Power of the Sword c-10

by Wilbur Smith

  it took eight days to make the journey to Johannesburg.

  He had not deliberately set out for the Witwatersrand, but circumstances and the whim of his helpers led him that way. By rail and truck and, later, when the wound began to heal and his strength returned, at night and on foot across the open veld, he at last reached the city.

  He had an address, his last contact with the brotherhood and he took the tramcar from the main railway station along the Braamfontein ridge and watched the street numbers as they passed.

  The number he needed was 36. It was one in a row of semi-detached cottages, and he started to rise to leave the tramcar at the next stop.

  Then he saw the blue police uniform in the doorway of number 36 and he sank down in his seat again and rode the tramcar to its terminus.

  He left it there and went into a Greek cafe across the road.

  He ordered a cup of coffee, paying for it with his last few coins, and sipped it slowly, hunched over the cup, trying to think.

  He had avoided a dozen police roadblocks and searches in these last eight days, but he sensed that he had exhausted his luck. There was no hiding-place open to him any longer.

  The road led from here on to the gallows.

  He stared out of the greasy plate-glass window of the cafe

  and the street sign across the road caught his eye. Something stirred in his memory, but it eluded his first efforts to grasp it. Then suddenly he felt the lift of his spirits and another weak glimmer of hope.

  He left the cafe and followed the road whose name he had recognized. The area deteriorated quickly into a slum of shanties and hovels and he saw no more white faces on the rutted unmade street. The black faces at the windows or in the reeking alleyways watched him impassively across that unfathomable void which separates the races in Africa.

  He found what he was looking for. It was a small general dealer's store crowded with black shoppers, noisy and laughing, the women with their babies strapped upon their backs, bargaining across the counter for sugar and soap, paraffin and salt, but the hubbub descended into silence when a white man entered the shop, and they gave way for him respectfully, not looking directly at him.

  The proprietor was an elderly Zulu with a fluffy beard of white wool, dressed in a baggy Western-style suit. He left the black woman he was serving and came to Manfred, inclining his head deferentially to listen to Manfred's request.

  Come with me, Nkosi. He led Manfred through to the storeroom at the back of the shop.

  You will have to wait, he said, perhaps a long time, and he left him there.

  Manfred slumped down on a pile of sugar sacks. He was hungry and exhausted and the shoulder was starting to throb again. He fell asleep and was roused by a hand on his shoulder and a deep voice in his ear.

  How did you know where to look for me? Manfred struggled to his feet. My father told me where to find you, he answered. Hello, Swart Hendrick It has been many years, little Manie. The big Ovambo grinned at him through the black gap of missing teeth; his head, laced with scars, was black and shiny as a cannonball.

  Many years, but I never doubted we would meet again.

  Never once in all those years. The gods of the wilderness have bound us together, little Manie. I knew you would come. The two men sat alone in the back room of Swart Hendrick's house. it was one of the few brick-built dwellings in the shanty town of Drake's Farm. However, the bricks were unbaked and the building was not so ostentatious as to stand out from the hovels that crowded close around it. Swart Hendrick had long ago learned not to draw the attention of the white police to his wealth.

  In the front room the women were cooking and working, while the children bawled or shouted with laughter round their feet. As befitted his station in life, Swart Hendrick had six town wives who lived together in an amiable symbiotic relationship. The possessive jealousy of monogamistic western women was totally alien to them. Senior wives took a major part in the selection of the junior wives and gained considerable prestige from their multiplicity, nor did they resent the maintenance sent to the country wives and their offspring or their spouse's periodic visits to the country kraal to add to the number of those offspring. They considered themselves all part of one family. When the children from the country were old enough to be sent into the city for the furtherance of their education and fortune, they found themselves with many fostermothers and could expect the same love and discipline as they had received in the kraal.

  The smaller children had the run of the house and one of them crawled mother-naked into Swart Hendrick's lap as he sat on his carved stool the sign of rank of a tribal chieftain.

