The Covenant Part 3

Nxumalo shook his head, liking the feel of the heavy metal. 'In the end it's a mystery, son. It's magic, because it lures men from lands you never heard of to come to our sh.o.r.es, to ford our rivers, to climb our mountains, to come a journey of many moons to Zimbabwe to get our gold.' Gently, almost lovingly, he retrieved the amulet and placed the chain about his neck, hiding the golden pendant beneath his cotton robe.

That was the beginning of his attempt to persuade Nxumalo: 'What you must do, son, is find eight rhinos and take their horns, then follow my trail to Zimbabwe . . .'

'What is Zimbabwe?' the boy asked one evening.

'How sad,' the old man said with unfeigned regret. 'Not one person in this village has ever seen Zimbabwe!'

'What is it?'

'Towers and soaring walls.' He paused and pointed to the low stone wall that surrounded the cattle kraal and said in an awed voice, 'Walls ten, twenty times higher than that. Buildings that reach to the sky.' A group of elders shook their heads in disbelief and clucked among themselves, but the Old Seeker ignored them. 'Our king, lord of a thousand villages bigger than yours, the great one the spirits talk to, he lives in a kraal surrounded by walls higher than trees.' He placed his hand on Nxumalo's arm and said, 'Until you've seen Zimbabwe, you live, in darkness.'

Whenever he spoke like this, telling the boy of the grandness of the city from which he came, he reverted to the problem of the rhinoceros horns and the necessity of bringing them to the city, but one morning as he spoke with Nxumalo and his father he said abruptly, 'Ngalo, dear friend of many searchings, today I leave you to look for the Ridge-of-White-Waters, and I want Nxumalo to lead me.'

'He knows the way,' Ngalo said, pointing directly west to where the prominent ridge lay. It was a four-day journey which entailed some dangers, but the path was a pleasant one. 'Why do you wish to go?'

'In my day, Ngalo, I have sought many things. Women, high office, the path to Sofala, the king's good wishes. But the best thing I ever sought was gold. And I am convinced that in your terrain, there must be gold somewhere.' Contemptuously he dismissed the iron ingots that remained under the tree. Addressing only Nxumalo, he said, 'Iron gives temporary power. It can be made into spearheads and clubs. But gold gives permanent power. It can be fashioned into dreams, and men will come a long way to satisfy their dreams.'

On the third day of their journey west, after they had pa.s.sed many small villages which the old man seemed to know, it became apparent to Nxumalo that the Seeker knew very well where the Ridge-of-White-Waters lay and that he had insisted on having companionship only because he wanted to convince Nxumalo of something. That night, as they were resting at the edge of a miserable kraal, the old man spied the boy standing alone, in his eyes a mixture of sadness and antic.i.p.ation as he stared toward the empty lands to the south.

'What is it, young friend?'

'It is my brother, mfundisi,' he said, using a term of respect. 'Last year he left for the south, and I must go too, when it is time.' It was a custom that he must honor: the oldest brother always succeeded to the chieftainship, while the younger brothers moved to the frontier and started their own villages. And this had been done since these blacks came down from the north, centuries ago.

'No, no!' the Old Seeker protested. 'Find me the rhinoceros horn. Bring it to me in Zimbabwe.'

'Why should I do so?'

The old man took the boy's hands and said, 'If one like you, a boy of deep promise, does not test himself in the city, he spends his life where? In some wretched village like this.'

On the fourth day such discussions halted temporarily, for the Old Seeker's troop was attacked by a band of little brown men who swarmed like pestilential flies determined to repel an invader. When their slim arrows began buzzing, Nxumalo shouted, 'Beware! Poison!' and he led the Old Seeker to safety inside a ring of porters whose shields repelled the arrows.

The fight continued for about an hour, with the little men shouting battle orders in a preposterous series of clicking sounds, but gradually the taller, more powerful blacks herded them away, and they retreated into the savanna, still uttering their clicks.

'Aiee!' Nxumalo shouted with exasperation as the little fellows disappeared. 'Why do they attack us like jackals?'

Old Seeker, who had worked with the small people in the north, said calmly, 'Because we're crossing hunting grounds they claim as their own.'

'Jackals!' the boy snorted, but he knew the old man was right.

