Power of the Sword c-10

by Wilbur Smith

  When you have done that, my brother, we will be ready to go on to do what we have to do. Swart Hendrick was a man of great strength, both physical and mental. He feared very little, would attempt anything and suffer much for what he wanted, but always he had followed someone else. Always there had been a man even fiercer and more fearless than he to lead him.

  We will do as you say, my brother, he agreed, and he knew instinctively that he had found someone to replace the man he had left to die upon a rock in the desert.

  I will wait here until the sun rises tomorrow, Swart Hendrick told the white boy. If you do not return by then, I will know you are safe. ,Will I see you again, Hennie? Manie asked wistfully, and Hendrick hesitated on the brink of empty promise.

  I think that our feet will be on different paths from now on, Manie. He reached out and placed a hand on Manfred's shoulder. But I shall think of you often, and, who knows, one day the paths may come together again. He squeezed the boy's shoulder and he noticed that it was sheathed in muscle, like that of a man full grown. Go in peace, and be a man like your father was. He pushed Manfred away lightly, but the white boy lingered. Hendrick, he whispered, there are many things I want to say to you, but I do not have the words.

  Hendrick said. We both know. It does not have to be spoken of. Go, Manie. Manfred picked up his pack and blanket roll and stepped out of the undergrowth onto the dusty rutted road. He started down towards the village, towards the spire of the church which he recognized somehow as a symbol of a new existence, that at once both beckoned and repelled him.

  At the bend in the road he looked back. There was no sign of the big Ovambo, and he turned and trudged down the main street towards the church at the far end.

  Without conscious decision he turned from the main street down a side opening and approached the pastory along the sanitary lane as he had done on the last visit with his father. The narrow lane was hedged with fleshy moroto plants, and he whiffed the sanitary buckets behind the little sliding doors of the outhouses that backed onto the lane. He hesitated at the back gate of the pastory and then lifted the latch and started at a snail's pace up the long pathway.

  Halfway along the path he was stopped by a bellow, and he stared about him apprehensively. There was another roar and a loud voice lifted in exhortation or acrimonious argument. It came from a ramshackle building at the bottom of the yard, a large woodshed perhaps.

  Manfred sidled down towards the shed and peered around the jamb of the door. The interior was dark but as his eyes adjusted Manfred saw that it was a toolroom, with an anvil and forge at one end and tools hanging on the walls. The earthen floor was bare and in the centre of it knelt Tromp Bierman, the trumpet of God.

  He was wearing dark suit trousers and a white shirt with the white tie of his office. His suit jacket hung on a pair of blacksmith's tongs above the anvil. Tromp Bierman's bushy beard was pointed to the roof and his eyes were closed, his arms lifted in an attitude of surrender or supplication; but his tone was far from submissive.

  Oh Lord God of Israel, I call upon you most urgently to give answer to your servant's prayers for guidance in this matter. How can I perform your will if I do not know what it is? I am only a humble instrument, I dare not take this decision alone. Look down, oh Lord God, have pity on my ignorance and stupidity and make known your intentions, Tromp broke off suddenly and opened his eyes. The great shaggy leonine head turned, and the eyes, like those of an Old Testament prophet, burned into Manfred's soul.

  Hastily Manfred snatched the shapeless sweatstained hat from his head and held it with both hands to his chest.

  I have come back, Oom, he said. Just like you said I must. Tromp stared at him ferociously. He saw a sturdy lad, broad-shouldered and with powerful shapely limbs, a head of dusty golden curls and contrasting eyebrows black as coal dust over strange topaz-coloured eyes. He tried to see beyond the pale surface of those eyes and was aware of an aura of determination and lucid intelligence that surrounded the youth.

  Come here, he ordered, and Manfred dropped his pack and went to him. Tromp seized him by the hand and dragged him down.

  Kneel, Jong, get down on your knees and give thanks to your Maker. Praise the Lord God of your fathers that he has heard my supplications on your behalf. Dutifully Manfred closed his eyes and clasped his hand.

