Текст книги "Power of the Sword"

Автор книги: Wilbur Smith

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 28 (всего у книги 51 страниц)

She left him in his stall and ran all the way back to the chAteau.

She had to talk to someone, if only it could have been Blaine. But Sir Garry was in the dining-room; he was always first down for breakfast.

Have you heard the news, my dear? he cried excitedly the moment she entered. I heard it on the radio at six o'clock. We are off gold. Hertzog did it! By God, there will be a few fortunes made and lost this day! Anybody who is holding gold shares will double and treble their money. Oh, my dear, is something wrong? Centaine had collapsed into her chair at the head of the dining-room table.

No, no. She shook her head frantically. There is nothing wrong, not any more. Everything is all right, wonderfully, magnificently, stupendously all right. At lunchtime Blaine telephoned her at Weltevreden. He had never done so before. His voice sounded hollow and strange on the scratchy line. He did not announce himself but said Simply: Five o'clock at the cottage. Yes, I'll be there. She wanted to say more but the line clicked dead.

She went down to the cottage an hour early with fresh flowers, clean crisply ironed linen for the bed and a bottle of Bollinger champagne, and she was waiting for him when he walked into the living-room.

There are no words that can adequately express my gratitude, she said.

That is the way I want it, Centaine, he told her seriously.

No words! We will never talk about it again. I shall try to convince myself it never happened. Please promise me never to mention it, never again as long as we live and love each other. I give you my solemn word, she said, and then all her relief and joy came bubbling up and she kissed him, laughing. Won't you open the champagne? And she raised the brimming glass when he handed it to her and gave him his own words back as a toast: For as long as we live and love each other, my darling. The Johannesburg Stock Exchange re-opened on January the second and in the first hour very little business could be conducted, for the floor was like a battlefield as the brokers literally tore at each other, screaming for attention. But by call-over the market had shaken itself out and settled at its new levels.

Swales of Rabkin and Swales was the first of her brokers to telephone Centaine. Like the market, his tone was buoyant and effervescent.

My dear Mrs Courtney, in the circumstances, Centaine was prepared to let that familiarity pass, my very dear Mrs Courtney, your timing has been almost miraculous. As you know, we were unfortunately unable to fill your entire purchase order. We were able to obtain only four hundred and forty thousand ERPMs at an average price of twenty-five shillings. The volume of your order pushed the price up two and six. However, she could almost hear him puffing himself up to make his announcement, however, I am delighted to be able to tell you that this morning ERPMs are trading at fifty-five shillings and still rising. I am looking forward to sixty shillings by the end of the week Sell them, Centaine said quietly and heard him choke at the end of the line.

If I may be permitted to offer a word of advice Sell them, she repeated. Sell all of them. And she hung up, staring out of the window as she tried to calculate her profits, but the telephone rang again before she reached a total, and one after another her other brokers triumphantly reported on the contracts she had made. Then there was a call from Windhoek.

Dr Twenty-man-Jones, it's so good to hear your voice. She had recognized him instantly.

Well, Mrs Courtney, this is a pretty pickle, Twenty-man-Jones told her glumly. The H'ani Mine will be back in profit again now, even with the parsimonious quota De Beers is allowing us. We've turned the corner, Centaine enthused. We are out of the woods. Many a slip 'twixt cup and lip. Gloomily Twenty-man-Jones capped cliche with cliche.

Best not to count our chickens, Mrs Courtney. Dr Twenty-man-Jones, I love you. Centaine laughed delightedly, and there was a shocked silence that echoed across a thousand miles of wire. I'll be there just as soon as I can get away from here. There is a lot for us to work on now., She hung up and went to look for Shasa. He was down at the stables chatting with his coloured grooms as they sat in the sun dubbining his polo harness and saddlery.

Cheri, I am driving into Cape Town. Will you come with me? 'What are you going all that way for, Mater? It's a surprise. That was the one certain way to gain Shasa's full attention and he tossed the harness he was working on to Abel and sprang to his feet.

Her ebullient mood was infectious and they were laughing together as they walked into Porters Motors showroom on Strand Street. The sales manager came from his cubicle on the run.

