Текст книги "Power of the Sword"

Автор книги: Wilbur Smith

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He had banished himself into the wilderness of Manchester University, to take up the new science of industrial psychology. In Manchester he had begun a long and lyrically happy liaison with a Jamaican trombone player and allowed his connections with the Party to fall into neglect. However, he was to learn that the Party never forgets its chosen ones and at the age of thirty-one, when he had already made some small reputation for himself in his profession, but when his association with his Jamaican lover had ended acrimoniously and he was dejected and almost suicidal, the Party had reached out one of its tentacles and drawn him gently back into the fold.

They told him that there was an opening in his field with the South African Chamber of Mines working with African Mineworkers. His penchant for black skin was by now an addiction. The infant South African Communist Party was in need of bolstering and the job was his if he wanted. It was implied that he had free choice in the matter, but the outcome was never in doubt and within a month he had sailed for Cape Town.

In the following five years he had done important pioneering work with the Chamber of Mines and had received both recognition and deep satisfaction from it. His connections with the Party had been carefully concealed, but the covert work he had done in this area was even more important, and his commitment to the ideals of Marxism had grown stronger as he grew older and saw at first hand the inhumanities of class and racial discrimination, the terrible abyss that separated the Poor and dispossessed black proletariat from the enormous wealth and privilege of the white bourgeoisie. He had found that in this rich and beautiful land all the gross ills of the human condition flourished as though in a hothouse, exaggerated until they were almost a caricature of evil.

Now Marcus Archer looked at this noble young man with the face of an Egyptian god and a skin of burnt honey, and he was filled with longing.

You speak English, don't you? he asked, and Moses nodded.

Yes, I do, he said softly, and Marcus Archer had to turn away and go back to his dais. His passion was impossible to disguise, and his fingers were trembling as he took up a stick of chalk and wrote upon the blackboard, giving himself a respite to get his emotions under control.

The tests continued for the rest of the afternoon, the subjects gradually being sorted and channelled into their various grades and levels on the results. At the end only one remained in the main stream. Moses Gama had completed the progressively more difficult tests with the same aplomb as he had tackled the first, and Dr Archer realized that he had discovered a prodigy.

At five o'clock the session ended and thankfully the subjects trooped from the classroom; the last hour had taxed even the brightest amongst them. Moses alone had remained undaunted and as he filed past the desk Dr Archer said: Gama! He had taken the name from the register. There is one more task I would like you to attempt., He led Moses down the verandah to his office at the end.

You can read and write, Gama? Yes, Doctor. It is a theory of mine that a man's handwriting can be studied to find the key to his personality, Archer explained.

And I would like you to write for me. They sat side by side at the desk, and Dr Archer set writing materials in front of Moses, chatting easily. This is a standard text I use. On the card he handed Moses was printed the nursery rhyme The Cat and the Fiddle'.

Moses dipped the pen and Archer leaned closer to watch.

His writing was large and fluent, the characters formed with sharp peaks, forward sloping and definite. All the indications of mental determination and ruthless energy were present.

Still studying the handwriting Archer casually laid his hand on Moses thigh, intensely aware of the hard rubbery muscle beneath the velvety skin, and the nib spluttered as Moses started. Then his hand steadied and he went on writing. He finished, laid the pen down carefully, and for the first time looked directly into Marcus Archer's green eyes.

Gama. Marcus Archer's voice shook and his fingers tightened. 'You are much too intelligent to waste your time shovelling ore. He paused and moved his hand slowly up Moses leg.

Moses stared steadily into his eyes. His expression did not change, but he let his thighs fall slowly open, and Marcus Archer's heart was thumping wildly against his ribs.

I want you to work as my personal assistant, Gama, he whispered, and Moses considered the magnitude of this offer.

He would have access to the files of every worker in the gold-mining industry; he would be protected and privileged, free to pass and enter where other black men were forbidden.

The advantages were so numerous that he knew he could not grasp them all in so brief a moment. For the man who made the offer he felt almost nothing, neither revulsion nor desire, but he would have no compunction in paying the price he demanded. If the white man wished to be treated as a woman, then Moses would readily render him this service.

