Read Online The Angels Weep by Wilbur Smith - Free Book Online Page A

unpierced, before the white horsemen came with their three-legged
guns that laugh like the river demons that live in the rocks
where the Zambezi river falls. When you still called him
“brother” and “friend”, I warned you
against him.’
    ‘I remember.’ Bazo’s own voice had sunk as
low as hers.
    ‘In my vision I saw you high upon a tree,
Bazo.’
    ‘Yes,’ he whispered, going on down the trail
without looking back at her. There was a superstitious tremor in
Bazo’s voice now, for his beautiful young wife had once
been the apprentice of the mad sorcerer, Pemba. When Bazo at the
head of his impi had stormed the sorcerer’s mountain
stronghold, he had hacked off Pemba’s head and taken Tanase
as a prize of war, but the spirits had claimed her back.
    On the eve of the wedding-feast when Bazo would have taken the
virgin Tanase as his first bride, as his senior wife, an ancient
wizard had come down out of the Matopos Hills and led her away,
and Bazo had been powerless to intervene, for she had been the
daughter of the dark spirits and she had come to her destiny in
these hills.
    ‘The vision was so clear that I wept,’ Tanase
reminded him, and Bazo shivered.
    In that secret cave in the Matopos the full power of the
spirits had descended upon Tanase, and she had become the Umlimo,
the chosen one, the oracle. It was Tanase, speaking in the weird
voices of the spirits, who had warned Lobengula of his fate. It
was Tanase who had foreseen the coming of the white men with
their wonderful machines that turned the night to noon day, and
their little mirrors that sparkled like stars upon the hills,
speeding messages vast distances across the plains. No man could
doubt that she had once had the power of the oracle, and that in
her mystic trances she had been able to see through the dark
veils of the future for the Matabele nation.
    However, these strange powers had depended upon her maidenhead
remaining unpierced. She had warned Bazo of this, pleading with
him to strip her of her virginity and rid her of these terrible
powers, but he had demurred, bound by law and custom, until it
had been too late and the wizards had come down from the hills to
claim her.
    At the beginning of the war which the white men had carried so
swiftly to Lobengula’s kraal at GuBulawayo, a small band
had detached from the main army; they were the hardest and
cruellest, led by Bakela the Fist, himself a hard fierce man.
They had ridden swiftly into these hills. They had followed the
secret path that Bakela had discovered twenty-five years or so
before, and galloped to the secret cavern of the Umlimo. For
Bakela knew the value of the oracle, knew how sacred she was, and
how her destruction would throw the Matabele nation into despair.
Bakela’s riders had shot down the guardians of the caverns,
and forced their way within. Two of Bakela’s troopers had
found Tanase, young and lovely and naked in the deepest recesses
of the cave, and they had violated her, savagely tearing the
maidenhead that she had once offered so lovingly to Bazo. They
had rutted upon her until her virgin blood splattered the floor
of the cavern and her screams had guided Bakela to them.
    He had driven his men off her with fist and boot, and when
they were alone, he had looked down upon Tanase where she lay
bloodied and broken at his feet. Then strangely, this hard fierce
man had been overcome with compassion. Though he had ridden this
dangerous road for the sole purpose of destroying the Umlimo, yet
the bestial behaviour of his troopers had weakened his resolve,
had placed some burden of recompense upon him.
    Bakela must have known that with her virginity torn from her
she had lost her powers, for he told her: ‘You, who were
Umlimo, are Umlimo no longer.’ He had accomplished her
destruction without using rifle or sword, and he turned and
strode from the dark cavern, leaving her life in exchange for her
virginity