Текст книги "Men of Men"

Автор книги: Wilbur Smith

Соавторы: Wilbur Smith
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"What will you do when you have them?" Jan Cheroot asked.

"Dig the stuff out."

"And then?" the little Hottentot demanded with a malicious gleam in his dark eyes, his features wrinkled as a sour windfallen apple. "What do you then?" he insisted.

"I intend to find out," Zouga replied grimly. "We have wasted enough time here already."

"My dear fellow," Neville Pickering gave him that charming smile. "I'm delighted that you asked. Had you not, then I should have offered. It's always a little problematic for a new chum to find his feet," he coughed deferentially, and went on quickly, "not that you are a new chum, by any means, " That was a term usually reserved for the fresh-faced hopefuls newly arrived on the boat from "home". "Home' was England, even those who were colonial-born referred to it as "home".

"I'd bet a fiver to a pinch of giraffe dung that you know more about this country than any of us here."

"African born," Zouga admitted, "on the Zouga river up north in Khama's land; accounts for the odd name Zouga."

"By jove, didn't realize that, I must say!"

"Don't hold it against me." Zouga smiled lightly, but he knew that there were many who would. Home born was vastly superior to colonial born. It was for that reason that he had insisted that Aletta should make the long sea voyage with him when it seemed that her pregnancies would reach full term. Both Ralph and Jordan had been born in the same house in south London, and both had arrived back at Good Hope before they were weaned. They were home-born, that was his first gift to them.

Pickering glossed over the remark tactfully. He did not have to declare his own birth. He was an English gentleman, and nobody would ever mistake that.

"There are many parts of your book that fascinated me.

I'll teach you what I know about sparklers if you'll answer my questions. Bargain?"

Over the days that followed they bombarded each other with questions, Zouga demanding every detail of the process of raising and sorting the yellow gravel from the deepening pit, while Pickering kept turning the conversation back to the land to the north, asking about the tribes and the gold reefs, about the rivers and mountains and the wild animals that swarmed upon the plains and in the lonely forests that Zouga had conjured up so vividly in Hunter's Odyssey.

Each morning an hour before the first light, Zouga would meet Pickering at the edge of the roadway above the workings. There would be an enamelled kettle bubbling on the brazier and they drank black coffee that was strong enough to stain the teeth, while around them in the gloom the black mine-workers gathered sleepily, still hugging their fur karosses over their shoulders, their voices muted but musical, their movements stiff and slow with sleepiness and the dawn chill.

At a hundred other points around the growing pit the gangs assembled, waiting for the light; and when it glimmered on the eastern horizon the men went swarming down into the workings, like columns of ants along the board walks and down the swaying ladders, spreading out on the chequer board of claims, the hubbub rising, the chant of tribesmen, the squeal of ropes, the hectoring shouts of the white overseers, and then the rattle of bucket loads of yellow gravel into the waiting carts upon the roadway.

Pickering was working four claims, which he owned in partnership.

"My partner is down in Cape Town. Heaven knows when he will be back."

Neville Pickering shrugged with that deceptively indolent air which he cultivated. "You'll meet him one of these fine days, and it will be an experience, memorable but not necessarily enjoyable."

It amused Zouga to see how Neville contrived to maintain his foppish elegance of dress, how he could walk the length of the number 6 Roadway without the dust hazing the shine of his boots; how he could scramble across the ladderworks without dampening his shirt with sweat, or exchange a flurry of blows with a brawny digger who was encroaching on his claims without it seeming to affect the drape of his Norfolk jacket. His casual sauntering gait carried him from one end of the diggings to the other, at a pace which had Zouga stretching his own legs.

The four claims were not in a single block, but each separated from the others by a dozen or so intervening claims, and Pickering moved from one to the other coordinating the work, pulling a gang of half-naked black men from one claim and leading them across to another where the work had fallen behind.

Abruptly he was on the roadway, checking the loading of the carts, and then again, just as abruptly, at the fenced-off plot beyond Market Square where his black workers were rocking the cradles of gravel.

The diamond cradles were like giant versions of the old-fashioned baby cradles from which they took their name. Standing on their half-moon-shaped feet, a man on each side kept them swinging easily from side to side while a third worker shovelled the yellow gravel into the top deck of the cradle from the mound that the cart had dumped. The top deck was a coarse steel sieve, with inch and a half openings in the mesh.

