he had penetrated the forbidden veil. From this transgression one had been born, the bastard 'Chakal, the worm in the belly', who had grown to become both the King and the scourge of Zululand, the same Chaka from whose tyranny Mzilikazi had flown with his tribe to the north. I am a loyal maiden of the King, Juba answered him shyly, 'and I cannot refuse to comfort one who follows the road on the King's business! Then she smiled up at him. It was neither bold nor provocative, but so sweet, so trusting and filled with admiration, that Gandang felt his heart squeezed afresh.
He was gentle with her, very gentle and calm and patient, so that she found herself impatient to render the service he desired, found herself desiring it as strongly as he so evidently did. When he showed her how to make a nest for him between her crossed thighs, she responded instantly to his word and touch, and there was something wrong with her throat and her breathing, for she was unable to answer him aloud.
While she held him in this nest she felt herself gradually overwhelmed by a strange wildness of heart and body. She tried to alter the angle of her pelvis, she tried to unlock her tightly crossed thighs and spread them for him, she strove to engulf him for she could no longer bear that dry and tantalizing friction against the inside of her upper legs. She wanted to feel him breast the warm and welcoming flood that she sent down for him and she wanted to feel him gliding upon it deeply up inside her. But his resolve, his respect for custom and law, was as powerful as that muscular body that drove above her, and he held her captive until the moment when she felt his grip break and his seed spring strongly from him to waste itself in the white sand beneath them.
At that moment she felt such a sense of loss that she could have wept aloud.
Gandang held her still, his chest heaving and the sweat forming little shiny runners across that smooth dark back and down the corded neck. Juba clung to him with both arms wrapped tightly about him, her face pressed into the hollow between his shoulder and his neck, and for a long time neither of them spoke.
, YOU are as soft and as beautiful as the first night of the new moon, Gandang whispered at last. And you are as black and as strong as the bull of the Chawala festival, she instinctively chose the simile that would mean most to a Matabele, the bull as the symbol of wealth and virility and the Chawala bull the most perfect specimen of all the King's herds.
You will be only one of many wives, Robyn was horrified at the thought. Yes. ' agreed Juba. 'First of all of them, and the others will honour me. 'I would have taken you with me to teach you many things and show you great wonders. 'I have already seen the greatest wonder, You will do nothing but bear children.'
Juba nodded happily. 'If I am truly lucky, I will bear him a hundred sons. 'I will miss you, I would never leave you, Nomusa, my mother, not for any person nor reason in the world, except this one. 'He wants to give me cattle. 'Since the death of my family, you are my mother, explained Juba, 'and it is the marriage price. 'I cannot accept payment, as though you were a slave.'
Then you demean me. I am of Zanzi blood and he tells me that I am the most beautiful woman in Matabeleland. You should set the lobola as one hundred head of cattle.'
So Robyn called the Induna to her. The marriage price is one hundred head of cattle, Robyn told him sternly.
You make a poor bargain, ' Gandang answered loftily. She is worth many times that amount. 'You will keep the cattle at your kraal, against my coming. You will tend them carefully and see that they multiply. 'It will be as you say, amekazi, my mother. ' And this time Robyn had to return his smile, for it was no longer mocking and his teeth were so white and he was, as Juba had said, truly beautiful. Look after her well, Gandang.'
Robyn embraced the young woman and their tears mingled and smeared both their cheeks. Yet when she left Juba did not look back once, but trotted behind Gandang's tall erect figure carrying her rolled sleeping-mat balanced upon her head, and her buttocks jiggled merrily under the short beaded apron.
Man and woman reached the saddle of the pass and disappeared abruptly from view.
The Hyena Road led Robyn and her little party into the mountains, into the mist and the strangely desolate valleys of heather and fantastically shaped grey stone. It led her to the slave stockades which Juba had described to her, the meeting-place where the white man and black man made their trade for human life, where the slaves exchanged their carved yokes for cuff and chains. But now the stockades were deserted, the thatch already sagging and falling in untidy clumps, only the sour smell of captivity lingered, and the swarming vermin that infected the empty buildings. In a futile gesture, Robyn put fire to the buildings.
From the misty mountains the road led on, down through dark gorges and at last to the low littoral where once more the heat clamped down upon them from a sullen overcast sky and the grotesque baobab trees lifted their twisted arthritic branches to it like crippled worshippers at a healing shrine.
The rains caught them here upon the coastal plain.
The flood swept three men away at a ford, four more, including one of the Hottentots, died of fever and Robyn herself was smitten with the first onslaught of the disease.
Shivering, half demented by the phantoms of malaria, she toiled on along the rapidly overgrown trail, slipping and stumbling in the mud, and cursing the fever miasma that rose from the brimming swamps and hung like a silver wraith in the sickly green glades of fever trees through which they hurried.
Fever and the rigours of the last stage of the journey had tired and weakened them all. They knew that they were, at the most, only a few days' march from the coast, deep into Portuguese territory and therefore under the protection of a Christian king and a government of civilized men. It was for these reasons that the Hottentot sentries slept beside the smouldering watch fire of damp wood, and it was there that they died, their throats slit with a blade sharp enough to cut off the least cry.
So Robyn woke to rough hands upon her, twisting her arms up between her shoulder blades and a bony knee in the small of her back, while steel cuffs clicked coldly about her wrists. Then the hands released her and she was wrenched cruelly to her feet, and dragged from the leaky hut beside the Hyena Road.
The previous evening she had been too tired and feverish to undress, so now she was still clad in a stained and rumpled flannel shirt and patched moleskin breeches.
She had even kept the cloth cap on her head, covering her hair, thus in the darkness her captors did not realize that she was a woman.
She was bound with her own porters and Hottentots, forced to wear the light marching chains which were proof, if proof was needed, as to who her captors were.
The dawn revealed them to be half-breeds and blacks, all of them dressed in the cast-off finery of European style, but carrying modern weapons.