On the morning of the fifth day, as planned, the file of men reached the Ridge-of-White-Waters, which later settlers would call Wit.w.a.tersrand, where the Old Seeker hoped to find evidence that gold existed, but the more carefully he explored the regiona handsome one, with prominent hillocks from which Nxumalo could see for milesthe more disappointed he became. Here the telltale signs, which in the lands about Zimbabwe indicated gold, were missing; there was no gold, and it became obvious that the exploration had been fruitless, but on the evening of their last day of tramping the hills the Old Seeker discovered what he was looking for. It was an ant hill, eleven feet high, and he rushed to it, breaking it apart with a long stick and fumbling through the fine-grained soil.

'What are you looking for?' Nxumalo asked, and the old man said, 'Gold. These ants dig down two hundred feet to build their tunnels. If there's gold here, they bring flecks to the surface.'

At this site there were none, and reluctantly the Old Seeker had to admit that he had taken this long journey to no avail: T didn't come to see your father. I didn't come for rhino horn. Son, when you have a mult.i.tude of targets, always aim for the one of merit. I came seeking gold, and I'm convinced there's gold here.'

'But you didn't find it.'

'I had the joy of hunting. Son, have you listened to what I've been telling you these days?' He led Nxumalo some distance from the spot where his bearers waited, and as he looked out over the vast bleakness visible from the fruitless ridge he said, 'It isn't even gold I seek. It's what gold can achieve. To Zimbabwe come men from all across the world. They bring us gifts you cannot imagine. Four times I went down the trails to Sofala. Twice I sailed upon the dhows to mighty Kilwa. I saw things no man could ever forget. When you seek, you find things you did not antic.i.p.ate.'

'What are you seeking?' Nxumalo asked.

The old man had no answer.

The task of collecting sixteen rhinoceros horns was proving much more complex than Nxumalo antic.i.p.ated when he accepted the challenge, and after the Old Seeker had departed to visit other tribes who might or might not know of gold mines, the boy approached his father: 'I want to track down the rhinos.'

'So the old talker poisoned you?'

Nxumalo looked down at his feet, unwilling to admit that he had been entrapped by blandishments and singing words. 'Like the iron,' his father said. 'You went, and you dug for iron, and you found it. And when you came home with ingots . . . they didn't mean very much, not really.'

'I want to see the city,' Nxumalo said.

'And you shall. And when you come home you'll tell me, "It didn't matter very much."'

Those of Nxumalo's brothers who remained at the kraal wished him well in his quest for the rhinoceros horns but showed no interest in joining him. The tribe was essentially sedentary, with fixed villages, st.u.r.dy wattled huts and a settled agriculture. The women knew how to cultivate fields, the men how to manage cattle and tend the fat-tailed sheep. One brother directed the metalworkers who provided tools for the region and another was gaining a reputation in the district as a herbalist and diviner.

But it was Nxumalo who championed the ancient arts of hunting and tracking in the wild, and because of this he seemed the more regal figure, the young man who best preserved the historical merits of the tribe. He was the only one with much chance of tracking down eight rhinoceroses and delivering the sixteen aphrodisiac horns to Zimbabwe, so on a warm summer morning he and six helpers moved eastward toward the heavily wooded area leading to the sea.

He was an imposing lad, not yet full height but taller than most men, and the princ.i.p.al characteristic that struck those who saw him for the first time was power: his arms and legs were well-muscled and his torso much broader than his hips. His face was large and placid, as if he knew no anger, and when he smiled all his features partic.i.p.ated and his shoulders moved forward, creating the impression that his entire body was enjoying whatever sensation had evoked the smile; and when his lips parted, his white teeth punctuated the grin. It was obvious that when he reached the age of eighteen he would be able to marry whom he pleased, for he was not only the chief's son but also a young prince among men.

He was so totally different from the small brown hunters who had once inhabited this area that he seemed unrelated to them, and in a way he was. Earliest man, Australopithecus, had once flourished over a large part of Africa, and as he developed into modern man, one branch settled close to the equator, where the sun placed a premium on black skin, which adjusted to its punishing rays; no primitive tribe of pale-white complexion could have prospered long in those blazing regions which produced Nxumalo's people, just as his heavily pigmented skin would have been at a severe disadvantage in the cold north, where the sun's parsimonious rays had to be carefully h.o.a.rded.