Mrs Courtney, we haven't seen you in far too long. May I wish you a happy and prosperous New Year. It's off to a good start on both counts, she smiled. Speaking of happiness, Mr Tims, how soon can you deliver my new Daimler? It will be yellow, naturally? With black piping, naturally! And the usual fittings, the vanity, the cocktail cabinet? All of them, Mr Tims. I will cable our London office immediately. Shall we say four months, Mrs Courtney? Let us rather say three months, Mr Tims. Shasa could barely contain himself until they were on the pavements in front of the showroom.

Mater, have you gone bonkers? We are paupers! Well, cheri, let's be paupers with a little class and style. Where are we going now? The post office. At the telegraph counter Centaine drafted a cable to Sotheby's in Bond Street: Sale no longer contemplated. Stop. Please cancel all preparations.

Then they went to lunch at the Mount Nelson Hotel.

Blaine had promised to meet her as early as he was able to escape from the meeting of the proposed new coalition cabinet. He was as good as his word, waiting for her in the pine forest, and when she saw his face her happiness shrivelled.

What is it, Blaine? Let's walk, Centaine. I've been indoors all day. They climbed the Karbonkelberg slopes behind the estate.

At the summit they sat on a fallen log to watch the sunset and it was magnificent.

This was the fairest Cape which we discovered in all our circumnavigation of the earth, she misquoted from Vasco da Garna's log, but Blaine did not correct her as she had hoped he might.

Tell me, Blaine. She took his arm and insisted, and he turned his face to her.

Isabella, he said sombrely.

You have heard from her? Her spirits sank deeper at the name.

The doctors can do nothing for her. She will be returning on the next mail ship from Southampton. in the silence the sun sank into the silver sea, taking the light from the world, and Centaine's soul was as dark.

How ironic it is, she whispered. Because of you I can have anything in this world except that which I most desire you, my love. The women pounded the fresh millet grain in the wooden mortars into a coarse fluffy white meal and filled one of the leather sacks.

Carrying the sack, Swart Hendrick, followed by Moses his brother, left the kraal after the rise of the new moon and crept silently up the ridge in the night. While Hendrick stood guard, Moses climbed to the old eagle owl nest in the leadwood tree and brought down the cartridge paper packets.

They moved along the ridge until they were beyond all possible chance of observation from the village, and even then they very carefully screened the small fire that they built amongst the ironstone boulders. Hendrick broke open the packets and poured the gleaming stones into a small calabash gourd while Moses prepared the millet meal in another gourd, mixing it with water until it was a soft porridge.

Meticulously Hendrick burned the cartridge paper wrappings in the fire and stirred the ashes to powder with a stick.

When it was done he nodded at his younger brother and Moses poured the dough over the coals. As it began to bubble Hendrick buried the diamonds in the unleavened dough.

Moses muttered ruefully as the millet cakes bubbled and hardened. It was almost an incantation. These are death stones. We will have no joy of them. The white men love them too dearly: they are the stones of death and madness. Hendrick ignored him and shaped the baking loaves, squinting his eyes against the smoke and smiling secretly to himself. When each round loaf was crisped brown on the underside he flipped it over and let it cook through until it was brick hard; then he lifted it off the fire and set it out to cool. Finally he repacked the crude thick loaves into the leather sack and they returned quietly to the sleeping village.

In the morning they left early and the women went with them the first mile of the journey, ululating mournfully and singing the song of farewell. When they fell behind neither of the men looked back. They trudged on towards the low brown horizon, carrying their bundles balanced on their heads. They did not think about it, but this little scene was acted out every single day in a thousand villages across the southern. sub-continent.

Days later the two men, still on foot, reached the recruitment station. It was a single-roomed general-dealer's store, standing alone at a remote crossroad on the edge of the desert. The white trader augmented his precarious business by buying cattle hides from the surrounding nomadic tribes and by recruiting for Wenela'.

Wenela was the acronym for the Witwatersrand Native Labour Association, a ubiquitous sprawling enterprise which extended its tentacles into the vastness of the African wilderness. From the peaks of the Dragon Mountains in Basutoland to the swamps of the Zambezi and Chobe, from the thirstlands of the Kalahari to the rain forest of the high plateau of Nyasaland, it gathered up the trickle of black men and channelled them first into a stream and finally into a mighty river that ran endlessly to the fabulous goldfields of the Ridge of White Waters, the Witwatersrand of Transvaal.