Yes, Doctor, I would like to work for you, he said.

On the last night in the barrack room of the induction centre, Moses called all his chosen lieutenants to him. They clustered around his bunk.

Very soon you will go from here to the Goldi. Not all of you will go together for there are many mines along the Rand. Some of you will go down into the earth, others will work on the surface in the mills and the reduction plants.

We will be separated for a while, but you will not forget that we are brothers. I, your elder brother, will not forget you. I have important work for you. I will seek you out, wherever you are, and you will be ready for me when I summon you. Eh heP they granted in agreement and obedience. We are your younger brothers. We will listen for your voice. You must know always that you are under my protection, that all trespasses against you will be revenged. You have seen what happens to those who give offence to our brotherhood. We have seen it, they murmured. We have seen it, and it is death. it is death, Moses confirmed. It is death also for any of the brotherhood who betray us. It is death for all traitors. Death to all traitors. They swayed together, coming once more under the mesmeric spell which Moses Gama wove about them.

I have chosen a totem for our brotherhood, Moses went on. I have chosen the buffalo for our totem for he is black and powerful and all men fear him. We are the Buffaloes. We are the Buffaloes. Already they were proud of the distinction. We are the black Buffaloes and all men will learn to fear us. These are the signs, the secret signs by which we will recognize our own. He made the sign and then individually clasped their right hands in the fashion of the white man, but the grip was different, a double grip and turn of the second finger. Thus you will know your brothers when they come to you. They greeted each other in the darkened barracks, each of them shaking the hand of all the others in the new way, and it was a form of initiation into the brotherhood.

You will hear from me soon. Until I call, you must do as the white man requires of you. You must work hard and learn. You must be ready for the call when it comes. Moses sent them away to their bunks and he and Hendrick sat alone, their heads together, speaking in whispers.

You have lost the little white stones, Moses told him.

By now the birds and the small beasts will have pecked the loaves and devoured the millet bread. The stones will be scattered and lost; the dust will cover them and the grass will grow over them. They are gone, my brother., Yes. They are gone, Hendrick lamented. After so much blood and striving, after all the hardships we endured, they have been scattered like seeds to the wind. They were accursed, Moses consoled him. From the moment I saw them I knew that they would bring only disaster and death. They are white man's toys. What could you have done with the white man's wealth? If you tried to spend it, if you tried to buy white man's things with it, you would instantly have been marked by the white police.

They would have come for you immediately and there would have been a rope or a jail cell for you. Hendrick was silent, considering the truth of this. What could he have purchased with the stones? Black men could not own their own land. More than a hundred head of cattle and the local chieftain's envy would have been aroused. He already had all the wives, and more, that he wished for, and black men did not drive in motor cars. Black men did not draw attention to themselves in any way, not if they were wise.

No, my brother, Moses told him softly. They were not for you. Thank the spirits of your ancestors that they were wrested from you and scattered back on the earth where they belong. Hendrick growled softly, Still it would have been good to have that treasure, to hold it in my hands, even secretly. There are other treasures even more important than diamonds or white man's gold, my brother. What are these treasures? Hendrick asked.

Follow me and I will lead you to them. But tell me what they are, Hendrick insisted.

You will discover them in good time. Moses smiled. But now, my brother, we must talk of first things; the treasures will follow later.

Listen to me. Borrivu, the red one, my little doctor who likes to be used as a woman, Bomvu has allocated you to the Goldi called Central Rand Consolidated. it is one of the richest of the Goldi, with many deep shafts.

You will go underground, and it is best if you make a name for yourself there. I have prevailed on Bomvu to send ten of our best men from the Buffaloes to CRC with you. These will be your impi, your chosen warriors. You must start with them, but you will build upon them, gathering around you the quick and strong and the fearless. 'What must I do with these men? Hold them in readiness. You will hear from me soon. Very soon. What of the other Buffaloes? Borrivu has sent them, at my suggestion, in groups of ten to each of the other Goldi along the Rand. Small groups of our men everywhere. They will grow, and soon we will be a great black herd of buffaloes which even the most savage lion will not dare to challenge. Swart Hendrick's initial descent in the earth was the first time in his life that he had been frightened witless, unable to speak or think, so terrified that he could not even scream or struggle against it.

