Men of Men b-2

by Wilbur Smith

  She crawled forward cautiously, lifting her abdomen clear of the sand, stepping on the spiked toes of her ranked legs, and then freezing as she saw her adversary across the cage. Her multiple jewelled eyes were sparkling like chips of black diamond.

  Goliath sensed her presence and leaped high, turned in the air and landed facing her. The two spiders confronted each other across the smoothly swept floor of white river sand, and only now was the difference in their sizes apparent. Goliath was enormous, swelling in rage, the long silken mane of burnished hair rising like the quills of a porcupine to enhance her size as she began to dance her challenge to her smaller adversary.

  Immediately Inkosikazi replied to the challenge, raising and lowering her abdomen in time to the rhythmic swaying of her carapace, lifting her legs in pairs and weaving them with an awful grace, like the many-armed Hindu god, Shiva.

  An utter silence had fallen on the watchers as they strained to catch every nuance of this stylized dance of death, and then a lust-choked roar burst from them as Goliath sprang.

  She exploded into flight, soaring with her talons fully extended, clearing the length of the arena without effort and landing precisely where Inkosikazi had stood a thousandth part of a second before. Inkosikazi had evaded that flashing leap with a bouncing side jump of her own, and now she faced the huge enraged creature and danced her defiance.

  The dazzling agility of these great spiders was, the essential attraction that drew such a following of eager spectators. There was no preliminary bracing or crouchigo ing to herald one of those swallowlight bounds. The spiders fired themselves like bullets, suddenly and unerringly at their rival, and reacted as swiftly to the counterattack. Then between each onslaught that mesmeric and chilling dance resumed.

  Jee! Jee!" The tightly drawn silence was interrupted by the chilling, killing cry of a Matabele warrior.

  "Jee! Jee!"The deep hissing chorus that had carried a black wave of naked bodies across a continent, a wave crested by the plumes of the war bonnets and lit by the glitter of the bright silver assegais.

  Bazo had not been able to skulk in the alley beyond the square. He had edged forward into the crowd until he reached the wagons, but as the conflict mounted, so had his warrior passions. He thrust forward through the packed ranks and now he was in the forefront, and he could not contain himself further.

  Jee! Jee!"He hissed his battle cry, and Ralph found himself echoing it.

  Inkosikazi was fighting instinctively, reacting mindlessly to the presence of another female in deadly sexual rivalry. It was the waving arms of the gigantic female across the cage which infuriated her, and it was mere coincidence that her first attacking leap was synchronized with the war chant.

  Twice she launched herself, and twice Goliath gave her ground. and then on her third leap Inkosikazi vaulted too high and touched the glass roof of the arena. The impact broke the perfect parabola of her flight, and she fell short and out of balance, scrabbling frantically in the fine white sand as Goliath saw her chance and flew in for the kill.

  The men howled with cruel glee, the women trilled with delicious horror as the two huge furry bodies came together chest to chest and entangled each other's limbs in a hideous octopus embrace.

  The impetus of Goliath's leap sent them rolling across Igi the arena like an india-rubber ball, until they struck the far wall and wrestled in a flurry of serpentine limbs. Both their long hooked fangs were fully erect, and they slashed at each other with their hairy wolf mouths, the needle points of the fangs striking the impenetrable shiny armour of carapace and jointed legs, glancing off the polished surface and leaving minute dribbles of colourless honey-thick venom on each other's chests.

  Instinctively they were holding their vulnerable abdomens clear, while straining to tear from the embrace for a chance to strike into the soft skin of the other. They came up on their hind legs and wrestled together, and immediately Goliath's weight began to take effect.

  With a sharp crackling sound, like a walnut in the jaw of a silver nutcracker, one of Inkosikazi's legs was torn bodily from the joint of her carapace, and she jerked convulsively, contracting her soft belly in a dreadful spasm.

  "Kill her! Rip her to pieces!" screamed the pretty blond girl, and tore at her perfumed silk handkerchief, shredding it between her fingers. Her face was swollen and inflamed and her eyes wild.

  Goliath shifted the grip of her many legs, groping for a soft spot into which to plunge the jerking red fang.

