Read sample chapters from Alan Thrush's novel: Of Land and Spirits

BOOK ONE: SENTENCE

CHAPTER FOUR

A summer dawn, the heat of first light burning a hot copper glow into rolling eastern clouds, dark and heavy with rain. A humid wetness hanging stickily over rocks and boulders and the sheer granite cliffs of the koppies all around, hugging the thickly grouped, fully leafed trees along fertile crests. The cloying dampness clung to the lush, verdant, rampant undergrowth, and to the tilled fields iridescent with young, eager, broad-leafed seedlings reaching upward for the sunlight and the never-ending rain. It clung to the village huts, staining their carefully plastered mud walls the colour of the rain drenched, foot-pounded, packed bare earth of the village clearing – a colour almost as black as night in this pre-dawn dimness, like the dead grass of the thatched roofs soaked almost to saturation by the abundant rainfall.
    It was already hot in the valley below the Mavuradonha Mountains, and humid even though no rain had fallen during the night.
    Jason Mavunha sat on his pack in the undergrowth beside a twisted tree, listening to the chanting of the villagers behind him, and perspiring steadily in the dawn humidity. Perspiration hung in beads upon the sharp features of his face as he stared with troubled eyes, bright and alert, along the path he was guarding, looking for his friend and fellow freedom fighter, Elias Chimombe.
    Comrade Lighting would return any minute now, Jason thought: back from checking the next village down the kraal line – the village that had sold out one of the sections in transit, the one that had called in Smith’s soldiers a few nights before. Jason shuddered, remembering his surprise and fear at the sound of the sudden firing just a few kilometres from where his own section had been sleeping that night. There had been no aircraft; just a sudden, devastating attack by soldiers who had infiltrated through the mountains to kill more than half the section. Jason’s team had been busy ever since that skirmish organising the evacuation of wounded north into Mozambique.
    Now it was time for retribution.
    Jason considered the reprisal, only half aware of the bush changing colour around him as the sun rose in the sky. The trees had lost their stark grey silhouettes, adopting a softer orange instead.
    During the night, while Lightning had been away making sure that the route along the kraal line was clear, the section commander had been visiting the spirit medium, seeking approval for the work which lay ahead. The ceremony was continuing still.
    Jason scanned the path again. Clear. He slung his rifle and carefully lit a cigarette, moving with the studied, casual ease he had picked up in the training camp in Mozambique, along with the habit of smoking itself.
    The training camp! Could it be that he had left it behind seven weeks before? Could it be that his section had been operating deep in Rhodesia’s remote north-eastern border area for nearly two months?
    Jason thought back, relieved that they hadn’t yet seen any action. Better keep quiet about that kind of relief, he reflected. It wouldn’t do to let the security officer know your true feelings about the capabilities of Smith’s soldiers.
    Jason knew that he was meant to behave like a warrior now, as his great grandfather had been a mighty Shona warrior when the whites had colonised the country. Now he was a trained freedom fighter, bent on revenge for the destruction of his family and its way of life. Yet he had seen the soldiers in action at first hand. He knew what they could do.
    Just as well it was not the function of the guerrillas to make contact with the enemy, he thought, remembering his training and the words of the political commissar:
    ‘You are the flea which fights the lion. The flea cannot kill the lion, but the lion cannot find the flea. Avoid Smith’s soldiers. Lay landmines for their trucks, but fire on them only when an easy victory is certain – when it is simple to escape. Your job is to mobilise the peasant population, to enforce their support for the Chimurenga, and to disrupt the function of government. Your job is not to actively engage Smith’s soldiers. Not yet. Remember that.’
    He would remember, all right, but if the chance for revenge came it would be sweet. Soldier or civilian sell-out; it mattered little to him. They were the enemy. They had murdered his brothers and beaten his mother, already a widow before the war had come to their village. They had burned his home.
    His mind began to trace the familiar pattern of the village he had left behind … huts and fields and chicken runs and cattle kraals. He began to compare them to this one, but the steady chanting from the ceremony around the spirit medium’s hut made it difficult to concentrate, and he was pulled unwillingly back to the present.
    There was a low whistle from the gap in the tall, green grass which was the path.
    Jason seized his rifle, dropping quickly and silently to lie beside his pack, merging with the thick undergrowth and pointing the SKS down the path before he returned the whistle.
    Chimombe brushed his way through the shoulder-high grass towards him. He was unarmed, having left his rifle with Jason for easier movement through the kraal line. He wanted neither peasant nor soldier to know who, or rather what, he was.
    Jason passed the Kalashnikov to him.
    ‘All clear at the village,’ Chimombe announced solemnly, strapping on his chest webbing. The curved magazines and dumpy-sized grenades covered his muscular chest. ‘They don’t know we’re here. Give me a draw on your smoke, will you?’
