Men of Men

by Wilbur Smith

  He peered up at Zouga hopefully, and Zouga stared back at him without expression.

  ‘Thank you for your time, sir, and for your sake I hope the gravel lasts.’

  Zouga touched the wide brim of his hat and sauntered away. Jock Danby watched him go, then spat viciously on the yellow ground at his feet and swung the shovel at it as though it were a mortal enemy.

  As he walked away Zouga felt a strange sense of elation. There was a time when he had lived by the turn of a card and the fall of a die, and he felt the gambler’s instinct now. He knew the gravel would not pinch out. He knew it sank down, pure and rich into the depths. He knew it with a deep unshakable certainty, and he knew something else with equal certainty.

  ‘The road to the north begins here.’ He spoke aloud, and felt his blood thrill in his veins. ‘This is where it begins.’

  He felt the need to make an act of faith, of total affirmation, and he knew what it must be. The price of livestock on the diggings was vastly inflated, and his oxen were costing him a guinea a day to water. He knew how to close the road back.

  By mid-afternoon he had sold the oxen: a hundred pounds a head, and five hundred for his wagon. Now he was committed, and he felt the currents of excitement coursing through his body as he paid the gold coin over the raw wooden counter of the tin shack that housed the branch of the Standard Bank.

  The road back was cut. He was chancing it all on the yellow gravel and the road northwards.

  ‘Zouga, you promised,’ Aletta whispered when the buyer came to Zouga’s camp to collect the oxen. ‘You promised that in one week—’ Then she fell silent when she saw his face. She knew that expression. She drew the two boys to her and held them close.

  Jan Cheroot went to each of the animals in turn and whispered to them as tenderly as a lover, and his stare was reproachful as he turned to Zouga while the span was led away.

  Neither man spoke, and at last Jan Cheroot dropped his gaze and walked away, a slight, bare-footed, bow-legged little gnome.

  Zouga thought he had lost him, and he felt a rush of distress, for the little man was a friend, a teacher and a companion of twelve years. It was Jan Cheroot who had tracked his first elephant, and stood shoulder to shoulder with him as he shot it down. Together they had marched and ridden the breadth of a savage continent. They had drunk from the same bottle and eaten from the same pot at a thousand camp fires. Yet he could not bring himself to call him back. He knew that Jan Cheroot must make his own decision.

  He need not have worried. When ‘dop’ time came that evening, Jan Cheroot was there to hold out his chipped enamel mug. Zouga smiled and, ignoring the line that measured his daily ration of brandy, he filled the mug to the brim.

  ‘It was necessary, old friend,’ he said, and Jan Cheroot nodded gravely. ‘They were good beasts,’ he said. ‘But then I have had many fine beasts go from my life, four-legged and two-legged ones.’ He tasted the raw spirit. ‘After a little time and a dram or two, it does not matter so much.’

  Aletta did not speak again until the boys were asleep in the tent.

  ‘Selling the oxen and the wagon was your answer,’ she said.

  ‘It cost a guinea a day to water them, and the grazing has been eaten flat for miles about.’

  ‘There have been three more deaths in the camp. I counted thirty wagons leaving today. It’s a plague camp.’

  ‘Yes.’ Zouga nodded. ‘Some of the claim holders are getting nervous. A claim that I was offered for eleven hundred pounds yesterday was sold for nine hundred today.’

  ‘Zouga, it’s not fair to me or the children,’ she began, but he interrupted her.

  ‘I can arrange a passage for you and the boys with a transport rider. He has sold his stock and he leaves in the next few days. He will take you back to Cape Town.’

  They undressed in darkness and silence, and when Aletta followed him into the hard narrow cot the silence continued until he thought she had fallen asleep. Then he felt her hand, smooth and soft, touch his cheek lightly.

  ‘I am sorry, my darling.’ Her voice was as light as her touch, and her breath stirred his beard. ‘I was so tired and depressed.’

  He took her hand and held the tips of her fingers to his lips.