  "Jee! Jee!"sang Bazo, his eyes bloodshot with passion, and Inkosikazi strained with all her remaining legs to break the grip that was slowly smothering her under the huge hairy body. Again there was that grisly crackling, one of her front legs broke off in a little spurt of body juices, and instinctively Goliath lifted the severed limb to her mouth.

  The distraction was sufficient, and Inkosikazi tore herself free and bounded halfway across the arena, landing in an unbalanced sprawl, her body fluids oozing from the leg stumps, but gathering herself swiftly. Goliath was still worrying the severed legs, the smell of her opponent's blood enrapturing her so that she mouthed the twitching limbs, striking at them with her fang, her full attention upon them, and Inkosikazi rebounded like a rubber ball thrown against a brick wall.

  She dropped lightly onto Goliath's broad furry back, locked in with her remaining legs, and then plunged the long blood-red fang into Goliath's abdomen, her head pumping as she forced a steady gush of poison into the bloated body.

  Goliath's body arched, her long jointed legs straightened into an agonized rictus, and the balloon of her belly spasmed and convulsed as the venom pulsed into her.

  Crouched upon her back like some grotesque incubus, Inkosikazi squirted in the fatal fluid until the bigger creature's limbs wilted and crumpled under her and her belly sagged gradually to the white sand of the arena.

  In the roaring consternation of disappointed punters and squeaks of women, both loathing and gloating at the same time, Ralph and Bazo rushed together and embraced with whoops of triumph. In the glassed arena Inkosikazi slowly withdrew the long curved hypodermic fang. Her venom not only paralysed and killed but also liquefied the body tissue of her prey. Her jaws opened and then locked into the jelly-soft passive body beneath her, and her own abdomen began to swell and subside as she sucked her vanquished adversary's fluids from her while she still lived.

  Ralph broke from the embrace of Bazo's thickly muscled arms.

  "Get her out of the cage," he told him. "I'll go and get the money."

  Bazo bore the basket high on the return from the conflict. His bare-chested Matabele ran behind him, in that floating stylized gait, half dance, half trot, and they brandished their fighting sticks and sang the praise song which Kamuza had composed in Inkosikazi's honour: "See with your thousand eyes, Hold hard with many arms of steel, Kiss with your long red assegai, Taste the blood, is it not richer than the milk of Mzilikazi's herds?

  Taste the blood, is it not sweeter than the wild honey in the comb?

  Bayete! Bayete!

  Royal greetings, Black Queen, Loyal greetings, Great Queen."

  Ralph dearly wanted to run with them in that triumphant procession, but he knew what his father would say if he heard that his son had joined such a barbaric display through the dusty streets, past the very portals of the Kimberley Club where Zouga Ballantyne was almost certainly passing his Sunday afternoon.

  Ralph followed them in a fashion that better suited Zouga's idea of how a young English gentleman should comport himself, but his cap was on the back of his head, his hands were thrust deeply into pockets jingling the gold coin, and there was a beatific grin on his face.

  The smile broadened further as a familiar big-gutted figure rolled out through the doors of Diamond Lil's canteen.

  "mister Ballantyne," bellowed Barry Lennox across the street. "mister Ballantyne, will you do me the very great honour of taking a glass with me?"

  "Enchanted indeed, sir." Ralph felt cocky enough to reply facetiously, and Le
nnox guffawed and flung an arm around Ralph's shoulders and led him into the canteen.

  Ralph looked about him quickly; it was the first time he had ever entered a place such as this. He hoped to see naked women dancing on the tables and gamblers in flowered waistcoats fanning open hands full of aces and kings and sweeping up pots of gold sovereigns.

  The only partially nude figure was that of Charlie, the undertaker, snoring on the sawdust floor with his shirt open to his hairy belly button; and the gamblers were all familiar faces, men beside whom Ralph worked every day on the stagings or in the pit. They were dressed in their work clothes and the cards were dog-eared and greasy and the pot was a small pile of copper and worn silver.

  "Ralph," said one of them, looking up. "Your daddy know where you are?"

