silence, but they were still facing towards the white men's laager.
Bazo passed beyond the shortened line and paused under the spreading branches of a wild teak tree. He looked up.
Mationda, the commander of what had once been the glorious Insukamini impi, hung by his neck from one of the main branches. There was a thong of rawhide around his throat, and his eyes were still open, bulging in a defiant glare towards his enemies. His right leg, shattered above the knee by machine-gun fire, was twisted at an ugly angle and hung lower than his other leg.
Bazo lifted his assegai in a salute to the dead induna.
'I greet you, Manonda, who chose death rather than to drink the bitter draught of defeat,' he shouted.
The Insukamini impi was no more. Its warriors lay in deep windrows in front of the wagons.
'I praise you, Manonda, who chose death rather than to live a cripple and a slave. Go in peace, Manonda and speak sweetly to the spirits on our behalf.'
'''Now'
Bazo turned back and stood before the waiting, silent ranks. The early morning sun, just clearing the tree tops, threw long black shadows in front of them.
'Are the eyes still red, my children?' Bazo sang out in a high clear voice.
'They are still red, Baba!' they answered him in bass chorus.
'Then let us go to do the work which still waits to be done.'
Where ten amadoda had raced in that first wave, now two made the last charge across the blood-soaked clay.
Only one of that pitiful band went more than halfway between the treelines and the wagons. The rest of them turned back and left Bazo to run on alone. He was sobbing with each stride, his mouth open, the sweat running in oily snakes down his naked chest. He did not feel the first bullet that struck him. It was just a sudden numbness as though part of his body was missing, and he ran on, jumping over a pile of twisted corpses, and now the sound of the guns seemed muted and far-off, and there was another greater dinning in his ears that boomed and echoed strangely like the thunder of a mighty waterfall.
He felt another sharp tug, like the curved red-tipped thorn of the 'wait-a-bit' tree hooking into his flesh, but there was no pain. The roaring in his head was louder, and his vision narrowed so that he seemed to be looking down a long tunnel in the darkness.
Again he felt that irritating but painless jerk and tug in his flesh, and he was suddenly weary. He just wanted to lie down and rest, but he kept on towards the flashing white canvas of the wagon tents. Yet again that sharp insistent pull as though he was held on a leash, and his legs buckled under him. Quite gently he toppled forward and lay with his face against the hard sun-baked clay.
The sound of the guns had ceased, but in its place was another sound, it was the sound of cheering; behind the wall of wagons the white men were cheering themselves.
Bazo was tired, so utterly deathly tired. He closed his eyes and let the darkness come.
The wind had swung suddenly and unseasonably into the east, and there was a cold dank mist lying on the hills. the fine guti which made the trees drip dismally and chilled every bone in Tanase's body as she trudged up a narrow path that led to a saddle between two pearly grey granite peaks. Over her shoulders was a leather cloak and on her head she balanced a bundle of possessions which she had salvaged from the cave of the Umlimo.
She reached the saddle and looked down into yet another valley choked with dense, dark green undergrowth. She searched it eagerly, but then her spirits slowly fell again. Like all the others, it was devoid of any human presence.
Since she had left the secret valley, the moon had reached its full, and waned to nothingness, and was once again a curved yellow sliver in the night sky. All that time she had searched for the women and children of the Matabele nation. She knew they were here, hiding somewhere in the Matopos, for it was always the way.
When a powerful enemy threatened the nation, the women and children were sent into the hills, but it was such a vast area, so many valleys and deep labyrinthine caves that she might search a lifetime without finding them.
Tanase started slowly down into the deserted valley.
Her legs felt leaden, and another spasm of nausea brought saliva flooding from under her tongue. She swallowed it down, but when she reached the floor of the valley, she sank down onto a moss-covered rock beside the little stream.
She knew what was the cause of her malady; though she had missed her courses by only a few days, she knew that the loathsome seed that her pale, hairy, balloonbellied ravisher had pumped into her had struck and taken hold, and she knew what she must do.
She laid aside her load and searched for dry kindling under the trees where the gub had not yet dampened it.
She piled it in the protected lee of a sheltering rock, and crouched over it.
For many long minutes she concentrated all her will upon it. Then at last she sighed, and her shoulders slumped. Even this minor power, this small magic of firemaking, had gone from her. As the white man with the golden beard had warned her, she was Umlimo no longer.
She was just a young woman, without strange gifts or terrible duties, and she was free. The spirits could make no demands upon her, she was free at last to seek out the man she loved.
As she prepared to make fire in the conventional manner, with the tiny bow for twirling the dry twig, two passions gave her strength to face the ordeal ahead of her her love and her equally fierce hatred.
When the contents of the little clay pot boiled, she added the shreds of dried bark of the tambooti to it, and immediately the sweet odour of the poisonous steam cloyed upon the back of her throat.
