The covenant, p.7
The Covenant, page 7
Often as they spun their cotton they would pause to watch the animals grazing on the far side of the lake, and if a zebra kicked its heels or a gazelle danced in the air, the girls would applaud. And if a troop of elephants chanced to move in, or a flight of cranes, there would be cries of pleasure and not much would be accomplished.
Among the weavers was Zeolani, fifteen years old and daughter of the man who knew how to make copper wire from ingots brought south from the Limpopo River. From bits and pieces left over from the consignment, her father had made her the seven slim bracelets she wore upon her left wrist, so that when she threw the shuttle in her weaving she created soft music, which pleased her and set her apart from the others.
The work was not onerous; nothing that the tribe did demanded sustained effort, and there were long periods when the girls spent most of their days in idleness. Zeolani used these times to slip back to the looms and weave for herself cloth made of second-grade cotton adorned with bits of copper taken from her father's hoard. This cloth was not pure white, like that woven for trading; it was a honeyed tan, well-attuned to her blackness, and when its copper flecks caught the sun, the cloth seemed to dance.
Of it she made herself a skirt, the first seen in this village, and when she wrapped it about her slim waist and pirouetted by the lake, her dark breasts gleaming in the sunlight, she made herself a girl apart.
'They say you were brave at the hunt,' she said to Nxumalo as she danced by when he lingered at the silent weaving shelter.
'Rhinos are hard to find.'
'And hard to kill?' As she posed this question, she swung away from him, aware that as her skirt flared outward it showed to fine advantage.
'The others did the killing,' he said, entranced by her gentle movements.
'I kept watching to the east,' she said. 'I was afraid.'
He reached for her hand, and they sat looking across the lake at the desultory animals who wandered down for a midday drink: a few antelope, two or three zebra, and that was all. 'At dusk,' he said, 'that shore will swarm.'
'Look!' she cried as a lazy hippopotamus half rose from the waters, jawed mightily, then submerged.
'I wish the strangers in far lands wanted hippo teeth instead of rhino horns,' Nxumalo said. 'Much easier to do.' Zeolani said nothing, and after a while he touched her skirt, and then, almost as if he were driven to speak, he blurted out: 'When I am gone I'll remember this cloth.'
'It's true, then? You've decided to go?'
'Yes.'
'The old man talked and talked . . . and you believed him?'
'I'll go. I'll see the city. And I'll come back.'
Taking her by the hands, he said fervently, 'When I traveled with the Old Seeker we came upon a fine land and I thought, "We'll leave the lake to my brothers ... to tend their cattle and their fields. Zeolani and I will find a few good hunters and we . . .'
She did not coyly repeat the we, for she knew well what Nxumalo had been thinking, because she, too, had contemplated moving away from this village and starting a new one with her hunter-husband. Instead of speaking, she took his hand, drew it close to her naked breast, and whispered, 'I shall wait for you, Nxumalo.'
After the next hunt, in which Nxumalo brought down four more rhinos, the young lovers found many opportunities to discuss their uncertain future. 'Can't I go to Zimbabwe with you?' Zeolani asked.
'So far! The way uncertain. No, no.'
They decided upon a course fraught with danger, but their love had matured at such a dizzy speed that they were eager to risk the penalties. At Zeolani's signaling they wandered by different routes into the savanna east of the village to a spot hidden by the two small hills shaped like a woman's breasts, and there they made love repeatedly, even though it could mean the end of his trip to Zimbabwe if she became pregnant. If word of such condition circulated, the tribe would condemn her for having known a man without sanction and everyone would know who the man must have been, and they would be severely punished.
There, between the hills, they kept their trysts, and fortune was with them, for there was no pregnancy. Instead, there developed a deepening love, and as the day approached when Nxumalo must march north with the tribute, their last meetings assumed a mournful cast that could not be dispelled.
'I will walk behind you,' the girl said, 'and come into Zimbabwe as if by accident.'
'No, it's man's work,' said this boy of sixteen.
'I will wait for you. You are the only one I will ever live with.'