The trader looked over these two new recruits in a perfunctory manner as they stood dumbly before him. Their faces were deliberately expressionless, their eyes blank, the only perfect defence of the black African in the presence of the white man.

Name? the trader demanded.

Henry Tabaka. Hendrick had chosen his new name to cover his relationship to Moses and to throw off any chance connection with Lothar De La Rey and the robbery.

Name? The trader looked at Moses.

Moses Gama. He pronounced it with a guttural G'.

Have you worked on the mines before? Do you speak English? 'Yes, Basie. They were obsequious, and the trader grinned.

Good! Very good! You will be rich men when you come home from Goldi. Plenty of wives. Plenty of jig-jig, hey? He grinned lasciviously as he issued them each with a green Wenela card and a bus ticket. The bus will come soon. Wait outside, he ordered, and promptly lost all interest in them.

He had earned his guinea-a-head recruitment fee, good money easily made, and his obligation to the recruits was at an end.

They waited under the scraggy thorn tree at the side of the iron-roofed trading store for forty-eight hours before the railway bus came rattling and banging and blowing blue smoke across the dreary wastes.

it stopped briefly and they slung their meagre luggage up onto the roofrack that was already piled with calabashes and boxes and bundles, with trussed goats and cages of woven bark stuffed with live fowls. Then they climbed into the overloaded coach and squeezed onto one of the hard wooden benches. The bus bellowed and blustered on over the plains and the rows of black passengers, wedged shoulder to shoulder, jolted and swayed in unison as it pitched and rolled over the rutted tracks.

Two days later the bus stopped outside the barbed-wire gates of the Wenela staging post on the outskirts of Windhoek, and most of the passengers, all young men, descended and stood looking about them aimlessly until a huge black overseer with brass plaques of authority on his arm and a long sjambok in his hand chivied them into line and led them through the gates.

The white station manager sat on the stoep of his office building, his boots propped on the half wall of the stoep and a black bottle of German lager at his elbow, fanning himself with his hat. One at a time, the black boss-boy pushed the new recruits in front of him for appraisal. He rejected only one, a skinny little runt of a man who barely had the strength to shuffle up to the verandah.

That bastard is riddled with TB. The manager took a gulp of his lager. Get rid of him. Send him back where he came from. When Hendrick stepped forward he straightened up in his thonged chair and set down the lager glass.

What is your name, boy? he asked.

Tabaka. Ha, you speak English. The manager's eyes narrowed. He could pick out the troublemakers; that was his job. He could tell by their eyes, the gleam of intelligence and aggression in them. He could tell by the way they walked and carried their shoulders; this big strutting, sullen black was big trouble.

,R

You in trouble with the police, boy? he asked again. You steal other man's cattle? You kill your brother perhaps, or jig-jig his wife, hey? Hendrick stared at him flatly.

Answer me, boy. No!

You call me Baas when you speak to me, do you understand? Yes, Baas, Hendrick said carefully, and the manager opened the police file that lay on the table beside him and thumbed through it slowly, suddenly looking up to catch any sign of guilt or apprehension on Hendrick's face. But he was wearing the African mask again, dumb, and resigned and inscrutable.

Christ, they stink. He threw the file back onto the table again.

Take them away, he told the black boss-boy, and he picked up his beer bottle and glass and went back into his office.

You know better than that, my brother, Moses whispered to him as they were marched away towards the line of thatched huts. When you meet a hungry white hyena, you do not put your hand in his mouth, and Hendrick did not reply.

They were fortunate; the draft was almost full, three hundred black men already gathered in and waiting in the line of huts behind the barbed-wire fence. Some of them had been there ten days and it was time for the next stage of their journey, thus Hendrick and Moses were not forced to endure another interminable wait. That night three railway coaches were shunted onto the spur of line that ran beside the camp and the boss-boys roused them before dawn.

Gather your belongings. Shayile! The hour has struck.

The steamer waits to take you to Goldi, to the place of gold. They formed up in their ranks again and answered to the roll-call. Then they were marched to the waiting coaches.

