The first to arrive were four young bulls, just ready to take up their stud duties. Craig had paid fifteen thousand dollars for each of them. Peter Fungabera was determined to make an important occasion out of their arrival. He persuaded two of his brother ministers to attend the welcoming ceremony, though neither the prime minister nor the minister of tourism, Comrade Tungata Zebiwe, was available on that day.
Craig hired a marquee tent, while Joseph happily and importantly prepared one of his legendary al fresco banquets. Craig was still smarting from having paid out two million dollars, so he went cheap on the champagne, ordering the imitation from the Cape of Good Hope rather than the genuine article.
The ministerial party arrived in a fleet of black Mercedes, accompanied by their heavily armed bodyguards, all sporting aviator, type sunglasses. Their ladies were dressed in full-length safari prints, of the wildest and most improbable colours. The cheap sweet champagne went down as though a plug had been pulled out of a bath, and they were all soon twittering and giggling likea flock of glossy starlings. The minister of education's senior wife unbuttoned her blouse, produced a succulent black bosom, and gave the infant on her hip an early lunch while herself taking on copious quantities of champagne. "Refuelling in flight," one of Craig's white neighbours, who had been an R.A.F bomber-pilot, remarked with a grin.
Peter Fungabera was the last to arrive, wearing full dress, and driven by a young aide, a captain in the Third Brigade whom Craig had noticed on several other occasions. This time Peter introduced him.
"Captain Timon Nbebi." He was so thin as to appear almost frail. His eyes behind the steel, rimmed spectacles were too vulnerable for a soldier, and his grip was quick and nervous. Craig would have liked to have spoken to him, but, by this time the transporter carrying the bulls was already grinding up the hills.
It arrived in a cloud of fine red dust before the enclosure of split poles that Craig had built to receive the bulls. The gangplank was lowered, but before the tailgate was raised Peter Fungabera climbed up onto the dais and addressed the assembly.
"Mr. Craig Mellow is a man who could have chosen any country in the world to live in and, as an internationally best selling writer, would have been welcomed there. He chose to return to Zimbabwe, and in doing so has declared to all the world that here is a land where men of any colour, of any tribe black Or white, Mashona or Matabele are free to live and wotk, unafraid and unmolested, safe in the rule of just laws After the political commercial, Peter Fungabera allowed himself a little joke. "We will now welcome to our midst these other new immigrants, in the sure knowledge that they will be the fathers of many fine sons and daughters, and contribute to the prosperity of our own Zimbabwe Peter Fungabera led the applause as Craig raised the gate and the first new immigrant emerged to stand blinking in the sunlight. He was an enormous beast, over a ton Of bulging muscles under the glistening red-brown hide. He had just endured sixteen hours penned up in a noisy, lurching machine. The tranquillizers he had been given had worn off, leaving him with a drug hangover and a bitter grudge against the entire world. Now he looked down on the clapping throng, on the swirling colours of the women's national costumes, and he found at last a focus for his irritation and frustration. He let out a long ferocious bellow, and, dragging his handlers behind him, he launched himself like an avalanche down the gangplank.
The handlers released their hold on the restrainers, and the split-pole barrier exploded before his charge, as did the ministerial party. They scattered like sardines at the rush Of a hungry barracuda.
High officials overtook their wives, in a race for the sanctuary of the jacaranda trees; infants strapped on the women's backs howled as loudly as their dams.
The bull went into one side of the luncheon marquee, still at a dead run, gathering up the guy ropes on his massive shoulders, so the tent came down in graceful billows of canvas, trapping beneath it a horde of panic, stricken revellers. He emerged from the further side of the collapsing marquee just as one of the younger ministerial wives sprinted, shrilling with terror, across his path. He hooked at her with one long forward-raked horn, and the point caught mi the fluttering hem of her dress. The bull jerked his head up and the brightly coloured. material unwrapped from the girl's body like the string from a child's top. She spun into an involuntary pirouette, caught her balance, and then, stark naked, went bounding up the hill with long legs flashing and abundant breasts bouncing elastically.
"Two to one, the filly to win by a tit," howled the R.A.F
LIM
bomber-pilot ecstatically. He had also fuelled up on the cheap champagne.
The gaudy dress had wrapped itself around the bull's head. It served to goad him beyond mere anger into the deadly passion of the corrida bull facing the matador's cape. He swung his great armed head from side to side, the dress swirling rakishly likea battle ensign in a high wind, and exposing one of his wicked little eyes which lighted on the honourable minister of education, the least fleet, footed of the runners, who was making heavy weather of the slope.
The minister was carrying the burden of flesh that behaves a man of such importance. His belly wobbled mountainously beneath his waistcoat. His face was grey as last night's ashes, and he screamed in a girlish falsetto of terror and exhaustion, "Shoot it! Shoot the devilP His bodyguards ignored the instruction. They were leading him by fifty paces and rapidly widening the gap.
Craig watched helplessly from his grandstand position on the transporter, as the bull lowered his head and drove up the slope after the Aeeing minister. Dust spurted from under his hooves, and he bellowed again. The blast of sound, only inches from the ministerial backside, seemed physically to lift and propel the honourable minister the last few paces, and he turned out to be a much better climber than sprinter. Fk'went up the trunk of the first jacaranda likea squirrel and hung precariously in the lower branches with the bull directly beneath him.
The bull bellowed again in murderous frustration, glaring up at the cowering figure, tore at the earth with his front hooves, and gored the air with full-blooded swings of his vicious, white-tipped horns.