The Angels Weep - Smith Wilbur (чтение книг txt) 📗

"Be gone," she said, "both of you. There are those that need you more than I do. Away with you both, follow your men into the hills."

The girls squealed with delight, and throwing aside all ceremony, they embraced Juba joyously.

"You are the sunshine and the moon," they told her, and then they fled to their huts to prepare for the journey, and for a little while Juba's own sorrow was lightened. But at the fall of night when no young wife came to summon her to Gandang's hut, it returned in full strength, and she wept alone on her sleeping-mat until at last sleep came over her, but then there were dreams dreams full of the glow of flames and the smell of rotting flesh, and she cried out in her sleep, but there was no one to hear and awaken her.

General Mungo St. John reined in and looked around him at the devastated forests. There was no cover, the locusts had seen to that, and it would make his task more difficult.

He lifted the slouch hat from his head and mopped his forehead.

This was the suicide month. The great cumulus cloud banks heaved up heaven high along the horizon and the heat shivered and wavered in mirage above the bare baked earth. Mungo carefully readjusted the black patch over his empty eye-socket, and turned in the saddle to look back at the file of men that followed him.

There were fifty of them, all Matabele, but wearing a bizarre motley of traditional and European dress. Some wore patched moleskin breeches, and others tasselled fur aprons. Some were barefoot, others wore rawhide sandals and a few even sported hobnailed boots without socks or puttees. Most of them were bare-chested, though a few wore cast-off tunics or tattered shirts. There was, however, one single item of uniform that was common to them all. It was worn on a chain around the left arm above the elbow, a polished brass disc engraved with the words. "BSA Co. Police." They were each of them armed with a new repeating Winchester rifle, and a bandolier of brass cartridges.

Their legs were dusty to the knees, for they had made a hard fast march southwards, keeping up easily with Mungo St. John's trotting mount.

Mungo looked them over with grim satisfaction. Despite the lack of cover, he believed that the speed of their advance must take the kraals by surprise.

It was like one of his slaving expeditions on the west coast, so long ago, before that damned Lincoln and the Royal bloody Navy had cut off the multi-million-dollar trade. By God, those had been the days.

The swift approach march, the encirclement of the village and the dawn rush with the slavers" clubs cracking against woolly black skulls.

Mungo roused himself. Was it a sign of age to hark back so often to the long-ago? he wondered.

"Ezra, he called his sergeant to come up to him. He was the only other mounted man in the column. He rode a swaybacked grey with a rough coat.

Ezra was a hulking Matabele with a scarred cheek, memento of a mining accident in the great diamond pit at Kimberley, six hundred miles to the south. It was there that he had adopted his new name and learned his English.

"How far ahead is Gandang's kraal?" Mungo asked him in that language.

"That far," Ezra swept his arm through an arc of the sky, indicating two hours or so of the sun's passage.

"All right," Mungo nodded. "Send the scouts out. But I want no mistakes. Explain to them again that they must cross the Inyati river upstream of the kraal and circle out to wait in the foothills." "Nkosi!" Ezra nodded.

"Tell them they must seize anybody who runs from the kraal, and bring them in." The business of translating every command irked Mungo, and for the hundredth time since he had crossed the Limpopo, he resolved to study the Sindebele language.

Ezra saluted Mungo with an exaggerated flourish, an imitation of the British soldiers he had watched from the barred window of his cell while he was serving his sentence for diamond theft, and turned in the saddle to shout the orders to the men who followed the two horsemen.

"Warn them that they must be in position before dawn. That is when we will ride in." Mungo unstrapped the felt-covered water-bottle from the pommel of his saddle and unscrewed the stopper.

"They are ready, Nkosi," the sergeant reported.

"Very well, Sergeant, send them away," said Mungo, and raised the water-bottle to his lips.

For many seconds after waking, Juba believed that the screams of the women and the whimpering of the children were all part of her nightmares, and she pulled the fur kaross over her head.

Then there was a crash as the door to the hut was broken open, a rush of bodies into the dark interior, and Juba came fully awake and threw off the kaross. Rough hands seized her and though she screamed and struggled, she was dragged naked into the open. The sky was paling with the dawn and the constables had piled fresh logs on the fire, so that Juba recognized the white man immediately, and she shrank back into the safety of the crowd of sobbing, wailing women before he could notice her.

Mungo St. John was in a fury, bellowing at his sergeant, striding backwards and forwards beyond the fire, slapping his riding-whip against his glossy boot. His face was flushed a dark crimson like the wattles of the waddling black sing isi the grotesque turkey buzzard of the veld, and his single eye blazed in the firelight.

"Where are the men? I want to know where the men have gone!"

Sergeant Ezra came hurrying down the rank of cringing women, peering into their faces. He stopped in front of Juba, recognizing her instantly, one of the grandes dames of the tribe, as she drew herself to her full height, even in her total and massive nudity she was dignified and queenly. She expected some mark of respect, some gesture of courtesy from him, but instead the sergeant seized her wrist and twisted her arm up so viciously that she was forced to her knees.