The covenant - James A. Michener [22]
When the file of newcomers reached the edge of the village it stopped to allow the Old Seeker time to arrange his clothing and take from a bag carried by one of his servants an iron staff topped by a handsome spread of ostrich feathers. Bearing this nobly in his left hand, he moved two steps forward, then prostrated himself, and from this position called, 'Great Chief, I bid you good morning!'
From the mass of villagers a man in his fifties stepped forward and nodded: 'Old Seeker, I bid you good morning.'
'Great Chief, did you sleep well?'
'If you slept well, I slept well.'
'I slept well, Great Chief.' Both the chief and his villagers must have sensed the irony in those words, for he was by no accounting a great chief, but protocol demanded that he be called such, especially when the man coming into the village sought advantages.
'You may rise,' the chief said, whereupon the Old Seeker stood erect, grasped his iron staff with one hand, placed his other upon the wrist, and rested his powder-gray head on both.
'What do you come seeking this time?' the chief asked, and evasively the old fellow replied, 'The goodness of the soil, the secrets of the earth.'
The chief nodded ceremoniously, and the formal greetings ended. 'How was the journey south?' he asked.
The old man handed his staff to a servant and said in a whisper, 'Each year, more difficult. I am tired. This is my last trip to your territories.'
Chief Ngalo burst into laughter, for the old man had made this threat three years ago and four years before that. He was a genial, conniving old rascal who had once served as overseer of mines in a great kingdom to the north and who now traveled far beyond his ruler's lands searching for additional mines, observing remote settlements, and probing always for new trade links. He was an ambassador-at-large, an explorer, a seeker.
'Why do you come to my poor village?' Chief Ngalo asked. 'You know we have no mines.'
'I come on a much different mission, dear friend. Salt.'
'If we had salt,' Ngalo said, 'we could trade with the world.'
The old man sighed. He had expected to be disappointed, but his people did need salt. However, they had other needs, some of them mysterious. 'What I could use,' he said confidentially, 'is rhinoceros horns. Not less than sixteen.' They were required, he explained, by older men who wished to marry young wives: 'They need assurance that they will not disappoint in bed.'
'But your king is a young man,' the chief said. 'Why does he need the horn?'
'Not he! For the rich old men with slanted eyes who live in a far country.'
From the tree under which they took their rest, the two men looked down at the lake, and Ngalo said, 'Tonight you will see many animals come to that water. Buffalo, lions, hippos, giraffes and antelope like the stars.' The Old Seeker nodded, and Ngalo added, 'But you will never see a rhino. Where can we possibly find sixteen horns?'
The old fellow reflected on this question and replied, 'In this life man is assigned difficult tasks. How to find a good wife. How to find sixteen horns. It is his task to find them.'
Chief Ngalo smiled. It was pleasurable to be with this old man. Always when he wanted something badly, he devised sententious and moral justifications. 'Mankind does not want sixteen rhinoceros horns,' he chided. 'You want them.'
'I am mankind.'
The chief could not resist such blandishments, but neither could he comply. 'Look, dear friend. We have no rhinos, but we have something much better.' Clapping for an aide, he cried, 'Tell Nxumalo to fetch the heavy earth!' And in a moment a boy of sixteen appeared, smiling, bearing three roughly rectangular ingots made from some kind of metal. Placing them on the ground before his father, he started to depart, but the Old Seeker asked, 'Do you understand what you have brought me, son?'
'Iron from Phalaborwa,' the boy said promptly. 'When my father's people went there to barter for these, I went with them. I saw the place where men worked the earth like ants. They had done so, they told me, for as long as anyone alive