He told how the white men had come up from the south. To begin with there were only one or two of them begging small favours, to shoot a few elephant, to trade their beads and bottles for native copper and ivory. Then there were more of them, and their demands were more insistent, more worrisome. They wanted to preach a strange three-headed god, they wanted to dig holes and search for the yellow metal and the bright stones. Deeply troubled, Lobengula had come to this place in the Matopos, and the Umlimo had warned him that when the sacred bird images flew from the ruins of Great Zimbabwe, then there would be no more peace in the land.

"The stone falcons were stolen from the sacred places," Gandang reminded them, "and Lobengula knew then that he could no more resist the white men than his father, Mzilikazi, had been able to." Thus the king had chosen the most powerful of all the white petitioners, "Lodzi" the big blue-eyed man who had eaten up the diamond mines and who was the and una of the white queen across the sea. Hoping to make him an ally, Lobengula had entered into a treaty with Lodzi, in exchange for gold coins and guns, he had granted to him a charter to dig for the buried treasures of the earth exclusively in Lobengula's eastern dominions.

However, Lodzi had sent a great train of wagons with hard fighting men like Selous and Bakela, leading hundreds of young white men armed like soldiers to take possession of the Charter lands. Sorrowfully, Gandang recited the long list of grievances and the breaking of faith, which had culminated in the clatter of Maxim guns, in the destruction of the king's kraal at Bulawayo, and the flight of Lobengula towards the north.

Finally, he described Lobeng'ula's death. Broken-hearted and sick, the king had taken poison, and Gandang himself had laid the body in a secret cave overlooking the valley of the Zambezi, and he had placed all the king's possessions around him, his stool, his head-pillow of ivory, his sleeping mat and fur kaross, his beer pots and beef-bowls, his guns and his war shield, his battle-axe and stabbing-spear, and at the last the little clay pots of glittering diamonds he had laid at Lobengula's gout-distorted feet. When all was done, Gandang had walled up the entrance to the cave, and slaughtered the slaves who had done the work. Then he had led the shattered nation back southwards into captivity.

At the last words, Gandang's hands fell to his sides, his chin sank onto the broad scarred and muscled chest, and a desolate silence descended upon them. At last one of the indunas in the second rank spoke. He was a frail old man with all the teeth missing from his upper jaw. His lower lids drooped away from his watery eyeballs so that the inner flesh showed like pink velvet and his voice was scratchy and breathless.

"Let us choose another king he began, but Bazo interrupted him.

"A king of slaves, a king of captives?" He laughed abruptly, scornfully. "There can be no king until there is a nation once again."

The ancient and una sank back, and gummed his toothless mouth, blinking about him miserably, his mind altering direction in the way of old men.

"The cattle," he murmured, "they have taken our cattle." The others hummed in angry assent. Cattle were the only true wealth, gold and diamonds were white men's baubles, but cattle were the foundation of the nation's welfare.

"One-Bright Eye sends un blooded young bucks of our own people to lord it in the kraals,-" complained another. "One-Bright-Eye" was the Matabele name for General Mungo St. John, the Chief Native Commissioner of Matabeleland.

"These Company police are armed with guns, and they show no respect for the custom and the law. They laugh at the indunas and the tribal elders, and they take the young girls into the bushes.-" "One-Bright-Eye orders all our amadoda, even those of Zanzi blood, respected warriors and the fathers of warriors to labour like lowly amah oh like dirt-eating slaves, digging his roads." The litany of their wrongs, real and fancied, was recited yet again by a succession of angry indunas, while only Somabula and Babiaan and Gandang and Bazo sat aloof. "Lodzi has burned our shields and snapped the blades of the stabbing-spears. He has refused our young men the ancient right to raid the Mashona when all the world knows that the Mashona are our dogs to kill or let live as we choose." "One-Bright Eye has disbanded the imp is and now no man knows who has the right to take a wife, nobody knows which maize field belongs to which village and the people squabble like sickly children over the few scrawny beasts that Lodzi has returned to us." "What must we do?" cried one, and then another strange and unprecedented thing happened. All of them, even Somabula, looked towards the tall scarred young man they called the Wanderer, and they waited expectantly for no one knew what.