The terror began when he was in the long line of black miners, each of them wearing black rubber gumboots and grey overalls, the unpainted silver helmets on their heads fitted with head lanterns. Hendrick shuffled forward in the press of bodies down the ramp between the poles of the crush, like cattle entering an abattoir, stopping and starting forward again. Suddenly he found himself at the head of the line, standing before the steel mesh gate that guarded the entrance to the shaft.

Beyond the mesh he could see the steel cables hanging into the shaft like pythons with shining scales, and over him towered the steel skeleton of the headgear. When he looked up he could see the huge wheels silhouetted against the sky a hundred feet above his head, spinning and stopping and reversing.

Suddenly the mesh gates crashed open and he was carried on the surge of black bodies into the cage beyond. They packed shoulder to shoulder, seventy men. The doors closed, the floor dropped under his feet and stopped again immediately. He heard the tramp of feet over his head and looked up, realizing that the skip was a double decker and that another seventy men were being packed into the top compartment.

Again he heard the clash of closing mesh gates and he started as the telegraph shrilled, four long rings, the signal to descend, and the skip fell away under him, but this time accelerating so violently that his body seemed to come free and his feet lay only lightly on the steel floor plates. His belly was sucked up against his ribs and his terror was unleashed.

In darkness the skip rocketed downwards, drumming and rattling and racing like an express train in a tunnel, and the terror went on and on, minute after minute, eternity after eternity. He felt himself suffocating, crushed by the thought of the enormous weight of rock above him, his ears popping and crackling at the pressure, a mile and then another mile straight down into the earth.

The skip stopped so abruptly that his knees buckled and he felt the flesh of his face sucked down from the bones of his skull, stretching like rubber. The gates crashed open and he was carried out into the main haulage, a cavern walled with glistening wet rock, filled with men, hundreds of men like rats in a sewer, streaming away into the endless tunnels that honeycombed the bowels of the world.

Everywhere there was water, glistening and shining in the flat glare of the electric light, running back in channels on each side of the haulage, squelching under his feet, hidden water drumming and rustling in the darkness or dripping from the jagged rock of the roof. The very air was heavy with water, humid and hot and claustrophobic so that it had a gelatinous texture, seeming to fill his eardrums and deafen him, trickling sluggishly into his lungs like treacle, and his terror lasted all that long march along the drive until they reached the stopes. Here the men split into their separate gangs and disappeared into the shadows.

The stopes were the vast open chambers from which the gold-bearing ore had already been excavated, the hanging wall above supported now by packed pillars of shoring timber, the footwall under them inclined upwards at an angle following the run of the reef.

The men of his gang trudging ahead of him led Hendrick to his station, and here under a bare electric bulb waited for the white shift boss, a burly Afrikaner flanked by his two boss-boys.

The station was a three-sided chamber in the rock, its number on the entrance. There was a long bench against the back wall of the station and a latrine, its open buckets screened by sheets of burlap.

The gang sat on the bench while the boss-boys called the roll, and then the white shift boss asked in Fanakalo, Where is the new hammer boy? and Hendrick rose to his feet.

Cronje, the shift boss, came to stand in front of him. Their eyes were on a level, both big men. The shift boss's nose was crooked, broken long ago in a forgotten brawl, and he examined Hendrick carefully. He saw the broken gap in his teeth and the scars upon his head and his respect was tentative and grudging. They were both hard, tough men, recognizing it in each other. Up there in the sunshine and sweet cool airs they were black man and white man. Down here in the earth they were simply men.

You know the hammer? Cronje asked in Fanakalo.

I know it, Hendrick replied in Afrikaans. He had practised working the hammer for two weeks in the surface training pits.

Cronje blinked and then grinned to acknowledge the use of his own language. I run the best gang of rock breakers on the CRC, he said, still grinning. You will learn to break rock, my friend, or I will break your head and your arse instead. Do you understand? I understand. Hendrick grinned back at him, and Cronje raised his voice.

