The covenant - James A. Michener [298]
But two days later Nxumalo was summoned back: 'Trusted friend, no man can rule forever.' As Shaka uttered these bitter words tears filled his eyes and he sat with his shoulders heaving, finally regaining enough control to add, 'If you and I could have another twenty years, we'd bring order to all the lands. We'd even bring the Xhosa into our fold.' With bitter regret he shook his head, then seemed to discharge his apprehensions: 'Nxumalo, you must go north again. Find Mzilikazi.'
'My King, I've seen your hatred for this traitor who stole your cattle.'
'It is so, Nxumalo, but you will take ten men and find him. Bring him to me. For if he rules the north and I the south, together we can protect this land from strangers.'
'What strangers?'
'Strangers will always come,' Shaka said.
Nxumalo's secret mission involved a long trip into land that no Zulu had ever entered, but they were guided toward Mzilikazi by the battered clans who trembled in the wake of the fleeing Kumalo commander, and at the end of a most tiring journey the kraal was located, and in it waited not a regimental commander but a self-proclaimed king.
'King of what?' Nxumalo asked.
'King-of-All-He-Will-See. Is that not enough?'
Nxumalo looked at the eyes still hooded, the face still handsome and delicately brown, but it was the voice that hauntedsoft, whispery, extremely gentle, like the man himself: 'Why would Shaka invite me, an enemy, to his kraal?'
'Because he needs you. He knows you are the greatest king in the north, as he is in the south.'
'If I stay here, I'm safe. If I go there . . .' He indicated an assegai in his side.
'No, Shaka needs you.'
'But I hate battle. I want no more of killing.' He spoke with such intensity, in that silken voice, that Nxumalo had to believe him, and at the end of six days' talking it was apparent that Mzilikazi, in many ways as able a king as Shaka, was not going to combine forces with the Zulu.
'This time, Mzilikazi, no threats from me,' Nxumalo said.
'Friends don't threaten each other. But because I know that you will listen to my reasoning I have a gift for you. Look!' And when the lion skins decorating his kraalan indulgence Shaka would never have permitted were parted, there stood a lissome girl of twenty prepared to go with Nxumalo as a gift.
'Shaka will think that you gave me the present because I did not argue diligently.'
'Shaka knew I would not join the Zulu. He'll understand the gift,' said Mzilikazi, and while Nxumalo stood next to the attractive girl he studied this strange king, so different from his own. Shaka was tall, iron-hard and lean; Mzilikazi seemed to be getting fat and soft. When Shaka spoke the earth seemed to cringe in obedience, but Mzilikazi smiled much more than he frowned and his voice never rose in anger. Furthermore, Shaka was a brilliant but violent man, somewhat distant even to his friends, while Mzilikazi was frank and open to all, a man who seemed always to do the right thing. He was much too clever to be trapped by the great King of the Zulu, and told Nxumalo, as the latter started south with his fourth bride, Nonsizi, 'We shall not meet again, Nxumalo. But I shall always remember you as a man of good heart. Tell Shaka that the conversations are ended. I shall move far from his reach.'
The pudgy king was right; Nxumalo never saw him again, but remembered him often and with the warmest feelings, for he commanded respect. As Nxumalo told his new bride, 'I can't understand it. Mzilikazi started out with his people like a band of brigands on the run. Now he's forming a kingdom.' Among the clans Mzilikazi's followers touched in their wild movement they became known as the fugitivesthe Matabeleand under that name they would flame through the generations, the tribe that outsmarted Shaka of the Zulu.
When Nxumalo crossed the Umfolozi River in the spring of 1827 he found the Zulu tense and frightened, for the Female Elephant had fallen ill, and her son was dispatching messengers to all parts of the kingdom to see if anyone had found a bottle of Rowland's