everything on the path, even the sound of the kanka's ragged breathing.
'Then give me good value, if I must pay with my life,' he chuckled, and then gasped with pain. 'So kitten, you have sharp claws.' And there was the clap of a blow on soft flesh, the sound of struggling, the bushes heaved and loose pebbles rolled away down the slope.
The constable guarding Imbali strained for a glimpse of what was happening. His lips were open and he licked them. He could make out blurred movement through the leafless branches, and then there was the sound of a body falling heavily to earth and the breath being driven violently from Ruth's lungs by a crushing weight.
'Hold still, kitten,' the kanka panted. 'You make me angry. Lie still,' and abruptly Ruth screamed. It was the shrill ringing cry of an animal in mortal agony, repeated again and again, and the kanka grunted. 'Yes. There, yes, and then snuffed like a boar at the trough, and there was a soft rhythmic slapping sound, and Ruth kept screaming.
The man guarding Imbali propped the spare rifle against the boulder and stepped off the path, and with the barrel of his own Winchester parted the branches and stared. His face seemed to swell and darken with passion, his whole attention concentrated on what he was watching.
With the second constable's attention so distracted, Imbali sidled along the granite, and then paused for an instant to gather herself before darting away. She had reached the angle of the pathway before the man turned and saw her.
'Come back!' he shouted.
'What is it?' the -kanka demanded from behind the bushes in a thick tortured voice.
'The other one, she is running.' 'Stop her,' the kanka bellowed, and his companion ran to the corner, Imbali was fifty paces down the hillside, flying like a gazelle over the rough ground, driven by her terror. The man thumbed back the hammer of his Winchester, flung the butt to his shoulder and fired wildly, without aiming. It was a fluke shot. It caught the girl in the small of the back and the big soft lead slug tore out through her belly. She collapsed and rolled down the steep pathway, her limbs tumbling about loosely.
The constable lowered the rifle. His expression was shocked and unbelieving. Slowly, hesitantly, he went down to where the girl lay.
She was on her back. Her eyes were open, and the exit wound in her flat young stomach gaped hideously, her torn entrails bulged from it.
The girl's eyes switched to his face, the terror in them flared up for an instant, and then slowly faded into utter blankness.
'She is dead.' The kanka had left Ruth, and come down the path.
He had left his apron in the bushes. His blue shirt, tails flapped around his bare legs.
Both of them stared down at the dead girl.
'I did not mean it,' said the kanka with the hot rifle in his hands.
'We cannot let the other one go back to tell what has happened,' his companion replied, and turned back up the pathway. As he passed, he picked up his own rifle from where it leaned against the rock. He stepped off the path, behind the thin screen of bushes.
The other man was still staring into Imbali's blank eyes when the second shot rang out. He flinched to the crack of it, and lifted his head. As the echoes lapped away amongst the granite cliffs, the kanka stepped back onto the path. He ejected the spent cartridge case from the breech and it pinged against the rock.
'Now we must find a story for One-Bright-Eye, and for the indunas,' he said quietly, and strapped the fur apron back around his thick waist.
They brought the two girls back to Gandang's kraal on the back of the police sergeant's grey horse. Their legs dangled down one side and their arms down the other. They had wrapped a grey blanket around their naked bodies, as though ashamed of the wounds upon them, but the blood had soaked through and dried black upon it, and the big metallic green flies swarmed joyously upon the stains.
In the centre of the kraal, the sergeant gestured to the kanka who led the grey, and he turned back and cut the line that secured the girl's ankles. The corpses were immediately unbalanced and slid head-first to the swept bare earth. They fell without dignity in an untidy tumble of bare limbs, like game brought in from the hunting veld for skinning and dressing out.
The women had been silent until then, but now they began the haunting ululation of mourning, and one of them scooped a handful of dust and poured it over her own head. The others followed her example, and their cries brought out the gooseflesh down the arms of the sergeant, though his expression remained neutral and his voice level as he spoke to Gandang.
'You have brought this sadness on your people, old man. If you had obeyed the wishes of Lodzi and sent in your young men, as is your duty, these women would have lived to bear sons.' 'What crime did they commit?' Gandang asked, and watched his senior wife come forward to kneel beside the bloody dust-smeared bodies.
