The Angels Weep (21 page)

‘She is a bride,’ she whispered. ‘Her
husband is the nephew of Gandang. Take care,
kanka
.’

The man ignored her. He lifted Ruth to her feet by the neck,
and twisted her face towards him.

‘Take us to where the men are hiding.’

Ruth stared at him silently for a second, and then suddenly
and explosively she spat into his face. The frothy spittle
spattered his cheeks and dripped from his chin.

‘
Kanka
!’ she hissed. ‘Traitor
jackal!’

The man never stopped smiling. ‘That is what I wanted
you to do,’ he told her, and hooked his finger into the
string of her skirt and snapped it. The skirt fell around her
ankles.

He held her by the scruff and she struggled and covered her
groin with both hands. The
kanka
looked at her naked body
and his breathing changed.

‘Watch the other,’ he told his companion and
tossed his Winchester rifle to him. The second constable caught
it by the stock and prodded Imbali with the barrel until she
backed up against the high granite boulder.

‘Our time will come very soon,’ he assured her,
and turned his head to watch the other couple, at the same time
holding Imbali pinned against the rock.

The
kanka
dragged Ruth off the path, but for only a few
paces, and the scrub that screened them was thin and
leafless.

‘My man will kill you,’ cried Ruth. They could
hear everything on the path, even the sound of the
kanka
‘s ragged breathing.

‘Then give me good value, if I must pay with my
life,’ he chuckled, and then gasped with pain. ‘So
kitten, you have sharp claws.’ And there was the clap of a
blow on soft flesh, the sound of struggling, the bushes heaved
and loose pebbles rolled away down the slope.

The constable guarding Imbali strained for a glimpse of what
was happening. His lips were open and he licked them. He could
make out blurred movement through the leafless branches, and then
there was the sound of a body falling heavily to earth and the
breath being driven violently from Ruth’s lungs by a
crushing weight.

‘Hold still, kitten,’ the
kanka
panted.
‘You make me angry. Lie still,’ and abruptly Ruth
screamed. It was the shrill ringing cry of an animal in mortal
agony, repeated again and again, and the
kanka
grunted.
‘Yes. There, yes,’ and then snuffed like a boar at
the trough, and there was a soft rhythmic slapping sound, and
Ruth kept screaming.

The man guarding Imbali propped the spare rifle against the
boulder and stepped off the path, and with the barrel of his own
Winchester parted the branches and stared. His face seemed to
swell and darken with passion, his whole attention concentrated
on what he was watching.

With the second constable’s attention so distracted,
Imbali sidled along the granite, and then paused for an instant
to gather herself before darting away. She had reached the angle
of the pathway before the man turned and saw her.

‘Come back!’ he shouted.

‘What is it?’ the
kanka
demanded from
behind the bushes in a thick tortured voice.

‘The other one, she is running.’

‘Stop her,’ the
kanka
bellowed, and his
companion ran to the corner.

Imbali was fifty paces down the hillside, flying like a
gazelle over the rough ground, driven by her terror. The man
thumbed back the hammer of his Winchester, flung the butt to his
shoulder and fired wildly, without aiming. It was a fluke shot.
It caught the girl in the small of the back and the big soft lead
slug tore out through her belly. She collapsed and rolled down
the steep pathway, her limbs tumbling about loosely.

The constable lowered the rifle. His expression was shocked
and unbelieving. Slowly, hesitantly, he went down to where the
girl lay. She was on her back. Her eyes were open, and the exit
wound in her flat young stomach gaped hideously, her torn
entrails bulged from it. The girl’s eyes switched to his
face, the terror in them flared up for an instant, and then
slowly faded into utter blankness.

‘She is dead.’ The
kanka
had left Ruth, and
come down the path. He had left his apron in the bushes. His blue
shirt-tails flapped around his bare legs.

Both of them stared down at the dead girl.

‘I did not mean it,’ said the
kanka
with
the hot rifle in his hands.

‘We cannot let the other one go back to tell what has
happened,’ his companion replied, and turned back up the
pathway. As he passed, he picked up his own rifle from where it
leaned against the rock. He stepped off the path, behind the thin
screen of bushes.

The other man was still staring into Imbali’s blank eyes
when the second shot rang out. He flinched to the crack of it,
and lifted his head. As the echoes lapped away amongst the
granite cliffs, the
kanka
stepped back onto the path. He
ejected the spent cartridge case from the breech and it pinged
against the rock.

‘Now we must find a story for One-Bright-Eye, and for
the indunas,’ he said quietly, and strapped the fur apron
back around his thick waist.

T
hey brought
the two girls back to Gandang’s kraal on the back of the
police sergeant’s grey horse. Their legs dangled down one
side and their arms down the other. They had wrapped a grey
blanket around their naked bodies, as though ashamed of the
wounds upon them, but the blood had soaked through and dried
black upon it, and the big metallic green flies swarmed joyously
upon the stains.

In the centre of the kraal, the sergeant gestured to the
kanka
who led the grey, and he turned back and cut the
line that secured the girl’s ankles. The corpses were
immediately unbalanced and slid head-first to the swept bare
earth. They fell without dignity in an untidy tumble of bare
limbs, like game brought in from the hunting veld for skinning
and dressing out.

The women had been silent until then, but now they began the
haunting ululation of mourning, and one of them scooped a handful
of dust and poured it over her own head. The others followed her
example, and their cries brought out the gooseflesh down the arms
of the sergeant, though his expression remained neutral and his
voice level as he spoke to Gandang.

‘You have brought this sadness on your people, old man.
If you had obeyed the wishes of Lodzi and sent in your young men,
as is your duty, these women would have lived to bear
sons.’

‘What crime did they commit?’ Gandang asked, and
watched his senior wife come forward to kneel beside the bloody
dust-smeared bodies.

‘They tried to kill two of my police.’

‘Hau!’ Gandang expressed his scornful disbelief,
and the sergeant’s voice rasped with anger for the first
time.

‘My men caught them and forced them to lead them to
where the
amadoda
are hiding. At last night’s camp,
when my men were asleep, they would have thrust sharpened sticks
into their earholes to the brain, but my men sleep lightly, and
when they awoke, the women ran into the night and my men had to
stop them.’

For a long moment Gandang stared at the sergeant, and his eyes
were so terrible that Ezra turned away to watch the senior wife
as she knelt beside one of the girls. Juba closed the slack jaws,
and then gently wiped the congealed blood from Ruth’s lips
and nostrils.

‘Yes,’ Gandang advised Ezra. ‘Look well,
white man’s jackal, remember this thing for all the days
that are left to you.’

‘Dare you threaten me, old man?’ the sergeant
blustered.

‘All men must die,’ Gandang shrugged, ‘but
some die sooner and more painfully than others.’ And
Gandang turned and walked back to his hut.

G
andang sat
alone by the small smoky fire in his hut. Neither the broiled
beef nor white maize cakes in the 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.

B
azo came down
out of the hills three days after the girls had been placed in
the earth, under the bare spreading 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 beerpot, 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, Baba, 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, Baba,’ 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.’