The covenant - James A. Michener [289]
Another, and then another, and then a fourth was hammered in, whereupon a rope was slung under the armpits of the screaming victim and he was pulled aloft to hang from the limb of a tree. After sixteen hours of mortal agony he would be dead.
Nxumalo, seeing this horrible punishment and aware that he was destined for it, tried to make some appeal to Shaka, but the awful judgment was proceeding: 'Mpepha, did you not throw rocks at me?' A list of grievances, kept alive for twenty years, was hurled at the terror-stricken man, who was then stripped and skewered.
Mqalane was next, and when he, too, dangled from the tree, Shaka was finished with the three whose long-ago behavior rankled deepest. The next eight were impaled on the poles of the cattle kraal, where he could not see them. 'It's repugnant to watch traitors die,' he told his men, but now two were dragged forward whose death he would cherish. 'Did you abuse me?' The men nodded. For that he would forgive them, and they sighed, but then he asked, 'Did you abuse my mother?' and when they stood, heads down, he screamed, 'Let them die as women!' whereupon the death squad fell upon them and tore away their privates.
Now only Nxumalo remained, and at him Shaka looked with loathing, but also confusion. He had been one of the herd boys; clearly Shaka remembered that, but he could not recall what exactly the Sixolobo refugee had done that merited skewering. The guards were already stripping him when the king's mind cleared slightly and he realized that his regimental commander ought not to be included, and with humility he brushed the guards aside and stood facing Nxumalo.
'What did you do against me when we were herd boys?'
And Nxumalo replied, 'Nothing, my Chief.'
'What did you ever do for me?'
And this time Nxumalo said, 'I cannot speak it, Mighty One. But I will whisper it.'
So Shaka moved everyone back, ordering the guards to let Nxumalo have his uniform, and as the naked commander stood with his leather skirt in his hand, he whispered to the chief, reminding him of that afternoon when they sat upon the grass and Nxumalo had assured him that one day he would have a penis of normal size.
Shaka put the fingertips of his left hand over his eyes and bowed his head. 'Are you Nxumalo of the iziCwe?'
'I am.'
'Dark spirits are on this field,' Shaka mumbled, and with a great strangling cry he demanded that the diviners conduct a smelling-out to identify the men in this gathering who housed these spirits, and the wild ones with snake skeletons dangling about their necks, dried gall bladders in their hair and black wildebeest tails in their hands ran helter-skelter among the Zulu, sniffing and listening and finally touching with their switching tails those who had brought evil upon the chief. As soon as a victim was designated, the knobkerrie men killed him.
Toward midnight, as Shaka sat drinking beer with Nxumalo, he began to feel pity for the impaled men. 'It would be too cruel to leave them hanging through the night,' he said, and he directed his people to gather huge mounds of grass and sticks to pile under the dangling men. 'See,' he cried to his victims, 'I no longer hold bitterness against you.' And he lit the grass so that the men might die quickly and escape the terrible agonies that would otherwise have come with the morning, when the hot sun began to shine upon them.
As a gesture of conciliation Shaka absorbed the Langeni regiments into his growing army, launching a policy that would result in a powerful force. When Dingiswayo, to whom he still owed nominal allegiance, died in battle with a northern tribe, the entire iziCwe contingent marched over to the Zulu, and Shaka said, 'Nxumalo, my truest friend, from this day you eat with the iziCwe.' This thrilling announcement had nothing to do with the manner in which the