The Angels Weep - Smith Wilbur - Страница 68

Bazo loped along at a deceptively easy gait that never varied, though the hills were steep and the valleys abrupt. His spirits were joyous, he had not truly realized how much the labours of the last weeks had galled until he was released from them. Once long ago he had worked with pick and shovel in the yellow diamond pit at Kimberley.

Henshaw had been his companion then, and the two of them had made a game of the brutal endless labour. It had built their muscles and made them strong, but had caged and cramped their spirits, until neither of them could suffer it longer, and they had escaped together.

Since those days Bazo had known the savage joy and the divine madness of that terrible moment that the Matabele call the "closing in." He had stood against. the king's enemies and killed in the sunlight with his regimental plumes flying.

He had won honours and the respect of his peers. He had sat on the king's council with the and una head ring on his brow, and he had come to the brink of the black river and briefly looked beyond it into the forbidden land that men call death, and now he had learned a new truth. It was more painful for a man to go backwards than it is for him to go forward. The drudgery of menial labour rankled the more now for the glories that had preceded it.

The path dropped away towards the river and disappeared into the dense dark green vegetation like a serpent into its hole. Bazo followed it down and stopped into the gloomy tunnel, and then froze. Instinctively his right hand reached for the non-existent -assegai on its leather thong under the grip of the long shield that also was not there so hard do old habits die. The shield had long ago been burned on the bonfires with ten thousand other shields, and the steel snapped in half on the anvils of the BSA Company blacksmiths.

Then he saw this was no enemy that came towards him down the narrow tunnel of riverine bush, and his heart bounded almost painfully against his ribs.

"I see you, Lord,"Tanase greeted him softly.

She was slim and upright as the young girl he had captured at the stronghold of Pemba the wizard, the same long graceful legs and clinched-in waist, the same heron's neck like the stem of a lovely black lily.

"Why are you so far from the village?" he demanded, as she knelt dutifully before him, and clapped her hands softly at the level of her waist.

"I saw you on the road, Bazo, son of Gandang." And he, opened his mouth to question her further, for he had come swiftly, then he changed his mind and felt the little superstitious prickle of insect feet along the nape of his neck. Sometimes still there were things about this woman that disquieted him, for she had not been stripped of all her occult powers in the cave of the Umlimo.

"I see you, Lord," Tanase repeated. "And my body calls to yours the way a hungry infant fresh roused from sleep frets for the breast."

He lifted her up, and held her face between his hands to examine it as though he had picked a rare and beautiful flower in the forest. It had taken much to accustom himself to the way she spoke of their secret bodily desires. He had been taught that it was unseemly for a Matabele wife to show pleasure in the act of generation, and to speak of it the way a man does. Instead she should be merely a pliant and unprotesting vessel for her husband's seed, ready whenever he was, and unobtrusive and self-effacing when he was not.

Tanase was none of these things. At first she had shocked and horrified him with some of the things she had learned in her apprenticeship for the dark mysteries. However, shock had turned to fascination as she had unfolded each skill before him.

She had potions and perfumes that could rouse a man even when he was exhausted and wounded from the battlefield, she had tricks of voice and eyes that bit like an arrowhead. Her fingers could find unerringly the spots beneath his skin at places on his body of which even he was unaware, upon which she played like the keys of the marimba, making him more man than he had even dreamed was possible. Her own body she could use more skilfully than he could wield his shield and long bright steel and deal as telling blows. She could make each separate muscle of her body move and tighten in complete freedom from the muscles around it.

At will she could bring him to precipitous rushing release or keep him hovering high as a black shouldered kite when it hunts on sharply stabbing pinions.

"We have been too long apart," she whispered, with that combination of voice and slant of wide Egyptian eyes that tripped his breath and made his heart race. "I came to meet you alone, so we could be free for a while of your son's clamorous adoration and the eyes of the villagers." And she led him off the track, and unclasped her leather cloak to spread it on the soft bed of fallen leaves.

Long after the storm had passed, and the aching tension had left his body, when his breathing was deep and even again and his eyelids drooped- with the deeply contented lassitude that follows the act Of love, she raised herself on her elbow above him, and with a kind of reverential wonder traced out the planes of his face with the tip of one finger, and then said softly. "Bayete!" It was the greeting that is made only to a king, and he stirred uncomfortably and his eyes opened wide. He looked at her, and knew that expression. Their loving had not softened her, and made her sleepy, as it had done him. That royal greeting had not been a jest.

"Bay'ete!" she said again. "The sound of it troubles you, my fine sharp-bladed axe. But why should it do so?" Suddenly Bazo felt the insects of fear and superstition crawling on his skin again, and he was angry and afraid. "Do not talk like this, woman. Do not offend the spirits with your silly girlish prattlings." She smiled, but it was a cruel catlike smile, and she repeated. "Oh Bazo, the bravest and the strongest, why do you then start so at my girlish words? You in whose veins runs the purest blood of Zanzi? Son of Gandang, the son of Mzilikazi, do you dream perchance of the little redwood spear that Lobengula carried in his hand? Son of Juba, whose great-grandfather was mighty Diniswayo, who was nobler even than his protege Chaka, who became King of Zulu, do you not feel the royal blood coursing in your veins, does it make you itch for things you dare not even speak aloud?"

"You are mad, woman, the mopani bees have entered your head and driven you mad." But Tanase smiled still with her lips close to his ear, and. she touched his eyelids with her soft pink fingertip.