They went boldly to one of the hills south of the village and looked west toward the spot that Nxumalo had chosen many months ago. 'It lies far beyond. There's a small stream and many antelope. When I was sleeping there I heard a rustle, so I opened one eye. It could have been an enemy. What do you suppose it was?'
'Baboons?'
'Four sable antelope. Their horns were wider than this,' and when he extended his arms to their maximum, Zeolani slipped into them and they embraced for the last time. Tears came to her eyes as her slim fingers traced the muscles in his arm.
'We were intended,' she said. 'By every sign we were intended.' And she counted the omens that should have brought them together, and each knew that never in this life could another mate be found so inevitably right.
'I shall wait for you,' the girl said, and with this childish and futile promise ringing in his ears, Nxumalo set forth.
It was a journey any young man would want to make, five hundred miles due north across the heart of Africa, crossing wide rivers, sharing the pathway with animals innumerable, and heading for a city known only in legend or the garbled reports of the Old Seeker. Sixteen men would accompany their young leader, and since only the guide Sibisi had made the first part of this trip before, the others were at least as excited as Nxumalo.
He was surprised at how lightly the men were burdened; on one of his hunting trips his helpers would carry three times the weight, but Sibisi explained, 'Much safer if travel light. Use the first days to tighten muscles. Enjoy the freedom and make yourselves strong, because on the twenty-seventh day .. .' He dropped his voice ominously. 'Then we reach the Field of Granite.'
The loading would have been simpler if the rhinoceros horns could have been reduced to powder and adjusted to the men's other cargo, but this was forbidden. The horns had to be intact upon delivery at Sofala to the waiting dhows that would carry them thus to China, so that apothecaries could be assured they were getting true horn and not some admixture of dust to make the packages larger.
The file set forth at dawn on a clear autumn day, when the swollen rivers of spring and summer had receded and when animals born earlier in the year were large enough to be eaten. Sibisi set a pace that would not tire the men at the beginning, but would enable them to cover about twenty miles each day. For two weeks they would travel through savanna much as they had known at home, with no conspicuous or unusual features.
Two men who carried nothing proved invaluable, for it was they who ranged ahead, providing meat for the travelers. 'I want you to eat a lot and grow strong,' Sibisi said, 'because when we reach the Field of Granite we must be at our best.'
On the morning of the sixth day the march speeded considerably, and the file covered at least twenty-five miles a day until they approached the first notable site on their journey. 'Ahead lies the gorge,' Sibisi said, and he regaled the novices with accounts of this spectacular place: 'The river hesitates, looks at the wall of rock, then leaps forward shouting, "It can be done!" And mysteriously it picks its way through the red cliffs.'
Sibisi added, 'Mind your steps. You're not clever like the river.'
The gorge was so extremely narrow, only a few yards across, that the river rushed through with tremendous force, its turbulence well suited to the towering red flanks. The transit required the better part of a day, the porters following a precipitous footpath that clung to the eastern edge of the river and carried them at times down into the river itself. At the midpoint of the gorge the tops of the walls seemed to close in, so that the sky was obliterated, and here birds of great variety and color flashed through, playing a game of missing the cliffs as they darted about.
'Insects,' Sibisi said, showing the others how the turbulence of the water created air currents that tossed insects aloft, where birds awaited, and for a while as Nxumalo paused to absorb the wonder of this placea river piercing a wall of rockhe felt that his journey could have no finer moment, but he was wrong. The true grandeur of this trip lay ahead, for as the travelers came out of the gorge they entered upon a place of wonder.
The land opened out like the vast ears of an elephant, and across it trees of the most outlandish nature scattered. 'They're upside down!' Nxumalo cried, rushing to a massive thing much thicker than any he had previously known. It was fifteen feet through the center, with bark soft and shaggy like the skin of an old dog; when he pressed against it, his thumb sank deep within. But what was truly remarkable were the branches, for this mighty tree reaching sixty feet into the air carried only tiny twigs resembling the roots of some frail plant, ripped out of its soil and stuck back in, upside down.
