The Covenant (13 page)

Nxumalo felt the white man’s hand touch his, and he was face-to-face
with the stranger. He felt the man’s hand press into his shoulder and heard the words spoken with heavy accent: “You bring excellent horns. They will be well received in China.”

Proudly, as if they owned the goods, the slaves undid the bales, producing fine silks from India and thousands of small glass beads—red, translucent blue, green, golden-yellow and purple. These would be sewn into intricate patterns to enhance garments, necklaces and other finery. The Arabs were pleased to obtain gold, which they would use to adorn their women; the blacks were just as gratified to get these beads for the adornment of theirs. So far as utility was concerned, it was a just exchange.

The Arabs also brought a collection of special items for bartering with vassal chiefs, and among these was a small metal disk on which an elephant and a tiger had been carved. This came from Nepal and was not worth much, so the Arab leader tossed it in his hand, judged it, and threw it to Nxumalo: “For the fine horns you brought us.” This disk, with its filigree chain, would be sent south to where Zeolani waited, and fifty years later when she died it would be buried with her, and five hundred years later it would be found by archaeologists, who would report:

The mines of Zimbabwe were scattered across an immense territory, Zambezi to Limpopo north to south, seashore to desert east to west, and it became Nxumalo’s job to visit each mine to assure maximum production. Gold, iron and copper had to flow in to Zimbabwe and lesser marketplaces throughout the kingdom so that the Arabs would continue to find it profitable to pursue their trade. His work was not
arduous, for when he reached a mine, all he did was check the accumulated metal; rarely did he descend into an actual mine, for they were small and dangerous affairs with but one responsibility: to send up enough ore to keep the furnaces operating, and how this was achieved was not his concern.

But one morning at the end of a journey two hundred miles west of the city he came upon a gold mine where production seemed to have ceased, and he demanded to know what slothful thing had happened. “The workers died, and I can find no others,” the overseer said plaintively.

“I saw many women …”

“But not little ones.”

“If the mine’s so small, get girls. We must have gold.”

“But girls can’t do the work. Only the little brown people …”

In some irritation Nxumalo said, “I’ll look for myself,” but when he saw the entrance to the mine he realized that he could not climb into that crevice. Since he insisted upon knowing how the production of a mine could be so abruptly terminated, he ordered the overseer to summon men who would widen the entrance, breaking away enough rock to permit his descent.

When he lowered himself to the working level, holding a torch above his head, he saw what the overseer meant: there at the face of the gold-bearing rock lay seven small brown figures, dead so long that their bodies were desiccated, tiny shreds of their former being. Four men, two women and a child had died, one after the other over a period of months or even years, and when the last was gone, no further ore had been sent aloft.

He remained in the mine for a long time, endeavoring to visualize the lives of these seven little people. Because the mine was so cramped, only they could work it, forced one time into the narrow opening, condemned thereafter to live underground for as long as they survived, eating whatever was thrown down to them, burying their dead in a pile beside the rock, living and dying in perpetual darkness.

Nxumalo remembered what Old Seeker had said about the wandering bands of small brown people with their poisoned darts. “Jackals,” he himself had termed them. Prior to visiting this mine he had never before seen them rounded up and enslaved, and certainly the councillors at Zimbabwe would not have sanctioned it, but on this far frontier, out of all touch with the capital, any mine overseer could act as a law unto himself.

“How long do they survive?” Nxumalo asked when he climbed out.

“Four, five years.”

“The children?”

“If the old folk live long enough, the children learn to mine. One family, maybe fifteen, eighteen years?”

“And if the old ones die too soon?”

“The children die with them.”

“What do you propose doing about the mine?”

“Our men are out hunting for some new brown workers. If they find any, we’ll be able to mine again.”

“Will you find them?”

“Hunting them is dangerous. They use poisoned arrows, you know.”

“Put your own women to work down there. That’s how we do it at other mines.”

“Our women prefer the sun and the fields,” the overseer replied, and in conspiratorial whispers he added, “You’re a man, Nxumalo. You know what fat beauties are for.”

“You opened the entrance for me to go down. A little more, and they can squeeze in.”

“What use could we men have of them if they came home exhausted from laboring underground? Tell me that.”

“When you have the hunger for them, let them rest a day or two.”

“I tell you, sir, our women would refuse to work as miners. You must bring me people from outside.”

Sternly Nxumalo said, “I shall return next season, and I will expect to see this mine operating at capacity. We must have gold.”

This ultimatum would be met, for as Nxumalo marched back toward Zimbabwe, the mine overseer, who loved his five fat wives, was relieved to see a band of warriors returning from the desert with nine small brown people. They would fit nicely into the mine; they would eat what was tossed down to them; and never again would they see daylight.

As Nxumalo visited the distant mines he often recalled that moment when he first saw the Limpopo and when he first climbed down into the mine: It was a premonition. I spend my life crossing rivers and descending shafts. Wherever he traveled through the vast domains of
Zimbabwe he came upon the old treasured mines, and in time learned how to predict where new ones might be found, and although nine out of his ten guesses proved barren, that tenth repaid all efforts. Each new find, each old mine that increased its output enhanced his reputation.

Although he had made himself familiar with thousands of square miles of the kingdom, there remained one place he had not visited: the citadel atop the Hill of Spirits at Zimbabwe itself, but now as he returned from his latest trip he was summoned to the king’s residence to deliver his report in person to the ruler and his councillors. He was guarded about what he said concerning the enslavement of the small brown people at that frontier mine, but he spoke boldly of the problems in the north, and when he finished, the senior councillor indicated that the king wished to speak with him alone.

After the assembly left, this councillor led Nxumalo through a maze of passages to the inner court, where, in a small roofless enclosure, he waited for his private audience. Soon the king appeared in his austere white robes, hastened directly to Nxumalo and said, “Son of Ngalo from the lands my people do not know, I have never seen you at the citadel.”