Here there was another white man in charge. He was tall and sunbrowned, his khaki shirtsleeves rolled up high on his sinewy biceps and wisps of blond hair hanging from under the shapeless black hat that was pulled low down on his forehead. His features were flat and Slavic, his teeth crooked and stained with tobacco smoke and his eyes were light misty blue; he smiled perpetually in a bland idiotic fashion and sucked at a cavity in one of his back teeth. He carried a sjambok on a thong from his wrist, and now and then, for no apparent reason, he flicked the tapered end of the hippohide whip against the bare legs of one of the men filing past him; it was a casual act born of disinterest and disdain rather than calculated cruelty, and though each stroke was feathery light, it stung like a hornet and the victim gasped and skipped and shot up the ladder into the coach with alacrity.

Hendrick drew level with him and the foreman's lips drew back from his bad teeth as he smiled even more widely. The camp manager had pointed the big Ovambo out to him.

A bad one, he had warned him. Watch him. Don't let him get out of hand. And now he used his wrist in the stroke that he aimed at the tender skin at the back of Hendrick's knee.

Che-cha! the overseer ordered. Hurry up! And the lash popped as it wrapped around Hendrick's leg. It did not split the skin, the overseer was an expert, but it left a purple black welt on the dark velvety skin.

Hendrick stopped dead, the other leg lifted to the first rung of the boarding ladder, gripping the rail with his free hand, with the other hand balancing his bundle on his shoulder, and he turned his head slowly until he was staring into the overseer's pale blue eyes.

Yes! I The overseer encouraged him softly, and for the first time there was a sparkle of interest in his eyes. He altered his stance subtly, coming onto the balls of his feet.

Yes! he repeated. He wanted to take this big black bastard, here in front of all the others. They were going to be five days in these coaches, five hot thirsty days during which tempers and nerves would be rubbed raw. He always liked to do it right at the beginning of the journey. It only needed one, and it would save a lot of trouble later if he made an example right here on the siding. That way all of them would know what to expect if they started anything, and in his experience they never did start anything after that.

Come on, kaffir. He dropped his voice even lower, making the insult more personal and intense. He enjoyed this part of his work, and he was very good at it. This cocky bastard would not be fit to travel when he had finished with him. He wouldn't be much use to anybody with four or five ribs stoved in, and perhaps a broken jaw.

Hendrick was too quick for him. He went up the ladder into the coach in a single bound, leaving the overseer on the siding, braced and poised for his attack with the sjambok held over-hand, ready to drive the point of the butt into Hendrick's throat as he charged.

Hendrick's move took him completely off balance so that when he aimed a hard cut of the lash at Hendrick's legs as he went up the ladder, he was too late by a full half second and the stroke hissed and died in air.

Following behind his brother, Moses saw the murderous expression on the white overseer's face as he passed. It is not yet ended, he warned Hendrick as they placed their bundles on the overhead racks and settled on the hard wooden bench that ran the length of the coach. He will come after you again. In the middle of the morning the three coaches were pulled off the spur and coupled to the rear of a long train of goods carriages, and after another few hours of shunting and jolting and false starts, they rumbled slowly up the hills and then ran southwards.

Late in the afternoon the train stopped for half an hour at a small siding and a food barrow was loaded into the leading coach. Under the pale eyes of the white overseer the two black boss-boys wheeled the barrow down the crowded coaches and each of the recruits was handed a small tin dish of white maize cake over which a dollop of bean stew had been spooned.

When they reached Swart Hendrick's seat, the white overseer shouldered the boss-boy aside and took the dish from his hands to serve Hendrick's portion himself.

We must look after this kaffir, he said loudly. We want him to be strong for his work at Goldi. And he spooned an extra portion of bean stew into the dish and offered it to Hendrick.

Here, kaffir. But as Hendrick reached for the dish, he deliberately let it drop onto the floor. The hot stew splashed over Hendrick's feet and the overseer stepped into the mess of maize porridge and ground it under his boot. Then he stood back with one hand on the billy club in his belt and grinned.

Hey, you clumsy black bugger, you only get one ration.

if you want to eat it off the floor, that's up to you. He waited expectantly for Hendrick to react, and then grimaced with disappointment when Hendrick dropped his eyes, leaned forward and began to scrape the mashed cake into the dish with his fingers, then scooped a ball of it into his mouth and munched on it stolidly.

