sneak into my room.
‘Tonight Inkosi-Inkosikazi will visit in your dreams to find the way of your night water,’ she said, tucking me in. ? The morning after the night Inkosi-Inkosikazi went walkabout in my dreams, he summoned me to sit alone with him again on the meeting mat. From an old leather bag he produced the twelve magic shin-bones from the great white ox. Then, squatting on his haunches as he prepared to throw the bones, he commenced a deep, rumbling incantation that sounded like distant thunder.
The strange bone-yellowed dice which would solve my bed-wetting habit briefly clicked together in his hands and then fell onto the ground in front of him. Inkosi-Inkosikazi flicked at them with his forefinger, and as he did so, tiny rolls of thunder came from his throat. With a final grunt he gathered them up and tossed them back into his ancient leather satchel.
Inkosi-Inkosikazi’s eyes, sharp pins of light in his incredibly wrinkled face, seemed to look right into me. ‘I visited you in your dreams and we came to a place of three waterfalls and ten stones across the river. The shin- bones of the great white ox say I must take you back so that you can jump the three waterfalls and cross the river, stepping from stone to stone without falling into the rushing torrent. If you can do this then the unfortunate business of the night water will be over.’
I nodded, not knowing what to say. After all, five-year-old kids are pretty rotten at riddles. His face became even more simian as he chuckled, ‘When you have learned this lesson I will show you the trick of the chicken sleep.’
I had seen the faint marks of last night’s circles, but no chickens. I guessed that they had been consigned to the communal tummy. I only hope he doesn’t use one of Granpa’s black Orpingtons, what a kerfuffle that would be, I thought.
‘Now, listen to me carefully, boy. Watch and listen. Watch and listen,’ he repeated. ‘When I tell you to close your eyes you will do so. Do you understand?’
Anxious to please him I shut my eyes tightly. ‘Not now! Only when I tell you. Not tight, but as you do when your eyes are heavy from the long day and it is time to sleep.’
I opened my eyes to see him crouched directly in front of me, his beautiful fly switch suspended slightly above my normal sightline. The fall of horsehair swayed gently before my eyes.
‘Watch the tail of the horse.’ My eyes followed the switch as it moved to and fro. ‘It is time to close your eyes but not your ears. You must listen well for the roaring of water is great.’
A sudden roar of water filled my head and then I saw the three waterfalls. I was standing on an outcrop of rock directly above the highest one. Far below me the river rushed away, tumbling and boiling into a narrow gorge. Just before the water entered the gorge and churned white I noted the ten stepping stones, like ten anthracite teeth strung across its mouth.
Inkosi-Inkosikazi spoke to me, his voice soft, almost gentle. ‘It is late; the bush doves, anticipating nightfall, are already silent. It is the time of day when the white waters roar most mightily as water does when it is cast in shadow.
‘You are standing on a rock above the highest waterfall, a young warrior who has killed his first lion and is worthy now to fight in the legion of Dingaan, the great impi that destroys all before it. Worthy even to fight in the impi of Shaka, the greatest warrior king of all.
‘You are wearing the skirt of lion tail as you face into the setting sun. Now the sun has passed beyond Zululand, even past the land of the Swazi and now it leaves the Shangaan and the royal kraal of Modjadji, the rain queen, to be cooled in the great, dark water beyond.
‘You can see the moon rising over Africa and you are at peace with the night, unafraid of the great demon Skokijaan who comes to feed on the dark night, tearing its black flesh until, at last, it is finished and the new light comes to stir the sleeping herd boys and send them out to mind the lowing cattle.’
As I stood on the great rock waiting to jump, I could see the new moon rising, bright as a new florin above the thundering falls.
‘You must take a deep breath and say the number three to yourself as you leap. Then, when you surface, you must take another breath and say the number two as you are washed across the rim of the second waterfall, then again a deep breath as you rise and are carried over the third. Now you must swim to the first stone, counting backwards from ten to one, counting each stone as you leap from it to the next to cross the rushing river.’ The old medicine man paused long enough for me to work out the sequence he had given me. ‘You must jump now, little warrior of the king.’
