1972 - A Story Like the Wind (35 page)

As François pulled himself upright, embarrassed, for he had nearly fallen flat on his face, he happened to look sideways over his shoulder and he saw a pair of black and white oxen led by a young woman, dragging some branches of thorn across the entrance to the kraal. This, too, he was to learn was done by one of uLangalibalela’s favourite daughters so that the bushes which possessed highly protective qualities could erase the tracks and mend the break that his and !#grave;Bamuthi’s feet had made in the magic circle when coming to uLangalibalela’s kraal. Knowing none of this however, it was a red-faced François who came face to face with uLangalibalela at last.

Prepared as he was for something unusual, he was taken aback at the simplicity and unpretentiousness of the man he saw before him. Such sorcerers and witch-doctors as he had seen, as well as those he had he’ard of, were always dressed up in fantastic clothes with necklaces of lions’ claws, leopards’ teeth, crocodiles’ skin, porcupines’ quills and all manner of furs, animal tails and even discarded snake-skins wrapped around their bodies. But this man in front of him wore nothing except a loin-cloth of soft yellow klipspringer leather, a very beautiful black and white necklace of beads around his long neck, an ivory bangle on one slender wrist, a bracelet of elephant’s hair on the other, and on his head a broad ring of brilliant copper which shone in the shadows Uke the halo around the head of a saint.

The man was tall and beautifully made. There was no fat at all on his body and, although he was old, his skin was smooth and unwrinkled. The face was unusually long, the forehead broad, the nose exceptionally pronounced for a Matabele andi the eyes, wide and large, were well spaced apart, set in what François thought was one of the most beautiful heads he had ever seen on a man. But what struck him most was the expression in the eyes. They looked as if they had seen not only all the things that had ever been but also all that could ever be. More, they appeared to be looking inwardly rather than outwardly, giving François the odd feeling that uLangalibalela saw ‘Bamu-thi and him not directly but their reflection in a mirror deep within himself.

François was still staring at him, almost in a trance, when uLangalibalela pointed with a hand, palm outward, unusually white in contrast with the dark skin of his wrist and the rest of his body, the fingers long and sensitive, saying, ‘Sit’.

François noticed that a young girl had appeared silently behind them and was unrolling two mats for them to sit on, but before sitting down, !#grave;Bamuthi began, saying, ‘Eyes of the people [one of uLangalibalela’s praise names], we have brought something to open…’

For the first time François, horrified with a conviction that !#grave;Bamuthi was about to deliver himself of the customary description of a gift as something to ‘open the eyes’ which he thought unusually insensitive and tactless, seeing how wide open uLangalibalela’s eyes had already proved to be, quickly interrupted, ‘Father, with your permission I would like to go back and fetch a few small things we have brought for you.’

Without waiting for permission, he hurried out of the kraal, doubled back to the tree. Gathering up the condensed milk and castor oil and, leading Little Finger with Hintza and Night and Day following, he was soon back at the kraal. There he thought it best to order Hintza to wait by the entrance, and he led the two heifers into uLangalibalela’s presence.

Although the mystic combination of the wonderful coat of Night and Day clearly pleased the great man, and the shape of Little Finger, so obviously that of a female born to be a mother of many, was also greatly to his liking, the unpredictable man of all wisdom surprised them by appearing to be most of all interested in the great, gleaming bottle full of Ousie-Johanna’s castor oil. François noticed that, for once, the prophet’s eyes seemed to be directly turned upon a thing in the world without. He stretched out both his hands, took the great glass bottle and held it up against the light blazing at the entrance. He seemed to recognize the contents at once but to make quite sure that it was indeed what he knew it to be, he removed the cork and smelt it. When the smell confirmed his impression there and then, he raised the bottle and took a little sip; rather as Ouwa’s guests at table had sipped some of Ouwa’s oldest brandy.

Throughout the rest of the consultation which followed, uLangalibalela every few minutes continued to sip this (to François) revolting liquid at regular intervals, timing the sips so that the bottle was emptied on the exact moment that the consultation ended.