You bloody niggers will eat anything, even your own dung, he snarled and went on down the coach.

The windows of the coaches were barred, and the doors at both ends were locked and bolted from the outside. The overseer carried the ring of keys on his belt, carefully securing all doors behind him as he passed. From experience he knew that many of the recruits would begin to have misgivings as soon as the journey began, and driven by homesickness and increasing fear of the unknown, by the disturbing unfamiliarity of all about them, would begin to desert, some of them even leaping from the speeding coach. The overseer made his rounds every few hours, meticulously counting heads, even in the middle of the night, and he stood over Hendrick deliberately shining the beam of his lantern into his face, waking him every time he passed down the coach.

The overseer never tired of his efforts to provoke Hendrick. It had become a challenge, a contest between them. He knew it was there; he had seen it in Hendrick's eyes, just a flash of the violence and menace and power, and he was determined to bring it out, flush it into the open where he could crush it and destroy it.

Patience, my brother, Moses whispered to Hendrick.

Hold your anger. Cherish it with care. Let it grow until it is full term, until you can put it to work for you., Hendrick was coming to rely more on his brother's advice and counsel with each day that passed. Moses was intelligent and persuasive, his tongue quick to choose the right word, and that special presence which he possessed made other men listen when he spoke.

Hendrick saw these special gifts of his demonstrated clearly in the days that followed. At first he spoke only to the men that sat near him in the hot crowded coach. He told them what it would be like at the place where they were going, and how the white men would treat them, what would be expected of them and what the consequences would be if they disappointed their new employers.

The black faces around him were intent as they listened, and soon those further up the benches were craning to catch his words and calling softly. Speak, louder, Gama. Speak, that all of us may hear your words. Moses Gama raised his voice, a clear compelling baritone, and they listened with respect. There will be many black men at Goldi. More than you ever believed possible, Zulus and Xhosas and N'debeles and Swazis and Nyasas, fifty different tribes speaking so many languages that you have never heard before. Tribes as different from you as you are different from the white man. Some of them will be traditional blood enemies of our tribe, waiting and watching like hyenas for a chance to turn upon you and savage you. There will be times when you are deep in the earth, down there where it is always night, that you will be at the mercy of such men.

To protect yourselves you must surround yourselves with men you can trust; you must place yourself under the protection of a strong leader; and in return for this protection you must give this chieftain your obedience and loyalty., And very soon they came to recognize that Moses Gama was this strong leader. Within days he was the undisputed chieftain of all the men in coach three, and while he was talking to them and answering their queries, stilling their fears and misgivings, Moses was in his turn assessing their individual worth, watching and weighing each of them, selecting, evaluating and discarding. He began to rearrange the seating in the coach, ordering those whom he had chosen to move closer to his own seat in the centre, gathering around him the pick of the recruits. And immediately the men he had singled out gained prestige; they formed an elite praetorian guard around their new emperor.

Hendrick watched him doing it, manipulating the men around him, subjecting them to the force of his will and personality, and he was filled with admiration and pride for his younger brother, giving up his own last reservations and willingly according to him his full loyalty and love and obedience.

By association with Moses, Hendrick himself was accorded the respect and veneration of the other men in the coach. He was Moses captain and henchman and they recognized him as such, and quite slowly it dawned upon Hendrick that in a few short days Moses Gama had forged himself an impi, a band of warriors on whom he could rely implicitly, and that he had done it with almost no apparent effort.

Sitting in the crowded coach that was already stinking like an animal cage with the rancid sweat of a hundred hot bodies and with the stench from the latrine cubicle, and mesmerized by the Messianic eyes and words of his own brother, Hendrick thought back to the other great black rulers who had emerged from the mists of African history, to lead first a tiny band, then a tribe and finally a vast horde of warriors across the continent, ravaging and plundering and laying waste.

He thought of Mantatisi and Chaka and Mzilikazi, of Shangaan and Angoni, and with a flash of clairvoyance he saw them at their beginnings, sitting like this at some remote camp-fire in the wilderness, surrounded by a small group of men, weaving the spell over them, capturing their imagination and spirit with a silken noose of words and ideas, inflaming them with dreams.