  Although he was deep in discussion with Manfred, he fondled the little one casually, as he would a favourite puppy, and when the beer pot was empty, he clapped his hands and one of the junior wives, the pretty moon-faced Zulu or the nubile Basuto with breasts as round and hard as ostrich eggs would bring in a new pot and kneel before Hendrick to present it to him.

  So, little Manie, we have spoken of everything, and said all that is to be said, and we come back to the same problem. Swart Hendrick lifted the beer pot and swallowed a mouthful of the thick white bubbling gruel. He smacked his lips, then wiped the half moon of beer from his upper lipwith the back of his forearm and handed the pot across to Manfred.

  That problem is this. At every railway station and on every road the white police are searching for you. They have even offered a price for you, and what a price, little Manie. They will give five thousand pounds for you. How many cattle and women could a man buy with that amount of money? He broke off to consider the question and shook his head in wonder at the answer. You ask me to help you to leave Johannesburg and to cross the great river in the north. What would the white police do if they caught me? Would they hang me on the same tree as they hang you, or would they only send me to break rocks in the prison of Ou Baas Smuts and King Georgy? Swart Hendrick sighed theatrically. It is a heavy question, little Manie. Can you give me an answer? You have been as a father to me, Hennie, Manfred said quietly. Does a father leave his son for the hyena and the vultures? 'if I am your father, little Manie, why then is your face white and mine black? Hendrick smiled. There are no debts between us, they were all paid long ago. My father and you were brothers. How many summers have burned since those days, Hendrick mourned the passage of time with a sorrowful shake of his head. And how the world and all those in it have changed. There is one thing that never changes, not even over the years, Hennie. What is that, oh child with a white face who claims my paternity? A diamond, my black father. A diamond never changes., Hendrick nodded. Let us speak then of a diamond. Not one diamond, Manfred said. Many diamonds, a bagful of diamonds that lie in a faraway place that only you and I know of. The risks are great, Hendrick told his brother. And doubt lurks in my mind like a man-eating lion lying in thick bush.

  Perhaps the diamonds are where the white boy says they are, but the lion of doubt still waits for me. The father was a devious man, hard and without mercy, I sense that the son has grown to be like the father. He speaks of friendship between us, but I no longer feel the warmth in him., Moses Gama stared into the fire; his eyes were dark and inscrutable. He tried to kill Smuts, he mused aloud. He is of the hard Boers like those of old, the ones that slaughtered our people at Blood river and shattered the power of the great chiefs. They have been defeated this time, as they were in 1914, but they have not been destroyed. They will rise to fight again, these hard Boers, when this white men's war across the sea ends, they will call out their impis and carry the battle to Smuts and his party once again. It is the way of the white man, and I have studied his history, that when peace comes, they often reject those who fought hardest during the battle. I sense that in the next conflict the whites will reject Smuts and that the hard Boers will triumph, and this white boy is one of them., You are right, my brother, Hendrick nodded. I had not looked that far into the future. He is the enemy of our people. If he and his kind come to power then we will learn a bitte
r lesson in slavery. I must deliver him to the vengeance of those who seek after him. Moses Gama raised his noble head and looked across the fire at his elder brother.

  It is the weakness of the multitudes that they cannot see the horizon, their gaze is fixed only as far ahead as their bellies or their genitals, Moses said. You have admitted to that weakness, why, my brother, do you not seek to rise above it? Why do you not raise your eyes and look to the future? I do not understand!

  The greatest danger to our people is their own patience and passivity. We are a great herd of cattle under the hand of a cunning herdsman. He keeps us quiescent with a paternal despotism, and most of us, knowing no better, are lulled into an acceptance which we mistake for contentment. Yet the herdsman milks us and at his pleasure eats of our flesh.