This impressed !#grave;Bamuthi because he remarked to François: ‘Look how anxious he is to rid his body of even such little food as he eats and purge his spirit so that he can conquer all and make the sources of our trouble ‘white’ to us.’

François himself would not have put it quite like that but, in essence, he was in agreement with !#grave;Bamuthi since the way uLangalibalela swallowed the castor oil seemed to him the greatest triumph of mind over matter that he had ever witnessed. However, he had no chance of following this trend of thought.

uLangalibalela, unpredictable as ever, broke the silence again, saying to !#grave;Bamuthi: ‘Son of Osebeni, you have brought the Little Feather of the Great White Bird to see me because you are in grave trouble.’

François was not surprised that uLangalibalela should know all about !#grave;Bamuthi. After all he had known !#grave;Bamuthi and !#grave;Bamuthi’s father for years. What did strike him was that the prophet referred to !#grave;Bamuthi as a Son of Osebeni, the kraal on the river bank where !#grave;Bamuthi had been born. It was as if in doing so, he were demonstrating, right at the beginning, that his main concern was with the origin of things. More surprising was that he, François, who had never been to see uLangalibalela before, should be recognized instantly as the son of his father. Still, at a stretch, he could find a rational explanation for that. His father was well known to the Matabele. They were the only Europeans living within a hundred miles or so of uLangalibalela’s kraal. Yet all was so confidently stated that François could not help feeling these opening remarks indicated a kind of knowledge which, at any moment, could go far beyond any rational limits.

So, overawed, François remained silent.

!#grave;Bamuthi, however, knowing the correct procedure in these things, immediately responded with the loud remark: ‘We smite the ground.’

As he spoke he looked hard at François to see why he was not joining in, since all it meant was an admission that what the prophet was saying was true and relevant. The remark had its origin in the ancient days when men of the Matabele, consulting a prophet would, in fact, smite the ground with their sticks, whenever he spoke words of truth to them.

‘The trouble that is darkening your hearts,’ uLangalibalela went on, his eyes still appearing to be focused within, ‘is the trouble that the Great White Bird is outside his body.’

This time François, remembering !#grave;Bamuthi’s initial look, joined in with: ‘We smite the ground.’

Saying it, François was impressed with the fact that the prophet appeared to have abandoned the technique of speaking through questions and was confronting them now with statements of fact, which presupposed a knowledge of information that they had assumed would have had to be extracted from them first. Yet even in this regard a rational explanation was possible since the knowledge of the decline of someone so prominent as Ouwa must have been discussed in many scores of beehive huts in the bush for many months.

‘It is true that though the Great White Bird has taken the medicines of many white inyangas today he is farther from his body than in the beginning.’

Again the two of them had to indicate agreement by smiting the ground.

‘It is true that the Great White Bird and his Little Lamb at this moment are on a journey to seek the help of more white inyangas?’

Here, smiting the ground metaphorically again, François felt the consultation was crossing the last limits of rational explanation. How else explain the prophet’s certain knowledge of the journey on which his parents had set out not so very many days before?

‘It is true that on this journey so far new inyangas have failed the Great White Bird and that is why you have come to uLangalibalela. You feel that Heaven has turned its back on the inyangas and the Great White Bird. It is true that you have come to uLangalibalela to put a name to the trouble and to strike down its cause.’

They agreed quickly in the traditional manner, expecting uLangalibalela would wish to hasten on with his authoritative pronouncements.

Instead the great unpredictable man paused to regard them steadily, filling them with acute discomfort, before saying: ‘You have come to me late and allowed the Great White Bird to go far away where it is most difficult for uLangalibalela to help.’

!#grave;Bamuthi and François had of course to agree humbly that they had left it too late. They should have come long before. Still uLangalibalela did not respond except by looking as it were far beyond them.

!#grave;Bamuthi, thoroughly uneasy, nudged François and urged him in a whisper to apologize and explain why they had not come before.

