Zingala straightened up from his task and held aching back muscles as he watched the tall stranger and his escort come down into the bowl. There was something familiar in the man’s walk, in the way he carried his shoulders, the tilt of his head, and Zingala frowned. He dropped his hands to his sides, and shuffled uncertainly as the man’s features touched a deep memory. The stranger stopped before him and stared into Zingala’s face - those eyes, yellow and fierce and compelling.
Quickly he looked down at the stranger’s feet and he saw the deep cleft between the toes. Zingala wailed and dropped onto his face upon the earth. He took one of Manatassi’s deformed feet and placed it upon his own grey- frosted pate.
‘Command me,’ he cried. ‘Command me, Manatassi, the great black beast, the Thunder of the Heavens.’
The others heard the name and they fell as though lightning had struck them down.
‘Command us,’ they cried. ‘Command us, black bull of a thousand cows.’
Manatassi looked upon his band of outlaws as they grovelled about him, and he spoke softly but in a voice that cut to the heart of each of them.
‘There is but one command I give you, and that is – OBEY!’
The furnace was shaped like the belly of a pregnant woman, and the entrance was slitted like her pudenda between spread thighs of moulded clay.
To fertilize the smelting of ore, Zingala introduced the buck-horn nozzle of the bellows into the opening. The nozzle was shaped like a priapus, and the work was done in a strictly ritualistic sequence while the apprentices sang the birth chant, and
When at last the plug of clay was drawn and the molten metal ran in a fiery stream into the sand moulds there was a murmur of relief and congratulation from the watchers.
Using an anvil of ironstone and a set of special hammers Zingala forged the lion’s paw with its five massive iron claws and its pad of solid metal. He filed and dressed and polished it, then he reheated it and tempered it in the blood of a leopard and the fat of a hippopotamus.
One of the skilled leather-workers built a socket of green elephant hide and shaped it to fit the stump of Manatassi’s right arm. The iron claw was fixed securely into the leather socket and when it was strapped to Manatassi’s stump it made a fearsome artificial limb.
Khani, the paramount ruler of Vendi and foppish half-brother of Manatassi, was with his woman when the iron claw tore the top off his skull. The girl beneath him screamed and fainted with the shock of it.
Sondala, the king of Buthelezi, had many subjects, a multitude of cattle, a little grazing-land and even less water to carry his people and his kine through a season of drought.
He was a small wiry man, with quick nervous eyes and a ready smile. Of all the tribes along the great river his was the latest to come out of the north, and he was crushed between the powerful Vendi tribe on the one hand and those white-robed, long-bearded brown-skinned Dravs on the other. He was a desperate man, ready to listen with both ears to any proposition.
He sat in the firelight and grinned and darted quick eyes at the gaunt godlike figure across the hut from him - this king with the ruined face, and bird’s feet and clawed hand of iron.
‘You have twelve regiments, each of 2,000 men,’ Manatassi told him. ‘You have five flowerings of maidens each of 5,000. You have, at the latest count, 127,000 cattle, bulls, cows, calves and oxen.’
Sondala grinned and wriggled uneasily, amazed at the accuracy of the Vendi king’s intelligence.
‘Where will you find food and grass and drink for such a multitude?’ Manatassi asked, and Sondala smiled and listened.
‘I will give you grazing, and land. I will give you a land rich with fruit and lush with grass, a land over which your people will march for ten generations without finding the limits of it.’
‘What do you want of me?’ Sondala whispered at last, still grinning and blinking his eyes quickly.
‘I want your regiments to command. I want your spear in my hand. I want your shield to march beside me.’
‘If I refuse?’ Sondala asked.
‘Then I will kill you,’ said Manatassi. ‘And take your regiments, and all five flowerings of your maidens, and all your 127,000 cattle, except for ten which I will sacrifice upon your grave as a mark of respect to your ghost.’ Manatassi grinned then also, and it was such a terrible baring of teeth in that battered face that Sondala’s own smile froze.
‘I am your dog,’ he said hoarsely, and he knelt before Manatassi. ‘Command me.’
‘There is but one command,’ said Manatassi softly. ‘And that command is, OBEY!’
In the first year Manatassi made treaties with the Vingo, the Satassa and the Bey. He fought the Xhota in a single devastating battle, employing tactics so revolutionary and relentless that the Xhota king and his wives and courtiers and princes were taken twenty minutes after battle was joined. Instead of massacring the menfolk, and taking the women and cattle as was the custom, Manatassi had only the king and royal family strangled, then he assembled the defeated regiments, still intact and under their own commanders, and he made them swear their allegiance to him. They thundered it in massed voice that seemed to shake the leaves in the trees and rock the hills upon their foundations.
In the second year, after the rains had passed, Manatassi marched westwards as far as that desert coast on which a cold green surf raged eternally. He fought four great battles, strangled four kings - treated with two others, and added almost
Those close to the great black beast knew that he seldom slept. It seemed there was some driving force within him that denied him rest or pleasure. He ate food without tasting it, in the perfunctory manner in which a man might throw a log upon the fire merely to keep it burning. He never laughed, and smiled only when a task was performed to his satisfaction. He used women with a swift brutality that left them trembling and weeping, and he shared companionship with no man.
Only once did his lieutenants see him show the emotions of a man. They stood upon the tall yellow dunes at the western limit of the land. Manatassi was apart from them draped in the leopard-skin of royalty and with the blue heron feathers of his head-dress fluttering in the cold breeze that came off the sea.
