"She will die! "gasped Bazo.
"Let her be," hissed Tanase. "She is not like other women. The poison will not harm her it serves only to open her soul to the spirits." The albino lifted the scorpion from her bosom, and dropped it into the flames of the fire where it writhed and withered into a little charred speck, and suddenly the Umlimo uttered an unearthly shriek.
"The spirits enter,"Tanase whispered.
The Umlimo's mouth gaped open, and little glassy strings of saliva drooled from her chin, while three or four wild voices seemed to issue from her throat simultaneously, each trying to drown out the others, voices of men and women and animals, until at last one rose above them, and silenced the others. It was a man's voice, and it spoke in the mystical tongue, even its modulation and cadence were totally alien, but Tanase quietly translated for them.
"When the noon sun goes dark with wings, and the trees are bare of leaves in the springtime, then, warriors of Matabele, put an edge to your steel." The four indunas nodded. They had heard this prophecy before, for the Umlimo was often repetitious and always she was obscure. They had puzzled over the same words before. It was this message that Bazo and Tanase had carried to the scattered peoples of the Matabele during their wandering from kraal to kraal.
The gross albino seer grunted and threshed her am-is, as though struggling with an invisible adversary. The pale pink eyes jerked in her skull, out of kilter with each other, so that she squinted and leered, and she ground her teeth together with a sound like a hound worrying a bone.
The girl-child rose quietly from where she squatted amongst the pots, and she leaned over the Umlimo and dashed a pinch of pungent red powder into her face. The Umlimo's paroxysm eased, the clenched jaw fell open and another voice spoke, a guttural, bluffed sound, barely human, using the same weird dialect, and Tanase strained forward to catch each syllable and then repeated calmly. "When the cattle lie with their heads twisted to touch their flank, and cannot rise, then warriors of Matabele take heart, for the time will be nigh." This time there was a slight difference in the wording of the prophecy from the one that they had heard before, and all of them pondered it silently as the Umlimo fell forward onto her face and flopped limply as a boneless. jellyfish. Slowly all movement of the albino's body ceased, and she lay like death.
Gandang made as if to rise, but Tanase hissed a warning, and he arrested the movement and they waited, the only sound in the cavern was the click and rustle of the fire and the flirt of bats" wings high against the domed roof.
Then another convulsion ran down the Umlimo's back, and her spine arched, her hideous face lifted, but this time her voice was childlike and sweet, and she spoke in the Matabele language for all of them to understand.
"When the hornless cattle are eaten up by the great cross, let the storm begin." Her head sagged forward, and the child covered her with a kaross of fluffy jackal furs.
"It is over," said Tanase. "There will be no more." Thankfully the four indunas rose, and crept back along the gloomy pathway through the catacombs, but as they saw the glimmer of sunlight through the entrance ahead, so their steps quickened, until they burst out in the valley with such indecent and undignified haste that they avoided each other's eyes.
That night, sitting in the open-sided setenghi on the floor of the valley, Somabula repeated the prophecies of the Umlimo to the assembled indunas. They nodded over the first two familiar riddles, and as they had a hundred times before, they delved inconclusively for the meaning, and then agreed. "We will find the meaning when the time is appointed it is always the way." Then Sornabula went on to relate the third prophecy of the Umlimo, the new and unfamiliar riddle. "When the hornless cattle are eaten up by the great cross." The indunas took snuff and passed the beer pots from hand to hand, as they talked and argued the hidden meaning, and only when they had all spoken did Somabula look beyond them to where Tanase sat holding the child under her leather cloak to protect him from the night chill. "What is the true meaning, woman? "he asked.
"Not even the Umlimo herself knows that," Tanase replied, "but when our ancestors first saw the white man riding up from the south, they believed that their mounts were hornless cattle." "Horses?"
Gandang asked thoughtfully.
"It may be so," Tanase agreed. "Yet a single word of the Umlimo may have as many meanings as there are crocodiles in the Limpopo river." "What is the cross, the great cross, of the prophecy?" Bazo asked.
"The cross is the sign of the white men's three-headed god," Gandang answered. "My senior wife, Juba, the little Dove, wears that sign about her neck, given to her by the missionary at Khami when she poured water on her head." "Is it possible that the white men's god will eat up the white men's horses?" doubted Babiaan. "Surely he is their protector, not their destroyer." And the discussion passed from elder to elder, while the watch fire burned low and over the valley the vast shining firmament of the heavens turned with weighty dignity.
To the south of the valley, amongst the other heavenly bodies, burned a group of four great white stars that the Matabele called the "Sons of Manatassi'. They told how Manatassi, that terrible queen, had strangled her offspring with her own hands, so that none of them might ever challenge her monarchy. According to the legend, the souls of the little ones had ascended to shine on high, eternal witness to the cruelty of their dam.
Not one of the indunas knew that the name by which the white men knew these same stars was the Southern Cross.
Ralph Ballantyne was wrong when he predicted to Harry Mellow that by the time they returned to the Rbase camp Mr. Rhodes and his entourage would have moved on to Bulawayo. For as they rode in through the gates of the stockade, he saw the magnificent mule coach still parked where he had last seen it, and beside it were a dozen other decrepit and travel-worn vehicles. Cape carts and surreys, even a bicycle with worn tyres replaced by strips of buffalo-hide.
"Mr. Rhodes has set up court here," Cathy explained furiously, as soon as she and Ralph were alone in the bath tent. "I have made the camp too comfortable by half, and he has taken it over from me." "As he does everything else," Ralph remarked philosophically, as he stripped off his stinking shirt, and flung it into the far corner. "I've slept in that for five nights, by God, the laundry boy will have to beat it to death with a club before he gets it into the tub." "Ralph, you aren't taking it seriously," Cathy stamped her foot in frustration.
"This is my home. The only home I have, and now do you know what that what Mr. Rhodes told me?" "Have we got any more soap?" Ralph demanded as he hopped on one leg to free his breeches. "One bar will not be enough." "He said, "Jordan will be in charge of the kitchens while we are here, Mrs. Ballantyne, he knows my tastes." What do you think of that?" "Jordan is a damned fine cook." Ralph lowered himself gingerly into the bath, and grunted as his naked buttocks touched the nearly boiling surface.
"I have been forbidden my own kitchen." "Get in!" Ralph ordered, and she broke off and stared at him incredulously. "What did you say?" she demanded, but in reply he seized her ankle and toppled Cathy shrieking her protests on top of himself.
Steaming water and suds splattered the canvas walls of the tent, and when he released her at last, she was sodden to the waist.