by Wilbur Smith
He had been physically sickened, vomiting and wracked by excruciating bowel cramps so that Zouga had dosed him with sulphur and treacle molasses.
Now they were talking about that thing, that thing so dreadful that he had tried to purge his memory of it. Now the two most important people in his world were talking about it openly, using words he had only seen in print and which had even then shamed him. They were mouthing those words and the air was full of shame and hatred and revulsion.
‘You have wallowed like a pig where a thousand other pigs have wallowed before you, in the fetid cesspool between that scarlet whore’s thighs.’
Jordan crept away along the wall, and reached the corner of the stoep. He could go no further.
‘If you were not ashamed to muck in that trough, did you not give a thought to what those other rutting boars had left there for you?’
His father’s words conjured up vivid images in Jordan’s mind. His stomach heaved, and he covered his mouth with his hand.
‘The sickness a harlot carries there is the curse of God upon venery and lust. If you could only see them in the pox hospital at Greenwich, raving idiots with their brains eaten half away by the disease, drooling from empty mouths, their teeth rotted out, their noses fallen into black festering holes, blind eyes rolling in their crazed skulls—’
Jordan doubled over, and sicked up on his own rawhide boots.
‘Stop it,’ said Ralph. ‘You have made Jordie sick.’
‘I have made him sick?’ Zouga asked quietly. ‘It is you who would make any decent person sick.’
Zouga came down the steps into the dusty yard, and he swung the whip, cutting the air with it, across and back and the lash fluted sharply.
Ralph stood his ground, and now his chin was up defiantly.
‘If you take that whip to me, Papa – I shall defend myself.’
‘You challenge me,’ Zouga stopped.
‘You only use a whip on an animal.’
‘Yes,’ Zouga nodded. ‘An animal – that’s why I take it to you.’
‘Papa, I warn you.’
Gravely Zouga inclined his head and considered the young man before him. ‘Very well. You claim to be a man, make good that claim.’ Zouga tossed the hippohide whip casually onto the verandah, and then turned back to his son.
Ralph was prepared, his weight balanced on the balls of his feet, although his hands were held low before him, they were balled into fists.
He never saw it. For a moment he thought that someone else had used a club on him from behind. The crack of it seemed to explode under the dome of his skull. He reeled backwards, his nose felt numb and at the same time swollen horribly. There was a tickling warmth on his upper lip and dumbly he licked it. It tasted of coppery salt, and he wiped at it with the back of his hand and then stared at the smear of blood on the back of his wrist.
His rage came on him with startling ferocity, as though a beast had pounced upon his back, a black beast that goaded him with its claws. He heard the beast growl in his ears, not recognizing his own voice, and then he rushed forward.
His father’s face was in front of him, handsome, grave and cold, and he swung his fist at it with all his strength, wanting to feel the flesh crush under his knuckles, the gristle of that arrogant beaked nose break and crackle, the teeth snap out of that unforgiving mouth.
His fist spun through air, meeting no check, swinging high about the level of his own head, and the blow died there, the sinews of his shoulder wrenched by the unexpected travel of his arm.
Again that burst of sound in his skull, his teeth jarring, his head snapping back, his vision starring momentarily into pinpoints of light and areas of deep echoing black, and then clearing again so that his father’s face floated back towards him.
Until that instant the only feelings he had ever had for Zouga were respect and fear and a weighty monumental love, but suddenly from some deep place in his soul rose a raging unholy hatred.
He hated him for a hundred humiliations and punishments, he hated him for the checks and frustrations with which he filled each precious day of Ralph’s life, he hated him for the reverence and deep respect in which other men held him, for the example that he knew he would be expected to follow faithfully all his life and doubted that he could. He hated him for the enormous load of duty and devotion he owed him and which he knew he could never discharge. He hated him for the love he had stolen from him, the love his mother had given unstintingly to his father and which he wanted all for himself. He hated him because his mother was dead, and his father had not prevented her going.
But most of all he hated him because he had taken something which had been wonderful and made it filthy, had taken a magical moment and made him ashamed of it, sick and dirty ashamed.