Slowly, over many centuries, Nxumalo's black ancestors, herding cattle before them and carrying seeds in their skin bags and baskets, had migrated southward, reaching the lake about four centuries after the birth of Christ. They arrived not as conquering heroes but as women and men seeking pasturage and safe enclaves; some had continued southward, but Nxumalo's tribe had fancied the encompa.s.sing hills about the lake.

As they lingered they came into contact with the small brown people, and gradually these had been pushed south or into the mountain ranges to the east. From these places the insatiable little hunters raided the kraals of Nxumalo's people, and there had to be confrontations. Some did live in peace with the invaders, trading the spoils of their hunt for tools and sanctuary, but thousands of others were turned into serfs or put to work at the mines. a.s.sociation continued over centuries, and occasionally at Nxumalo's kraal some woman of his tribe would have enormous b.u.t.tocks, signaling her inheritance from the small people. There were fierce clashes between the two groups but never a pitched battle; had there been, the end result might have been more humane, because as things turned out, the little brown people were being quietly smothered.

It was an able group that had moved south in this black migration: skilled artisans knew the secrets of smelting copper and making fine tools and weapons tipped with iron. In certain villages women wove cloth, sometimes intermixing threads of copper. And every family owned earthenware pots designed and crafted by clever women and fired in kilns in the ground.

Their language bore no resemblance to that of the small people. A few tribes, moving south along the sh.o.r.es of the eastern ocean, would pick up the click sounds, but Nxumalo's people had acquired none. Their speech was pure, with an extensive vocabulary capable of expressing abstract thought and a lively apt.i.tude for tribal remembrance.

Two special attributes set these tribes ahead of any predecessors: they had developed sophisticated systems of government, in which a chief provided civil rule and a spirit-medium religious guidance; and they had mastered their environment, so that cattle herding, agriculture and the establishment of permanent villages became practical. And there was one more significant addition: over the vast area trade flourished, so that communities could socialize; Chief Ngalo's people could easily import iron ingots from the great mines at Phalaborwa, one hundred and seventy miles away, and then send fabricated spearheads to villages that lay two hundred miles southwest, beyond the Ridge-of-White-Waters.

In other words, when Nxumalo set forth to find the rhinoceros horns that would carry him to Zimbabwe, he was the inheritor of a substantial culture, which he intended, even at his early age, to augment and protect. He knew that when his father died, his older brother would inherit the chieftainship, at which time he himself would take a wife and move farther west to establish a frontier village of his own, and this prospect pleased him. His impending excursion to Zimbabwe was an exploration, not a removal.

On the sixth day of their march, after pa.s.sing great herds of buffalo and wildebeest, Nxumalo told his companions, 'There must be rhinos among those trees,' but when they reached the area where the savanna gave way to real forest, they found nothing, and an older man suggested, 'I've never seen rhinos where the trees were so many,' and he pointed back toward the spa.r.s.er savanna.

Nxumalo was about to rebuke the man, for he had once been with hunters who had found their rhino in heavy woods, but he restrained himself and asked, 'You found rhinos back there?'

'We did.'

'Then let's look there.' And when they did, they saw unmistakable signs of the mighty beast. But these blacks were not Bushmen, and the mastery the brown people had shown in tracking animals was little known; it was obvious that rhinos had been here, but where they had gone, the hunters could not determine. They hunted, therefore, in a hit-or-miss way, moving about in large circles and with such noise that a Bushman would have been shocked. But they were fortunate, and in time they came upon a black, pointed-snout rhino with two ma.s.sive horns, one behind the other.

Killing so formidable a beast required both skill and courage. The former would be contributed by the six huntsmen with iron-tipped spears, the latter by Nxumalo as leader of the expedition. Placing his men along the route he intended the animal to follow, he moved quietly into position somewhat ahead of the beast, leaped suddenly from the gra.s.s and exposed himself to the startled animal, which, with instant impulse to destroy, lunged madly at the boy like some enormous juggernaut launched upon an undeviating course.

Horns low to impale, little legs pumping, snout ablaze and throat uttering deep growls, the rhinoceros charged with enormous power, while the boy ran backward with beautiful deftness. It was a moment no hunter could forget, that grand relationship of beast and man, when a single mistake on the part of the latter meant immediate death. And since the animal could run much faster than the boy, it was obvious that the latter must be killed unless some other force intervened, and this occurred just when it seemed that the powerful horns must catch the lad, for then the six hunters rose up and thrust their spears to turn the animal aside.

