'I am in Francistowti. The Red Cross are caring for me.'
'Do you have a message?' She replied in Sindebele. 'Your beautiful bird has flown high and swiftly.' Then she added, 'I have met others here.
Do not despair.' That is good I want' you to-' Peter Fungabera reached across and took the microphone from his hand. 'Excuse me, Comrade, but I am paying for the call.' He held the microphone to his lips and depressed the transmit button. 'Transmission ends,' he said, and broke the connection.
He tossed the microphone casually to the guard captain.
'Have the tape translated by one of the Matabele trusties and bring me a copy immediately.' Then he turned back to Tungata.
Your little holiday is over, Comrade, now you and I have work to do. Shall we go?' aw long would he be able to draw out the search for Lobengula's grave, Tungata wondered. Fo, every hour he could gain would have value -another hour of life, another hour of hope.
'It is almost twenty years since my grandfather took me to visit the site. My memory is unclean'
'Your memory is as brilliant as that sun up there,' Peter told him. 'You are renowned for your ability to remember places and faces and names, Comrade, you forget that I have heard you speak in the Assembly, without notes.
Besides which, you will have a helicopter to ferry you directly to the site.'
'That will not work. The first time I went was on foot. I must go back the same way. I would not recognize the landmarks from the air.' So they went back along the dirt roads that Tungata and old Gideon had bussed over so many years before, and the Tungata genuinely could not find the starting place fall of rocks in the old river course and the kopje shaped like an elephant's head. They spent three days searching, with Peter Fungabera becoming more and more short tempered and disbelieving, before they stopped at the tiny village and trading-store that was the last reference point that Tungata could remember.
'Haul The old road. Yes, the bridge was washed away many years ago. It was never used again. Now the new road goes so and so-' They found the overgrown track at last and four hours later reached the dry river-bed. The old bridge had cot lapsed into a heap of shattered concrete already overgrown with lianas, but the rock wall upstream was exactly as Tungata had remembered it and he experienced a pang of nostalgia. Suddenly old Gideon seemed very close to him, so much so that he glanced around and made a small sign with his right hand to appease the ancestral spirits and whispered, 'Forgive me, Babo, that I am going to betray the oath.' Strangely the presence that he sensed was benign and fondly indulgent, as Old Gideon had always been. 'The lies this way.' They left the Land-Rover at the broken path bridge and continued on foot.
Tungata. led with two armed troopers at his back. He set an easy pace, that chafed Peter Fungabera who followed behind the guards. As they went, Tungata could allow his imagination to wander freely. He seemed to be part of the exodus of the Matabele people of almost a hundred years before, an embodiment of Gandang, his great-great-grandfather, faithful and loyal to the end. He felt again the despair of a defeated people and the terror of the hard riding white pursuit that might appear at any instant from the forest behind them, with their chattering three, legged machine-guns. He seemed to hear the lament of the women and the small children, the lowing of herds as they faltered and fell in this hard and bitter country.
When the last of the draught oxen were dead, Gandang had ordered the warriors of his famous Inyati regiment into the traces of the kingy's remaining wagon. Tungata imagined the king, obese and diseased and doomed, sitting up on the rocking wagon box staring into the forbidding north, a man caught up in the millstones of history and destiny and crushed between them.
'And now the final betrayal,' Tungata thought, bitterly.
'I am leading these Shana animals to disturb his rest once again.' Three times, deliberately, he took the wrong path, drawing it out to the very limit of Peter Fungabera's patience. The third time, Peter Fungabera. ordered him stripped naked and his wrists and ankles bound together, then he had stood over him with a cured hippo-hide whip, the vicious kiboko that the Arab slave-traders had in traduced to Africa, and he thrashed Tungata likea dog until his blood dripped into the sandy grey earth.
It was the shame and humiliation of the beating rather than the pain that had made Tungata turn back and pick up his landmarks again. When he reached the hill at last, II;, it appeared ahead of them with all the suddenness that Tungata recalled so vividly from his first visit.
They had been following a deep gorge of black rock, polished by the roaring torrential spates of the millennia.