  ‘I have been such a poor wife to you, always too sick and weak when you needed someone strong.’ Timidly she let her body touch his. ‘And now when I should be a comfort to you, I do nothing but snivel.’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘That’s not true.’ And yet over the years he had resented her often enough for just those reasons. He had felt like a man trying to run with shackles on his ankles.

  ‘And yet I love you, Zouga. I loved you the first day I laid eyes on you, and I have never ceased to love you.’

  ‘I love you too, Aletta,’ he assured her, yet the words came automatically; and to make up for the lack of spontaneity, he placed his arm around her shoulders and she drew closer still and laid her cheek against his chest.

  ‘I hate myself for being so weak and sickly,’ she hesitated, ‘for not being able to be a real wife any more.’

  ‘Shh! Aletta, do not upset yourself.’

  ‘I will be strong now – you will see.’

  ‘You have always been strong, deep inside.’

  ‘No, but I will be now. We shall find that capful of diamonds together, and afterwards we shall go north.’ He did not reply, and it was she who spoke again. ‘Zouga, I want you to make love to me – now.’

  ‘Aletta, you know that is dangerous.’

  ‘Now,’ she repeated. ‘Now, please.’ And she took his hand down and placed it under the hem of her nightdress against the smooth warm skin of her inner thigh. She had never done that before, and Zouga found himself shocked but strangely aroused, and afterwards he was filled with a deep tenderness and compassion for her that he had not felt for many years.

  When her breathing had become regular once more, she pulled his hands away gently and slipped out of the cot.

  Leaning on one elbow he watched her light the candle and then kneel by the trunk that was lashed to the foot of the cot. She had plaited her hair with a ribbon in it, and her body was slim as a young girl’s. The candlelight flattered her, smoothing out the lines of sickness and worry. He remembered how lovely she had been.

  She lifted the lid of the trunk, took something from the interior and brought it to him. It was a small cask with an ornate brass lock. The key was in the lock.

  ‘Open it,’ she said.

  In the candlelight he saw that the cask contained two thick rolls of five-pound notes, each bound up with a scrap of ribbon, and a draw-string pouch of dark green velvet. He lifted out the pouch and it was heavy with gold coin.

  ‘I was keeping it,’ she whispered, ‘for the day it was really needed. There is almost a thousand pounds there.’

  ‘Where did you get this?’

  ‘My father, on our wedding day. Take it, Zouga. Buy that claim with it. This time we will make it all right. This time is going to be all right.’

  In the morning the purchaser came to claim the wagon. He waited impatiently while the family moved their meagre possessions into the bell tent.

  Once Zouga had removed the cots from the tented half of the wagon body he was able to lift the planking from the narrow compartment over the rear wheel truck. Here the heavier goods were stored to keep the vehicle’s centre of gravity low. The spare trek chain, the lead for moulding into bullet, axe heads, a small anvil – and then Zouga’s household god which he and Jan Cheroot strained to lift from its padded bed and lower to the ground beside the wagon.

  Between them they carried it to the tent and set it upright against the far screen of the bell tent.

  ‘I’ve lugged this rubbish from Matabeleland to Cape Town and back,’ complained Jan Cheroot disgustedly as he stood back from the graven birdlike figure on its stone plinth.

  Zouga smiled indulgently. The Hottentot had hated that ancient idol from the very first day they uncovered it together in the overg
rown ruins of an ancient walled city, a city they had stumbled on while hunting elephant in that wild untamed land so far to the north.

  ‘It’s my good-luck charm,’ Zouga smiled.

  ‘What luck?’ Jan Cheroot demanded bitterly. ‘Is it luck to have to sell the oxen? Is it luck to live in a tent full of flies amongst a tribe of white savages?’ Muttering and mumbling bitterly, Jan Cheroot stamped out of the tent and snatched up the halters of the two remaining horses to take them down to water.

  Zouga paused for a moment in front of the statue. It stood almost as high as his head on its slim column of polished green soapstone. Atop the column crouched a stylized bird figure on the edge of flight. The cruel curve of the falcon beak fascinated Zouga, and in a habitual gesture he stroked the smooth stone and the blank eyes stared back at him inscrutably.

  Zouga opened his lips to whisper to the bird, and at that moment Aletta stooped into the triangular opening of the tent and saw what he was doing.