Four of the iron-tipped spears found their mark, and the great beast began to thrash at the low bushes in his path, forgetting the boy and wheeling to face his new adversaries, one of whom was stooping to recover his weapon. With a wild charge the beast bore down upon the man, who leaped aside, abandoning his spear, which the rhinoceros broke into many pieces. Then Nxumalo closed in with an axe, taking a mighty swipe at the beast's back legs. As he did so, another man thrust his spear with great force into the animal's neck.

The battle was not over, but its outcome was certain, and instead of trailing the damaged beast for days, as the Bushmen would have done, these determined men, with their superior weapons, closed in and brought him down with stabs and thrusts and tormentings. The great black beast tried to defend himself, kicking and goring, but in the end the seven men were too persistent, and he died.

'Two of our horns,' Nxumalo said as his men hacked the precious item from the carca.s.s. They were curious, these horns, not horn at all but heavily compacted ma.s.ses of hair, and their presence doomed this magnificent animal to near-extinction, for silly old men in distant China believed that rhinoceros horn, properly administered in powder form, restored virility, and China in these days was rich enough to search the world for horn. Nxumalo's men, so prudent in so many ways, cut from this dead rhinoceros only the two horns, cached them beneath a tree blazed with many cuts, and abandoned the ton or more of choice meat as they set out to find their next quarry.

They killed three additional rhinos on this hunt, driving them into pits lined with jagged stakes. The eight horns they carried back to the village, leaving the carca.s.ses to the vultures, hyenas and ants, and in each of the killings young Nxumalo had run in the shadow of those piercing horns and those thundering feet. 'He is a skilled huntsman,' the men told the chief. 'He can do anything.' And when the boy heard this report he smiled, and his handsome black body glistened as he leaned forward to show his appreciation.

In almost no respect did Nxumalo's village resemble the dwelling place of the little brown men which had preceded it: now there were substantial rondavels instead of open s.p.a.ce on the ground, and carefully nurtured grains and vegetables instead of chance gatherings; now there was a fixed community. But in one regard life was much the same: women and men wore almost no clothes.

So it was remarkable that one of the princ.i.p.al industries of the village was the weaving of cotton cloth, and when young Nxumalo returned with his eight rhinoceros horns, to be hailed a hero, it was natural that he take notice of one of the girls who sat in a low gra.s.s-roofed building by the lake, throwing their shuttles and shifting their looms.

Often as they spun their cotton they would pause to watch the animals grazing on the far side of the lake, and if a zebra kicked its heels or a gazelle danced in the air, the girls would applaud. And if a troop of elephants chanced to move in, or a flight of cranes, there would be cries of pleasure and not much would be accomplished.

Among the weavers was Zeolani, fifteen years old and daughter of the man who knew how to make copper wire from ingots brought south from the Limpopo River. From bits and pieces left over from the consignment, her father had made her the seven slim bracelets she wore upon her left wrist, so that when she threw the shuttle in her weaving she created soft music, which pleased her and set her apart from the others.

The work was not onerous; nothing that the tribe did demanded sustained effort, and there were long periods when the girls spent most of their days in idleness. Zeolani used these times to slip back to the looms and weave for herself cloth made of second-grade cotton adorned with bits of copper taken from her father's h.o.a.rd. This cloth was not pure white, like that woven for trading; it was a honeyed tan, well-attuned to her blackness, and when its copper flecks caught the sun, the cloth seemed to dance.

Of it she made herself a skirt, the first seen in this village, and when she wrapped it about her slim waist and pirouetted by the lake, her dark b.r.e.a.s.t.s gleaming in the sunlight, she made herself a girl apart.

'They say you were brave at the hunt,' she said to Nxumalo as she danced by when he lingered at the silent weaving shelter.

'Rhinos are hard to find.'

'And hard to kill?' As she posed this question, she swung away from him, aware that as her skirt flared outward it showed to fine advantage.

'The others did the killing,' he said, entranced by her gentle movements.

'I kept watching to the east,' she said. 'I was afraid.'