The depths were studded with stagnant green pools in which giant whiskered catfish stirred the scummy surface as they rose to feed, and lovely swallow-tailed butterflies floated in the heated air above, gems of scarlet and iridescent blue.
They came around a bend in the gorge, clambering over boulders the size and the colour of elephants, and abruptly the surrounding cliffs opened and the forest fell back.
Before them, likea vast monument to dwarf the pyramids of the pharaohs, the hill of Lobengula rose into the sky.
The cliffs were sheer and daubed with lichens of twenty different shades of yellow and ochre and malachite. There was a breeding colony of vultures in the upper ledges, the parent birds sailing gracefully out over the heated void, tipping their wings in the rising thermals as they banked and spiralled.
'There it is,' Tungata murmured. 'Thabas Nkosi, the hill of the king.' The natural pathway to the summit followed a fault in the rock face where limestone overlaid the country rock.
At places it was steep and daunting and the troopers, weighted with packs and weapons, glanced nervously over the drop and hugged the inner wall of rock as they edged upwards, but Peter Fungabera and Tungata climbed easily and surefooted over even the worse places, leaving the escort far below.
'I could throw him over the edge,' Tungata thought, 'if I can take him unawares.' He glanced back and Peter was ten paces below him. He had the Tokarev pistol in his right hand and he smiled likea mamba.
'No,' he warned, and they understood each other with, out further words. For the moment Tungata put away the thought of vengeance and went on upwards. He turned a corner in the rock and they came out onto the crown of the hill, five hundred feet above the dark gorge.
Standing a little apart, both of them sweating lightly in the white sunlight, they looked down into the deep wide valley of the Zambezi. On the edge of their vision, the wide waters of the man-made lake of Kariba glinted softly through the haze of heat and blue smoke from the first bush- fires of the dry season. The troopers came off the path with transparent relief, and Peter Fungabera looked expectantly at Tungata.
'We are ready to go on, Comrade.'
'There is not much further to go,' Tungata answered him.
Over the crest of the cliff the rock formation had eroded and broken up into buttress and tumbled ramparts, the trees that had found purchase in the cracks and crevices had intertwined their root systems over the rock-face like mating serpents, while their stems were thickened and deformed by the severe conditions of heat and drought.
Tungata led them through the broken rock and tortured forest, into the mouth of a ravine. At the head of the ravine grew an ancient Natalensis, the strangler fig ficus tree, its fleshy limbs of blotched yellow loaded with bunches of bitter fruit. As they approached it a flock of brown parrots, green wings flagged with bright yellow, that had been feasting on the wild figs, exploded into flight. At the base of the ficus tree, the cliff was segmented, and the roots had found the cracks and forced them apart.
Tungata stood before the cliff and Peter Fungabera, suppressing an exclamation of impatience, glanced at him and saw his lips were moving silently, in a prayer or entreaty. Peter Fungabera began to examine the cliff ace more carefully, and realized with rising excitement that the racks in the rock were too regular to be natural.
'Here!' he shouted to his troopers, and when they hurried forward, he pointed out one of the blocks in the face, and they set to work on it with bayonets and bare hands.
Within fifteen minutes of sweaty labour, they had worked the block free, and it was now clear that the face was in reality a wall of carefully fitted masonry. In the depths of the aperture left by the block, they could make out a second wall of masonry.
'Bring the prisoner,' Peter ordered. 'He will work in the front rank.' By the time it was too dark to go on, they had opened an aperture just wide enough for two men to work shoulder to shoulder in the outer wall, and had begun on the inner wall. In the forefront, Tungata was able to confirm what he had guessed on his first visit to the tomb so long ago the signs that he had noticed then and concealed from old grandfather Gideon were even more apparent on the inner wall of the tomb. They helped salve his conscience and ease the pain of oath- breaking.
r Reluctantly Peter Fungabera called a halt on the work for the night. Tungata's hands were raw from contact with the rough blocks and he had lost a fingernail where it had been trapped and torn off in a slide of masonry. He was 9 handcuffed to one of the Third Brigade troopers for the night, but even this could not keep him from dreamless exhaustion-drugged sleep. Peter Fungabera had to kick both him and his guard awake the next morning.
it was still dark and they ate their