He rushed back at Zouga, swinging wildly with both fists meeting only air, and the blows that landed on his own head and face sounded as though somebody far away was chopping down a tree with a steel axe.
Zouga fell away neatly before each charge, swaying his head back or to the side, deflecting a blow with his arms, ducking carefully under a flying fist, and counter-punching only with his left hand, flicking it in with deceptive lightness, for at each shot Ralph’s head snapped backwards sharply and the blood from his nose and his swollen lips slowly turned his face into a running red mess.
‘Stop it, oh please stop it!’ Jordan crouched against the verandah wall with the yellow vomit staining his shirt front. ‘Please stop it!’
He wanted to cover his face with his hands, to blot out the violence and the blood and the terrible black hatred – but he could not. He was locked in an awful fascination, watching every stinging cruel blow, every droplet of flung blood from his brother’s face.
Like a corrida bull Ralph came up short at last, and stood with his feet wide apart, his knees giving like reeds overweighted with dew, trying feebly to shake the blackness from his head and the blood from his eyes, his fists bunched up still but too heavy and weak to lift above his waist, his chest heaving for air, swaying and catching his balance every few seconds with an uncontrolled stagger, peering blindly about him for his tormentor.
‘Here,’ said Zouga quietly, and Ralph lurched towards the voice and Zouga used his right hand for the first time. He chopped him cleanly under the ear, a short measured blow, and Ralph flopped face forward into the dust and snored into it, blowing little red puffs with each breath.
Jordan flew down the steps and dropped to his knees beside his brother, turning his head to one side so he could breathe freely and dabbing ineffectually at the blood with his fingers.
‘Jan Cheroot,’ Zouga called. He was breathing deeply but slowly; there was colour in his cheeks above his beard, and he touched a few beads of perspiration on his forehead with the kerchief from around his throat.
‘Jan Cheroot!’ he called again irritably, and this time the little Hottentot roused himself and hurried down the steps.
‘Get a bucket of water,’ Zouga told him.
Jan Cheroot dashed the contents of a gallon bucket into Ralph’s face, washing away the bloody mask, and Ralph gasped and snorted and tried to crawl to his knees.
Jan Cheroot dropped the bucket and grabbed his arm; Jordan stooped and got his head under Ralph’s other armpit and between them they lifted him to his feet.
They were both much smaller than Ralph and he hung between them like a dirty blanket on a washline, with the mixture of water and blood dripping to form pale pink rosettes on his shirt front.
Zouga lit a cheroot, studied the ash to be sure it was drawing evenly, then replaced it between his teeth.
He stepped up to his eldest son. With his thumb he pulled down each lower eyelid in turn and peered into his pupils, then grunted with satisfaction. He studied the cut in Ralph’s eyebrow, then took his nose between his fingers and moved it gently from side to side to check it for damage, then finally he pulled back Ralph’s lip and inspected his teeth for chips or breakage and stepped back.
&nbs
p; ‘Jan Cheroot, take him down to Jameson’s surgery. Ask Doc to stitch that eye and give him a handful of mercury pills for the pox.’
Jan Cheroot started to lead Ralph away but Zouga went on, ‘Then on your way back stop at Barnato’s Gymnasium and sign him up for a course of boxing lessons. He’ll have to learn to fight a bit better than that or he’s going to get his head beaten in even before he dies of the clap.’
On the way back from Market Square Jan Cheroot and Ralph walked with their heads together, talking seriously.
‘Why do you think they call him Bakela, the Fist?’ Jan Cheroot asked, and Ralph grimaced painfully.
His face was lumpy and the colour was coming up in his bruises, deep plum and cloudy blue like summer thunderclouds. The horsehair stitches stuck up stiffly out of his eyebrow and lip, and the cuts were soft-scabbed like cranberry jam.
Jan Cheroot grinned and clucked with sympathy, and then asked the question that had burned his tongue since first he had learned the cause of Zouga’s wrath.
‘So how did you like your first taste of pink sugar?’