'It is upside down,' Sibisi agreed. 'The gods did it.'
'Why?'
'They made this excellent tree. Perfect in every respect. Big branches like an ordinary tree. But it was lazy, and when they came back to gather fruit, they found nothing. So in anger they ripped it out of the ground and jammed it back in, upside down, as you can see.'
When Nxumalo laughed at the sight of this monstrosity, Sibisi gripped his arm. 'No ridicule. Many men owe their lives to this tree, for when you are perishing from thirst you come here, puncture the bark, and out will drip a little water.' Nor was it only water the baobab gave, for its leaves could be boiled and eaten, its seeds sucked or ground to make a tingling drink, and its spongy wood stripped and woven into rope.
It was a tree that festooned the landscape, its great pillars of thick glossy bark and tangled branches spreading far into the sky. Wherever he looked north of the gorge, there stood these trees, as if to cry, 'We are sentinels of a new land. You are coming onto the earth we guard.'
And it was a new land. The savanna sprouted different grasses, and there were different birds and different small animals running between the rocks. But in the distance there were always the same large animals: elephant and eland and galloping zebra. They were the permanent gods that accompanied men when they journeyed north, and at night when they lit their campfire, Nxumalo could hear the lions prowling near, lured by the smell of human beings but repelled by their flames, and in the distance the soft grumbling of the hyenas. It was as if a man traveling across the savanna carried with him a garland of beasts, beautiful and wild and useful. Nxumalo, peering into the darkness, could sometimes see their eyes reflecting the flames, and he was always surprised at how close they came; on nights when it was his turn to keep the fire alive, he would allow it to die perilously low, and in the near-darkness he would see the lions moving closer, closer, their eyes not far from his, their soft and lovely forms clearly discernible. Then, with a low cry, he would poke the embers and throw on more wood, and they would quietly withdraw, perplexed by this untoward behavior but still fascinated by the wavering flames.
On the morning of the seventeenth day Nxumalo saw two phenomena that he would always remember; they were as strange to him as the upside-down baobab trees, and they were premonitory, for much of his life from this time on would be spent grappling with these mysteries.
From a hill three days north of the gorge he looked down to see his first mighty river, the Limpopo, roaring through the countryside with a heavy burden of floodwaters collected far upstream and a heavier burden of mud. The waters swirled and twisted, and to cross them was quite impossible, but Sibisi said, 'They'll subside. Two days we can walk across.' He could not have said this in spring, but he knew that this untimely flooding must have originated in some single storm and would soon abate.
In the waiting period Nxumalo inspected the second phenomenon, the vast copper deposits just south of the Limpopo, where he was surprised to see women, some as young as Zeolani, whose lives were spent grabbing at rock and hauling it lump by lump up rickety ladders to furnaces whose acrid fumes contaminated the air and shortened the lives of those who were forced to breathe them.
The tribe in charge of the mines had accumulated large bundles of copper wire, which Nxumalo agreed to have his men transport to Zimbabwe, and now the two who had been carrying nothing were pressed into service. Even Nxumalo, whose burden had been light, took four measures of the wire, since the miners paid well for this service.
We've always traded our copper with Zimbabwe,' the mine overseer said, 'and when you reach the city you'll see why.' His words excited Nxumalo, and he was tempted to ask for more details, but he kept silent, preferring to find out for himself what lay at journey's end.
When the Limpopo subsided and its red-rock bottom was fordable, the seventeen men resumed the exciting part of their march, for now they were in the heart of a savanna so vast that it dwarfed any they had known before. Distances were tremendous, a rolling sea of euphorbia trees, baobabs and flat-topped thorn bushes, crowded with great animals and alluring birds. For endless miles the plains extended, rolling and swelling when small hills intervened, and cut by rivers with no name.
At the end of the first day's march from the Limpopo they came upon the farthest southern outpost of the kingdom of Zimbabwe, and Nxumalo could barely mask his disappointment. There was a kraal, to be sure, and it was surrounded by a stone wall, but it was not the soaring construction that Old Seeker had promised. 'It's larger than my father's wall,' Nxumalo said quietly, 'but I expected something that high.' And he pointed to a tree of modest size.