“To go so high is not permitted, sir.”

“It is permitted,” the king said. “Let us go there now and ask the spirits.” And under palm umbrellas the king and his inspector of mines walked down the main passageway through the city, past the area where the joiners and the masons dwelt, past the site where workmen brought stones for the walls. It seemed a lifetime since Nxumalo had helped repair those walls, and it was like a dream to be walking beneath them with the king himself.

They moved swiftly along the royal path that led to the rock-encircled citadel, and now the way became little more than a track, four feet across, but twice each day forty women swept it so that not a blade of grass or a pebble marred its surface. To attain the steep trail that led up to the summit, they had to pass the pits from which women dug wet clay used for plastering walls; and as the king went by, they all bowed their heads against the moist ground, but he ignored them.

The winding path climbed through a grove of trees, then traversed bare, rocky slopes, and reached at last an extremely narrow passageway between boulders. The king betrayed that he was out of breath, and although Nxumalo was well trained because of his distant journeys, he deemed it prudent to make believe that his chest heaved too,
lest he appear disrespectful. At last they broke into a free and level space, and Nxumalo saw a grandeur he had not even vaguely anticipated when staring at the citadel from below.

He was in the midst of a great assembly of walls and courtyards twined among the immense granite boulders which gave the place its magnificence; those massive rocks determined where the walls must run, where the gracefully molded huts could stand. Rulers came from far distances to negotiate with the king, and so long as the meetings were held down below in the city, these foreign rulers, often as rich as the king, were apt to be slightly contemptuous of his soft-spoken arguments, but once they had been forced to climb that difficult path to see the citadel, they had to acknowledge that they were dealing with a true monarch.

Nxumalo was startled by the vivid colors that decorated the walls, the sculptures that marked the parapets and the symbolism that abounded. But what interested him most were the little furnaces at which metallurgists worked the gold ingots he sent from his mines, and he watched with admiration as they fashioned delicate jewelry by processes so secret they were never spoken of outside the citadel.

Despite his interest in the gold, Nxumalo was led away to the eastern flank of the citadel, and again he walked with that inner fear that had marked his first meeting with the king, for he knew that he was heading for the quarters of the great Mhondoro, the one through whom the spirits spoke and the ancestors ruled. By accident he caught a glimpse of the king’s face and saw that he, too, had assumed a solemn mien.

The Mhondoro’s enclosure seemed deserted when Nxumalo entered, but soon a shadowy figure could be seen moving in the dark recesses of a hut that filled one corner of the area. The main feature was a platform, waist-high, from which rose four soapstone pedestals, each topped by a sculptured bird which appeared to hover above the sacred place. Another wall contained a lower platform on which stood a collection of monoliths and other sacred objects of great beauty. Each related to some climactic experience of the race, so that in this enclosure stood the full history and mythology of Zimbabwe, a meaningful record of the past that could be read by the Mhondoro and his king as easily as European monks unraveled the writings of their historians.

The king was permitted by custom to walk to the meeting platform,
but Nxumalo had to crawl on his knees, and as he did so he saw that when the discussions began he would be sitting among skull-like carvings, clay animals decorated with ostrich feathers, elaborate collections of medicated beads and pebbles, and tangled clumps of precious herbs. But no single item arrested his attention like the crocodile six feet long, carved from hard wood in such reality that it seemed capable of devouring the holy man; when Nxumalo took his seat beside this monster, he found that its scales were made from hundreds of wafer-thin gold plates that moved and glistened when he disturbed the air.

Now from the interior of his hut the Mhondoro appeared, wearing a yellow cloak and a headdress of animal furs. It was the king who paid homage: “I see you, Mhondoro of my fathers.”

“I see you, Powerful King.”

“This is the one who was sent,” the king said.

The Mhondoro indicated that Nxumalo must keep his gaze forward, lest his eyes fall upon the symbols of kings long dead and anger their spirits, who would be watching. The young man scarcely dared breathe, but at last the Mhondoro addressed him: “What news from the mines?”

“The gold from the west declines.”

“It used to be copious.”

“It still is, to the north, but our men are afraid to go there.”

“Trouble, trouble,” the spirit-medium said, and he turned to the king, speaking softly of the problems overtaking their city.

Nxumalo appreciated their concern, for at times on his recent journeys he had felt as if the entire Zimbabwe hegemony were held together by frail threads of dissolving interests. He sensed the restlessness and suspected that certain provincial chiefs were entertaining ideas of independence, but he was afraid to mention these fears in the presence of the city’s two most powerful men. There were other irritations too: wood, grazing rights, the lack of salt. And there was even talk that the Arabs might open their own trade links in areas beyond Zimbabwe’s control.

The painful afternoon passed, and when fires appeared in the city below, the Mhondoro began chanting in a dreamy voice: “Generations ago our brave forebears erected this citadel. Mhlanga, son of Notape, son of Chuda …” He recited genealogies back to the year 1250 when Zimbabwe’s walls were first erected. “It was the king’s
great-grandfather who caused that big tower down there to be built, not long ago, and it grieves my heart to think that one day we may have to give this noble place back to the vines and the trees.”

In the silence that followed, Nxumalo became aware that he was supposed to respond: “Why would you say that, Revered One?”

“Because the land is worn out. Because our spirits flag. Because others are rising in the north. Because I see strange ships coming to Sofala.”

It was in that solemn moment that Nxumalo first glimpsed the fact that his destiny might be to remain always in Zimbabwe, helping it to survive, but even as he framed this thought he looked at these two men sitting beneath the beautiful carved birds and he could not conceive that these leaders and this city could be in actual danger.