  He is our enemy, for the slavery in which he holds us is so insidious that it's impossible to goad the herd to rebel against it. 'If he is our enemy, what of these others that you call the hard Boers? Hendrick was perplexed. Are they not a fiercer ?

  enemy Upon them will depend the ultimate freedom of our people. They are men without subtlety and artifice. Not for them the smile and kind word that disguises the brutal act.

  They are angry men filled with fear and hatred. They hate the Indians and the Jews, they hate the English, but most of all they hate and fear the black tribes, for we are many and they are few. They hate and fear us because they have what is rightly ours, and they will not be able to conceal their hatred. When they come to power, they will teach our people the true meaning of slavery. By their oppressions, they will transform the tribes from a herd of complacent cattle into a great stampede of enraged wild buffalo before whose strength nothing can stand. We must pray for this white boy of yours and all he stands for. The future of our people depends upon him. Hendrick sat for a long time staring into the fire, and then slowly raised his great bald head and looked at his brother with awe.

  I sometimes think, son of my father, that you are the wisest man of all our tribe, he whispered.

  Swart Hendrick sent for a sangoma, a tribal medicine man.

  He made a poultice for Manfred's shoulder that when applied, hot and evil-smelling, proved highly efficacious and within ten days Manfred was fit to travel again.

  The same sangoma provided a herbal dye for Manfred's skin which darkened it to the exact hue of one of the northern tribes. The eyes, Manfred's yellow eyes, were not a serious handicap. Amongst the black mine workers who had worked out their Wenela contract and were returning home, there were certain symbols which confirmed their status as sophisticated men of the world, tin trunks to hold the treasures they had acquired, the pink post office savings books filled with the little numbers of their accumulated wealth, the silver metal mine helmets which they were allowed to retain and which would be worn with pride everywhere from the peaks of Basutoland to the equatorial forests, and lastly a pair of sunglasses.

  Manfred's travel papers were issued by one of Hendrick's Buffaloes, a clerk in the pay office of ERPM, and they were totally authentic. He wore his dark sunglasses when he boarded the Wenela train and his skin was dyed the same hue as the black workers who surrounded him closely. All these men were Hendrick's Buffaloes, and they kept him protected in their midst.

  He found it strange but reassuring that the few white officials that he encountered on the long slow journey back to South West Africa, seldom looked at him directly. Because he was black, their gaze seemed to slide by his face without touching it.

  Manfred and Hendrick left the train at Okahandja and with a group of other workers climbed onto the bus for the final hot dusty miles to Hendrick's kraal. Two days later they set out again, this time on foot, heading north and east into the burning wilderness.

  There had been good rains during the previous season and they found water in many of the pans in the southern Kavango and it was two weeks before they saw the kopjes humped like a caravan of camels out of the blue heat haze along the desert horizon.

  Manfred realized as they tramped towards the hills how alien he was in this desert. Hendrick and his father had belonged here, but since childhood Manfred had lived in towns and cities. He would never have been able to find his way back without Hendrick's guidance; indeed he would not have survived more than a few days in this harsh and unforgiving land without the big Ovambo.

  The kopje that Hendrick led Manfred towards seemed identical to all the others. It was only when they scaled the steep granite side and stood upon the summit, that the memories came crowding back. Perhaps they had been deliberately suppressed, but now they emerged again in stark detail. Manfred could almost see his father's features ravaged by fever and smell again the stench of gangrene from his rotting flesh. He remembered with fresh agony the harsh words of rejection with which his father had driven him to safety, but he closed his mind to the ache of them.

  Unerringly he went to the crack that split the granite dome and knelt over it, but his heart sank when he peered down and could distinguish nothing in the deep shadows that contrasted with the sunlight and its reflection from the rock around him.

  ,so they have gone, these famous diamonds, Hendrick chuckled cynically when he saw Manfred's dismay. Perhaps the jackals have eaten them. Manfred ignored him and from his pack brought out a roll of fishing-line. He tied the lead sinker and the stout treble fish hook to the end and lowered it into the crack, Patiently he worked, jigging the hook along the depth of the crack while Hendrick squatted in the small strip of shade under the summit boulders and watched him without offering encouragement.

