Men of Men

by Wilbur Smith

  Zouga lifted the wide-brimmed hat. Carefully he mopped the beads of sweat from the smoother paler skin along his hairline, and then he inspected the damp red stain on the silk bandanna and grimaced with distaste. It looked like blood.

  He re-knotted the silk about his throat, still peering down into the depths, and his eyes clouded with disenchantment as he remembered the high hopes and bounding expectation that he had brought with him on that day – was it really ten years ago? It seemed like a day and an eternity.

  He had found himself dreaming, the random events from those lost years replaying through his mind, the sorrows and the joys magnified by his imaginings and by the passage of time.

  Then, after a few minutes, Zouga roused himself. Dreaming was an old man’s vice. The past was beyond regret; today was all that counted. He straightened his shoulders and looked down at Ralph in the swinging skip. Something jarred him, scattering the last of his dreams.

  The skip was riding differently, it did not have the accustomed weight to it, he could not yet make out the heaped yellow gravel, which, despite his orders, Ralph usually over-loaded high above the steel sides of the skip.

  It was empty, and Ralph was alone. He was coming up without the Matabele gang to help run the skip over the bars and up-end its burden of gravel into the chute, down which it would be carried to the waiting cart.

  Zouga cupped his hands to his mouth to shout an enquiry – but the words stayed in his throat.

  Ralph was close enough now for Zouga to see the expression on his face. It was tragic, stricken with some terrible emotion.

  Zouga lowered his hands and stared at his son in dread anticipation. The skip hit the end bars with an iron clash and the winchman threw out the gear lever, expertly braking the steel skip against the bars.

  Ralph jumped lightly across the narrow gap onto the platform, and stood there, still staring at Zouga.

  ‘What is it, my boy?’ Zouga asked quietly, fearfully – and for answer Ralph turned away and glanced down into the empty body of the skip.

  Zouga stepped up beside him, and followed his glance. He saw that he had been mistaken – the skip was not empty.

  ‘It has taken us all morning to hack that out of the east face,’ Ralph told him.

  It looked like a roughly cut gravestone, before the inscription was chiselled in, as wide as the stretch of a man’s arms and imperfectly squared up, the marks of the steel wedges and pickaxe still fresh upon it.

  ‘We broke three pick handles on it,’ Ralph went on grimly, ‘and we only got it out because there was a natural fracture line that we could crack open with wedges.’

  Zouga stared at the ugly cube of stone, not wanting to believe what it was, trying to close his ears against his son’s voice.

  ‘Underneath it’s the same, solid, hard as a whore’s heart, no faults, no cracks.’

  The lump of stone was a dull ugly mottled thing, across which the steel tools had left paler weals and furrows.

  ‘Sixteen of us,’ Ralph went on. ‘We worked on it all morning.’ He opened his hands, and showed them palms upwards. The horny yellow calluses had been torn open, the raw flesh beneath was mushy and caked with dust and earth. ‘All morning we broke our hearts and our picks on it – and that bloody little chip weighs less than half a ton.’

  Slowly Zouga stooped over the edge of the skip and touched the stone. It was as cold as his heart felt – and its colour was dark mottled blue.

  ‘The blue,’ Ralph confirmed quietly. ‘We have hit the blue.’

  ‘Dynamite or blasting gelatine,’ Ralph said. ‘That’s the only way we’ll ever move it.’

  He was stripped to the waist, a polish of sweat on his arms, and little drops of it hanging like dew in the thick hair of his chest.

  The tombstone of blue marble lay at his feet, and Ralph rested on the shaft of the sledgehammer. The blows he had swung at the rock had raised bursts of sparks and tiny puffs of white dust that stung their nostrils like pepper – but had not cracked the rock through.

  ‘We cannot blast in the pit,’ Zouga said tiredly. ‘Can you imagine two hundred diggers firing away dynamite, every one doing it when and how he wanted?’ He shook his head.

  ‘There is no other way,’ Ralph said. ‘No other way to get it out.’

  ‘And if you do get it out?’ Jordan asked from the verandah where he had stood without speaking for the past hour.

  ‘What do you mean?’ Zouga demanded. He could hear the strain in his own voice, and knew how close his anger and frustration were to the surface.

  ‘What will you do with it when you do get it out?’ Jordan persisted, and they all stared at the awful blue lump.

  ‘There are no diamonds in that stuff.’ Jordan said it for them.

  ‘How do we know that?’ Ralph snapped at him, his voice rough and ugly with the same tension that gripped Zouga.

  ‘I know it,’ Jordan said flatly. ‘I can sense it – just look at it. It’s hard and bleak and bare.’

  Nobody replied to that, and Jordan shook his curls regretfully. ‘Even if there were diamonds in it, how would you free them from the blue? You can’t smash them out with sledgehammers. You’d end up with diamond dust.’

  ‘Ralph,’ Zouga turned away from Jordan, ‘this stuff, this blue – it’s only on the east face, isn’t it?’

  ‘So far.’ Ralph nodded. ‘But—’

  ‘I want you to cover up the east face,’ Zouga told him bluntly. ‘Shovel gravel over the exposed rock. Nobody else must see it. Nobody else must know.’