Bazo made a sign with one hand and Tanase stooped out through the entrance of the reed hut. Clad only in the brief leather apron, slim and straight and supple, she carried the roll of sleeping-mat in her arms, and she knelt before Bazo and unrolled the mat on the earth at his feet.

The nearest indunas who could see what was concealed in the roll grunted with excitement. Bazo took it up in both hands and held it high. It caught the light, and now they all gasped. The design of the blade was by King Chaka himself-, the metal had been beaten out and polished to burning silver by the -skilled smiths of the Rozwi, and the blood wood shaft had been bound with copper wire and the coarse black hairs from the tail-tuft of a bull elephant.

"Jee!" hissed one of the indunas, the deep drawn-out war chant of the fighting imp is and the others took up the cry, swaying slightly to the force of it, their faces lighting with the first ecstasy of the fighting madness, Gandang put a halt to it. He sprang to his feet and the chant broke off as he made an abrupt gesture.

"One blade will not arm the nation, one blade will not prevail against the little three-legged guns of Lodzi." Bazo rose and stood facing his father.

"Take it in your hands, Babo," he invited, and Gandang shook his head angrily, but he could not take his eyes off the weapon.

"Feel how the heft of it can make a man of even a slave," Bazo insisted quietly, and this time Gandang stretched out his right hand.

His palm was bloodless white with tension and his fingers trembled as they closed around the grip.

"Still it is only one blade, he insisted, but he could not resist the feel of the beautiful weapon and he stabbed into the air with it.

"There are a thousand like this," Bazo whispered. "Where?"

Somabula barked.

"Tell us where, clamoured the other indunas, but Bazo goaded them.

"By the time that the first rains fall, there will be five thousand more. At fifty places in the hills the smiths are at work."

"Where?" Somabula repeated. "Where are they?" "Hidden in the caves of these hills." "Why were we not told?" Babiaan demanded.

Bazo answered, "There would have been those who doubted it could be done, those who counselled caution and delay, and there was no time for talk." Gandang nodded. "We all know he is right, defeat has turned us into chattering old women. But now," he handed the assegai to the man beside him, "feel it!" he ordered.

"How will we assemble the imp is the man asked, turning the weapon in his hands. "They are scattered and broken." "That is the task of each of you. To rebuild the imp is and to make certain that they are ready when the spears are sent out." "How will the spears reach us?" "The women will bring them, in bundles of thatching grass in rolls of sleeping-mats." "Where will we attack? Will we strike at the heart, at the great kraal the white men have built at GuBulawayo?"

"No." Bazo's voice rose fiercely. "That was the madness which destroyed us before. In our rage we forgot the way of Chaka and Mzilikazi, we attacked into the strength of the enemy, we went in across good shooting ground onto the wagons where the guns waited."

Bazo broke off, and bowed his head towards the senior indunas.

"Forgive me, Babo, the puppy should not yap before the old dog barks.

I speak out of turn." "You are no puppy, Bazo," Somabula growled.

"Speak on!" "We must be the fleas," Bazo said quietly. "We must hide in the white man's clothing and sting him in the soft places until we drive him to madness. But when he scratches, we will move on to another soft place.

"We must lurk in darkness and attack in the dawn, we must wait for him in the bad ground and probe his flanks and his rear." Bazo never raised his voice, but all of them listened avidly. "Never must we run in against the walls of the laager, and when the three-legged guns begin to laugh like old women, we must drift away like the morning mist at the first rays of the sun." "This is not war," protested Babiaan.

"It is war, Babo." Bazo contradicted, "the new kind of war, the only kind of war which we can win." "He is right," a voice called from the ranks of indunas. "That is the way it must be." They spoke up, one after the other, and no man argued against Bazo's vision, until the turn came back to Babiaan. "My brother Somabula has spoken the truth, you are no puppy, Bazo. Tell us only one thing more, when will it be?"