  Oh Lord, forgive your servant's importunity in bringing to your notice such other trivial matters, when in fact you were occupied with more dire affairs. We thank you for delivering into our care this young person, whom we shall temper and hone into a sword. A mighty blade that shall strike down the Philistine, a weapon that shall be wielded to your glory, in the just and righteous cause of your chosen people, the Afrikaner VoLk. He prodded Manfred with a forefinger like a pruning shear.

  Amen! Manfred gasped at the pain.

  We will glorify and praise you all the days of our life, O Lord, and we beg of you to bestow upon this chosen son of our people the fortitude and the determination, The prayer, punctuated by Manfred's fervent Amens lasted until Manfred's knees ached and he was dizzy with fatigue and hunger. Then suddenly Tromp hauled him to his feet and marched him up the path to the kitchen door.

  Mevrou, the trumpet of God sounded. Where are you, woman? Trudi Bierman rushed breathlessly into the kitchen at the summons and then stopped aghast, staring at the boy in ragged, filthy clothing.

  My kitchen, she wailed. My beautiful clean kitchen. I have just waxed the floor.

  The Lord God has sent this Jong to us, Tromp intoned.

  We will take him into our home. He will eat at our table, he will be as one of our own. But he is filthy as a kaffir. Then wash him, woman, wash him. At that moment a girl slipped timidly through the doorway behind the matronly figure of Trudi Bierman and then stiffened like a frightened fawn as she saw Manfred.

  Manfred barely recognized Sarah. She had filled out, firm well-scrubbed flesh covered her elbows, which had so recently been bony lumps on sticklike arms. Her once pale cheeks were apple pink, the eyes that had been lacklustre were clear and bright, her blond hair, brushed until it shone,

  was plaited into twin pigtails and pinned on top of her head, and she wore long modest but spotless skirts to her ankles.

  She let out a cry and rushed at Manfred with arms outstretched, but Trudi Bierman seized her from behind and shook her soundly.

  You lazy wicked girl. I left you to finish your sums. Back you go this instant. She pushed her roughly from the room and turned back to Manfred, her arms folded and her mouth pursed.

  You are disgusting, she told him. Your hair is long as a girl's. Those clothes, Her expression hardened even more fearsomely. And we are Christian folk in this house. We'll have none of your father's godless wild ways, do you understand? I'm hungry, Aunt Trudi. You'll eat when everybody else eats, and not before you are clean. She looked at her husband. Menheer, will you show the boy how to build a fire in the hotwater geyser? She stood in the doorway of the tiny bathroom and remorselessly supervised his ablutions, brushing aside all his attempts at modesty and his protests at the temperature of the water, and when he faltered, taking the bar of blue mottled soap herself and scrubbing his most tender and intimate creases and folds.

  Then with only a skimpy towel about his waist she led him by the ear down the back steps and sat him on a fruit box. She armed herself with a pair of sheep shears and Manfred's blond hair fell about his shoulders like wheat before the scythe. When he ran his hand over his scalp it was stubbly and bristly and the back of his neck and the skin behind his ears felt cool and draughty.

  Trudi Bierman gathered up his discarded clothing with a pantomime of distaste and opened the furnace of the geyser.

  Manfred was only just in time to rescue his jacket, and when she saw his expression as he backed away from her, holding the garment behind his back and surreptitiously fingering the small lumps in the lining, she shrugged.

  Very well, perhaps with a wash and a few patches. In the meantime I'll find you some of the domini
e's old things. Trudi Bierman took Manfred's appetite as a personal challenge to her kitchen and her culinary skills. She kept heaping his plate even before he had finished, standing over him with a ladle in one hand and the handle of the stew-pot in the other. When at last he fell back satiated, she went to fetch the milk tart from the pantry with a victorious gleam in her eye.

  As strangers in the family, Manfred and Sarah were allocated the lowliest seats in the centre of the table, the two plump, pudding-faced, blond Bierman daughters sitting above them.

  Sarah picked at her food so lightly that she earned Trudi Bierman's ire. I didn't cook good food for you to fiddle with, young lady. You'll sit here as long as it takes you to clean your plate, spinach and all, even if that takes all night., And Sarah chewed mechanically, never taking her eyes from Manfred's face.