All hammer boys here! They stood up from the bench, five of them, all big men like Hendrick. It took tremendous physical strength to handle the jack hammers. They were the elite of the rockbreaking gangs, earning almost double wages and bonus for footage, earning also immense prestige from lesser men.

Cronje wrote their names up on the blackboard under the electric bulb: Henry Tabaka at the bottom of the list and Zama, the big Zulu, at number one. When Zama stripped off his jacket and tossed it to his line boy, his great black muscles bulged and gleamed in the stark electric light.

Ha" He looked at Hendrick. So we have a little Ovambo jackal come in yipping from the desert. The men around him laughed obsequiously. Zama was top hammer on the section; evervbody laughed when he made a joke.

I thought that the Zulu baboon scratched his fleas only on the peaks of the Drakensberg so his voice can be heard afar, Hendrick said quietly, and there was a shocked silence for a moment and then a guffaw of disbelieving laughter.

All right, You two big talkers, Cronjeintervened, let's break some rock. He led them from the station up the stope to the rock-face where the gold reef was a narrow grey horizontal band in the jagged wall, dull and nondescript, without the faintest precious sparkle. The gold was locked away in it.

The roof was low; a man had to double over to reach the face; but the stope was wide, reaching away hundreds of metres into the darkness (in either band, and they could hear the other gangs out there along the rockface, their voices echoing and reverberating, their hinterns throwing weird shadows.

Tabaka!" Cronje yelled. Here! He had marked the shot holes to be drilled with splashes of white paint, indicating the inclination anti depth of each hole.

The blast was a Precise and calculated firing of gelignite I charges. The outer holes would be charged with shapers to form the hanging wall and foot wall of the stopc they would fire first, while the pattern of inner shots fired a second later. These were the 'cutters that would kick the ore back and clear it from the face.

Shaya! Cronje yelled at Hendrick. Hit it! and lingered a second to watch as Hendrick stooped to the drill.

it squatted on the rock floor in front of the face, an ungainly tool in the shape of a heavy machine-gun, with long pneumatic hoses attached to it and running back down the slope to the compressed airsystem in the main haulage.

Swiftly Hendrick fitted the twenty-foot-long steel jumpers

bit into the lug of the drill and then he and his line boy dragged the tool to the rockface. It took all the strength of both Hendrick and his assistant to lift the tool and position the point of the drill on the white paint mark for the first cut. Hendrick eased himself into position behind the tool, taking the full weight of it on his right shoulder. The line boy stepped back, and Hendrick opened the valve.

The din was stunning, a stuttering implosion of sound that drove in against the eardrums as compressed air at a pressure of 500 pounds a square inch roared into the drill and slammed the long steel bit into the rock.

Hendrick's entire body shuddered and shook to the drive of the tool against his shoulder but still he leaned his full weight against it. His head jumped on the thick corded column of his neck so rapidly that his vision blurred, but he narrowed his eyes and aimed the point of the drill into the rock at the exact angle that the shift boss had called for.

Water squirted down the hollow drill steel, bubbling out of the hole in a yellow mist, splattering into Hendrick's face.

The sweat burst from his black skin, running down his face as though he were standing under a cloudburst, mingling with the slimy mud pouring down his naked back and scattering like rain as his straining muscles fluttered and jumped to the impulse of the pounding steel drill at his shoulder.

Within minutes the entire surface of his body began to itch and burn. It was the hammer boys affliction; his skin was being scrubbed back and forth a thousand times a minute by the violent shaking motion of the drill, and with each minute the agony became more intense. He tried to close his mind to it but still it felt as though a blowtorch was being played over his body.

The long steel drill sank slowly into the rock until it reached the depth marker painted on it and Hendrick closed the valve. There was no silence for even though his hearing was dulled, as though his eardrums were filled with cotton wool, yet he could still hear the echoes of the drill thunder resounding against the roof of his skull.

7.Ne The line boy ran forward, seized the jumper bit and helped him withdraw it from the first shot hole and reposition the tip on the second daubed paint mark. Once again Hendrick opened the valve and the din and the agony began again.