I took a deep breath and launched myself into the night. The cool air, mixed with spray, rushed past my face and then I hit the water below, sank briefly, rose to the surface and expelled the deep breath I had taken. With scarcely enough time to take a second breath I was swept over the second waterfall and then again I fell down the third roaring cascade to be plunged into a deep pool at the base of the third waterfall. I swam strongly and with great confidence to the first of the great stones glistening black and wet in the moonlight. Jumping from stone to stone I crossed the river, counting down from ten to one, then leaping to the pebbly beach on the far side.
Clear as an echo, his voice cut through the roar of the falls. ‘We have crossed the night water to the other side and it is done, you must open your eyes now, little warrior.’ Inkosi-Inkosikazi brought me back from the dreamtime and I looked around, a little surprised to see the familiar farmyard about me. ‘When you need me you may come to the night country and I will be waiting. I will always be there in the place of the three waterfalls and the ten stones across the river.’ Pointing to what appeared to be an empty mealie meal sack, he said: ‘Bring me that chicken and I will show you the trick of the chicken sleep.’
I got up and walked over to the sack and opened it. Inside, the sharp, beady red eye of the chicken that looked like Granpa blinked up at me. I dragged the sack over to where the previous circles he’d made in the dust had been and the old man rose and called over to me to draw a new circle in the dirt. Then he showed me how to hold the old rooster. This was done by securing the main body of the chicken under your right armpit like a set of bagpipes and grabbing it high up its neck with your left hand so that its featherless head is held between forefinger and thumb. Getting a good hold of its feet with your free hand, you dip the chicken towards the ground at an angle of forty-five degrees while squatting on the ground with the chicken’s beak not quite touching the rim of the circle. The beak is then traced around the perimeter three times whereupon the bird is laid inside the circle.
The old man made me practise it three times. To my amazement and his amusement, the old rooster lay within the circle docile as a sow in warm mud. To bring the chicken back from wherever chickens go in such trying circumstances, all I needed to do was touch it and say in a gruff voice, ‘Chicken sleep, chicken wake, if chicken not wake then chicken be ate!’ Which is, I suppose, a pretty grim warning to a chicken.
I did not ask Inkosi-Inkosikazi how a Shangaan chicken could understand Zulu because you simply do not ask such questions of the greatest medicine man in all of Africa.
I was as yet unaware that this chicken was pretty exceptional, that the ability to understand a couple of African languages was probably not beyond him.
‘The chicken trick is our bond. We are now brothers bound in this common knowledge and also the knowledge of the place in the dreamtime. Only you and I can do this trick or come to that place.’
I’m telling you something, it was pretty solemn stuff. With a yell across the farmyard the old man called for his driver who was asleep in the back of the Buick. Together we walked towards the big, black car.
‘You may keep this chicken to practise on,’ Inkosi-Inkosikazi said as he climbed into the back seat of the car.
As if from nowhere, the car was surrounded by field women who loaded up the trunk with the tributes they’d brought the previous day. Nanny handed the old man a small square of brightly coloured cloth into the corner of which were knotted several coins. Inkosi-Inkosikazi declined the offer of what was, for Nanny, two months’ salary.
‘It is a matter between me and the boy. This place is on my way to the Molototse River where I go to see Modjadji, the rain queen.’ He stuck his head out of the rear door window and gazed up into the sky. ‘The rains have not come to Zululand, and in this matter her magic is greater than mine.’
The rains had been good north of the Drakensberg Mountains and now Nanny grew fearful as she asked for news of her people.
‘The fields are ploughed three months and the seed maize is ready in the great seed pots, but the wind carries away the soil as we wait for the rains to come,’ the old man sighed.
Nanny translated the news of the drought to the women. Drought is always news to be shared among the
