The covenant - James A. Michener [284]
'I like to be clean.'
'I think you like to stand naked before the others. To show them that your penis is now big, like theirs.' Shaka frowned, but said nothing. 'And with girls, you're not like the rest of us. You often avoid the pleasures of the road.'
This was a lovely euphemism for one of the most gracious of the local customs. Since among these clans premarital intercourse was severely forbidden, the habit had evolved of 'taking the pleasures of the road,' meaning that youngsters were permitted to reach out for a likely love and take her into the bushes for any imaginable kind of frolic so long as pregnancy did not result. The men in the iziCwe were notorious for their gentle debauches, and none enjoyed them more than Nxumalo, but he had noticed that Shaka was indifferent to this love-play.
'No,' Shaka said reflectively on this particular day, 'I am destined to be a king. And it's perilous for a king to have children. They fight for his throne. When he grows old they kill him.' He was in his mid-twenties when he said this, and so far as Nxumalo could rememberand he knew this moody warrior better than anyone elseShaka had never once boasted of his sexual exploits as other young men did. Nxumalo suspected that his friend had never lain with a woman, even though he was six foot three, with no fat about his middle, and the target of many eyes.
'When it's time to marry,' Nxumalo predicted, 'watch out! You'll be the first.'
'No,' Shaka said quietly. 'For me no children.'
'We'll see,' Nxumalo said, whereupon Shaka gripped him by the shoulder: 'You say I lie?'
'Oh, no,' Nxumalo replied, brushing his hand away. 'But you love women more than any man I've ever known. Your mother.'
In a rage so violent that the grass trembled, Shaka leaped up, sought madly for a stone, and would have crushed Nxumalo's head had not the latter slithered away like a frightened snake.
'Shaka!' he cried from behind a tree. 'Put that down!'
For several moments the warrior stood there, gripping the stone till his dark hands showed pale at the knuckles.
As the routine of army life absorbed them, disclosing no alternatives for the years that loomed, Nxumalo saw with some anxiety that his friend was becoming almost suicidal, dreaming hopelessly of goals he could never attain, and he felt that he must help him assuage this corrosive bitterness: 'When you said, "One day I'll be chief"of what? There's no chance here. There's no chance of returning to the Langeni.'
'Oh! Wait!' Shaka said with fiery determination. 'One day I will return to the Langeni. There are men there I want to see again.' And he began to recite the names of the boys who had tormented him in the pastures: 'Nzobo, Mpepha, Mqalane.'
'You want to become chief of the Langeni?'
'Chief of them?' He laughed, and began to stride back and forth. 'I want to be king of a real tribe. And with my men to march upon the Langeni. And ask them about their laughter.' Suddenly he changed completely and asked Nxumalo, 'Wouldn't you like to go back and be chief of the Sixolobo?'
'I don't even remember them.'
'Don't you want to meet the men who killed your father?' 'I wouldn't know them. My father broke a rule. He was executed.' 'But if we could take the iziCwe and march into Langeni land one year, then Sixolobo the next . . .' His big hands had their fingers extended and slowly he brought them together. 'There's only one clan I want to lead,' Shaka said. 'The Zulu.'
Nxumalo grew grave: 'You must forget the Zulu. They banished you. Your father hasn't seen you in years, and he has many other sons. What are the Zulu but a tiny flea compared to this clan?'
'But if I were King of the Zulu . . .' He hesitated, reluctant to share his aspirations. Lamely he concluded: 'The Zulu are real men. By the end of the first day they'd understand my dreams.'
In 1815 he revealed his vision of what warfare in his territory was to become. It was an engagement with the Butelezi, and everyone else supposed it was to be an ordinary confrontation, with the two chiefs seated in their chairs as thousands