As the cradle rocked rhythmically, the gravel tumbled and bounced across the sloping sieve, the finer stuff under one and a half inches in diameter dropping through onto the second deck of the cradle while the coarse pebbles and waste rolled over under the surveillance of the two cradle men, who watched for the highly unlikely flash of a diamond too big to fall through onto the second deck.

A diamond more than one and a half inches across would be the fortune-maker, the finder's passport to great wealth, the almost impossible "pony" of the diggers' dreams, a stone heavier than one hundred carats.

on the second deck the mesh was much finer, halfinch square, and a yellow dust blew away like smoke as the cradle agitated it, while on the third deck the mesh was finer still, allowing only the worthless tailings to drop to waste, stuff smaller than the crystals of refined sugar.

From the third deck the gravel was gathered with reverential care, and this was washed in a tub of precious water, every drop of which had been transported thirty miles from the Vaal river.

The gravel was washed in a circular sieve of the number 3 mesh, the finest of all. The worker agitating and dipping over the tub, muddy to the elbows. Finally the contents of the sieve, cleansed of mud, were dumped onto the flat metal surface of the sorting-table, and the sorters began picking over it with the flat wooden blades of their scrapers.

Women were far away the best sorters, they had the patience, the manual dexterity and the fine eye for colour and texture that was needed. The married diggers kept their wives and daughters at the sorting-table from the minute the mellow morning light was strong enough until the dusk faded each evening.

Pickering was not lucky enough to have women working his tables, but the Africans he had were carefully trained, although never trusted.

"You would never credit what they do with a good stone to try and get away with it. I smile sometimes at what the Duchess would think if she knew that the shiner hanging around her neck had been up the tail end of a big black Basuto," Pickering chuckled. "Come, I'll show you what to look for."

The wiry little black sorter at the head of the table advertised his superior status by his European finery, embroidered waistcoat and Derby hat, but his feet were bare and he carried his snuff-horn in the pierced lobe of his ear. He vacated his seat at the table cheerfully, and Neville Pickering took up the scraper and began to sift through the gravel, a few pebbles at a time.

"There!" he grunted suddenly. "Your first wild diamond, old man!

Take a good look at it, and let's hope it isn't your last."

Zouga was surprised. It was not what he had expected, and then his surprise was replaced immediately by disappointment. It was a drab little chip of stone, barely the size of one of the sand fleas which swarmed in the red dust of the camp.

It lacked the fire and flash that Zouga had expected, and its colour was a dingy yellow: the colour of champagne perhaps, but without that wine's sparkle.

"Are you sure?" Zouga asked. "It doesn't look like a diamond to me. How can you tell?"

"It's a splint-chip, probably a piece of a larger stone. It will go ten points, that's a tenth part of a carat, and we will be lucky to get five shillings for it, but it will pay the wages of one of my men for a week."

"How do you tell the difference between that, and those?" Zouga indicated the mound of gravel in the centre of the table, still wet from the washing-tub, glistening in a thousand different shades of red and gold, anthracite black and flesh pinks, the gaudy show of diamondiferous gravel.

"It's the soapiness," Pickering explained, "the soap texture. You will train your eye to it soon, don't bother about the colour, look for the soap." He took the stone in the teeth of a pair of wooden tweezers and turned it in the sunlight. "A diamond is unwettable, it repels water; so in the wet gravel it stands out, and the difference is that soapy look."

Neville proffered the stone. "There, I tell you what, you keep it as a gift, your first diamond."

They had been hunting for nearly ten days now, and had gradually moved farther and farther north.

Twice they had sighted quarry, small groups, but each time the quarry had scattered at the first approach.

Zouga was getting desperate. His claims were lying abandoned in the New Rush workings, the level of the surrounding claims would be sinking swiftly, making his more difficult to work and every day increasing the danger of rock slide. Those claims had already killed five men. Jock Danby had warned him.

He was lying now, belly down, on a tiny rocky kopje fifty miles north of the Vaal river, eighty miles from New Rush, and he was still not certain when he could finish this business and turn southwards again.