  The hook snagged something deep in the crack, and cautiously Manfred applied pressure on the line. It held and he took a twist around his wrist and pulled upwards with gradually increasing strength.

  Something gave, and then the hook pulled free. He drew the line in hand over hand. One point of the treble hook had opened under the strain, but there was a shred of rotted canvas still attached to the barb.

  He bent the tine of the hook back into shape and lowered it once again into the crack. He plumbed the depths, working each inch from side to side and up and down. Another half hour of work and he felt the hook snag again.

  This time the weight stayed on it, and he eased the line in, an inch at a time. He heard something scraping on the rough granite, then slowly a shapeless lumpy bundle came into view deep down. He lifted it slowly, holding his breath as it came up the last few feet. Then as he swung it clear, the canvas of the old rucksack burst open and a cascade of glittering white stones spilled onto the granite top around him.

  They divided the diamonds into two equal piles as they had agreed, and drew lots for the first choice. Hendrick won and made his selection. Manfred poured his share into the empty tobacco pouch he had brought for the purpose.

  You told the truth, little Manie, Hendrick admitted. I was wrong to doubt you. The following evening they reached the river and slept side by side beside the fire. in the morning they rolled their blankets and faced each other.

  Goodbye, Hennie. Perhaps the road will bring us together again. 'I have told you, little Manie, that the gods of the wilderness have linked us together. We will meet again, that I am certain of. I look forward to that day. The gods alone will decide whether we meet again as father and son, as brothers, or as deadly enemies, Hendrick said and slung his pack over his shoulder. Without looking back he walked away into the southern desert.

  Manfred watched him out of sight, then he turned and followed the bank of the river into the north-west. That evening he came upon a village of the river people. Two of the young men in their dugout canoe ferried him across to the Portuguese side. Three weeks later Manfred reached Luanda, capital of the Portuguese colony, and rang the bell on the wrought-iron gates of the German consulate.

  He waited in Luanda three weeks for orders from the German Abwehr in Berlin, and slowly it dawned upon him that the delay was deliberate.

  He had failed in the task they had set him, and in Nazi Germany failure was unforgivable.r />
  He sold one of the smallest diamonds from his hoard at a fraction of its real value and waited out his punishment.

  Each morning he called at the German consulate and the military attached turned him away with barely concealed contempt.

  No orders yet, Herr De La Rey. You must be patient. Manfred spent most of his days in one of the water-front cafes and his nights in his cheap lodgings, endlessly going over each detail of his failure, or thinking about Uncle Tromp and Roelf in the concentration camp, or about Heidi and the child in Berlin.

  His orders came at last. He was issued a German diplomatic passport and he sailed on a Portuguese freighter as far as the Canary islands. From there he flew on a civilian Junkers aircraft with Spanish markings to Lisbon.

  In Lisbon he encountered the same deliberate contempt.

  He was dismissed casually to find his own lodgings and await those orders which seemed never to come. He wrote personal letters to Colonel Sigmund Boldt and to Heidi.

  Although the consulate attache assured him that these had gone out in the diplomatic bag to Berlin, he received no reply.

  He sold another small diamond and rented pleasant spacious; lodgings in an old building on the bank of the Tagus river, passing the long idle days in reading, study and writing.

  He began work on two literary projects simultaneously, a political history of southern Africa and an autobiography, both for his own edification and with no intention of ever publishing. He learned Portuguese, taking lessons from a retired schoohnaster who lived in the same building. He kept up a rigorous physical training schedule, as though he were still boxing professionally, and he came to know all the secondhand book stores of the city where he purchased every law book he could find and read them in German, English and Portuguese. But still the time hung heavily on his hands and he chafed at his inability to take part in the conflict that raged around the globe.