They piled Lobengula's tusks of yellow ivory at each hand, and at his feet Gandang placed his toy spear of kingship and his beer pots and eating plates, his knives and mirrors and snuff-horn, his beads and ornaments, a bag of salt and another of grain for the journey, and finally the little sealed clay pots of uncut diamonds to pay his way into the spirit world of his forefathers.
Under Gandang's supervision, they sealed the mouth of the cavern with heavy slabs of black ironstone, then, dolefully singing the king's praises, they went back down the hill.
There were no cattle to slaughter for the funeral feast, nor grain for the beer pots. Gandang called the leaders of the mourning people to him.
"A mountain has fallen," he said simply. "And an age is past. I have left behind me my wife and my son and the land that I loved. Without those things a man is nothing. I am going back. No man need follow me. Each must choose his own path, but mine is south again to Gubulawayo and the magical hills of the Matopos, to meet and talk with this man Lodzi."
In the morning, when Gandang started southwards again, he looked back and saw what was left of the Matabele nation straggling along behind him, no longer a great and warlike people, but a bewildered and broken rabble.
Robyn Codrington stood on the cool shaded verandah of Khami Mission. It had rained that morning, and the air was washed sparkling clean and the wet earth smelled like newly baked bread as the bright sunshine warmed it.
Robyn wore the black ribbons of mourning sewn on her sleeves.
"Why do you come here?" she demanded quietly, but unsmilingly, of the man who mounted the front steps of the verandah.
"I had no choice," Mungo Sint John answered her. He stopped on the top step, and studied her for a moment without any trace of mockery on his face.
Her skin was scrubbed and fresh, devoid of either rouge or powder.
It was smooth and fine-textured. There was no pouching below her clear green eyes, no blurring of her jawline, and her hair drawn back from her temples and forehead was innocent of silver lacing. Her body was small-breasted and narrow-hipped, tall and supple, but when she saw the direction of his gaze, the line of Robyn's lips hardened and set.
"I should be grateful, sir, if you would state your business and leave."
"Robyn, I am sorry, but perhaps it is best that the uncertainty is over."
In the four months since the return of @ the flying column from the Shangani, a dozen rumours. had come out of the bush.
That fateful morning, Mungo Sint John's column, cut off by the flooded river, had heard heavy firing on the opposite bank. Then almost immediately they had themselves come under fierce attack by elements of the Matabele army. They had been forced to retire, a long weary fighting retreat in the rain that had taken weeks of starvation and privation, until at last the harrying impis had let them go, but not before the gun carriages had been abandoned and half the horses lost.
Nobody had known what had happened to Allan Wilson's patrol on the north bank of the Shangani, but then the word had reached Gubulawayo that the little band had cut their way through the impis, gained the Zambezi, and rafted down it to the Portuguese settlement of Tete, three hundred miles downstream. Later that was denied by the Portuguese and hopes plunged, to be revived again when a Matabele induna coming in to surrender suggested that the white men had been taken prisoner by the Inyati regiment, rumour, denial and counter-rumour for four harrowing months, and now Mungo Sint John was standing before Robyn.
"It's certain," he said. "I did not want a stranger to bring the news to you."
"They are dead," she said flatly.
"All of them. Dawson reached the battlefield and found them."
"He would not have been able to recognize them or be certain of how many bodies. Not after all these months, not after the hyena and vultures, "
"Robyn, please." Mungo held out a hand to her, but she recoiled from him.
"I won't believe it, Clinton could have escaped."
"In the bush Dawson met the senior induna of the Matabele. He is coming in with all his people to surrender. He described to Dawson the patrol's last stand, and how in the end they all died."
"Clinton could have, " She was very pale, shaking her head firmly.
"Robyn, it was Gandang. He knew your husband-well.
"Hlopi" he called him, the man with white hair. He saw him lying with the other dead. It is certain. There can be no more hope."
"You can go now," she said, and then quite suddenly she was weeping. Standing very erect and chewing her lower lip to try and stop herself, but her face had crumpled and the rims of her eyelids turned rosy-pink with grief.
"I cannot leave you like this," he said and limped down the stoep towards her.
"Don't come near me," she husked through her tears, and she retreated before him. "Please don't touch me."
He came on, lean and rangy as an old torn-leopard; but the cruel and swarthy planes of his face had softened with an expression she had never seen upon them before, and his one good eye held her swimming green ones with a deep and tender concern.
"Don't, oh please don't, "Now she held up both hands as if to ward him off, and she turned her face away. She had reached the end of the verandah; her back was pressed to the door of the bedroom which Cathy and Salina had once shared, and she began to pray, her voice muffled by her own tears.
"Oh Gentle Jesus, help me to be strong-" His hands fell upon her shoulders; they were hard as bone and cool through the thin cotton of her blouse. She shuddered, and gasped.
Have pity. I beg you. Let me be."
He took her chin in the cup of his hand and forced her face up to his.
"Will you give me no peace, ever?" she mumbled brokenly, and then his mouth covered hers and she could not speak again. Slowly the rigidity went out of her body, and she swayed against him. She sobbed once, and began to slump into the embrace of his hard muscled arms. He caught her behind the knees, and around the shoulders, and lifted her like a sleeping child against his chest.
He kicked open the door to the bedroom, stepped through and pushed it closed with his heel.
There was a dustsheet on the bed, but no pillow or eiderdown. He laid her upon it, and knelt beside her, still holding her to his chest.
"He was a saint," she choked. "And you sent him to his death. You are the very devil."
Then with the shaking, frantic fingers of a drowning woman, she unfastened the mother-of-pearl buttons down the front of his linen shirt.
"His chest was hard and smooth, the olive skin covered with crisp, dark curls. She pressed her open lips to it, breathing deeply the man-smell of him.
"Forgive me," she sobbed. "Oh God, forgive me."
From his cubbyhole beside the pantries, Jordan Ballantyne could overlook the cavernous kitchens of Groote Schuur.
There were three chefs at work over the gleaming, anthracite-burning Aga ranges, and one of them hurried across to Jordan with the enamelled double-boiler and a silver spoon. With it Jordan tasted the Beamaise sauce that would go with the galjoen. The galjoen was a fish of the stormy Cape waters; fancifully its shape could be likened to that of a Spanish galleon, and its delicate greenish flesh was one of the great African delicacies.
"Perfect," Jordan nodded. "Parfait, Monsieur Galliard, comme toujours." The little Frenchman scurried away beaming, and Jordan turned to the heavy teak door leading to the wine cellars below the kitchens.
Jordan had personally decanted the port that afternoon, ten bottles of the forty-year-old Vilanova de Gaia of the 1853 vintage; it had faded to the beautiful tawny colour of wild honey. Now a Malay waiter in long white Kanzu robes, with crimson sash and pillbox fez, came up the stone steps, reverently carrying the first Waterford glass decanter on a Georgian silver tray.
Jordan poured a thimbleful into the chased silver tastevin which he wore on the chain about his neck. He sipped, rolled it on his tongue and then drew breath sharply through pursed lips to let the wine declare itself.