    He pulled hard on the butt, grunting satisfaction as he exhaled, and passing it back to Jason. The broad face remained expressionless. Without a word he moved on up the path towards the chanting, only to return a short while later.
    ‘Section commander wants you up by the huts,’ Chimombe told him. ‘The women have got some food for us. I’ve had mine. I’ll take over sentry here.’
    ‘Is the possession over?’
    ‘Go see for yourself.’
    Jason grabbed his pack and walked towards the village.
    The medium’s hut stood well above the others against a backdrop of mountains and foothills. Around it, the dawn cast an orange glow over everything, the heat of the morning forcing the first wisps of steam from the damp earth. Most of the villagers around the hut had snapped out of their trance. Some were tending fires and pots of food. Others were setting free the cattle and goats for grazing, or preparing to fetch water from the river nearby.
    But four or five were still in rapture, stamping their bare feet and clapping worn hands, moving in slow, tired little circles on the bare, brown earth, eyes vacant or completely rolled back in their sockets – a shocking white against the blackness of their faces. Over their hair, and draped around their shoulders, they wore the half-white, half-black shawls of the ritualistic possession, giving them a sense of eerie uniformity as the capes flowed down and about their ragged clothing. All carried axes as they danced and sang and sweated out their passion: the half-moon shaped ceremonial axes of the Shona people that indicated ownership of the land.
    Ownership of the land. Not just the land of this village, but all of the land; the entire country.
    Jason listened to the high pitched chanting, half song and half wail, and was frightened at the picture his imagination sent him of the ghostly communication proceeding within the hut – communication through the medium with the actual spirit of the first chief of this tribe, a chief who had been dead for over two hundred years.
    In the dim, dank smokiness behind the door of the medium’s hut, among the bones and skins and juices of his witchly trade, Jason knew that the section commander would be talking directly to the dead chief himself, receiving a final blessing on the forthcoming reprisals. He would be receiving it directly from the ghost of the tribal chief himself; speaking through the body, power and voice of tribal spirit medium: the swikiro.
    Scary stuff, Jason thought, pausing to shoulder his pack and tighten the grip on his rifle before he approached. Scary, sombre, and eerie all at the same time.
    He didn’t like these spiritual possessions – had never liked them even among his own tribe, because they flew in the face of the Christianity that the missionaries had preached in the tribal lands ever since the coming of the whites. The possessions frightened him. And this one especially frightened him, because this was not his own kraal; this was not the swikiro of his own village. His entire section were strangers to this medium and to every villager within the kraal line. The possession was a potential threat to them, because this medium had jurisdiction over the very village which had sold out the section in transit. So the swikiro had the power to influence his villagers to betray this section, too.
    That was the rub. The medium’s blessing of the violence to come was vital. They were operating in foreign territory, hundreds of kilometres from their own villages, working among complete strangers and in alien terrain. The people here wanted little more than to be left alone. They wanted peace, not war. The comrades simply had to have the approval of the swikiro, even though they could not forecast his political inclinations. If the swikiro believed in Smith, they could all be dead within a few hours. The soldiers would be waiting. But if they could win over the swikiro, if they could persuade him to present the guerrilla section to his people as the reincarnation of the rebellion of eighty years before, then the area would be lost to Smith’s soldiers forever. They would have won the people over to the side of the Struggle.
    Jason knew. The word of the swikiro was law, even if it was not the law of the white man. The spirit mediums held absolute power over the peasants, and the peasants held the key to the outcome of the war. They either helped Zanla or they helped Smith. Just a little further down the kraal line the villagers had helped Smith, calling in the soldiers who had killed so many.
    That was reality. That was the guts of the Chimurenga.
    The door to the medium’s hut opened. The section commander blinked at the brightness of the dawn: it was hard to tell from his expression how the ritual had gone.
    The swikiro came out behind him, calm and impassive. Any trace of possession by the ancestral chief had vanished with the night.
    The ceremony was over. Jason waited anxiously to know the spirit medium’s orders.
    ‘Bayonet! Bring me food!’ the commander barked. ‘We eat, and then we go. There will be killing in the sell-outs’ village today. The spirit of the chief has ordered it!’
    The guerrillas left the swikiro a little before midday. An almost unbearable summer heat shimmered above the koppies around them, bouncing off damp fields and paths to punch each man almost as a physical blow, making all of them perspire freely through their clothing and seeming to add to the weight of their packs and weapons. On the horizon, thunderclouds promised rain.
    The ten men walked in single file, but widely spaced so that each could only just keep the one ahead within sight. The commander led, walking quickly, and keeping to the thicker bush of the rivers and koppies, the long line of his men snaking through the bushy cover that hid their passage from enemy eyes.
