'Damned if we weren't all a sight better off in the old days when everybody knew their place instead of trying to ape their betters,' Mark Anders grumbled, and the priest nodded.
'No sense in looking for trouble --' He broke off as Victoria came out on to the wide verandah. Storm Anders had helped her select her full-length white satin wedding dress with a wreath of tiny red tea roses holding the long veil in place around her brow. The contrast of red and white against her dark and glossy skin was striking and her joy was infectious. Even Mark Anders forgot his misgivings for the moment, as Lady Anna at the piano struck up the wedding march.
x At her father's kraal, Victoria's family had built a magnificent new hut for her nuptial night. Her brothers and half-brothers had cut the wattle saplings and the trunk for the central post and plaited the stripped green branches into the shape of the beehive. Then her mother and sisters and half-sisters had done the women's work of thatching, carefully combing the long grass stems and lacing the crisp bundles on to the wattle framework, packing and trimming and weaving them until the finished structure was smootll and symmetrical and the brushed grass stems shone like polished brass.
Everything the hut contained was new, from the three-legged pot to the lamp and the blankets and the magnificent kaross of hyrax and monkeyskins which was the gift of Victoria's sisters, lovingly tanned and sewn by them into a veritable work of art.
At the cooking fire in the centre of the hut Victoria worked alone, preparing the first meal for her husband, while she listened to the shouted laughter of the guests outside in the night. The millet beer was mild. However, the women had brewed hundreds of gallons and the guests had been drinking since early morning.
Now she heard the bridegroom's party approaching the hut. There was singing and loud suggestive advice, cries of encouragement and rude exhortations to duty and then Moses Gama stooped through the entrance. He straightened and stood tall over her, his head brushing the curved roof and outside the voices of his comrades retreated and dwindled.
Still kneeling, Victoria sat back on her heels and looked up at him. Now at last she had discarded her western clothing and wore for the last time the short beaded skirt of the virgin. In the soft ruddy light of the fire her naked upper body had the dark patina of antique amber.
'You are very beautiful,' he said, for she was the very essence of Nguni womanhood. He came to her and took her hands and lifted her to her feet.
'I have prepared food for you,' she whispered huskily.
'There will be time later to eat." He led her to the piled kaross and she stood submissively while he untied the thong of her apron and then lifted her in his arms and laid her on the bed of soft fur.
As a girl she had played the games with the boys in the reed banks beside the waterhole, and out on the open grassy veld where she had gone with the other girls to gather firewood conveniently close to where the cattle were being herded. These games of touching and exploring, of rubbing and fondling, right up to the forbidden act of intromission, were sanctioned by tribal custom and smiled at by the elders, but none of them had fully prepared her for the power and skill of this man, or for the sheer magnificence of him. He reached deeply into her body and touched her very soul so that much later in the night she clung to him and whispered: 'Now I am more than just your wife, I am your slave to the end of my days." In the dawn her joy was blighted, and though her lovely moon face remained serene, she wept within when he told her, 'There will 0my be one more night - on the road back to Johannesburg. Then I must leave you." 'For how long?" she asked.
'Until my work is done,' he replied, then his expression softened and he stroked her face. 'You knew that it must be so. I warned you that when you married me, you were marrying the struggle." 'You warned me,' she agreed in a husky whisper. 'But there'was no way that I could guess at the agony of your leaving." They rose early the following morning. Moses had acquired a secondhand Buick, old and _slbbvenJg.b.not toex.('itehntrs,* o_,- but one of Hendrick Tabaka's expert mechanics had overhauled the engine and tightened the suspension, leaving the exterior untouched.
In it they would return to Johannesburg.
Though the sun had not yet risen, the entire kraal was astir, and Victoria's sisters had prepared breakfast for them. After they had eaten came the hard part of taking leave of her family. She knelt before her father.
'Go in peace, my daughter,' he told her fondly. 'We will think of you often. Bring your sons to visit us." Victoria's mother wept and keened as though it were a funeral, not a wedding, and Victoria could not comfort her although she embraced her and protested her love and duty until the other daughters took her away.
Then there were all her stepmothers and her half-brothers and half-sisters, and the uncles and aunts and cousins who had come from the farthest reaches of Zululand. Victoria had to make her farewells to all of them, though some partings were more poignant than others. One of these was her goodbye to Joseph Dinizulu, her favourite of all her relatives. Although he was a half-brother and seven years younger than she was, a special bond had always existed between them. The two of them were the brightest and most gifted of their generation in the family, and because Joseph lived at Drake's Farm with one of the elder brothers, they had been able to continue their friendship.
However, Joseph would not be returning to the Witwatersrand.
He had written the entrance exams and been accepted by the exclusive multi-racial school, Waterford, in Swaziland, and Lady Anna Courtney would be paying his school fees. Ironically, this was the same school to which Hendrick Tabaka was sending his sons, Wellington and Raleigh. There would be opportunity for their rivalry to flourish.
'Promise me you will work hard, Joseph,' Vicky said. 'Learning makes a man strong." 'I will be strong,' Joseph assured her. The elation that Moses Gama's speech had aroused in him still persisted. 'Can I come and visit you and your husband, Vicky? He is a man, the kind of man I will want to be one day." Vicky told Moses what the child had said. They were alone in the old Buick, all the wedding gifts and Vicky's possessions filling the boot and piled in the back seat, and they were leaving that great littoral amphitheatre of Natal, going up over the tail of the Drakensberg range on to the high veld of the Transvaal.
'The children are the future,' Moses nodded, staring ahead at the steep blue serpent of road that climbed the escarpment, past the green hill of Majuba where the Boers had thrashed the British in the first of many battles with them. 'The old men are beyond hope. You saw them at the wedding, how they kicked and baulked like unbroken oxen when I tried to show them the way - but the children, ah the children!" He smiled. 'They are like fresh clean sheets of paper. You can write on them what you will. The old men are stone-hard and impermeable, but the children are clay, eager clay waiting for the shaping hands of the potter." He held up one of his hands. It was long and shapely, the hand of a surgeon or an artist and the palm was a delicate shade of pink, smooth and not calloused by labour.
'Children lack any sense of morality they are without fear, and death is beyond their conception. These are all things they acquire later, by the teaching of their elders. They make perfect soldiers for they question nothing and it takes no great physical strength to pull a trigger. If an enemy strikes them down they become the perfect martyrs. The bleeding corpse of a child strikes horror and remorse into even the hardest heart. Yes, the children are our key to the future. Your Christ knew it when he said "Suffer the little children to come unto me"." Victoria twisted on the leather bench seat of the Buick and stared at him.