However, gradually the itching burn of his body blurred into numbness and he felt disembodied as though cocaine had been injected under his skin.

So he stood to the rock all that shift, six hours without let or relief. When it ended and they trooped back from the face, splattered and coated with yellow mud from head to foot and weary beyond pain or feeling, even Zama the great black Zulu was reeling on his feet and his eyes were dull.

In the station Cronje wrote the total of work completed against their names on the blackboard. Zama had drilled sixteen patterns, Hendrick twelve and the next best man ten.

Hau! Zama muttered as they rode up to the surface in the crowded skip. On his very first shift the jackal is number two hammer. And Hendrick had just enough strength to reply: And on his second shift the jackal will be top hammer. it never happened. Not once did he break more rock than the Zulu. But at the end of that first month as Hendrick sat in the company beer hall with the other Ovambos of the Buffalo totem gathered around him, the Zulu came to his table carrying two one-gallon jugs of the creamy effervescent millet beer that the company sold its men. It was thick as porridge, and just as nutritious, though only very mildly alcoholic.

Zama set a one-gallon jug down in front of Hendrick and said: We broke some rock together this month, hey, jackal? And we'll break a lot more together next month, hey, baboon? And they both roared with laughter and raised the beer jugs in unison and drank them dry.

Zama was the first Zulu to become initiated into the brotherhood of the Buffaloes, not as natural as it sounded for tribal barriers, like mountain ranges, were difficult to cross.

It was three months before Hendrick saw his brother again, but by that time Hendrick had extended his influence throughout the entire compound of black mine workers at the CRC mine property. With Zama as his lieutenant, the Buffaloes now encompassed men from many different tribes, Zulus and Shangaans and Matabeles. The only criterion was that the new initiates should be hard reliable men, preferably with some influence over at least a section of the eight thousand odd black miners, and preferably also appointed by the mine administration to positions of authority on the property: clerks or boss-boys or company police.

Some of the men who were approached resisted the brotherhood's overtures. One of these, a senior Zulu bossboy with thirty years service and a misplaced sense of duty to his tribe and the company, fell into one of the ore chutes on the sixtieth level of the main haulage the day after he refused. His body was ground to a muddy paste by the tons of jagged rock that rumbled over it. It seemed that nobody had witnessed the accident.

one of the company police indunas, who also resisted the blandishments of the brotherhood, was found stabbed to death in his sentry box at the main gates to the property, while yet another was burned to death in the kitchens. Three Buffaloes witnessed this last unfortunate incident caused by the victim's own clumsiness and inattention and there were no more refusals.

When at last the messenger came from Moses, identifying himself with the secret sign and handclasp, he bore a summons to a meeting, and Hendrick was able to leave the mine property without check.

By government decree the black mine workers were strictly confined within the barbed-wire fences of the compounds. It was the opinion of both the Chamber of Mines and the Johannesburg city fathers that to let tens of thousands of single black males roam the goldfields at will would invite disaster. They had the salutary lesson of the Chinese before them. In 1904, almost fifty thousand Chinese coolies had been brought into South Africa to fill the huge shortage of unskilled labour for the gold mines. However, the Chinese were much too intelligent and restless to be confined to compounds and restricted to unskilled labour and they were highly organized in their secret long societies. The result was a wave of lawlessness and terror that swept over the goldfields, rapine and robbery, gambling and drugs, so that in 1908, at huge cost, all the Chinese were rounded up and shipped home. The government was determined to avoid a repetition of this terror and the compound system was strictly enforced.

However, Hendrick passed through the gates of the CRC compound as though he were invisible. He crossed the open veld in the starlight until he found the overgrown track and followed it to the old abandoned shafthead. There, parked behind the deserted rusting corrugated iron shed, was a black Ford sedan and as Hendrick approached it cautiously the headlights were switched on, spotlighting Hendrick, and he froze.

Then the lights were switched off and Moses voice called out of the darkness, I see you, my brother. They embraced impulsively and then Hendrick laughed.