Jan Cheroot and the two boys were farther down the slope with the horses, holding them in a shallow ravine that was choked with scrub thorn. Jordan's girlish tones carried to where Zouga sat, blending with the cries of circling birds, and Zouga lowered the binoculars to rest his eyes and to listen to his son's voice.

He had worried about taking the boy on this rough journey, especially so soon after that bout of camp fever, but there had been no alterative, no safe place to leave him. Once again Jordan's stamina had belied his delicate looks. He had ridden hard and kept up well with his brother, at the same time recovering the flesh that the fever had burned from his body; and in the last days the deathly pallor of his skin had been gilded to velvety peach.

Thinking about Jordan led directly to memories of Aletta, memories still so filled with sorrow and raw guilt that he could not bear them and he lifted the binoculars again and raked the plain, seeking distraction. He found it with relief.

There was unusual movement far out on the wide plain. Through the lens Zouga picked up a herd of a hundred wildebeest, the "wild cattle" of the Boers. These ungainly animals, with their mournful Roman noses and scraggly beards, were the clowns of the veld. They chased each other in aimless circles, nose to earth and heels kicking at the sky, then abruptly they ceased this lunatic cavorting and stood snorting at one another with wild-eyed expressions of amazement.

Beyond them Zouga caught a flicker of other movement: until that moment it had been hidden by the dust kicked up by the splayed wildebeest hooves. Carefully he adjusted the bevelled focus ring of his binoculars, and the heat mirage trembled and melted before his gaze, turning the movement into a serpentine wriggle that seemed to float above the plain on a lake of silver shimmering water.

,"Ostriches!" he thought disgustedly. The distant shapes seemed to wriggle like long black tadpoles in the watery wavering mirage of distance. The long-legged birds seemed to float free of the earth, blooming miraculously in the tortured air above the plain. Zouga tried to count them, but they changed shape and coagulated into a dark wavering mass, their plumed backs bobbing.

Suddenly Zouga sat up. He dropped the binoculars and polished the lens with the tail of the silk bandanna around his throat, then quickly lifted them to his eyes again. The grotesque dark shapes had separated, the lumpy wriggling bodies fined down, the elongated legs had assumed normal proportions.

"Men!" whispered Zouga, and counted them eagerly, as eagerly as he had ever made a first sighting of the huge ivory-carrying grey bull elephants in the hunting veld.

He reached eleven before another layer of heated air intervened and altered the distant man-shapes to grotesque unsteady monsters once again.

Zouga slung the binoculars over his shoulder and went down the slope with the loose scree rolling under his boots. Jan Cheroot and the boys lay in the bottom of the ravine on their saddle blankets, their saddles propped behind them as bolsters.

Zouga slid down the bank and landed between them before they had returned from the fairyland that Jan Cheroot had been spinning for them.

"A good bunch," he told Jan Cheroot.

Zouga reached down and withdrew the short Martinihenry carbine from the leather bucket of Ralph's saddle.

He levered the breech-block down and checked the weapon was empty.

"We aren't after springbuck. Don't you load until either Jan Cheroot or I tell you," he ordered sternly.

Jordan was still too little to handle the heavy rifle, but he rode well enough to make the encircling sweep with which they would try to close the net.

"Remember, Jordie, that you stay close enough to Jan Cheroot to hear what he tells you," Zouga told him, glancing up at the sun as he did so.

It was well past noon; he would have to move fairly soon, for if they could not surround the little band of black men at the first attempt, if they did not achieve surprise, then it would be the old time-consuming business of spooring them down individually. So far attempts at doing so had always been interrupted by the sudden African nightfall.

"Saddle up," Zouga ordered, and they scrambled to their horses.

Zouga swung up onto the bay gelding and glared sternly at Ralph.

"Now you do what you are told, or I'll warm your tail feathers for you, young man."

He swung the horse's head and pointed it down the ravine, while behind his back Ralph grinned at Jan Cheroot conspiratorially, his face flushed with excitement, and the little Hottentot closed one eyelid briefly but kept his flat wrinkled oriental features expressionless.

Zouga had chosen the kopje with care; from it a ravine meandered out across the plain in an approximate east to west direction, and he followed it now, slouching in the saddle to keep his head below the level of the banks and keeping the gelding down to a walk so as not to raise dust.