  "Does yours?" Ralph shot back, the cockiness unabated.

  "And do you know who he is?"

  There was a hoot of laughter from the others, and the man grinned good-naturedly. "Damn me, but the boy has a sharp enough tongue."

  "Give my sporting friend a beer," Lennox told the barman, and he looked dubious.

  "How old is your sporting friend?"

  "He will be forty years old on one of his future birthdays. However, sir, I consider that question to be a direct slur on my sporting friend's honour. I have broken jaws that asked less impertinent questions."

  "Two beers coming up, mister Lennox."

  Barry Lennox and Ralph saluted each other with the schooners, and Lennox gave them a toast.

  "To a lady of our mutual acquaintance, bless her bright eyes and all her lovely legs."

  The beer was faintly warm and tasted like soap and quinine, but Ralph forced down a mouthful and smacked his lips appreciatively. He would have much preferred a cool green bottle of ginger beer with a pop up marble in the neck.

  "Cigar?" Lennox opened his silver case, and Ralph hesitated only a moment, then selected one of the thick Havanas and bit off the end in a faithful imitation of Zouga Ballantyne.

  He sucked from the Vesta that Lennox held for him, and cautiously held the smoke in his mouth. That was the last draw he took, and after that he used the cigar like a conductor's baton, waving it airily and creating about himself a cloud of perfumed blue without actually touching it to his lips again. Somehow he was able to impart the impression of swagger while standing at the rough-sawn bar counter.

  I mean, anybody knows the classic Zulu battle tactics. They wait for bad ground and thick bush, there are few soldiers who use cover and defilade the way they do." Ralph sipped his beer and waved his cigar as he discussed Lord Chelmsford's current campaign against the Zulu King Cetewayo. The views he was expressing were those of Zouga Ballantyne, learned by heart and unadulterated; so though his listeners winked and nudged at his pretensions, they could not fault his logic. "The device of decoying Chelmsford's flying column out of the camp and then doubling back to destroy the base with its depleted defences is as old as Chaka Zulu himself.

  Chelmsford was at fault, there, no doubt on it."

  There was a gloomy shaking of heads, as there always was when anyone mentioned the catastrophic reversal of British arms that Chelmsford had been manoeuvred into at the Hill of the Little Hand, Isandhlwana, across the Buffalo River in Zululand.

  The corpses of seven hundred British dead, militia and regular regiments, had already lain for six months on the bleak grassland below the little hill. Lord Chelmsford had abandoned the field, and his dead lay where they had fallen, their bellies ripped open by Zulu assegais to allow their souls to escape, the litter of wagons and broken equipment scattered about them, their flesh taken off the bone by vulture and jackal and hyena.

  The thought of leaving British soldiers unburied on the battlefield seemed to threaten the very foundation of the greatest empire the world had ever known.

  "Chelmsford must retake the field," said one of the men at the bar.

  "No, sir," Ralph shook his head firmly. "That will be inviting another disaster for a sentimental gesture."

  "What do you propose, mister Ballantyne?" the man asked sarcastically.

  "A page from the Boer book." Ralph had an audience of grown men listening to him, perhaps not with respect, but at least with attention. This was heady stuff, even though the ideas were his father's, and Ralph threw in an oat. "By God! those boers know ow to fight the tribes. Mounted men as a screen around a column of wagons that can be thrown into laager within minutes.

  Go for the heart of the Zulu nation, their cattle herds pull the impis into the open, make them come in across good shooting ground against the laagered wagons -" Ralph did not finish his plan of battle; abruptly he lost his sequence of ideas and began to stutter like an idiot, a blush darkening his tanned, handsome young face.

  Barry Lennox followed the direction of Ralph's gaze, and then he grinned delightedly.

  Diamond Lil had entered the canteen through the rear door. It was six o'clock in the evening and an hour before she had risen, stretching and yawning like a sleepy leopard, from the brass bed in the darkened room behind the canteen.

  A servant had filled the enamelled hip bath with buckets of steaming water, and Lil had poured in a vial of perfume before stepping into the bath and settling luxuriously into the fragrant water, shouting for her canteen manager.

