' It was the voice of an old woman, a very old woman, quavering and shrill. Zouga's heart jumped again, and then raced as he looked up. The cliff face was bare and smooth. His heart was fluttering against his ribs like a trapped bird, and his breath rasped and sawed in his throat. White is the colour of slavery, sang a young girl's voice, filling the air about his head, having no direction and no substance, sweet and liquid as the burble of running water. She spoke in the voices of Belial and Beelzebub, the hideous voices of Azazel and Behar, all Satan's myriad alter- egos, ' his father had written, and Zouga felt the slow leaden spread of superstitious terror weighing down his legs.
Another voice, roaring like a bull, boomed from the mouth of the cave. 'The white eagle has cast down the stone falcons.'
He took a long slow breath, to bring his mutinous body under control, and he cast his mind back deliberately to a childhood memory. Brighton pier on August bank holiday, the small boy clutching his Uncle William's hand and staring up in wonder at the magician on the stage who made a doll come to life and speak in a quaint piping voice, answering the voice from the box too small to contain even a rabbit. The memory steadied him, and he laughed. It was a clear firm laugh, surprising himself even. Keep your tricks for the children, Umlimo. I come in peace to speak with you as a man.'
There was no reply, though he thought he caught the silken whisper of bare feet on stone, coming from the darkness beyond the turned stone wall. See me, Umlirno! I lay aside my weapons.'
He unslung the powder bag and dropped it at his feet, and then he laid the elephant gun across it and holding his empty hands before him advanced slowly into the cave.
As he reached the step in the wall, there was the crackling spitting snarl of an angry leopard from the shadows just ahead of him. It was a terrible sound, fierce and real, but Zouga had himself in hand now. He did not miss a pace but stooped under the sill through the gap, and straightened on the far side.
He waited for a minute while his eyes adjusted, and he could make out shapes and planes in the gloom.
There were no other voices or animal sounds. There was a faint source of light somewhere ahead of him in the depths of the cave, and he could now make out a way among St. the scree and fallen rock that choked the cave, in some places as high as the low roof.
Zouga began to pick his way carefully forward. The light grew stronger, and Zouga realized that it was a single beam of sunlight, shining through a narrow crack in the roof.
Looking up, he stumbled and put out a hand to save himself. it was not rock that he touched but something sticklike that moved beneath his touch. There was a rattle, and a loose dry rush of debris. Zouga caught his balance and glanced down. A disembodied human skull gaped up at him from empty black eye sockets, the cheekbones still covered with a parchment of dried skin.
With a jolting little shock Zouga realized that what he had taken for loose scree and rock was instead piles of human remains, dried and desiccated corpses, lying in mounds and heaps, choking the passages and deepest recesses of the cave, here and there a single body, crouched or sprawled alone, bone shining dully from gaps in its covering of dark dried skin or through the rotting leather garments. That reeking charnel house, Fuller Ballantyne had called it.
Instinctively Zouga wiped the hand that had touched the long-dead skeleton, and then went on towards the light. There was the smell of smoke now, and of human presence, and another sweet mousy odour that was hauntingly familiar but which Zouga could not place at that moment. The floor of the cave sloped downwards under his feet, and he turned a rocky shoulder and looked down into a small natural amphitheatre, with a floor of smooth granite.
In the centre of the floor burned a low fire of some aromatic wood, the smoke spiced the air and rose in a slow spiral towards the crack in the rocky roof, clouding the beam of sunlight with milky blue. There seemed to be other fingers of the cave leading further into the hillside, like the adits of a mine shaft, but Zouga's attention was focused on the figure that sat across the fire from him.
Zouga went slowly down on to the floor of the stone amphitheatre without taking his eyes from the figure. That foul and midnight hag, his father had called the Umlimo but this was no hag. She was young, in full physical prime, and as she knelt facing him Zouga realized that he had seldom seen such a fine-looking woman, certainly not in India or Africa, and very seldom, if ever, in the northern lands.
She had a long regal neck on which her head balanced like a black lily on its stern . Her features were Egyptian, with a straight fine nose and huge dark eyes above high moulded cheekbones. Her teeth were small and perfect, her lips chiselled like the flutes of a pink seashell.
She was naked, her body slim, her limbs long and fine, her hands and feet narrow and delicately shaped with tapered fingers and pate pink palms. Her small breasts rode high and were perfectly round, her waist narrow but flaring into tight hard buttocks and hips like the curve of a Venetian vase. Her sex was a wide triangle, deeply cleft, the inner lips bursting out unashamedly, like the wings of a dark exotic butterfly emerging from its woolly chrysalis.
She was watching him with those huge dark eyes, and when he stopped across the fire from her, she made a slow gracious gesture with those delicately long fingers.
Obediently Zouga squatted down opposite her and waited.
The woman took up one of the calabash gourds from the array beside her, holding it between the palms of her hands and poured from it into a shallow earthen bowl.
It was milk. She set the calabash aside, and Zouga expected her to offer him the bowl, but she did not. She continued to watch him inscrutably. I come from the north, Zouga said at last. Then call me Bakela.'
Your sire slew the one before me, said the woman.
Her voice was compelling, for although the fluted lips barely moved, it was thrown with the power and timbre of the skilled ventriloquist. The sound of it seemed to quiver in the air long after she finished speaking and he knew now with certainty who had spoken in the voice of child and maid, of warrior and wild animal. He was a sick man, Zouga replied, not questioning the source of her knowledge. Not querying how she had known that he was the son of the father.
Her words explained much to Zouga, and it was logical that the Urnlimo was a hereditary duty, the office of high priestess being passed on down the years. This magnificent woman was the latest bearer of the title. My father was driven mad by the sickness in his blood. He did not know what he did, Zouga explained. It was part of the prophecy. ' The Umlimo's statement shimmered against the cave walls, but she did not stir while the silence spun out over many minutes. These, Zouga spoke at last, indicating the dusty, crumbling piles of dead, 'who were they, and how did they die? 'They are the people of the Rozwi, ' said the woman, and they died by fire and