I stand at the beginning of an enterprise which I do not yet understand, he thought. All I have done up until this time was only my initiation, all the fighting and killing and striving was but a training. Now I am ready for the endeavour, whatever it may be, and Moses Gama will lead me to it. I do not need to know what it is. It is sufficient only that I follow where it leads. And he was listening avidly as Moses spoke names that he had never heard and expounded ideas that were new and strangely exciting.

Tenin, said Moses, not a man, but a god come down to earth. And they thrilled to the tale of a land to the north where the tribes had united under this man-god Lenin, had smitten down a king and in doing so had become part of the godhead themselves.

They were enchanted and aroused as he told them of a war such as the earth had never seen before, and their atavistic battlelust scalded their veins and pumped up their hearts, hard and hot as the head of the fighting axe when it comes red and glowing from the ironsmith's forge. The revolution Moses called this war, and as he explained it to them, they saw that they could be part of this glorious battle, they too could be slayers of kings and become part of the godhead.

The door at the head of the coach crashed back on its slide and the white overseer stepped through and stood with his hands on his hips, grinning mirthlessly at them, and they lowered their heads and stared at the floor, hooding and screening their eyes. But those sitting close to Moses, the chosen ones, the elite, they began to understand then where the battle would be fought and who were the kings that would be slain.

The white overseer sensed the charged atmosphere in the coach. It was thick as the odour of unwashed black bodies and the stink of the latrine in the corner of the coach; it was as electric as the air at noon in the suicide days of November just before the great rains break, and he searched quickly for Hendrick sitting in the centre of the coach.

One rotten potato, he thought bitterly, and the whole sackful is spoiled. He touched the billy club in his belt. He had found out the difficult way that the lash of the sjambok was too long to wield effectively in the confines of the coaches. The billy was a stopper, fourteen inches of hard wood, the end drilled and filled with lead shot. He could break bone with it, crush in a skull to kill a man instantly if he needed to, or with a delicate alteration of the weight of the blow merely stun him. He was an artist with the billy club, as he was with the sjambok, but each had its place and time. It was the billy's time now, and he moved slowly down the coach, pretending to ignore Hendrick, examining the faces of each of the other men as he passed, seeing the new rebelliousness in their sullen faces and becoming more angry with the man who had made his task more difficult.

I should have gone after him at the beginning, he told himself bitterly. I've almost left it too late. Me, who loves the quiet life and the easy way. Well, we'll have to make the best of it now. He glanced casually at Hendrick as he passed, and then from the corner of his eye saw the big Ovambo relax slightly as he went on down the aisle between the seats.

You are expecting it, my boy. You know it has to happen, and I'm not going to disappoint you. At the far door of the coach he paused, as if he had an afterthought, and he came back down the aisle slowly, grinning to himself. Now he stopped in front of Hendrick again, and sucked noisily at the cavity in his tooth.

Look at me, kaffir, he invited pleasantly and Hendrick lifted his chin and stared at him.

Which is your mpahle? he asked. Which is your luggage? and Hendrick was taken off-guard. He was acutely conscious of the treasure of diamonds in the rack above his head and now he glanced up at the leather sack instinctively.

Good. The white overseer lifted the sack off the rack and dropped it onto the floor in front of Hendrick.

Open it, he ordered, still grinning, one hand on his hip the other on the handle of the billy.

Come on. The grin became cold and wolfish as Hendrick sat without moving. Open it, kaffir. Let's see what you are hiding!

It had never failed him yet. Even the most docile of men would react to protect their belongings, no matter how worthless and insignificant.

Slowly Hendrick leaned forward and untied the neck of the leather sack. Then he straightened again and sat passively.

The white overseer stooped, seized the bottom of the sack and straightened up again, never taking his eyes off Hendrick's face. He shook the sack vigorously, spilling the contents onto the floor.

The blanket roll fell out first, and using the toe of his boot the overseer spread it open. There was a sheepskin gilet and other spare clothing in the roll, and a nine-inch knife in a leather sheath.

Dangerous weapon, said the overseer. You know that no dangerous weapons are allowed in the coaches. He picked up the knife, pressed the blade into the niche of the window and snapped it off; then he tossed the two separate pieces out between the bars of the window behind Hendrick's head.