  She listened attentively, a small frown cracking the perfect pale skin of her forehead, as he recited the figures of the previous night's take, his eyes averted from the white skin of her shoulders and the tight pink-tipped bosom that peeked through the hot suds. Then she had dismissed him with a wave of her hand and stepped naked from the bath, glowing pinkly from the hot water, her steam-damp hair dangling down the sleek white body. She poured a little gin into a coloured Venetian glass and sipped it neat as she started the powdering and the painting, rolling her eyes at herself in the mirror, practising her professional smile with the tiny diamond twinkling in the centre of the wide display of white teeth, then, at last, considering herself levelly and appraisingly.

  She was twenty-three years old, and she had come a long hard way from the house in Mayfair where Madame Hortense had sold her maidenhood to an elderly Whig minister of state for one hundred guineas. She had been thirteen years old then, only ten years ago, but it seemed like a dozen lifetimes.

  The house in Mayfair was truly the only home she had ever known, and she often thought back with nostalgia to those days. Madame Hortense had treated her more like a daughter than a house girl. There was always a pretty bonnet or a new dress on her birthday and at Christmas, and she had had special privileges. Lil would ever be grateful for what she learned about men and money and power from Hortense.

  Then one Saturday evening a half dozen young officers from a famous cavalry regiment, celebrating their orders for foreign service, had visited the house in Mayfair.

  Amongst them was a young captain, dashing, rich and beautiful; he saw Lil across the salon the moment he entered. Ten days later Lil had sailed with him for India on the Peninsular and Orient mailship, while Madame Hortense wept on the quay and waved until the ship cleared the pool of London and disappeared beyond the first bend of the river. Forty days later Lil found herself abandoned by her protector.

  From an upper window of the Mount Nelson Hotel in Cape Town she watched her cavalry captain's ship clear Table Bay for Calcutta, her sorrow at parting alleviated by the luxurious surroundings in which her protector had left her. Lil shrugged off her grief, drank a glass of igs gin, bathed and re-painted her face, then sent for the manager.

  "i cannot pay my bill," she told him and, taking his hand " led him unprotestingly into the bedroom of her suite.

  "Madame, may I give you some advice?" he asked a little later as he retied his Ascot and shrugged into his waistcoat.

  "Good advice is always welcome, sir."

  "There is a place called New Rush five hundred miles north of here and there are five thousand diggers there, each with a pocket full of diamonds."

  Now Lil entered her cant
een. It was still early for a Sunday. It was one of the things she had learned from Madame Hortense, always be there long before you are expected. It keeps clients satisfied and employees honest.

  Quickly she checked her clientele. It was the usual Sunday afternoon crowd. It would be better soon. She stooped and counted the bottles under the bar counter, examining the wax seals to make certain they had not been tampered with.

  "Never be greedy, darling," Hortense had taught her.

  "Water the beer, they expect that, but keep good whisky."

  She straightened and opened the huge ornate cash register with a chime of bells, making certain that it flagged the correct price, and then touched the line of gold sovereigns in their special slotted drawer. The metal had a marvellous feel under her fingertips, and she picked up a coin as though merely to feel the weight and take pleasure from it. Gold was the only thing in all the world she trusted. Her barman was watching her in the mirror as he swabbed the counter top; she pretended to replace the sovereign in its slot, letting it clink and then palmed it smoothly and closed the drawer of the register. The barman was new. It would be interesting to see if he covered the shortage or reported it, little things like that had made her rich at the age of twenty-three.

  She glanced up into the mirror, once again appraising her own face and shoulders in the less flattering sunlight that streamed into the canteen. Her eyes were sharp as a stropped razor, but the skin around them was clear and fresh as rose petals without the first sign of wrinkling.

  "You will wear well, my dear," Hortense had told her, "if you use the gin and don't let it use you." She had been right, Lil decided. She looked as she had when she was sixteen years old.

  She shifted her gaze from her own face, and swept the canteen. The mirror was imperfect, and the silvering was beginning to go in dark spots, slightly distorting the young face that was watching her intently. Her gaze flicked over it, and then came back.