François obeyed at once, starting in a nervous way but gathering confidence as he went on at length, giving uLangalibalela a full account of when he had first had a premonition of Ouwa’s decline on the evening that Hintza came into his life, right up to that moment in uLangalibalela’s kraal. He ended with an emphatic assertion that if the matter had been one for !#grave;Bamuthi and himself alone they would have come to consult the prophet many months before. He stressed that his parents had considered it right to go to the inyangas of their own race first (something he thought, of which the prophet would approve). And what, he asked, would uLangalibalela have thought if the young son of a man of Ouwa’s standing, presumed he knew better than his own father and had gone-ahead of his wishes in the matter?

uLangalibalela could not help being impressed by François’s question. The whole basis of Matabele order was recognition of parental authority.

!#grave;Bamuthi himself was moved to whisper: ‘Well spoken, Little Feather.’

‘We will not begin to herd the cattle after it has been killed by lions,’ uLangalibalela announced magnanimously, indicating that he had no desire to close the stable doors after the horse had bolted. ‘Let us go to the heart of the matter and open the gates of distance.’

At this, uLangalibalela turned about and from somewhere behind him produced a mass of fine, dried twigs which came, François was to discover later, from shrubs and bushes of great magic quality. With these twigs he laid meticulously in front of him two little bonfires. When they were both ready for lighting he commanded the daughter, to bring two coals from the fire within his own hut.

When they arrived on a metal scoop, to François’s amazement, he picked up one between finger and thumb and then inserted it carefully into one of the two little fires. He bent down and blew on the coal steadily with his own breath. Suddenly the twigs burst into flame, and there stood a long, slender little pillar of fire between them and the prophet.

For a moment or two, uLangalibalela regarded the upright little flame, a look of the infinite in his eyes, before uttering the words: ‘A straight, clear flame is he: clearly the flame of a man.’

He then did precisely the same with the other coal. Although François would have sworn there was no difference in either the shape or nature of the twigs used in the two identical fires, the second b’ttle bonfire mysteriously caught light in a totally different manner. Instead of catching at one point in the centre and soaring in one aspiring flame, it caught fire in several places at once and proceeded to spread out and about, emitting a darker smoke more inclined to linger and cling to the earth.

Yet uLangalibalela regarded this fire too with the same satisfaction as the first, exclaiming, ‘A fire that tries to possess and cling, clearly a female fire is she.’ By this François knew that one flame represented Ouwa and the other Lammie.

There followed a long and extremely strenuous silence’for !#grave;Bamuthi and François while uLangalibalela first studied the two fires in front of him and then went into some sort of trance, looking far beyond the flames as if at a multitude of presences invisible yet real enough, making !#grave;Bamuthi and François feel as if hemmed in a crowd. Although it was morning and the day was bright, François trembled inwardly, finding the moment dark, and comparable only to those sessions he had had long ago with old Koba by the fireside in his home, when she had told him stories of sinister magic and supernatural phenomena.

As a result it seemed an age before he heard uLangalibalela grunt with approval and declare in a voice like a ventriloquist’s that now he saw all. Straight away uLangalibalela began a long account of his father’s condition, during which François and !#grave;Bamuthi had to ‘smite the ground’ so often that their mouths went dry with the effort. At that very moment, uLangalibalela declared, Ouwa and Lammie had arrived by train in a great city. They had already been to see the great white inyangas. The result had been the same as before. Heaven was continuing to turn its back on them. François’s father was farther away from his body than when he had left. Soon he would be out of reach of it for ever.

At this point, François and !#grave;Bamuthi were horrified to note the tall upright fire which apparently represented Ouwa, was beginning to splutter, weaken and to give out almost more smoke than flame, though it still had many twigs to feed it.

On the other hand, the prophet stressed, the Little Lamb was more determined than ever to make Ouwa return to his body. She had succeeded in getting the greatest white inyanga of all to agree to make powerful medicines for him. Hearing this, François’s heart warmed to Lammie’s gallant, single-minded spirit. He was overjoyed to observe how Lammie’s little fire gathered itself together as if in harmony with his own inner warmth and burnt up more brightly until there was hardly any smoke left in it at all.