for the fury and passion of their youth which had long ago cooled in their own breasts.
Lobengula. sat on the bench of his wagon. It was a big twenty-four-foot four-wheeler built in Cape Town from good English oak, but it still showed all the marks of punishment from its long trek up from the south.
it had not moved in many years, so the grass had grown up through the wheel spokes and around the axle shafts. The canvas of the tent was bleached bone white and crusted with the dung of the hens which roosted on the hoops of the tent framework, but the canvas protected Lobengula from the sun and the seat on the box elevated his head above the level of his courtiers and guards and children and wives and supplicants who crowded the enclosed stockade.
The wagon was Lobengula's throne, and the open stockade his audience chamber. Because there would be white men and women in his audience, he had donned his European finery for this occasion. The long coat encrusted with gold lace had once belonged to a Portuguese diplomat. The lace was tarnished and one epaulette was missing, and the front could not be buttoned over the King's noble belly not by twelve inches, and the sleeves reached only halfway down his forearms. With the toy spear of kingship, the shaft of red wild mahogany and the blade of brightest silver, in his right hand, he used it to summon a boy from out of the crush.
The child was shaking with terror, and his voice so tremulous that Lobengula had to lean forward to hear him.
'i waited until the leopard entered the goat house; then I crept up and closed the door and I barricaded it with stones.'
'How did you kill the beast?' Lobengula demanded.
'i stabbed him through the chinks in the wall with my father's assegai.' and The boy crept forward and laid the lustrous gold dappled skin at Lobengula's feet.
'Take your choice of three cows from my black royal herds, little one, and drive them to your father's kraal and tell him that the king has given you a praise name. From this day you will be known as 'The one who stares into the eyes of the leopard'.'
The boy's voice cracked in an adolescent squeak as he backed away gabbling the praises.
Next was a Hollander, a big arrogant white man with a querulous voice.
'I have waited three weeks for the king to decide This was translated for Lobengula, and he mused aloud.
'See how red the man's face becomes when he is angry, like the wattles on the head of the black vulture. Tell him that the king does not count days, perhaps he will have to wait as long again, who knows?'
And he dismissed him with a flirt of the spear.
He took a pull from the bottle of champagne that stood on the wagon seat beside him. The wine fizzed and spilled onto the front of his gold-frogged jacket. Then suddenly his face lit into a beatific smile, but his voice was carping and querulous.
'I sent for you yesterday, Nomusa, Girlchild of Mercy.
I am in great pain; why did you not come sooner?'
'An eagle flies, a cheetah runs, but I am limited to the pace of a mule, oh King,' said Robyn Codrington, as she picked her way through the offal that littered the earthen floor of the stockade, and with the, fly switch in her hand cleared a path through the crowd towards the wagon, even dealing a stinging cut to one of the king's black-cloaked executioners.
'Out of my way, eater of human flesh,' she told him primly. 'Be gone, child stabber.' And the man leaped aside nimbly and scowled after her.
'What is it, Lobengula?' she asked as she reached the wagon. 'What ails you this time?'
'My feet are filled with burning coals., 'Gout,' Robyn said as she touched the grotesquely swollen appendages. 'You drink too much beer, oh King, you drink too much brandy and champagne., She opened her bag.
'You would have me die of thirst. You are not well named, Nomusa; there is no pity in your heart.'
'Nor yours, Lobengula,' Robyn snapped. 'They tell me you have sent another impi to murder the people of Pemba.'
'He is only a Mashona,' Lobengula chuckled. 'Save your sympathy for a king whose stomach feels as though it is filled with sharp stones.'
'Indigestion,' Robyn scolded. 'Gluttony killed your father, and it is killing you.'
'Now you would starve me also. You want me to be a skinny little man of no consequence.'
'A thin live one or a fat dead one,' Robyn told him.
'Open your mouth.'
Lobengula choked on the draught, and rolled his eyes theatrically.
'The pain is better than the taste of your medicine.'
'i will leave you five of these pills. Eat one when your feet swell and the pain becomes fierce.'
'Twenty,' said Lobengula. 'A box full. I, Lobengula, King of Matabele, command it. Leave me a box of these little white pills.'
'Five,' said Robyn firmly. 'Or you will eat them all at one time, as you did before.'
The king rocked with gargantuan laughter, and almost fell from the wagon seat.
'I think I will command you to leave those little white huts of yours at Khami, and come to live closer to me.'
'I should not obey.'