After half a mile he removed the wide-brimmed hat from his head and raised himself cautiously in the stirrups until his eyes were just above the bank, and he darted a quick glance into the north and then immediately ducked down again.

"Station here," he told Ralph. "And don't move until I do."

They moved on down the ravine, while Zouga placed Jan Cheroot and Jordan side by side in a bend of the ravine where the bank had collapsed and formed an easy ramp up which they could launch their charge.

"Keep Jordie close," Zouga cautioned Jan Cheroot, and swung the gelding around with the saddlery creaking as the animal turned in the narrow gut of the ravine; then Zouga trotted back until he was in the centre. of the waiting line, and there he halted and contained his impatience, glancing up repeatedly at the lowering sun.

There would probably not be another chance for many days, and each day was vital for those untended claims.

Zouga jerked the rifle from the leather bucket at his knee, selected a cartridge from the bandolier around his waist and slipped it into the breech. Then he returned the weapon uncocked to the bucket. It was merely a precaution, but he had no means of knowing what manner of men those approaching figures were.

Even if their intentions were peaceable, and their ultimate object identical to Zouga's own, yet they would be armed and nervous, so nervous that they had avoided the road from the north and were travelling over the open veld. They were in company for defence, and Zouga knew they would have been harassed often along the way, by black men and white: the black men trying to rob and cheat them of their meagre possessions, the white men of something infinitely more valuable, their right to contract their labour to the highest bidder.

On the day that Zouga thanked Neville Pickering for his tuition and began preparing to work the Devil's Own claims for his personal account, he had faced the problem that was already wracking the entire sub-continent.

Only black men could stand the conditions of physical labour in the diggings. Only black men would work for a wage that made the diggings profitable, and even that beggarly wage was many times more than the Boer f armers of the surrounding backveld republics could afford to Day.

The diamond diggings had denuded the countryside of labourers for five hundred miles around; and the Boers resented that as fiercely as they resented the nest of adventurers and fortune seekers that the diggings supported.

The diamonds had caused an upheaval in the Boers' traditional way of life; not only were the miners threatening the supply of cheap labour, which only just allowed a diligent and frugal farmer to eke out a living for himself and his family from the savage land, but the diggers were doing something else that from the Boer point of view was unforgivable, that went against all their deeply held beliefs and threatened not just their livelihood but their very physical existence.

The diamond diggers were paying the black tribesmen with guns. The Boers had fought the tribes at Blood River and Mosega, they had stood to the laager in ten thousand threatening dawns, the favourite hour of attack. They had seen the smoke rising from their burning homesteads and crops, they had ridden out on commando on the spoor of their stolen herds, and they had buried the pale coipses of their children, the blood drained from the frail bodies through the gaping and terrible wounds of the assegai. They had buried them at Weenen, the Place of Weeping, and at other accursed and abandoned grave sites across the land.

The payment of black men with guns went against every one of their instincts; it flew full in the face of their laws and offended the memories of their dead heroes.

For these reasons Boer commandos from the little backveld republics were sweeping the land and patrolling the lonely roads from the north to try and prevent the tribesmen reaching the diggings and instead press them to work upon the land.

However, five shillings a week and a musket at the end of a three years" contract were a lure that brought the tribesmen, on foot, against a hundred hazards, on a journey of hundreds of miles, daring the commandos and all else, to reach the diggings.

They came in their hundreds, but still not enough of them arrived to fill those hungry diamond pits. In vain Zouga and Jan Cheroot had ridden the workings. Every black man was signed on contract, and jealously guarded by his employer.

Zouga had told Jan Cheroot, "We'll offer seven shillings and sixpence a week."

They signed five men that same day at the higher wage, and the next day there were a dozen deserters waiting outside Zouga's camp, eager for the new coin.

Before Zoug2. could sign them, Neville Pickering sauntered up. "Official visit, old man," he murmured apologetically. "As a member of the jolly old Diggers" Committee, I have to tell you the rate is five shillings not seven and six." When Zouga opened his mouth to protest, Pickering smiled easily and held up his hand.

"No, Major. I'm sorry. It's five shillings, and not a penny more."

Zouga was already in no doubt about the sweeping powers of the Diggers" Committee. An edict from the elected body was enforced firstly by a warning, then a beating, and finally by the full aggression of the entire community of diggers which could end in a burning or even a lynching.

