Why trouble about the dead when there are
so many to be sent to join them? Macumazahn, the hour is at
hand. The fool Cetewayo has quarrelled with your people, the
English, and on my counsel. He has sent and killed women, or
allowed others to do so, across the river in Natal. His
messengers came to me asking what he should do. I answered,
'Shall a king of the blood of Chaka fear to allow his own wicked
ones to be slain because they have stepped across a strip of
water, and still call himself king of the Zulus?' So those women
were dragged back across the water and killed; and now the
Queen's man from the Cape asks many things, great fines of
cattle, the giving up of the slayers, and that an end should be
made of the Zulu army, which is to lay down its spears and set to
hoeing like the old women in the kraals."
"And if the king refuses, what then, Zikali?"
"Then, Macumazahn, the Queen's man will declare war on the Zulus;
already he gathers his soldiers for the war."
"Will Cetewayo refuse, Zikali?"
"I do not know. His mind swings this way and that, like a pole
balanced on a rock. The ends of the pole are weighted with much
counsel, and it hangs so even that if a grasshopper lit on one
end or the other, it would turn the scale."
"And do you wish me to be that grasshopper, Zikali?"
"Who else? That is why I brought you to Zululand."
"So you wish me to counsel Cetewayo to lie down in the bed that
the English have made for him.
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