  Quickly, almost guiltily, Zouga dropped his hand and turned to face her. Aletta hated that stone image even more bitterly than did Jan Cheroot. Now she stood very still. Her arms were filled with a pile of neatly folded linen and clothing – but her eyes were troubled.

  ‘Zouga, must we have that thing in here?’

  ‘It takes up no room,’ he told her lightly, and came to take her burden from her, place it on the truckle bed, and then turn back to take her in his arms.

  ‘I will never forget what you did last night,’ he told her, and felt the rigidity go out of her body. She swayed against him and lifted her face to his. Once again he felt his chest squeezed with compassion as he saw the lines of sickness and worry at the corners of her eyes and mouth, saw the grey patina of fatigue on her skin.

  He bowed his head to kiss her lips, feeling awkward at such unaccustomed demonstration of affection; but at that moment the two boys burst into the tent, raucous with laughter and excitement and dragging between them a stray puppy on a string, and Aletta broke hurriedly from Zouga’s embrace and, flushing with embarrassment, adjusted her apron, beginning to scold her offspring fondly.

  ‘Out with it! It’s covered in fleas.’

  ‘Oh please, Mama!’

  ‘Out, I say!’

  She watched Zouga set off into the sprawling settlement, striding down the dusty track with his shoulders squared and the old jaunty spring in his step, then she turned back to the cone of soiled canvas set on a bleak dry plain under the cruel blue African sky, and she sighed. The weariness came upon her again in waves.

  In her girlhood there had been servants to perform the menial tasks of cooking and cleaning. She still had not mastered the smoky fluttering open flames of the camp fire, and already a fine red coating of dust had settled upon everything, even the surface of the goat’s milk in its earthenware jug. With an enormous effort of will, she gathered her resolve and stooped determinedly into the tent.

  Ralph had followed Jan Cheroot down to the wells to help with the horses. She knew that the two of them would not return until the next mealtime. They made an incongruous pair, the wizened little old man and the handsome reckless child already taller and more sturdy than his inseparable protector and tutor.

  Jordan stayed with her. He was not yet ten years of age, but without his companionship she doubted that she could have borne the terrible journey across those bone-breaking miles, the burning dusty days and the frosty nights of aching cold.

  Already the child could cook the simple camp dishes, and his unleavened bread and griddle scones were family favourites at every meal. She had taught him to read and write, and given to him her love of poetry and fine and beautiful things. He could already darn a torn shirt and wield the heavy coal-filled stroking-iron to smooth a shirt. His sweet piping tones and angelic beauty were constant sources of intense joy to her. She had grown his golden curls long for once, resisting her husband when he wanted to scissor them short as he had done Ralph’s.

  Jordan stood below her now, helping her to string a canvas screen across the tent that would divide the sleeping and living areas. She was suddenly compelled to lean down and touch those soft fine curls.

  At the touch he smiled sweetly up at her, and abruptly her senses spun dizzily. She swayed wildly on the rickety cot, trying to keep her balance and, as she fell, Jordan struggled to hold and steady her. He did not have the strength and her weight bore them both to the ground.

  Jordan’s eyes were huge and swimming with horror. He helped her half crawl, half stagger back to the cot and collapse upon it.

  Waves of heat and nausea and giddiness broke over her.

  Zouga was the first customer at the office of the Standard Bank when the clerk opened the door onto Market Square. Once he had deposited the contents of Aletta’s casket and the clerk had locked it in the big green iron safe against the far wall, Zouga had a balance of almost £2,500 to his credit.

  That knowledge armed his resolve. He felt tall and powerful as he strode up the ramp of the central causeway.

  The roadways were seven feet wide. The mining commissioner, after the lesson of the diggings at Bultfontein and Dutoitspan, had insisted that these access roads be left open to service the claims in the centre of the growing pit. The workings were a mosaic of square platforms, each precisely thirty feet square. Some of the diggers, with more capital and better organization, were sinking their claims faster than others, so that the slower workers were isolated on towers of golden yellow earth, high above their neighbouring claims, while the fastest miners had sunk deep square shafts at the bottom of which toiled the naked black labourers.

