The Angels Weep

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 again. It has changed, Babo, and we must change with it." "Tell me what else there is to be done," Gandang invited. "What way can I help to bring success?"

"You must order the young men to come down out of the hills and to go in to work as the white men are bidding." Gandang considered the question without speaking. "From now until the hour, we must become fleas. We must live under the white men's cloak, so close to the skin that he does not see us, so close that he forgets we are there waiting to sting." Gandang nodded at the sense of it, but there was a fathomless regret in his eyes. "I liked it better when we formed the bull, with the horns outflung to surround the enemy and the veterans massed in the centre to crush them. I loved the closing in when we went in singing the praise song of the regiment, when we made our killing in the sunlight with our plumes flying." "Never again, Babo," Bazo told him. "Never again will it be like that. In the future we will wait in the grass like the coiled puff-adder. We may have to wait a year or ten, a lifetime or more perhaps we may never see it, my father. Perhaps it will be our children's children who strike from the shadows with other weapons than the silver steel that you and I love so well, but it. is you and I that will open the road for them to follow, the road back to greatness." Gandang nodded, and there was a new light in his eyes, like the first glow of the dawn. "You see very clearly, Bazo. You know them so well, and you are right. The white man is strong in every way except patience. He wants it all to happen today.