the Bushman about the colour, high cheek bones and slanted eyes of this face. But the long, sleek black hair, neatly brushed back, showed it to be the face of a man infinitely more sophisticated, and in the circumstances more sinister than that of any Bushman of Africa could have been. There was no mistake about it, François knew that he was looking at a Chinese, moreover a man who, compared with the desperate, uncared-for look of his companions, appeared centred, assured, fastidious, self-respecting, and inwardly at home, though he was there some ten thousand miles at least from his native land.

The moment François had established this, relieved and at the same time bewildered, he quickly crawled backwards into the mist, made his way as fast as he could down the rocky mound and hurried along the track to the camp. He was barely halfway there when he collided with a tall figure looming abruptly out of the mist. It was !#grave;Bamuthi, and he narrowly escaped being severely man-handled since !#grave;Bamuthi’s first thought not unnaturally, was that he had collided with one of the desperate men from the rocky mound below.

!#grave;Bamuthi’s relief was greater than the anger originally inspired by his anxiety when he had discovered Franjois’s deception and absence. All he did was to say rather sorrowfully. ‘How much longer, Little Feather, will you go on wandering with folly as a companion? You are old enough to know by now that he who refuses to listen, will not hear in time of trouble.’

François made the most of this windfall of leniency and hurried into a brief explanation of why he had felt compelled to find out exactly what sort of men !#grave;Bamuthi’s Massarwa had been. He was certain, he said, that on their return it would be one of the things Mopani would need to know, seeing how close to his own game sanctuary that unnecessary massacre of animals had taken place. All this took time and a great deal of explanation, mainly because !#grave;Bamuthi had never heard of China or Chinese before. However he was so happy at having François safely back that there were no further reproaches. Besides, he had another important consideration on his mind.

When they reached the edge of the bush, he stopped, turned about and, pointing at the east said urgently, ‘Little Feather,
Ku’ Mpondo Zankomo
.’

One gives this expression here in its original because François found that his own mother tongue, although influenced by three centuries of history in southern Africa, still could not match its native languages for describing natural phenomena of the land. The expression !#grave;Bamuthi had just used was one of his favourite both for its sound and for its associations. Its literal meaning is, ‘It is the horns of a bullock’, but it implied the most evocative image of the very first light of day, the moment when the horns of the beloved Matabele cattle just became visible against the glow of day in the east—a far more manly description of dawn for François than the famous Greek cliche for the break of day which, for all his love of Homer instilled in him by Ouwa, sounded incredibly effeminate and feeble. He was thinking of Homer’s tiresome and oft-repeated,’…came the rose-fingered dawn’.

There was in fact nothing at all ‘rose-fingered’ about that explosion of violent light which followed !#grave;Bamuthi’s observation and nothing at all effeminate about the speed and vigour with which the sun strode upwards and soon was well above the bush on the far side of the open depression, sending the great midnight mist like an immense flight of the sacred white ibis scattering before it.

When that happened !#grave;Bamuthi and François were lying down under cover just inside the edge of the bush, watching the rocky mound below clearly emerge into view in its entirety. Another tall palm of smoke was revealed standing on the crown of rock for about an hour or so. Then a line of men, heavily laden and bowed with the weight of equipment on their backs, could be seen coming slowly down the winding track to set out, as !#grave;Bamuthi had surmised, westwards in the direction of the far-off and, to them both, fabled land of Angola.

They went on lying there under cover just long enough to make certain that all the men had gone from the rock. Then !#grave;Bamuthi leapt to his feet, calling on François to hurry and saying it was more important than ever to get to uLangalibalela as soon as possible. They had one good omen, that of the elephants, he said, which had made him very happy because it confirmed that he and François had chosen the right way. But the way now had been crossed by another, and the black omen of the men they had just seen vanishing to the west, darkened the first. He told François to look at that great depression below them to see just how bad the new omen was.

François looked and knew at once what !#grave;Bamuthi meant. He counted forty different groups of large vultures hopping awkwardly up and down in the lovely grass, staining its morning sheen with the flapping of dust-brown wings as they tried in vain to get airborne, so filled were they with food.

‘You see,’

!#grave;Bamuthi remarked, ‘half of one of those dead animals under the vultures would have been enough to feed these men. Clearly they killed because they have death in their hearts and have come to like only killing. And that is a sign not good for us or for the time left to your Ouwa, our Great White Bird, or indeed any of us.’