  For a man to move from one claim to another was already a laborious and often downright dangerous journey: crossing rickety board walks above the dizzying shaft of a deep claim, scrambling up high swaying rope ladders or down the steps of a pole ladder, lengths of native timber lashed together with cross-steps that creaked and gave with a man’s weight.

  Standing on the crumbling roadway with the workings gaping below him, Zouga wondered what would be the outcome if the strike continued to great depth. It already required a level head and strong stomach to chance the uneven pit, and he wondered again at man’s determination to accumulate wealth against any odds, in the face of any danger.

  He watched while from the bottom of the workings a leather bucket, brimming with broken lumps of the compacted yellow gravel, was hauled up, swinging at the end of a long rope, two sweating black men dipping and swinging over the windlass, their muscles swelling and subsiding in the bright sunlight.

  The bucket reached the lip of the roadway, and they seized it, lugged it to the waiting cart with its patient pair of mules, and dumped the contents into the half-full body. Then one of them dropped the empty bucket over the side of the roadway to the waiting men fifty feet below. At hundreds of points along the fourteen causeways the same operation was being repeated, endlessly the loaded buckets came swinging up and were dropped back empty.

  Occasionally, breaking the monotonous rhythm, the seam of a leather bucket would burst, showering the men below with jagged chunks of rock, or a worn rope would snap and, with warning shouts, the toilers at the bottom of the pit would hurl themselves aside to avoid the plunging missile.

  There was an impatient humming excitement that seemed to embrace the entire workings. The urgent shouted commands between pit and roadway, the squeal of rope sheaves, the thudding jar of pick and swinging shovel, the rich lilting chorus of a gang of Basuto tribesmen singing as they worked, small wiry little mountaineers from the Dragon Range.

  The white diggers, bullying and bustling, scrambled down the swaying ladderworks or stood over their gangs on the pit floor, hawk-eyed to forestall a ‘pick-up’: the possibility of a valuable diamond being exposed by a spade and swiftly palmed by one of the black workers, to be slipped into the mouth or other body opening at the first opportunity.

  Illegal diamond selling and buying was already the plague of the diggers. In their eyes, every black man was
a suspect. Only men with less than one quarter black blood were allowed to hold and work claims. This law made it easier to apportion blame, for a black face with a diamond in his possession was guilty without appeal. However, this law could not control the shady white men that hung around the diggings, ostensibly travelling salesmen, actors or proprietors of infamous drinking canteens but in reality all I.D.B., Illegal Diamond Buyers. The diggers hated them with a ferocity that sometimes boiled over in a night of rioting and beating and burning in which innocent merchants, as well as the guilty, lost all their possessions in the flames, while the mob of diggers danced about the burning shacks chanting: ‘I.D.B.! I.D.B.!’

  Zouga moved cautiously out along the crest of the roadway, at times pushed perilously close to the edge by a passing cart laden with diamondiferous earth.

  He reached the point above Jock Danby’s claims from which he had spoken to the friendly digger the previous day.

  The two claims were deserted, the leather bucket and rope coils abandoned, a pick handle standing upright with its point driven into the earth far below the level of the roadway.

  There was a big bearded digger working the adjoining claim, and he scowled up in response to Zouga’s hail.

  ‘What you want?’

  ‘I’m looking for Jock Danby.’

  ‘Well, you are looking in the wrong place.’

  The man turned and aimed a kick at the nearest labourer. ‘Sebenza, you black monkey!’

  ‘Where will I find him?’

  ‘Other side of Market Square, behind the Lord Nelson.’ The man answered off-handedly without turning his head.

  The dusty pitted open square was as littered with filth as the rest of the settlement, and crowded with the wagons of the transport riders and the carts of farmers who had come in to sell milk or produce and of the water sellers, peddling the precious stuff by the bucket.

  The Lord Nelson was a stained red dusty canvas over a wooden frame. Three of the previous night’s drinkers were laid out like embalmed corpses in the narrow alley beside the canteen, while the single bar-room was already filling with the early morning customers.