breath he drew jarred his whole body. Tumultuous echoes boomed out of the blackness of the cavern, the shouts of men and the bellowing and snarling of wild animals, the screams of a woman in terrible anguish and the crash of rifle fire.
Zouga pushed himself away from the cliff and stooped through the entrance. Almost immediately he stumbled over a body. It was that of an old man, his hair pure white and his skin wrinkled like a dried prune. Zouga stepped over him, into a puddle of his dark, sticky blood.
As he moved forward, Zouga's eyes accustomed to the gloom, and he peered about him at the mummified bodies of ancient dead piled haphazard against the walls of the cavern. Here and there white bone gleamed through the parchment of leathery dried flesh, and an arm was raised in a macabre salutation or a gesture of supplication.
Zouga moved on through this grisly catacomb, and ahead of him there was a diffused source of light. He quickened his pace as another gale of wild screams was this time mingled with booming inhuman laughter that bounced from the rocky walls and roof.
He turned a corner of jagged rock and looked down into a natural amphitheatre in the floor of the cavern. It was lit by the flames of a flickering orange fire, and from above by a single beam of sunlight that came in through a narrow crack in the high arched roof. The sunbeam was dimmed to an unearthly blue by the tendrils of curling smoke from the fire, and like the limelights of a theatre stage it dramatized the group of struggling figures on the floor of the amphitheatre beyond the fire.
Zouga ran down the natural steps, and had almost reached them before he realized what they were doing.
Between them Daniel and Thorn had the body of a young black girl stretched out on the rocky floor, the girl was naked, on her back with her limbs spreadeagled. Her 'led body was as glossy as the pelt of a panther, her limbs were long and shapely. She was struggling with the desperation of a wild animal in a trap. But her screams were muted by the fur kaross wrapped about her head, and Jim Thorn knelt upon her shoulders, pinning her helplessly while he twisted her arms back against the joint of the elbows and roared with cruel laughter that was too loud for his skinny body.
Will Daniel was over the girl, his face swollen and dark with congested blood. His belt and breeches were down across the back of his knees. He was grunting and snuffling like a boar at the trough. His pale buttocks were covered with a fuzz of sparse curly black hair. He drove against the girl with a wet slapping sound like a washerwoman pounding laundry on a slab.
Before Zouga. could reach him, Will Daniel's whole body stiffened and jerked spasmodically and then he rolled off the tender young body, and he was bloodied from the knees to the navel of his sagging, hairy paunch.
'By God, Jim my lad,' he panted at the little trooper, 'that was better than a belly ache. Get up on the bitch for your turn-' Then he saw Zouga coming out of the shadows, and he grinned at him. 'First come, first served, Major-' Zouga took two strides to reach him, and then he kicked him in his smiling mouth with the heel of his riding boot. Will Daniel's bottom lip split open like the petals of a rose, and he scrambled to his feet, spitting out white chips of tooth, and hauling up his breeches over his monstrous nakedness.
'I'll kill you for that.' He tugged at the knife on his dangling unclinched belt, but Zouga thrust the muzzle of his rifle into his belly, doubling him over at the waist, and then whirled to slam the butt against Jim Thorn's temple, as Thorn was reaching for his abandoned rifle.
'Get on your feet,' Zouga told him coldly, and, swaying and clutching the swelling above his ear, Jim Thorn backed off against the wall of the cave.
'I'll get you for this,' Will Daniel wheezed painfully, still holding his belly, and Zouga turned the rifle back onto him.
'Get out,' he said softly. 'Get out of here you filthy bloody animals.'
They shuffled up the steps of the amphitheatre; and from the shadows of the cavern entrance, Will Daniel yelled again, his voice blustering and angry.
'I'll not forget this, Major bloody Ballantyne. I'll get you yet!'
Zouga turned back to the girl. She had pulled the kaross off her head, and she crouched on the stone floor with her legs curled up under her. She was trying to staunch the flow of her virgin blood with her hands, but she stared at Zouga with the tortured ferocity of a leopard held by the serrated jaws of a spring trap.
Zouga felt an overwhelming compassion sweep over him, yet he knew there was no succour he could give her.
'You, who were Umlimo, are Umlimo no longer,' he said at last, and she drew back her head and spat at him.
The frothy spittle splattered against his boots, but the effort made her whimper with pain and press her hands against her lower belly.
A fresh trickle of bright arterial blood snaked down her thigh.
'I came to destroy the Umlimo,' he said. 'But she is destroyed not by a bullet from a gun. Go, child. The gift of the spirits has been taken from you. Go swiftly, but go in peace.'
Like a wounded animal she crept on her hands and knees into the dark maze of tunnels beyond the amphitheatre, leaving a speckle of bloody drops upon the stone floor.
she looked back at him once. 'Peace, you say, white man. There will be no peace, ever!'
And then she was gone into the shadows.
The rains had not yet come, but their heralds soared up to the heavens, great ranges of cumulus cloud, their heads shaped like mushrooms. Silver and blue and imperial purple, they stood above the Hills of the Indunas.
The heat seemed trapped beneath them. It clanged down upon the iron hills like a blacksmith's hammer on the anvil. The impis were thick as safari ants upon the slopes; they squatted in dense ranks their shields under them, their assegais and guns laid on the rocky earth@ before them, thousands upon thousands they waited, every plumed head craning down towards the royal kraal at the foot of the hills.
There was the beat of a single drum. Tap, tap! Tap tap! And the great black mass of warriors stirred like an amorphous sea monster rising from the depths.