The question stopped Ralph in his tracks while he considered it seriously, then he answered without moving his damaged lip.
‘It was bloody marvellous,’ he said.
Jan Cheroot giggled and hugged himself with delight. ‘Now you listen to me, boy, and you listen good. I love your daddy, we been together so many years I can’t count, and when he tells you something you can believe it – nearly every time. But me, I have never in my life passed up a chance for a slice of that warm stuff – never once, old or young or in between, ugly as a monkey or so pretty it would break your heart, whenever it was offered and lots of times when it wasn’t, old Jan Cheroot grabbed it, boy.’
‘And it never killed you.’ Ralph supplied the summation.
‘I guess I would have died without it.’
Ralph started walking again. ‘I hope Bazo will fight his fancy again next Sunday. I’m going to need ten guineas pretty badly by then.’
The moon was lipping the horizon, putting the stars to pale shame. It was still a few days short of full, but on the stoep of Zouga’s cottage it was light enough to read the headlines of a crumpled copy of the Diamond Fields Advertiser that lay beside Zouga’s empty riempie chair.
The only sounds were the distant baying of a moon-crazy hound, and the flirt of bats’ wings as they spun high parabolas in the moonlight or came fluttering in under the overhang of the verandah roof to pick a moth from the air. The front door was stopped wide open to allow the night’s cool to penetrate the inner rooms of the cottage. Jordan crept through it timidly.
He was bare-footed, and the old flannel shirt he wore as a nightdress was one of Zouga’s cast-offs. The tails flapped around his bare knees as he moved down the verandah and stopped before the tall falcon-headed carving that stood on its pedestal at the end of the covered stoep.
The slanting moonlight lit the graven bird image from the side, leaving half of it in black mysterious shadow.
Jordan stopped before the image. The clay floor was cold on his bare soles, and he shivered not entirely from the cold, and looked about him surreptitiously.
Zouga’s camp slept, that deep pre-dawn sleep.
Jordan’s curls, bushed wildly from the pillow, sparkled like a halo in the moonlight, and his eyes were in shadow, dark holes like those of a skull. All night he had lain rigid in his narrow bed and listened to his brother’s heavy breathing through his swollen nose.
Lack of sleep made Jordan feel light-headed and fey. He opened the little twist of newspaper which he had hidden under his pillow when he went to bed.
It contained half a handful of rice and a thin slice of cold roasted lamb. He laid it at the foot of the soapstone column, and stepped back.
Once more he looked about him to make sure that he was alone and unobserved. Then he sank down to his bare knees with the book held against his chest, and bowed his head.
The book was bound in blue leather with gold leaf titling on its spine: Religions of the American Indians.
‘I greet you, Panes,’ Jordan whispered, his swollen eyelids tightly closed.
‘The Indians of California, the Acagchemem tribe adore the great buzzard Panes.’ The book Jordan held to his breast had become far and away the most precious of all his possessions. He did not like to remember how he had obtained it. It was the only thing he had ever stolen in his life, but he had been forgiven for that sin. He had prayed to the goddess and been forgiven.
‘The Panes was a woman, a young and beautiful woman, who had run off into the mountains and been changed into a bird by the god Chinigchinich.’
Jordan knew with all his being whom this description depicted. His mother had been young and beautiful, and she had run away to the black mountain of Death without him.
Now he opened the book and bowed his head over it. It was not light enough to read the fine print of the text, but Jordan knew the invocation to the goddess by heart.
‘Why did you run away?’ he whispered. ‘You would have been better with us. Are we not the ones who love you? It was better that you stayed, for now you are Panes. If we make you a sacrifice of rice and meat, will you not come back to us? See the sacrifice we set for you, great Panes.’
The morning wind stirred, and Jordan heard the branch of the camel-thorn scrape upon the roof before the wind touched him. It was a warm, soft wind, and it ruffled his hair.
Jordan clenched his eyes even tighter, and the little insects of awe crawled upon his skin. The goddess had many ways of showing her presence. This was the first time she had come as a soft warm wind.