  It was the first time that Manfred had paid for a meal with two graces, before and after, and each of them seemed interminable. He was nodding and swaying in his chair when Tromp Bierman startled him fully awake with an Amen like a salvo of artillery.

  The pastory was already groaning at the seams with Sarah and the Bierman offspring. There was no place for Manfred, so he was allocated a corner of the tool-shed at the bottom of the yard. Aunt Trudi had turned a packing case on end to act as a cupboard for his few cast-off items of clothing and there was an iron bed with a hard lumpy coir mattress and a faded old curtain hung on a string to screen his sleeping corner.

  Don't waste the candle, Aunt Trudi cautioned him from the doorway of the tool-shed. You will only get a new one on the first day of each month. We are thrifty folk here.

  None of your father's extravagances, thank you! Manfred pulled the thin grey blanket over his head to protect his naked scalp from the chill. It was the first time in his life that he had had a bed and room of his own and he revelled in the sensation, sniffing the aroma of axle grease and paraffin and the dead coals in the forge as he fell asleep.

  He woke to a light touch on his cheek and cried out confused images rushed out of the darkness to terrify him.

  He had dreamed of his father's hand, reeking of gangrene, that had reached across from the far side of the grave and he struggled up from under the blanket.

  Manie, Manie. It's me. Sarah's voice was as terrified as his own cry had been. She was silhouetted by the moonlight through the single un-curtained window, thin and shivering in a white nightdress, her hair brushed out and hanging to her shoulders in a silvery cloud.

  What are you doing here? he mumbled. You mustn't come here. You must go. If they find you here they will, he broke off. He was not sure what the consequences would be, but he knew instinctively that they would be severe.

  This strange but pleasant new sense of security and belonging would be shattered.

  I've been so unhappy. He could tell by her voice that she was crying. Ever since you went away. The girls are so cruel they call me vuilgoed, "trash". They tease me because I can't read and do sums the way they can and because I speak funny. I've cried every night since you went away. Manfred's heart went out to her, and despite his nervousness at being discovered, he reached out for her and drew her down onto the bed. I'm here now. I'll look after you, Sarie, he whispered. I won't let them tease you any more. She sobbed against his neck, and he told her sternly, I don't want any more crying, Sarie. You aren't a baby any more. You must be brave. I was crying because I was happy, she sniffed.

  No more crying, not even when you are happy, he ordered. Do you understand? And she nodded furiously, and made a little choking sound as she brought her tears under control.

  I've thought about you every day, she whispered. I prayed to God to bring you back like you promised. Can I get into bed with you, Manie? I'm cold. No, he said firmly. You must go back, before they catch you here. Just for a moment, she pleaded and before he could protest she had wriggled around, lifted the blanket and slipped under the corner.

  She wrapped herself around him. The nightdress was thin and worn, her body cold and shivery, and he could not bring himself to chase her out.

  ,Five minutes, he muttered. Then you have to go. Swiftly the heat flowed back into her small body, and her hair was soft against his face and smelt good, like the fur of an unweaned kitten, milky and warm. She made him feel old and important, and he stroked her hair with a paternal proprietary feeling.

  Do you think God answers our prayers? she asked softly.

  I prayed the hardest I know how, and here you are, just like I asked. She was silent a moment. But it took a long time and a lot of prayers. I don't know about prayers, he admitted. My pa never prayed much. He never taught me how. Well, you better get used to it now, she warned him. In this house, everybody prays all the time. When she at last crept out of the tool-shed back to the big house, she left a warm patch on the mattress, and a warmer place in his heart.

  It was still dark when Manfred was roused by a blast from the Trumpet of God in person.

  Ten seconds and then you get a bucket of cold water, long. And Uncle Tromp led him, shivering and covered in goosebumps, to the trough beside the stables.

  Cold water is the best cure for the sins of the young flesh, Jong, Uncle Tromp told him with relish. You will muck out the stables and curry the pony before breakfast, do you hear? The day was a dizzying succession of labour and prayer, the household chores sandwiched between long sessions of school work and even longer sessions on their knees, while either Uncle Tromp or Aunt Trudi exhorted God to step up their performance or visit them with all kinds of retribution.

