across it upright, like a tight-rope walker, without looking at his feet or the hundred-foot drop beneath him. Even Bazo shook his head and said 'Hau!' which is an exclamation of deep amazement, and Ralph stood panting in the bottom of the pit, looking up at Bazo, and shouted with triumphant laughter.
Then Ralph learned to use the fighting sticks the hard way, for this was the game the Matabele had played since their first day as herd boys in the veld. Before he mastered the art of the sticks he had, perforce, to learn how to staunch a bleeding cut in his own scalp inflicted by Bazo's stick by plugging it with a handful of dust snatched in the midst of the contest.
A week short of his sixteenth birthday, Ralph beat Bazo for the first time. They fought behind the thatched beehive huts that the Matabele had built on the open veld beyond Zouga's camp.
it started lightheartedly, Bazo the instructor, hectoring his pupil, executing the weaving steps of the traditional combat with indolent grace like a sleepy black panther, a fighting stick held in each hand and flourished with studied artistry of movement to form a fluid screen from which a vicious cutting attack could be launched with either hand.
Ralph turned to face him so that they revolved smoothly as a balanced wheel, like a pair of trained dancers, and when they taunted each other Ralph's repartee was in fluent and colloquial Matabele. He was stripped to the waistband of his riding breeches, and his torso, which had at Zouga's orders been so long protected from the sun, was creamy pale; only his arms and the deep V at his throat were sun dark.
'I once had a pet baboon,' Bazo told him. 'It was an albino baboon, white as the moon, and so stupid it never learned even a simple trick. That baboon reminds me of somebody, though I cannot think who.'
Ralph smiled with his lips only, exposing square white teeth, but the black brows were joined above his nose. 'I am only surprised that a Matabele thought he could teach a baboon, surely it should be the other way around.'
Bazo jumped back and hooted, beginning the giya the challenge dance of the warrior, leaping high and making the kerries sing in the air until they blurred like the wings of a sunbird in flight.
'Let us see if your sticks are as quick as your tongue,' he shouted; a-.id then suddenly he was attacking, the song of the fighting sticks rising to a shriek as he cut for Ralph's knee, the shriek ending with a crack like a rifle shot as Ralph caught it on his guard; and instantly Bazo cut with the other hand, for the elbow and, crack again as Ralph warded off the blow with his own kerrie.
The sticks clattered against each other in a rising tempo, and the circle of Matabele watchers encouraged them with the deep drawn-out Jee!' as a stroke was skilfully countered and turned into a hissing riposte to be countered in its turn.
Bazo broke first, jumping back with a light sheen of sweat turning his muscles to black velvet, his chest swelling and subsiding, his chuckle only slightly hoarse.
There should be a pause now, as the combatants circled each other again, in that stylized shuffling dance, trading light insults, catching breath, stooping to dry their hands in the dust to improve their grip on the sticks, but, not this time, for as Bazo broke and jumped back and for an instant dropped his right hand, so Ralph went in.
Even the pretence of a smile was gone from Ralph's mouth. His jaw was clenched, lumps of muscles knotted with determination beneath his ears. Bazo's right guard had dropped, and his attention had switched to the audience of Matabele faces, for whose benefit he was already composing the next jibe.
Jee!' They shouted encouragement and warning, and Bazo tried desperately to raise his guard and swivel to face the unexpected attack. He managed a touch of stick against stick, just enough to cushion the blow, otherwise it would have broken bone. Ralph's kerrie smashed into the point of his shoulder, and abruptly it was no longer a game.
The blow to Bazo's shoulder raised a welt as thick as a finger across the muscle, and almost paralysed the arm to the fingertips. So as he caught Ralph's next cut he felt the kerrie jerk and turn in his numb fingers, almost breaking his grip, and the shock of it was transferred into the abused muscle so that he grunted involuntarily, a little grunt of agony that seemed only to goad Ralph.
His sun-dark features were a mask of fighting fury, his eyes cold and green, and little droplets of sweat flew from his long black hair with the force of every blow that he swung.
The Matabele had never seen him like this, but they recognized the killing madness, for they had themselves all been in battle and killed, and it infected them so that they danced and stamped with excitement and spurred Ralph with their voices.
,'Jee!' they sang, and Bazo fell back, giving ground to Ralph's attack as the sticks cracked and rattled. His mouth was wide open now as he gasped for air and his throat was a deep pink cavern. Blood ran in a thin shining slick down behind his ear, spreading over his straining throat and then onto his right shoulder like a mantle.
A glancing blow above his eye had not opened the flesh, but had formed a blister of black blood as large as a walnut under the skin. It hung from Bazo's forehead like some bizarre bloodsucking leech, and still the blows hissed and cracked about him, thick as tropical rain, falling on his guard so that the shock was carried through arm and shoulder and jarred his head upon the thick black column of his neck.
Then another blow went through and the ivory flash of Bazo's teeth was dulled with a film of blood that snaked down from one nostril into his mouth, and another blow went through, on the line of his thigh, the swelling rising instantaneously, the skin stretched glossy and black, and almost crippled Bazo who was pinned by the injured leg, and Ralph was still attacking, instinctively swinging him against the bad leg so that Bazo was slow and clumsy in the turn, and again one of Ralph's sticks fluted and thumped into rubbery muscle and Bazo reeled and almost went down, recovering with an immense effort, his counter-stroke loose and lacking power, so that Ralph spurned it aside and used his point.
He drove the end of his right-hand kerrie through Bazo's guard, using it as though it were a sword rather than a club, and Bazo was not ready for it. With all Ralph's weight behind it, the kerrie tore into Bazo's belly muscles, up under the heavy ribcage, and the Matabele doubled over the blow, one kerrie flying from his hand the other dropping to dangle uselessly at his side.
He dropped on his knees, head bowed to expose the back of his neck, the knuckles of his spine standing out between the ridges of hard black muscle.
Ralph's eyes were fastened on the unprotected neck, and they were glazed over with the same soapy sheen as an uncut diamond, his movements too swift to be anything but instinctive. He threw the kerrie on high and shifted his weight from the back foot to the leading foot, and all his strength flowed into his back and shoulders as he went into the killing stroke.
'Jee!' roared the watchers, themselves carried beyond the frontiers of sanity on the hot wave of fighting