"What do I do for a gang, then?" Zouga demanded.

"You do what we all do; you go out and find a gang, before another digger or a Boer commando grabs them."

"I might have to go as far north as the Shashi river," Zouga snapped sarcastically, and Pickering nodded in agreement.

"Yes, you might."

Zouga smiled thinly at the memory of his first lesson in digger labour relations, and now he settled his hat firmly and gathered up his reins.

"All right," he muttered, "let's go recruiting!" And he put his heels into the gelding's flanks and went lunging up the bank of the ravine onto the open plain.

The tribesmen were five hundred yards dead ahead, and he counted swiftly: sixteen of them, If he could take them all he could start back for New Rush in tomorrow's dawn. Sixteen men were sufficient to work the Devil's Own, and at that moment they had, for Zouga, the same value as a fifty-carat diamond. They were in single file, moving swiftly, the trotting gait of the fighting impis of Zulu, no women or children with them.

"Good," grunted Zouga as the gelding stretched out under him, and he held him back in an easy canter as he glanced right.

Jan Cheroot was tearing across the plain, Jordan plugging along in his dust fifty strides behind. At this distance Jordan did not look like a child; they might have been a pair of armed riders, and Jan Cheroot was swinging wide, trying to get behind the little group of men, pinning them before they scattered, pinning them long enough for Zouga to get within hail.

Zouga glanced left and scowled as he saw that Ralph was at full gallop, leaning low over his horse's neck, brandishing the Martini-Henry rifle, and Zouga hoped it was still unloaded, wished that he had specially ordered Ralph not to show the rifle, and yet even in that moment of anger he experienced a little prickle of pride as he watched his son ride; the boy was born to the saddle.

Zouga checked the gelding again, bringing him down to a trot, giving his flank men time to complete the circle, and at the same time trying to reduce the dramatic effect of his approach. He knew that they would appear to the tribesmen to be an armed commando, their intentions warlike, and he tried to soften this by lifting his hat and waving it over his head.

Then suddenly Jan Cheroot was reining in, gesturing to Jordan to do the same. They had got behind the band, and opposite them, facing them across the wide circle, Ralph was wheeling his filly and bringing her up sharply on her hind legs, rearing and shaking out her mane theatrically.

In the centre the tribesmen had moved swiftly, and with the concerted action of trained fighting men.

They had dropped the rolled bundles of sleeping-mat, cooking-pot and leather grain bag that they had been carrying on their heads, and they had bunched into a defensive circle shoulder to shoulder, war shield overlapping war shield, while above them the steel of their assegais flicked little pinpricks of sunlight.

They did not wear the full regalia of their fighting regiments, the kilts of monkey tails, the cloaks of desert fox furs, the tall headdress of ostrich and widow-bird feathers they were travelling with weapons only; but the shields they presented to the approaching horseman and the glint of steel told Zouga all he wanted to know. The shields gave the tribe its name, the Matabele, the people of the long shields.

The little group of men who stood impassively in the sunlight and watched Zouga ride up were the finest warriors that Africa had ever spawned. Yet they were almost five hundred miles south of the borders of Matabeleland.

"I set for a covey of partridge," Zouga smiled to himself, "and I have trapped a brood of eagles."

A hundred yards from the ring of shields, Zouga reined in; but the gelding, infected by the tension, fidgeted under him.

The long shields were made of dappled black and white oxhide, every regiment of the Matabele carried a distinctive shield.

Zouga knew that black dappled with white was the regimental colour of the Inyati, the Buffaloes Regiment, and again he felt a twist of nostalgia.

Once the induna who commanded the Inyati had been a friend; they had travelled together across the mimosaclad plains of Matabeleland; they had hunted together and shared the comfort of the same camp fires.

It was all so long ago, on his first visit to the land below the Zambezi river, but Zouga was carried back so vividly that it required an effort of will to shake off the memory.

He lifted his right hand, fingers spread in the universal gesture of goodwill.

"Warriors of Matabele, I see you," he called to them, speaking their language as fluently as one of them, the words returning to his tongue readily.

He saw the small stir behind the war-shields, the shift of heads with which they greeted his words.