Ha! So you drive a motor car now, like a white man. The motor car belongs to Bomvu. Moses led him to it, and Hendrick sank back against the leather seat and sighed comfortably. This is better than walking. Now tell me, Hendrick my brother. What has happened at CRC? And Moses listened without comment until Hendrick finished his long report. Then he nodded.

You have understood my wants. It is exactly as I wished it. The brotherhood must take in men from all the tribes, not just the Ovambo. We must reach to each tribe, each property, every corner of the goldfields. You have said all this before, Hendrick growled, but you have never told me why, my brother. I trust you, but the men I have assembled, the impi you bid me build, they look to me, and they ask one question. They ask me why? What is the profit in this thing? What is there for us in the brotherhood? And what do you answer them, my brother? I tell them they must be patient. Hendrick scowled. I do not know the answer, but I look wise as if I do. And if they nag me, like children, well, then I beat them like children. Moses laughed delightedly, but Hendrick shook his head.

Don't laugh, my brother, I can't go on beating them much longer. Moses clapped his shoulder. Nor will you have to much longer. But tell me now, Hendrick, what is it you have missed most in the months you have worked at CRCV Hendrick answered. The feeling of a woman under me. That you shall have before the night is finished. And what else, my brother? The fire of good liquor in my belly, not the weak slop from the company beerhall. My brother, Moses told him seriously, 'you have answered your own question. These are the things that your men will get from the brotherhood. These are the scraps we will throw our hunting dogs: women and liquor and, of course money, but for those of us at the head of the Buffaloes there will be more, much more. He started the engine of the Ford.

The gold-bearing reefs of the Witwatersrand form a sprawling arc one hundred kilometres in length. The older properties such as East Daggafontein are in the eastern sector of the arc where the reef originally outcropped; the newer properties are in the west where the reef dips away sharply to great depth; but like Blyvooruitzicht, these deep mines are enormously rich. All the mines are laid out along this fabulous crescent, surroun e the urban development which the gold wealth has attracted and fostered.

Moses drove the black Ford southwards, away from the mines and the white man's streets and buildings, and the road they followed quickly narrowed and deteriorated, its surface rutted and riven with pot holes and puddles from the last thunderstorm. it lost direction and began to meander, degenerating into a maze of lanes and tracks.

The street lights of the city were left behind them, but out here there was other illumination: the glow of hundreds of wood fires, their orange light muted by their own drifting smoke banks. There was one of these cooking fires in front of each of the shanties of tarpaper and old corrugated iron that crowded so closely that there were only narrow lanes between them, and there was amongst the shacks a feeling of the presence of many unseen people, as though an army were encamped out here in the open veld.

Where are we? Hendrick asked.

We are in a city that no man acknowledges, a city of people who do not exist. Hendrick glimpsed their dark shapes as the Ford bumped and pitched over the rough track between the shanties and shacks and the headlights swung aimlessly back and forth illuminating little cameo scenes: a group of black children stoning a pariah dog; a body lying beside the track drunk or dead; a woman squatting to urinate in the angle of one of the orrugated iron walls; two men locked in silent deadly combat; a family at one of the fires eating from tins of bully beef, their eyes huge and shining as they looked up startled into the headlights; and other dark shapes scurrying furtively away into the shadows, hundreds of them and the presence of thousands more sensed.

This is Drake's Farm, Moses told him. One of the squatter townships that surround the white man's Goldi. The odour of the amorphous sprawling aggregation of humanity was woodsmoke and sewage, old sweat on hot bodies and charred food on the open wood fires. It was the smell of garbage mouldering in the rain puddles and the nauseating sweetness of bloodsucking vermin in unwashed bedding.

How many live here? Five thousand, ten thousand. Nobody knows, nobody

cares. Moses stopped the Ford and switched off the headlights and the engine.

The silence afterwards was not truly silence; it was the murmur of multitudes like the sea heard at a distance, the mewling of infants, the barking of a cur dog, the sounds of a woman singing, of men cursing and talking and eating, of couples arguing shrilly or copulating, of people dying and defecating and snoring and gambling and drinking in the night.