'They tried to kill two of my police.' 'Haul' Gandang expressed his scornful disbelief, and the sergeant's voice rasped with anger for the first time. ' 'My men caught them and forced them to lead them to where the amadoda are hiding. At last night's camp, when my men were asleep, they would have thrust sharpened sticks into their ear holes to the brain, but my men sleep lightly, and when they awoke, the women ran into the night and my men had to stop them.' For a long moment Gandang stared at the sergeant, and his eyes were so terrible that Ezra turned away to watch the senior wife as she knelt beside one of the girls. Juba closed the slack jaws, and then gently wiped the congealed blood from Ruth's lips and nostrils.
'Yes' Gandang advised Ezra. 'Look well, white man's jackal, remember this thing for all the days that are left to you. 'Dare you threaten me, old man?' the sergeant blustered. 'All men must die,' Gandang shrugged, 'but some die sooner and more painfully than others.'
And Gandang turned and walked back to his hut.
Gandang sat alone by the small smoky fire in his hut. Neither the broiled beef nor white maize cakes in Gthe platter at his side had been touched. He stared into the flames, and listened to the wailing of the women and the beat of the drums.
He knew that Juba would come to tell him when the girls' bodies had been bathed and wrapped in the green skin of the freshly slaughtered ox. As soon as it was light, it would be his duty to supervise the digging of the grave in the centre of the cattle kraal, so he was not surprised when there was a soft scratching at the doorway and he called softly to Juba to enter.
She came to kneel at his side. 'All is ready for the morning, my husband.' He nodded, and they were silent for a while, and then Juba said, 'I wish to sing the Christian song that Nomusa has taught me when the girls are put into the earth.' He inclined his head in acquiescence, and she went on.
'I wish also that you would dig their graves in the forest so that I may place crosses over them.' 'If that is the way of your new god,' he agreed again, and now he rose and crossed to his sleeping-mat in the far corner.
'Nkosi,' Juba remained kneeling. 'Lord, there is something else.' 'what is it?' He looked back at her. His beloved features remote and cold.
'I, and my women, will carry the steel as you bid me,' she whispered. 'I made an oath with my finger in the wound in Ruth's flesh. I will carry the assegais to the amadoda.' He did not smile, but the coldness went out of his eyes, and he held out one hand to her.
Juba rose and went to him, and he took her hand and led her to the sleeping-mat.
Bazo came down out of the hills three days after the girls had been placed in the earth, under the bare Bspreading branches of a giant mimosa at a place which overlooked the river. There were two young men with him, and the three of them went directly to the graves with Juba guiding them. After a while, Bazo left the two young bridegrooms to mourn their women and he went back to where his father waited for him under the fig tree.
After he had made his dutiful greetings, they drank from the same beer pot passing it back and forth between them in silence, and when it was empty Gandang sighed.
'It is a terrible thing.' Bazo looked up at him sharply.
'Rejoice, my father. Thank the spirits of your ancestors,' he said.
'For they have given us a greater bargain than we could ever have wished for.' 'I do not understand this.' Gandang stared at his son.
'For two lives lives of no importance, lives that would have been spent in vain and empty-headed frivolity for this insignificant price, we have kindled a fire in the belly of the nation. We have steeled even the weakest and most cowardly of our amadoda. Now when the time comes, we know that there will be no hesitating. Rejoice, MY father, at the gift we have been given.' 'You have become a ruthless man,' Gandang whispered at last.
'I am proud that you should find me so,' Bazo replied. 'And if I am not ruthless enough for the work, then my son or his son, in their time, will be.' 'You do not trust the oracle of the Umlimo?' Gandang demanded. 'She has promised us success.' 'No, my father.' Bazo shook his head. 'Think carefully on her words. She has told us only to make the attempt. She promised us nothing. It is with us alone to succeed or fail. That is why we must be hard and relentless, trusting nobody, looking for any advantage, and using it to the full.' Gandang thought about that for a while, then sighed again.
'It was not like this before.' Nor will it ever be
