Although he was certainly the youngest of the group, Bazo was clearly their leader. Son of Gandang he was therefore the nephew of King Lobengula, grandson of old King Mzilikazi himself. His noble birth assured him preference, but it was clear that he was quick and clever also.
"To earn the guns you covet a man must work hard, in a deep pit in the earth," Zouga said. "He must milk himself of his sweat by the calabash full every day for three years, before he is paid with a gun."
"We have heard these things," Bazo nodded.
"Then you shall have your guns, each of you a fine gun, at the end of three years. 1, Bakela, the Fist, give you my word on it."
it was a custom of the diggings, a ceremony of initiation, that when a gang of raw tribesmen arrived at New Rush the established black labourers would rush to line each side of the track, most of them dressed in castoff European finery as a badge of their sophistication.
They would jeer their newly arrived brethren: "Behold, the baboons have come down from the hills."
"Nay! Baboons are cunning; these cannot be baboons."
And they pelted the newcomers with pieces of filth as well as insults.
Bazo's group were the first Matabele to reach the diggings. The Matabele language is almost identical to that of Zululand, and very closely associated to the Southern Xhosa. Bazo understood every word of the banter, and he gave a quiet but grim order to his little group.
His men dropped their sleeping-mats and the long shields rattled one against the other, the broad bright assegais whispered in the sunlight as they were bared, and the taunts and derisive laughter dried on the instant, to be replaced with expressions of astonishment and real dismay.
"Man e! Now!" hissed Bazo. The ring of shields exploded outwards, and the crowd fled before it in disordered panic.
From the back of the gelding, Zouga had a grandstand view of the charge, and he had no illusions as to the danger of the moment. Even such a tiny war party of Matabele amadoda on the rampage through the camp could cause chaos and frightful slaughter amongst the unarmed black labourers.
"Bazo! Kawulisa! Stop them!"he roared, spurring across the front of the murderous rank of rawhide shields and steel.
The erstwhile tormentors ran with their heads twisted backwards, yelling with terror and eyes popping. They knocked each other down and the fallen grovelled in the dust. A portly black man, dressed in grubby duck breeches many sizes too small and a frock coat many sizes too large, ran into the side of one of the shacks lining the track, the home of one of the less affluent diggers, and the canvas wall burst open before the power of his run, the thatch roof collapsed on top of the fugitive, covering him completely with a haystack of dried grass and probably saving his life, for the point of a Matabele assegai had been inches from the straining seam of his bulging breeches at the moment the shack collapsed.
Bazo gave a single blast on the buckhorn whistle that hung on a thong at his throat, and the spearsmen froze.
The charge stopped dead on the instant, and the Matabele trotted back to where they had dropped their baggage, all of them grinning with delight; as they formed up again, Bazo sang the first line of the Inyati regimental war chant in a high ringing voice: "See the war shields black as midnight, white as the high storm clouds at noon And the men behind him came crashing in with the chorus: "Black as the Inyati bull, white as the egrets that he carries upon his back The entry of the little band of warriors to the New Rush diggings became a triumphal procession. Riding at their head Zouga felt like a Roman emperor.
Yet not one of the young warriors had ever swung a pick or hefted a shovel. Jan Cheroot had to place the tools in their hands, positioning their fingers correctly on the handles, all the while muttering his disdain of such ignorance. However, they had the knack of it within minutes, and the velvety black muscles, forged in war and the training for war, changed the mundane tools into lethal weapons; they attacked the yellow earth as though it were a mortal adversary.
Confronted with a wheelbarrow for the first time, two of them lifted it bodily and walked away with it and its contents. When Ralph demonstrated the correct use of the vehicle, their wonder and delight was childlike, and Bazo told them smugly: "I promised you many wonders, did I not?"
They were a highly disciplined group of young men, accustomed since childhood firstly to the strict structure of family life in the kraals and then from puberty to the communal training and teamwork of the fighting regiments.
They were also fiercely competitive, delighting in any challenge to pit their strength or skill against one another.
Zouga, knowing all these things, organized them in four teams of four men, each named after a bird, the Cranes, the Hawks, the Shrikes and the Khorhaans, and each week the team with the best performance in lashing the gravel was entitled to wear the feathers of their adopted bird in their hair and to a double ration of meat and mealie-meal and twala, the African beer fermented from millet grain. They turned the work into a game.
There were some small adjustments to be made. The Matabele were cattle-men, their whole lives devoted to raising, protecting and enlarging their herds, even if these expansions were often at the expense of their less warlike neighbours. Their staple diet was beef and maas, the calabash-soured milk of the Nguni.
Beef was an expensive item on the diggings, and it was with patent distaste that they sampled the greasy stringy mutton that Zouga provided. However, hard physical labour builds appetites, and within days they were eating this new diet if not with relish at least without complaint.
Within those same few days the labour was apportioned and each man learned his task.
Jan Cheroot could not be inveigled down into the workings.
"Ek is near meerkat nie," he told Zouga loftily, reverting to the bastard Dutch of Cape Colony. "I am not a mongoose; I do not live in a hole in the ground."
Zouga needed a trusted man on the sorting-tables, and that was where Jan Cheroot presided. Squatting like a yellow idol over the glittering piles of washed gravel, the triangular shape of his face was emphasized by the scraggy little beard on the point of his chin, by the high oriental cheekbones and slanted eyes, each in their spider-web of wrinkles.
He was quick to pick out the soapy sheen of the noble stones in the piles of dross, but there was another pair of eyes sharper and quicker. Traditionally the women made the best sorters, but little Jordan proved immediately to have an uncanny talent at picking out diamonds, no matter what their size or colour.
The child picked the very first stone from the very first sieveful. It was a minute stone, twenty points, a fifth part of a carat, and the colour was a dark cognac brown, so that Zouga doubted its integrity. But when he showed it to one of the kopje-wallopers, it was a veritable diamond and the buyer offered him three shillings for it.
After that nobody questioned Jordan, instead a doubtful stone was passed to him for judgement. Within a week he was the Devil's Own chief sorter.
He sat opposite Jan Cheroot at the low metal table, almost the same size as the Hottentot. He wore a huge sombrero of platted maize stalks to protect his delicate peachlike skin from the sun, and he sorted the gravel as though it were a game of which he never tired. Competing with Jan Cheroot avidly, a high-pitched shriek of excitement signalled each discovery, and his neat little hands flew over the gravel like those of a pianist over the ivory keyboard.
Zouga had found a woman to give both Ralph and Jordan their lessons. The wife of a Lutheran preacher, she was a plump-breasted, sweet-faced woman with irongrey hair swept up into an enormous bun at the back of her head. missis Gander was the only schoolmistress within five hundred miles, and for a few hours each morning she gave a small group of diggers" children their reading, writing and arithmetic in the little galvanizediron church at the back of Market Square.