    He led his men boldly. To move during daylight was extremely dangerous. But this called for a bolder approach than usual. They needed to underline the discipline of their cause with a dominating superiority over their enemy.
    Everywhere they were greeted with wary respect, for the villagers knew that their swikiro had held council during the night. They could guess the purpose of the march.
    ‘Mangwanani, Comrade! Good morning!’
    Nods of acknowledgement from the line of guerrillas. An occasional smile of greeting returned:
    ‘Pamberi ne hondo!’
    ‘Yewoii, Comrade. Forward with the war!’
    Jason walked in the middle of the line, glowing with pleasure and pride at this palpable recognition. It made him feel good. It made up for the training in Mozambique.
    He turned around to grin at Chimombe behind him, but saw that he was too far behind to acknowledge.
    Always so serious, that Chimombe. Always concentrating on the job at hand. With a start he realised that the fatigue of the night’s vigil was catching up with him, and he made a conscious effort to fight the urge to let his mind lapse into neutral.
    Got to stay awake, he thought. Got to be like Chimombe. Keep alert. The swine could still be watching the kraal. We might hit an ambush. Got to be ready.
    He fingered the change lever of his SKS rifle, checking that it was ready to fire. Then he wondered about the reprisals, watching the bush and the hills they were passing through. Somebody was going to pay with his life for the soldiers’ attack; that much was certain. And no surprise either. After all, helping Smith’s soldiers made any man an immediate enemy of the Struggle, and Jason had seen death before, in the camp in Mozambique, and before that in his very home.
    It took the guerrillas about one and a half hours of hard marching to reach the village. The section commander did not halt, but signalled to his men to spread out into an extended line on either side, approaching the village quickly and directly across a field of bright green seedlings which lay between the bush of the hills and the clearing of the huts.
    Jason ran to take up his position in the changing formation.
    There was a shouted warning from the village, and a boy ran out to one side of the approaching line, heading for the bush away to Jason’s left. From the corner of his eye, he saw Chimombe pause to take aim, then fire a short burst. Only twenty metres away, Jason clearly saw the bullets rip right through the boy’s chest to kick dust and stone in the ploughed furrows on the other side, knocking him down. The small body lay quite still.
    All around, the bush was stunned into silence by the sudden violence, the loud singing of the cicadas cut short, the lowing of the cattle no more. Only the birds rose shrieking from the trees, as if they themselves had felt the force of the bullets. But there was no time for shock.
    ‘Nobody move!’ the commander bellowed to the villagers. ‘Bayonet, don’t hang about! Catch up, comrade, catch up!’
    A woman started to run towards the boy.
    ‘Nobody move! Don’t anybody move!’ To the woman: ‘You! Stand still!’
    ‘He is my son,’ she wailed.
    ‘I said stand still!’
    The guerrillas reached the village, four of them moving past the pole-and-mud huts to take up defensive positions on the approaches to the far side. The villagers cowered away from them. Chickens and dogs scurried out of their way in fright. Jason and the other four fanned out to face back the way they had approached, choosing outcrops of rock or patches of bush to conceal themselves.
    ‘Bayonet!’ shouted the commander, ‘Over here!’
    Jason trotted over, passing the body of the boy and shooting a furtive glance at the corpse still emptying its blood into a bright red, sodden circle of ploughed earth. How easily it could have been his brother.
    The commander was already speaking to the village head by the time Jason reached him. He had the old man kneeling on the ground, pleading for his life. Jason was struck by the contrast. Here was age and youth, wisdom and ignorance in a single image. But here also was power and powerlessness; before him was the essence of the Struggle itself – the overturning of tradition. Amid the mud and thatch of the huts, the headman had become merely a tool of the Revolution as he suffered the indignity of pleading for his life with a man much younger than himself. In the eyes of Zanla, he was merely a misguided village head who had backed the wrong side. With his bare feet and bent frame clad in tattered trousers and a ragged shirt, he seemed dwarfed by the towering section commander, young and strong in leather boots and blue jeans, his open denim jacket and his chest webbing filled with magazines and hand grenades strapped over skin tight tee-shirt. Nobody but the guerrillas wore blue denim.
    The commander held his Kalashnikov casually over one shoulder, the banana-like magazine pointing to the sky. He spoke softly, the lack of intonation adding further menace to his question:
    ‘Who informed on the comrades, old man?’
    The headman trembled, dumbfounded with fear.
    The commander placed the butt of the Kalashnikov on the ground and unfolded the wicked, three-edged bayonet from beneath its barrel as the old man watched. He picked up the rifle again, pushing the blade into the old man’s throat, increasing the pressure until it was ready to pierce the skin. The old man fell backwards, his eyes crossing as he tried to focus on the steel at his throat. The commander moved to keep the bayonet in position.