  Yet by the end of the first week Manfred had subtly rearranged the pecking order amongst the perman younger members of the household. He had quelled the Bierman girls first furtive but concerted attempts at mockery with a steady implacable stare from his yellow eyes, and they retreated in twittering consternation.

  Over the school books it was different. His cousins were all dedicated scholars, with the benefit of a lifetime of enforced study. As Manfred grimly applied himself to the tome of German grammar and Melckes Mathematics for Secondary Schools, their smug self-satisfied smiles at his floundering replies to Aunt Trudi's catechism were all the incentive he needed.

  I'll show them, he promised himself, and he was so committed to the task of catching and overhauling his cousins that it was days before he became aware of how the Bierman girls were victimizing little Sarah. Their cruelty was refined and secretive; a jibe, a name, a mocking face; calculated exclusion from their games and laughter; sabotage of her domestic chores, a soot stain on garments Sarah had just ironed, rumpled linen on a bed she had just made, grease marks on dishes she had washed; and vicious grins when Sarah was chastised for laziness and negligence by Aunt Trudy who was only too pleased to perform this godly duty, with the back of a hairbrush.

  Manfred caught each of the Bierman girls alone. Held them by the pigtails and looked into their eyes from a range of a few inches while he spoke in a soft measured voice that hissed with passion and ended - and don't run and tell tales to your mother, either. Their deliberate cruelty ended with dramatic suddenness, and under Manfred's protection Sarah was left severely alone.

  At the end of that first week, after the fifth church service of a long, tedious Sunday, one of the cousins appeared in the doorway of the tool-shed where Manfred was stretched on his bed with his German grammar.

  My pa wants to see you in his study. And the messenger wrung one hand in a parody of looming disaster.

  Manfred soused his short-cropped hair under the tap and tried to brush it flat in the splinter of mirror wedged above his bed. It immediately sprang up again in damp spikes and he gave up the effort and hurried to answer the summons.

  He had never been allowed into the front rooms of the pastory. They were sacrosanct, and of these the dominie's

  study was the holy of holies. He knew from warnings, repeated by his cousins with morbid relish, that a summons to this room was always associated with punishment and pain. He trembled on the threshold, knowing that Sarah's n
ightly visits to the tool-shed had been discovered, and he started wildly at the bellow that answered his timid knock, then pushed the door open slowly and stepped inside.

  Uncle Tromp stood behind the sombre stinkwood desk, leaning on clenched fists that were placed in the centre of the blotter. Come in, Jong. Shut the door. Don't just stand there! he roared and dropped heavily into his chair.

  Manfred stood before him, trying to form the words of repentance and atonement, but before he could utter them, Uncle Tromp spoke again.

  Well, Jong, I have had reports of you from your aunt. His tone was at odds with his ferocious expression. She tells me that your education has been sadly neglected, but that You are willing and seem to be applying yourself. Manfred sagged with relief so intense that he had difficulty following the long exhortation that followed. We are the underdogs, long. We are the victims of oppression and Milnerism. Manfred knew about Lord Milner from his father; the notorious English governor and opponent of Afrikanderdom under whose decree all children who spoke the Afrikaans language in school were forced to wear a dunce's cap with the legend I am a donkey, I spoke Dutch inscribed upon it. There is Only one way that we can overcome our enemies, Jong. We have to become cleverer and stronger and more ruthless than they are. The Trumpet of God became so absorbed by his own words, that he lifted his gaze to the elaborate patterns of the fancy plastered ceiling and his eyes glazed over with a mixture of religious and political fanaticism, leaving Manfred free to glance around him furtively at the over-furnished room.

  Bookshelves covered three walls, all of them stacked with religious and serious tomes. John Calvin and the authors of the Presbyterian form of church government predominated, though there were works of history and philosophy, law and biography, dictionaries and encyclopaedia and shelves of hymns and collected sermons in High Dutch, German and English.