‘Oh great Panes, I don’t want to wallow in filth like Ralph. I don’t ever want to smell the trough where a thousand pigs have wallowed. I don’t want to go mad, and have my teeth rot out of my mouth.’ He whispered softly but ardently, and then the tears began to squeeze out from between his lids.
‘Please save me, great Panes.’ He poured out all his horror and disgust to the sacred bird-woman. ‘They were hitting each other. They were hating each other, and the blood, oh the blood—’
At last he was silent, head bowed, shivering, and then he rose to his bare feet, and for the first time looked at the image.
The bird stared back at him stonily, but Jordan cocked his lovely golden head as though he were listening, and the moonlight silvered his skin.
He turned, still clutching the book, and crept back along the verandah. As he turned the far corner there was a furry rush of dark bodies out of the shadows, and the soft squeals of the bush rats as they squabbled over the sacrifice.
Jordan pushed open the door of the kitchen and it smelled of woodsmoke and curry powder and carbolic soap.
He stooped to the ashbox of the black iron stove, and when he blew lightly through the grating the ashes glowed.
He pushed a long wax taper through the bars and blew again and a little blue flame popped into life. He carried it carefully across the kitchen, sheltering it with his cupped hand, and transferred the flame to the stump of candle in the neck of the dark green champagne bottle. Then he blew out the taper and placed the bottle on the scrubbed yellow deal table and stepped back.
For a few seconds longer he hesitated, then he took the skirts of the faded and patched nightshirt, lifted them as high as his shoulders and looked down at his body.
The puppy fat had disappeared from his belly and hips. His navel was a dark eye in the flat clean plain of his trunk, and his legs were gracefully shaped. His buttocks lean and tight, like immature fruit.
His body was smooth and hairless except for the golden wisps at the juncture of his legs. It was not yet thick enough to curl, and was sparse and fine as silk thread freshly spun upon the cocoon.
From the centre of this cloudy web his penis hung down limply. It had grown alarmingly in the last few months, and in Jordan’s horrified imagination, he foresaw the day when it would be thick and heavy as his arm, a huge shameful burden to carry through life.
At this moment it looked so soft and white and innocent, but when he woke in the mornings it was hard as bone, hot and throbbing with a sinfully pleasurable ache.
That was bad, but in these last weeks that terrible swelling and stiffening had come upon him at the most unexpected times: at the dinner table with his father seated opposite him, in the schoolroom when the new schoolmistress had leaned over him to correct his spelling, seated at the sorting-table beside Jan Cheroot, on the gelding’s back when the friction of the saddle had triggered it, and that awful stiff thing had thrust out the front of his breeches.
He took it in his hand now and it seemed helpless and soft as a newborn kitten, but he was not deceived. He stroked it softly back and forth and instantly he felt it change shape between his fingers. He released it quickly.
The joint of mutton that the family had dined off the previous evening stood on the deal table, under a steel mesh fly-cover. Jordan lifted the cover, and the leg was hacked down to the bone.
His father’s hunting knife lay beside the cold joint. The handle was stag-horn and the blade was nine inches long, sweeping up to a dagger point, and the white mutton fat had congealed upon the blade.
Jordan picked up the knife in his right hand.
The previous evening he had watched his father flicking the edge of the blade across the long steel. It always fascinated him, because Zouga held the razor edge towards his own fingers as he worked.
The proof of his father’s expertise with the steel was the way in which the heavy knife seemed to glide effortlessly through the meat of the joint. It was wickedly sharp.
Jordan looked down again at that long white thing that stuck out of his body. The loose skin at the tip was half retracted so that the pink acorn pushed out from beneath it.
He tucked the tail of his shirt under his chin to free both hands and seized himself at the root, enclosing within the circle of his fingers the wrinkled bag with its tender marbles of flesh, and he pulled it out, stretching it out like the neck of the condemned man upon the headsman’s block, while with the other hand he brought the knife down and laid the blade against his own belly, just above the fine golden fluff of pubic hair.