"That I cannot tell you." "Who can?" Bazo looked down at Tanase, who still knelt at his feet. "We have assembled in this valley for good reason," Bazo told them. "If all agree, then my woman who is an intimate of the Umlimo, and an initiate of the mysteries, will go up to the sacred cavern to take the oracle." "She must go immediately." "No, Babo." Tanase's lovely head was still bowed in deep respect. "We must wait until the Umlimo sends for us." There were places where the scars had knotted into hard lumps in Bazo's flesh. The machine-gun bullets had done deep damage. One arm, fortunately not the spear arm, was twisted and shortened, permanently deformed. After hard marching or exercise with the weapons of war, or after the nervous tension of planning and arguing and persuading others to his views, the torn and lumpy flesh often seized up in agonizing spasms.

Kneeling beside him in the little reed hut, Tanase could see the cramped muscles and rigid contraction of sinews under his dark skin twisted like living black mambas trying to escape from a silken bag.

With strong tapered fingers, she worked the ointment of fat and herbs into the crested muscle down his spine and the shoulder-blades, following the rubbery contractions up his neck to the base of his skull. Bazo groaned at the sweet agony of her bone-hard fingers, but slowly he relaxed and the knotted muscles subsided.

"You are good for me in so many ways, "he murmured.

"I was born for no other reason, she answered, but Bazo sighed and shook his head slowly.

"You and I were both born for some purpose which is still hidden from us. We know that we are different, you and me." She touched his lips with her finger to still him. "We will come back to that on the morrow." She placed both hands on his shoulders and drew him backwards, until he lay flat on the reed mat, and she began to work on his chest and the rigid muscles of his flat hard belly.

"Tonight there is only us," she repeated, in the throaty purr of a lioness at the kill, delighting in the power she could wield over him with the mere pressure of her fingertips, and yet at the same time consumed by a tenderness so deep that she felt her chest crushing beneath the weight of it. "Tonight we are all the world." She leaned forward and touched the bullet-wounds with the tip of her tongue and his arousal was so massive that she could not encompass it within the span of her thumb and long pink-lined fingers.

He tried to sit up, but she held him down with a light pressure against his chest, then she slipped the drawstring of her apron and with a single movement straddled him, both of them crying out involuntarily at the heat and terrible yearning of each other's bodies.

Then they were swept away together in a sudden exquisite fury.

When it had passed, she cradled his head against her bosom, and crooned to him like an infant, until his breathing was deep and regular in the dark hut. Even then, though she was silent, she did not sleep with him but lay and marvelled that such rage and compassion could possess her at the same moment in time.

"I will never know peace again," she realized suddenly. "And nor will he. "And she mourned for the man she loved, and for the need to goad and drive him on towards the destiny that she knew awaited both of them.

On the third day the messenger of the Umlimo came down from the cavern to where the indunas waited in the village.

The messenger was a pretty girl-child with a solemn expression and old wise eyes. She was on the very edge of puberty with the hard little stones already forming in her mulberry-dark nipples and the first light fuzz shading the deep cleft in the angle of her thighs.

Around her neck she wore a talisman that only Tanase recognized. It was a sign that one day this child in her turn would take on the sacred mantle of the Umlimo and preside in the gruesome cavern in the cliff above the village.

Instinctively the child looked to Tanase where she squatted to one side of the ranks of men, and with her eyes and a secret hand sign of the initiates, Tanase indicated Somabula, the senior and una The child's indecision was merely a symptom of the swift degeneration of Matabele society. In the time of the kings no one, child nor adult, would have been in any doubt as to the order of precedence.

When Somabula rose to follow the messenger, his half brothers rose with him, Babiaan on one hand and Gandang on the other.

"You also, Bazo," Sornabula said, and though Bazo was younger and more junior than some of them, none of the other indunas protested at his inclusion in the mission.