In the centre the tribesmen had moved swiftly, and with the concerted action of trained fighting men.
They had dropped the rolled bundles of sleeping-mat, cooking-pot and leather grain bag that they had been carrying on their heads, and they had bunched into a defensive circle shoulder to shoulder, war shield overlapping war shield, while above them the steel of their assegais flicked little pinpricks of sunlight.
They did not wear the full regalia of their fighting regiments, the kilts of monkey tails, the cloaks of desert fox furs, the tall headdress of ostrich and widow-bird feathers they were travelling with weapons only; but the shields they presented to the approaching horseman and the glint of steel told Zouga all he wanted to know. The shields gave the tribe its name, the Matabele, the people of the long shields.
The little group of men who stood impassively in the sunlight and watched Zouga ride up were the finest warriors that Africa had ever spawned. Yet they were almost five hundred miles south of the borders of Matabeleland.
"I set for a covey of partridge," Zouga smiled to himself, "and I have trapped a brood of eagles."
A hundred yards from the ring of shields, Zouga reined in; but the gelding, infected by the tension, fidgeted under him.
The long shields were made of dappled black and white oxhide, every regiment of the Matabele carried a distinctive shield.
Zouga knew that black dappled with white was the regimental colour of the Inyati, the Buffaloes Regiment, and again he felt a twist of nostalgia.
Once the induna who commanded the Inyati had been a friend; they had travelled together across the mimosaclad plains of Matabeleland; they had hunted together and shared the comfort of the same camp fires.
It was all so long ago, on his first visit to the land below the Zambezi river, but Zouga was carried back so vividly that it required an effort of will to shake off the memory.
He lifted his right hand, fingers spread in the universal gesture of goodwill.
"Warriors of Matabele, I see you," he called to them, speaking their language as fluently as one of them, the words returning to his tongue readily.
He saw the small stir behind the war-shields, the shift of heads with which they greeted his words.
"Jordan!" Zouga called, and the child circled out and reined in his pony at Zouga's side. Now the difference in size between man and boy was apparent.
"See, warriors of King Lobengula, my son rides with me." No man took his children to war. The ring of shields sank a few inches so Zouga could see the dark and watchful eyes of the men behind them; but as Zouga pushed the gelding a few paces forward, the shields were immediately lifted again defensively.
"What news of Gandang, induna of the Inyati Regiment, Gandang who is as my brother?" Zouga called again persuasively.
At the mention of the name one of the warriors could no longer contain himself, swept aside his shield and stepped from the ring of spears.
"Who calls Gandang brother?" he demanded in a clear firm voice, a young voice, yet with the timbre and inflection of one used to authority.
"I am Bakela, the Fist," Zouga gave his Matabele name, and he realized that the warrior facing him was still a youth, barely older than Ralph. But he was lean and straight, narrow in the hips and with muscle in the shoulder and arms built up in the games of war. Zouga guessed he had probably already killed his man, washed his spear in blood.
Now he crossed the open ground towards Zouga, his stride lithe, his legs long and shapely beneath the short leather kilt.
"Bakela," he said, as he stopped a dozen paces from the gelding's head. "Bakela." He smiled, a brilliant show of white even teeth in the broad and handsome Nguni face.
"That is a name I took with the first draught of my mother's milk, for I am Bazo, the Axe, son of the same Gandang whom you call brother, and who remembers you as an old and trusted friend. I know you by the scar on your cheek and the goid in your beard. I greet you, Bakela."
Zouga swung down off the gelding, leaving the rifle in the saddle scabbard, and, grinning broadly, went to clasp the youth's upper arms in an affectionate salute.
Then, turning with his fists on his hips, still smiling, Zouga shouted to Ralph. "Go and see if you can shoot a springbuc or better even, a wildebeest; we'll need plenty of meat for tonight."
Ralph let out a whoop at the command, and provoked the filly with his heels, forcing her to rear again and then come down in full run, mane flying, hooves pounding as she bore away. Without being ordered, Jan Cheroot shook his bony mare into a canter and followed the flying filly.
The two riders returned in the dusk, and the hunt had gone well. They had found rare quarry, a bull eland so old that his neck and shoulders had turned blue with age and the swinging dewlap almost swept the dusty earth between his stubby forelegs.
He was as big as a prize stud bull, with a chest round as a brandy cask of Limousine oak, and Zouga guessed he would weigh not much under a ton, for he was fat and sleek; there would be a tubful of rich white lard in the chest cavity, and thick layers of yellow fat beneath the glossy hide. He was a prize indeed, and the little band of Matabele drummed their assegai against the hide shields and shouted with delight when they saw him.
The bull snorted at the hubbub and broke into a lumbering gallop, trying to break away, but Ralph swung the filly to head him off and within a hundred yards the bull changed the gallop for a short winded trot and allowed himself to be turned back towards the group of waiting men.
Ralph reined in the filly, kicked his feet from the stirrups and jumped easily to the earth, throwing up the carbine as he landed cat-like on his toes and seeming to fire in the same instant.
The bull's head flinched at the shot, blinking the huge shining eyes convulsively as the bullet slammed into his skull between them, and he collapsed with a meaty thud that seemed to tremble in the earth.
The Matabele streamed out like a pack of wild dogs, swarming over the mountainous carcass, using the razor edge of their war-assegai as butchers" knives, going for the tidbits, the tripes and the liver, the heart and the sweet white fat.
The Matabele gorged on fat eland meat, grilling the tripes over the coals, threading garlands of liver and fat and succulent heart onto wet white mimosa twigs from which they had peeled the bark, so that the melting fat sizzled and bubbled over the layers of meat.
"We have killed no game since we left the forests," Bazo explained their ravenous appetites. Though the desert teemed with springbuck herds, they were not the type of game that a man on foot, armed only with a stabbing spear, could run down easily.
"Without meat a man's belly is like a war drum, full of nothing except noise and wind."
"You are far from the land of the Matabele," Zouga agreed. "No Matabele has been this far south since the old king took the tribe north across the Limpopo, and in that time even Gandang, your father, was a child."
"We are the first to make this journey," Bazo, agreed proudly. "We are the point of the spear."
In the firelight the warriors about him looked up and their expressions echoed his pride in their achievement.
They were all youths, the eldest only a few years older than Bazo, not one of them over nineteen years of age.
"Where does this long journey take you?" Zouga asked.
"To a wonderful place in the south from which a man returns with great treasures."
"What manner of treasures?" Zouga asked again.
"These." Bazo reached across the circle to where Ralph leaned against his saddle, using it as a pillow, and Bazo touched the polished wooden butt of the Martini-Henry that protruded from the gun bucket.
"Isibamu, guns!" said Bazo.
"Guns?" Zouga asked. "A Matabele indoda with a gun?"
His voice mildly derisive. "Is not the assegai the weapon of the true warrior?"
Bazo looked uncomfortable for a moment and then recovered his aplomb.
"The old ways are not always the best," he said. "The old men tell us that they are, so that young men will consider them wise." And the Matabele in the circle about the fire nodded and made little sounds of agreement.