He reached for her hand, and they sat looking across the lake at the desultory animals who wandered down for a midday drink: a few antelope, two or three zebra, and that was all. 'At dusk,' he said, 'that sh.o.r.e will swarm.'

'Look!' she cried as a lazy hippopotamus half rose from the waters, jawed mightily, then submerged.

'I wish the strangers in far lands wanted hippo teeth instead of rhino horns,' Nxumalo said. 'Much easier to do.' Zeolani said nothing, and after a while he touched her skirt, and then, almost as if he were driven to speak, he blurted out: 'When I am gone I'll remember this cloth.'

'It's true, then? You've decided to go?'

'Yes.'

'The old man talked and talked . . . and you believed him?'

'I'll go. I'll see the city. And I'll come back.'

Taking her by the hands, he said fervently, 'When I traveled with the Old Seeker we came upon a fine land and I thought, "We'll leave the lake to my brothers ... to tend their cattle and their fields. Zeolani and I will find a few good hunters and we . . .'

She did not coyly repeat the we, we, for she knew well what Nxumalo had been thinking, because she, too, had contemplated moving away from this village and starting a new one with her hunter-husband. Instead of speaking, she took his hand, drew it close to her naked breast, and whispered, 'I shall wait for you, Nxumalo.' for she knew well what Nxumalo had been thinking, because she, too, had contemplated moving away from this village and starting a new one with her hunter-husband. Instead of speaking, she took his hand, drew it close to her naked breast, and whispered, 'I shall wait for you, Nxumalo.'

After the next hunt, in which Nxumalo brought down four more rhinos, the young lovers found many opportunities to discuss their uncertain future. 'Can't I go to Zimbabwe with you?' Zeolani asked.

'So far! The way uncertain. No, no.'

They decided upon a course fraught with danger, but their love had matured at such a dizzy speed that they were eager to risk the penalties. At Zeolani's signaling they wandered by different routes into the savanna east of the village to a spot hidden by the two small hills shaped like a woman's b.r.e.a.s.t.s, and there they made love repeatedly, even though it could mean the end of his trip to Zimbabwe if she became pregnant. If word of such condition circulated, the tribe would condemn her for having known a man without sanction and everyone would know who the man must have been, and they would be severely punished.

There, between the hills, they kept their trysts, and fortune was with them, for there was no pregnancy. Instead, there developed a deepening love, and as the day approached when Nxumalo must march north with the tribute, their last meetings a.s.sumed a mournful cast that could not be dispelled.

'I will walk behind you,' the girl said, 'and come into Zimbabwe as if by accident.'

'No, it's man's work,' said this boy of sixteen.

'I will wait for you. You are the only one I will ever live with.'

They went boldly to one of the hills south of the village and looked west toward the spot that Nxumalo had chosen many months ago. 'It lies far beyond. There's a small stream and many antelope. When I was sleeping there I heard a rustle, so I opened one eye. It could have been an enemy. What do you suppose it was?'

'Baboons?'

'Four sable antelope. Their horns were wider than this,' and when he extended his arms to their maximum, Zeolani slipped into them and they embraced for the last time. Tears came to her eyes as her slim fingers traced the muscles in his arm.

'We were intended,' she said. 'By every sign we were intended.' And she counted the omens that should have brought them together, and each knew that never in this life could another mate be found so inevitably right.

'I shall wait for you,' the girl said, and with this childish and futile promise ringing in his ears, Nxumalo set forth.

It was a journey any young man would want to make, five hundred miles due north across the heart of Africa, crossing wide rivers, sharing the pathway with animals innumerable, and heading for a city known only in legend or the garbled reports of the Old Seeker. Sixteen men would accompany their young leader, and since only the guide Sibisi had made the first part of this trip before, the others were at least as excited as Nxumalo.

He was surprised at how lightly the men were burdened; on one of his hunting trips his helpers would carry three times the weight, but Sibisi explained, 'Much safer if travel light. Use the first days to tighten muscles. Enjoy the freedom and make yourselves strong, because on the twenty-seventh day .. .' He dropped his voice ominously. 'Then we reach the Field of Granite.'

The loading would have been simpler if the rhinoceros horns could have been reduced to powder and adjusted to the men's other cargo, but this was forbidden. The horns had to be intact upon delivery at Sofala to the waiting dhows that would carry them thus to China, so that apothecaries could be a.s.sured they were getting true horn and not some admixture of dust to make the packages larger.

