Free The Angels Weep by Wilbur Smith Page A

vicious thorn.
The silence was oppressive, for no bird sang and no small animal
rustled the leaves.
    Bazo stepped lightly across the boulders in the bed of the
narrow stream that crossed the trail and paused to look back as
Tanase scooped a handful of the cool water and held it to the
boy’s lips. Then they went on.
    The path ended abruptly against a sheer cliff of pearly
granite, and Bazo stopped and leaned on the light throwing-spear,
the only weapon that the white administrator in Bulawayo allowed
a black man to carry to protect himself and his family against
the predators which infested the wilderness. It was a frail
thing, not an instrument of war like the broad stabbing
assegai.
    Leaning his weight on the spear, Bazo looked up the tall
cliff. There was a watchman’s thatched hut on a ledge just
below the summit, and now a quavering old man’s voice
challenged him.
    ‘Who dares the secret pass?’ Bazo lifted his chin
and answered in a bull-bellow which sent the echoes bouncing from
the cliffs.
    ‘Bazo, son of Gandang. Bazo, Induna of the Kumalo blood
royal.’
    Then, not deigning to await the reply, Bazo stepped through
the convoluted portals of granite, into the passageway that split
the cliff.
    The passage was narrow, barely wide enough for two grown men
to walk shoulder to shoulder, and the floor was clean white sand
with chips of bright mica that sparkled and crunched like sugar
under his bare feet. The passage twisted like a maimed serpent,
and then abruptly debouched into a sweeping valley of lush green,
bisected by a tinkling stream that spilled from the rock-face
near where Bazo stood.
    The valley was a circular basin a mile or so across,
completely walled in by the high cliffs. In its centre was a tiny
village of thatched huts, but as Tanase came out of the mouth of
the secret passage and stopped beside Bazo, both of them looked
beyond the village to the opposite wall of the valley.
    In the base of the cliff, the low wide opening of a cavern
snarled at them like a toothless mouth. Neither of them spoke for
many minutes as they stared across at the sacred cave, but the
memories came crowding back upon both of them. In that cavern
Tanase had undergone the frightful indoctrination and initiation
which had transformed her into the Umlimo, and on the rocky floor
she had suffered the cruel abuse that had stripped her of her
powers, and made her an ordinary woman once more.
    Now in that cavern another being presided in Tanase’s
place as spiritual head of the nation, for the powers of the
Umlimo never die, but are passed on from one initiate to another,
as they had been from forgotten times when the ancients had built
the great stone ruins of the Zimbabwe.
    ‘Are you ready?’ Bazo asked at last.
    ‘I am ready, lord,’ she replied, and they started
down towards the village. But before they reached it, they were
met by a weird procession of creatures, some of them barely
recognizable as human, for they crawled on all fours and whined
and yapped like animals. There were ancient withered crones with
empty dugs flapping against their bellies, pretty little girls
with pubescent breast-buds and blank unsmiling faces, old men
with deformed limbs who dragged themselves in the dust, and slim
mincing youths with well-formed muscular bodies and mad eyes that
rolled back into their skulls, all of them decked with the
gruesome paraphernalia of the necromancer and wizard, bladders of
lion and crocodile, skin of python and bird, skulls and teeth of
ape, of man, and of beast. They ringed Bazo and Tanase, prancing
and mewling and leering, until Bazo felt his skin itching with
the insects of loathing and he lifted his son high on his
shoulder away from their touching, prying hands.
    Tanase was unperturbed, for this fantastic throng had once
been her own retinue, and she stood expressionless as one of the
horrible witches crawled to her and slobbered and frothed over
her