"Forgive me, Babo, the puppy should not yap before the old dog barks.
I speak out of turn." "You are no puppy, Bazo," Somabula growled.
"Speak on!" "We must be the fleas," Bazo said quietly. "We must hide in the white man's clothing and sting him in the soft places until we drive him to madness. But when he scratches, we will move on to another soft place.
"We must lurk in darkness and attack in the dawn, we must wait for him in the bad ground and probe his flanks and his rear." Bazo never raised his voice, but all of them listened avidly. "Never must we run in against the walls of the laager, and when the three-legged guns begin to laugh like old women, we must drift away like the morning mist at the first rays of the sun." "This is not war," protested Babiaan.
"It is war, Babo." Bazo contradicted, "the new kind of war, the only kind of war which we can win." "He is right," a voice called from the ranks of indunas. "That is the way it must be." They spoke up, one after the other, and no man argued against Bazo's vision, until the turn came back to Babiaan. "My brother Somabula has spoken the truth, you are no puppy, Bazo. Tell us only one thing more, when will it be?"
"That I cannot tell you." "Who can?" Bazo looked down at Tanase, who still knelt at his feet. "We have assembled in this valley for good reason," Bazo told them. "If all agree, then my woman who is an intimate of the Umlimo, and an initiate of the mysteries, will go up to the sacred cavern to take the oracle." "She must go immediately." "No, Babo." Tanase's lovely head was still bowed in deep respect. "We must wait until the Umlimo sends for us." There were places where the scars had knotted into hard lumps in Bazo's flesh. The machine-gun bullets had done deep damage. One arm, fortunately not the spear arm, was twisted and shortened, permanently deformed. After hard marching or exercise with the weapons of war, or after the nervous tension of planning and arguing and persuading others to his views, the torn and lumpy flesh often seized up in agonizing spasms.
Kneeling beside him in the little reed hut, Tanase could see the cramped muscles and rigid contraction of sinews under his dark skin twisted like living black mambas trying to escape from a silken bag.
With strong tapered fingers, she worked the ointment of fat and herbs into the crested muscle down his spine and the shoulder-blades, following the rubbery contractions up his neck to the base of his skull. Bazo groaned at the sweet agony of her bone-hard fingers, but slowly he relaxed and the knotted muscles subsided.
"You are good for me in so many ways, "he murmured.
"I was born for no other reason, she answered, but Bazo sighed and shook his head slowly.
"You and I were both born for some purpose which is still hidden from us. We know that we are different, you and me." She touched his lips with her finger to still him. "We will come back to that on the morrow." She placed both hands on his shoulders and drew him backwards, until he lay flat on the reed mat, and she began to work on his chest and the rigid muscles of his flat hard belly.
"Tonight there is only us," she repeated, in the throaty purr of a lioness at the kill, delighting in the power she could wield over him with the mere pressure of her fingertips, and yet at the same time consumed by a tenderness so deep that she felt her chest crushing beneath the weight of it. "Tonight we are all the world." She leaned forward and touched the bullet-wounds with the tip of her tongue and his arousal was so massive that she could not encompass it within the span of her thumb and long pink-lined fingers.
He tried to sit up, but she held him down with a light pressure against his chest, then she slipped the drawstring of her apron and with a single movement straddled him, both of them crying out involuntarily at the heat and terrible yearning of each other's bodies.
Then they were swept away together in a sudden exquisite fury.
When it had passed, she cradled his head against her bosom, and crooned to him like an infant, until his breathing was deep and regular in the dark hut. Even then, though she was silent, she did not sleep with him but lay and marvelled that such rage and compassion could possess her at the same moment in time.
"I will never know peace again," she realized suddenly. "And nor will he. "And she mourned for the man she loved, and for the need to goad and drive him on towards the destiny that she knew awaited both of them.
On the third day the messenger of the Umlimo came down from the cavern to where the indunas waited in the village.
The messenger was a pretty girl-child with a solemn expression and old wise eyes. She was on the very edge of puberty with the hard little stones already forming in her mulberry-dark nipples and the first light fuzz shading the deep cleft in the angle of her thighs.
Around her neck she wore a talisman that only Tanase recognized. It was a sign that one day this child in her turn would take on the sacred mantle of the Umlimo and preside in the gruesome cavern in the cliff above the village.
Instinctively the child looked to Tanase where she squatted to one side of the ranks of men, and with her eyes and a secret hand sign of the initiates, Tanase indicated Somabula, the senior and una The child's indecision was merely a symptom of the swift degeneration of Matabele society. In the time of the kings no one, child nor adult, would have been in any doubt as to the order of precedence.
When Somabula rose to follow the messenger, his half brothers rose with him, Babiaan on one hand and Gandang on the other.
"You also, Bazo," Sornabula said, and though Bazo was younger and more junior than some of them, none of the other indunas protested at his inclusion in the mission.
The child-witch took Tanase's hand, for they were sisters of the dark spirits, and the two of them led the way up the steep path. The mouth of the cavern was a hundred paces wide, but the roof was barely high enough to clear a man's head. Once long ago the opening had been fortified with blocks of dressed stone, worked in the same fashion as the walls of Great Zimbabwe, but these had been tumbled into rough piles, leaving gaps like those in an old man's teeth.
The little party halted involuntarily. The four indunas hung back and drew closer together, as though to take comfort from each other.
Men who had wielded the assegai in a hundred bloody battles and run onto the guns of the white men's laager were fearful now as they faced the dark entrance.
In the silence a voice spoke suddenly from above them, emanating from the bare cliff-face of smooth lichen-streaked granite. "Let the indunas of royal Kumalo enter the sacred place!" They were the quavering discordant tones of an ancient bedlam, and the four warriors looked up fearfully, but there was no living thing to be seen, and none of them could summon the courage to reply.
Tanase had felt the child's hand quiver slightly in her grip at the ventriloquist effort of projection, and only Tanase was so attuned to the ways of the witches that she knew how the art of the voices was taught to the apprentices of the Umlimo. The child was already highly skilled, and Tanase shuddered involuntarily as she realized what other fearful skills she must have mastered, what other gruesome ordeals and terrible agonies she must already have endured. In a moment of empathy she squeezed the child's narrow cool hand, and together they stepped through the ruined portals.