    ‘Who is the sell-out, old man? Who sold out the comrades?’
    Jason stood to one side, watching in stunned horror. He could guess what was coming, and he felt his bladder tighten with his own fear at the sight of the commander bending over the village headman, menace oozing from every pore.
    The old man remained silent. With a single, swift motion, the commander leant forward to push the bayonet easily through the man’s throat and into the ground beneath. There was a wheezing hiss from his victim, and a coughing rush of bubbling blood. The headman thrashed his legs and reached up with his hands to seize the rifle barrel of his tormentor. The commander simply let him do it, stepping deftly to one side. Then he fired a single shot which blew the bottom of the man’s jaw clean away. The blast splashed blood and fragments all over the commander, but he did not seem to react. Instead, he pulled back calmly, took a careful bead on the headman’s forehead, and fired again into the old man’s head, centrally between the eyes.
    There was another shower of bone and brains and blood. Some of the villagers began to scream. Women and children wept. One vented her bowels with fear, the mess spreading over the bare earth between her feet. Only the men remained silent.
    ‘Shut up, all of you!’ the commander hissed, turning to point his rifle at them. The sight of the bloody Kalashnikov and the commander’s face, twisted with anger and disgust, silenced them.
    Again came the commander’s voice, soft and clear and menacing:
    ‘Now, once more. Who was it? Who sold out the comrades?’
    A woman stepped forward. It was the same woman who had run to help her son.
    ‘I went to the soldiers,’ she sobbed quietly.
    ‘Then come here and lie down, witch. We have a special punishment for you.’
    The woman tried to run, but Jason was ready for the dash, and he caught her easily. He dragged her over to his commander and threw her to the ground.
    ‘Bayonet! Hold her shoulders.’
    She is pretty, Jason thought. The commander will rape her. Perhaps we shall all get a turn.
    But Jason could never have anticipated what followed. In a few brief, swift movements, the commander lay down his rifle, took out a pair of pliers and a razor from his webbing, seized the woman’s upper lip with them and pulled it forward. There was a ripping, wrenching sound as he used the razor to slice it off.
    It was horrible.
    The woman’s head suddenly looked like a live skull grinning inanely through a lipless face. There was blood everywhere. Jason gagged. Even the commander looked ashen as he retrieved his rifle.
    ‘Let her go, Bayonet.’
    Jason saw that the woman had passed out, and did as he was told.
    The commander turned to the villagers who were cowering in the shade of the huts all around. The atmosphere was electric with fear and loathing.
    ‘Now listen, you dogs of Smith,’ he bellowed to them. ‘This is what happens to all those who oppose the sons of the revolution. This is what happens to everyone who thinks of betraying the doctrine of Zanla. We will shout out our penance together, as loudly as we can – pasi na Ian Douglas Smith!’
    There was temporary silence, the villagers glancing uneasily at one another, and at the woman who was spilling blood into a messy puddle on the ground.
    The commander fired a short burst into the air.
    ‘Shout it!’ he screamed. ‘Shout it! And then run and tell the soldiers. Tell everyone. Everybody must know about this thing that has happened today. Now shout it! DOWN WITH IAN DOUGLAS SMITH!’
    ‘PASI NA IAN DOUGLAS SMITH!’ roared the villagers. One of the women fainted. All the children were shivering and crying out their fear.
    ‘PASI NE MA SERROUT!’
    ‘DOWN WITH THE MISERABLE SELLOUTS!’
    ‘PAMBERI NE CHIMURENGA!’
    ‘FORWARD WITH THE REVOLUTION!’
    ‘PAMBERI NE HONDO!’
    ‘FORWARD WITH THE WAR!’
    A cloud blocked out the sun, and it began to rain – a light shower preceding the full might of the afternoon storm to come.
    The commander turned to Jason.
    ‘It is over, Bayonet. Your first reprisal. And now it rains, as the swikiro predicted. The rain gods smile on our cause. Because our cause is just.’
    There was a hint of a smile on the commander’s face as he turned to gather his men. The orders came quickly and calmly. The commander had regained his composure.
    ‘Lightning! Burn the huts. All of them. You, Hit Man! Go to the enclosure and shoot the cattle. Bayonet! Kill four chickens for tonight’s meal. Quickly now. We must go.’
    Jason stumbled off to the chicken hut, perched on its stakes above the ground to protect the birds from reptiles. His commander’s brief words of comfort had not helped much. It had all happened so quickly. Less than ten minutes. He could hear the commander rapping out orders as he went to kill the chickens – calm authority from the man who had received the blessing of the kraal’s swikiro only a few hours before.
    In the distance, there was thunder.