The file set forth at dawn on a clear autumn day, when the swollen rivers of spring and summer had receded and when animals born earlier in the year were large enough to be eaten. Sibisi set a pace that would not tire the men at the beginning, but would enable them to cover about twenty miles each day. For two weeks they would travel through savanna much as they had known at home, with no conspicuous or unusual features.

Two men who carried nothing proved invaluable, for it was they who ranged ahead, providing meat for the travelers. 'I want you to eat a lot and grow strong,' Sibisi said, 'because when we reach the Field of Granite we must be at our best.'

On the morning of the sixth day the march speeded considerably, and the file covered at least twenty-five miles a day until they approached the first notable site on their journey. 'Ahead lies the gorge,' Sibisi said, and he regaled the novices with accounts of this spectacular place: 'The river hesitates, looks at the wall of rock, then leaps forward shouting, "It can be done!" And mysteriously it picks its way through the red cliffs.'

Sibisi added, 'Mind your steps. You're not clever like the river.'

The gorge was so extremely narrow, only a few yards across, that the river rushed through with tremendous force, its turbulence well suited to the towering red flanks. The transit required the better part of a day, the porters following a precipitous footpath that clung to the eastern edge of the river and carried them at times down into the river itself. At the midpoint of the gorge the tops of the walls seemed to close in, so that the sky was obliterated, and here birds of great variety and color flashed through, playing a game of missing the cliffs as they darted about.

'Insects,' Sibisi said, showing the others how the turbulence of the water created air currents that tossed insects aloft, where birds awaited, and for a while as Nxumalo paused to absorb the wonder of this placea river piercing a wall of rockhe felt that his journey could have no finer moment, but he was wrong. The true grandeur of this trip lay ahead, for as the travelers came out of the gorge they entered upon a place of wonder.

The land opened out like the vast ears of an elephant, and across it trees of the most outlandish nature scattered. 'They're upside down!' Nxumalo cried, rushing to a ma.s.sive thing much thicker than any he had previously known. It was fifteen feet through the center, with bark soft and s.h.a.ggy like the skin of an old dog; when he pressed against it, his thumb sank deep within. But what was truly remarkable were the branches, for this mighty tree reaching sixty feet into the air carried only tiny twigs resembling the roots of some frail plant, ripped out of its soil and stuck back in, upside down.

'It is upside down,' Sibisi agreed. 'The G.o.ds did it.'

'Why?'

'They made this excellent tree. Perfect in every respect. Big branches like an ordinary tree. But it was lazy, and when they came back to gather fruit, they found nothing. So in anger they ripped it out of the ground and jammed it back in, upside down, as you can see.'

When Nxumalo laughed at the sight of this monstrosity, Sibisi gripped his arm. 'No ridicule. Many men owe their lives to this tree, for when you are perishing from thirst you come here, puncture the bark, and out will drip a little water.' Nor was it only water the baobab gave, for its leaves could be boiled and eaten, its seeds sucked or ground to make a tingling drink, and its spongy wood stripped and woven into rope.

It was a tree that festooned the landscape, its great pillars of thick glossy bark and tangled branches spreading far into the sky. Wherever he looked north of the gorge, there stood these trees, as if to cry, 'We are sentinels of a new land. You are coming onto the earth we guard.'

And it was a new land. The savanna sprouted different gra.s.ses, and there were different birds and different small animals running between the rocks. But in the distance there were always the same large animals: elephant and eland and galloping zebra. They were the permanent G.o.ds that accompanied men when they journeyed north, and at night when they lit their campfire, Nxumalo could hear the lions prowling near, lured by the smell of human beings but repelled by their flames, and in the distance the soft grumbling of the hyenas. It was as if a man traveling across the savanna carried with him a garland of beasts, beautiful and wild and useful. Nxumalo, peering into the darkness, could sometimes see their eyes reflecting the flames, and he was always surprised at how close they came; on nights when it was his turn to keep the fire alive, he would allow it to die perilously low, and in the near-darkness he would see the lions moving closer, closer, their eyes not far from his, their soft and lovely forms clearly discernible. Then, with a low cry, he would poke the embers and throw on more wood, and they would quietly withdraw, perplexed by this untoward behavior but still fascinated by the wavering flames.