"Jordan!" Zouga called, and the child circled out and reined in his pony at Zouga's side. Now the difference in size between man and boy was apparent.

"See, warriors of King Lobengula, my son rides with me." No man took his children to war. The ring of shields sank a few inches so Zouga could see the dark and watchful eyes of the men behind them; but as Zouga pushed the gelding a few paces forward, the shields were immediately lifted again defensively.

"What news of Gandang, induna of the Inyati Regiment, Gandang who is as my brother?" Zouga called again persuasively.

At the mention of the name one of the warriors could no longer contain himself, swept aside his shield and stepped from the ring of spears.

"Who calls Gandang brother?" he demanded in a clear firm voice, a young voice, yet with the timbre and inflection of one used to authority.

"I am Bakela, the Fist," Zouga gave his Matabele name, and he realized that the warrior facing him was still a youth, barely older than Ralph. But he was lean and straight, narrow in the hips and with muscle in the shoulder and arms built up in the games of war. Zouga guessed he had probably already killed his man, washed his spear in blood.

Now he crossed the open ground towards Zouga, his stride lithe, his legs long and shapely beneath the short leather kilt.

"Bakela," he said, as he stopped a dozen paces from the gelding's head. "Bakela." He smiled, a brilliant show of white even teeth in the broad and handsome Nguni face.

"That is a name I took with the first draught of my mother's milk, for I am Bazo, the Axe, son of the same Gandang whom you call brother, and who remembers you as an old and trusted friend. I know you by the scar on your cheek and the goid in your beard. I greet you, Bakela."

Zouga swung down off the gelding, leaving the rifle in the saddle scabbard, and, grinning broadly, went to clasp the youth's upper arms in an affectionate salute.

Then, turning with his fists on his hips, still smiling, Zouga shouted to Ralph. "Go and see if you can shoot a springbuc or better even, a wildebeest; we'll need plenty of meat for tonight."

Ralph let out a whoop at the command, and provoked the filly with his heels, forcing her to rear again and then come down in full run, mane flying, hooves pounding as she bore away. Without being ordered, Jan Cheroot shook his bony mare into a canter and followed the flying filly.

The two riders returned in the dusk, and the hunt had gone well. They had found rare quarry, a bull eland so old that his neck and shoulders had turned blue with age and the swinging dewlap almost swept the dusty earth between his stubby forelegs.

He was as big as a prize stud bull, with a chest round as a brandy cask of Limousine oak, and Zouga guessed he would weigh not much under a ton, for he was fat and sleek; there would be a tubful of rich white lard in the chest cavity, and thick layers of yellow fat beneath the glossy hide. He was a prize indeed, and the little band of Matabele drummed their assegai against the hide shields and shouted with delight when they saw him.

The bull snorted at the hubbub and broke into a lumbering gallop, trying to break away, but Ralph swung the filly to head him off and within a hundred yards the bull changed the gallop for a short winded trot and allowed himself to be turned back towards the group of waiting men.

Ralph reined in the filly, kicked his feet from the stirrups and jumped easily to the earth, throwing up the carbine as he landed cat-like on his toes and seeming to fire in the same instant.

The bull's head flinched at the shot, blinking the huge shining eyes convulsively as the bullet slammed into his skull between them, and he collapsed with a meaty thud that seemed to tremble in the earth.

The Matabele streamed out like a pack of wild dogs, swarming over the mountainous carcass, using the razor edge of their war-assegai as butchers" knives, going for the tidbits, the tripes and the liver, the heart and the sweet white fat.

The Matabele gorged on fat eland meat, grilling the tripes over the coals, threading garlands of liver and fat and succulent heart onto wet white mimosa twigs from which they had peeled the bark, so that the melting fat sizzled and bubbled over the layers of meat.

"We have killed no game since we left the forests," Bazo explained their ravenous appetites. Though the desert teemed with springbuck herds, they were not the type of game that a man on foot, armed only with a stabbing spear, could run down easily.

"Without meat a man's belly is like a war drum, full of nothing except noise and wind."

"You are far from the land of the Matabele," Zouga agreed. "No Matabele has been this far south since the old king took the tribe north across the Limpopo, and in that time even Gandang, your father, was a child."

"We are the first to make this journey," Bazo, agreed proudly. "We are the point of the spear."