One of the herders attached to the outpost said, 'Patience, young boy. This is not the city.' When he saw Nxumalo's skepticism he led him along a path to a spot from which a valley could be seen. 'Now will you believe the greatness of Zimbabwe?' And for as far as his eye could travel, Nxumalo saw a vast herd of cattle moving between the hills. 'The king's smallest herd,' the man said. Nxumalo, who had been reared in a society where a man's status was determined by his cattle, realized that the King of Zimbabwe must be a man of extraordinary power.
When Sibisi and the outpost headman settled down with their gourds of beer, Nxumalo, uninformed on the topics they discussed, wandered off, to find something that quite bewitched him: one of the herdsmen, with little to do day after day, had caught a baby eland to rear as a pet. It was now full grown, heavier than one of Nxumalo's father's cows and with twisted horns twice as long and dangerous, but it was like a baby, pampered and running after its mother, in this case the herdsman, who ordered it about as if it were his fractious son.
The eland loved to play, and Nxumalo spent most of one day knocking about with it, pushing against its forehead, wrestling with its horns and avoiding its quick feet when the animal sought to neutralize the boy's cleverness. When the file moved north the eland walked with Nxumalo for a long time, its handsome flanks shining white in the morning sun. Then its master whistled, called its name, and the big animal stopped in the path, looked forward to his new friend and backward to its home, then stamped its forefeet in disgust and trotted back. Nxumalo stood transfixed in the bush, staring at the disappearing animal and wishing that he could take such a congenial beast with him, when the eland stopped, turned, and for a long spell stared back at the boy. They stayed thus for several minutes, consuming the space that separated them, then the animal tossed its head, flashed its fine horns, and disappeared.
Nxumalo now carried only two bundles of wire, for Sibisi had said quietly, 'I'll take the others. You must prepare yourself for the Field of Granite.' In the middle of the plains, blue on the far horizon, rose a line of mountains, and marking the pathway to them stood a chain of ant hills, some as high as trees, others lower but as big across as a baobab. They were reddish in color and hard as rock where the rains had moistened them prior to their baking by the sun.
On the twenty-ninth day as they neared Zimbabwe they saw ahead of them two mighty granite domes surrounded by many-spired euphorbias, and as they walked, bringing the domes ever closer, Sibisi pointed to the west, where a gigantic granite outcropping looked exactly like some monstrous elephant resting with its forelegs tucked under him. 'He guards the rock we seek,' Sibisi said, and the men moved more quickly to reach this vital stage in their progress.
Between the twin domes and the sleeping elephant lay a large field of granite boulders, big and round, like eggs half buried in the earth. Nxumalo had often seen boulders that resembled these, but never of such magnificent size and certainly none that had their peculiar quality. For all of them were exfoliating, as if they wished to create building blocks from which splendid structures could be made; they formed a quarry in which nine-tenths of the work was done by nature, where man had to do only the final sizing and the portage.
The rounded domes, fifty and sixty feet high, had been laid down a billion years ago in layers, and now the action of rain and sun and changing temperature had begun to peel away the layers. They were like gigantic onions made of rock, whose segments were being exposed and lifted away. The result was unbelievable: extensive slabs of choice granite, a uniform six inches thick, were thrown down year after year. Men collecting them could cut them into strips the width of a building block and many yards long. When other men cut these strips into ten-inch lengths, some of the best and strongest bricks ever devised would result.
There was only one drawback to this operation: the Field of Granite lay in the south; the site where the bricks were needed was five miles to the north. To solve this problem the king had long ago decreed a simple rule: no man or woman traveling north to Zimbabwe was permitted to pass this field without picking up at least three building blocks and lugging them to the capital. Strong men, like Sibisi's, were expected to carry eight, and even couriers like Nxumalo, son of a chief, had to bring three. If their other burdens were too great, they must be laid aside, for no man could move north without his stone bricks.