  Ralph nodded, and Zouga went on, ‘We will keep on raising the yellow gravel from the other sections as though nothing has happened; and nobody, not one of you, is to say a word about – about us having struck the blue.’ He looked directly at Jordan. ‘Do you understand, not a word to anybody.’

  Zouga sat easily in the saddle, riding with the long stirrups of a Boer hunter or of a born colonial.

  He knew that Rhodes was leaving in the next few weeks, to keep his term at Oxford University. Perhaps his imminent departure would make his judgement hasty.

  ‘Let’s hope so, anyway.’ And his mount flicked his ears back to listen to his voice.

  ‘Steady, old man.’ Zouga touched his withers, feeling a quick twist of guilt at his intentions. He knew he was going to try and sell faulty goods, and he steeled himself against his own conscience.

  He touched his mount’s flank with his knee and turned him off the rutted dusty track through the break in the milkwood fence and into Rhodes’ camp.

  Rhodes sat with his back to the mud wall of the shack, a mug in his hand, the big shaggy leonine head cocked to something that Pickering was saying.

  The talk of the diggings was that he was already a multimillionaire, at least on paper, and Zouga had seen the champagne bucket of uncut diamonds poured out onto his lunch table. Yet here Rhodes was sitting on a soap box in the dusty yard, dressed in shabby ill-fitting clothes, drinking from a chipped enamel mug.

  Zouga dropped his reins and his horse stopped obediently, and when he slipped off its back there was no need for him to tether it. It would stand as long as Zouga wanted it to.

  He crossed the yard towards the small group of men, and Zouga smiled to himself. Rhodes’ mug might be chipped – but it contained a twenty-year-old cognac. Rhodes’ seat might be a soapbox, but he sat it as though it were a throne, and the men that sat around him like courtiers or supplicants were all rich and powerful men, the new aristocracy of the diggings.

  One of these rose now and came to meet Zouga, laughing lightly and brandishing a rolled newspaper.

  ‘By gad, Major, they say you need only speak of the devil.’ He clapped Zouga’s shoulder. ‘I hope you are taking this assault on our masculine pride as seriously as we are – and have come to offer to champion our cause.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’ Zouga’s protest was lost in the laughter and friendly pummelling as they came to crowd around him. Only Rhodes had not left his seat against the wal
l, but even he was smiling.

  ‘Let him read it for himself, Pickling,’ Rhodes suggested mildly, and Pickering handed Zouga the news sheet with a flourish.

  It was a copy of the Diamond Fields Advertiser – so newly printed that the ink smudged beneath Zouga’s fingers.

  ‘Front page,’ said Pickering gleefully. ‘The headline.’

  GAUNTLET THROWN DOWN

  LADY INSULTED

  SEEKS SATISFACTION

  This morning your editor was privileged to receive a visit from a beautiful and distinguished visitor to Kimberley. Mrs Louise St John is the wife of a hero of the American Civil War, and in her own right a noted equestrienne.

  Her stallion ‘Shooting Star’ is a remarkable example of the recently developed American breed known as Palammo. He is a former Louisiana champion of the breed, and quite one of the most magnificent animals ever to be seen on the Diamond Fields.

  Mrs St John attempted to enter her mount in the regular point-to-point meetings organized by the Kimberley Sporting Club – but was informed by Major Ballantyne, the Club President, that she was barred from riding—

  Zouga skipped quickly over the next few paragraphs:

  ‘Simply because I happen to be a woman . . .

  Insufferable masculine arrogance.’

  He smiled and shook his head.

  ‘Challenge the good major to ride against me over any course of his choice for any purse he stipulates.’

  Now Zouga laughed delightedly, and tossed the paper back to Pickering.

  ‘The lady has good bottom’, he admitted, ‘in both senses of the word.’

  ‘I will lend you King Chaka,’ Beit promised. He was a strong hunter, English and Arab blood, from one of the famous Cape studs. Beit had paid three hundred guineas for him.

  Zouga shook his head and shot an affectionate glance at his own hunting horse standing across the yard. ‘That won’t be necessary, I shan’t be riding.’

  There was a howl of jovial protest from them all.

  ‘By God, Ballantyne, you can’t let us down.’

  ‘This damned vixen will say you funked it, old man.’

  ‘My wife will crow for a week – you’ll ruin my marriage.’

  Zouga held up his hands. ‘I’m sorry, gentlemen. This is merely a bit of female nonsense – and you can quote me.’

  ‘You won’t ride, then?’

  ‘Certainly not.’ Zouga was smiling, but his voice had a brittle edge. ‘I have more serious matters to concern me.’

  ‘You are right, of course.’ Rhodes’ piping voice stilled them all into respectful silence. ‘That pale brute is a flying devil and the lady rides like a witch – we have all seen that.’

  The scar on Zouga’s cheek turned pale pink, and there was a sudden green glint in his eye; but the smile stayed on his lips.

  ‘That fancy high-stepper moves well on the flat, I grant you, but over the course I would choose he would be lucky to finish, let alone win.’

  ‘You’ll ride then?’ They were clamouring again immediately.

  ‘No, gentlemen. That’s my final word.’

  Long after the others had left, the three of them sat on: Pickering, Rhodes and Zouga. The sun had set, and just the orange glow of the fire lit their faces. The first bottle of cognac was empty and Pickering had opened another. Now Rhodes was staring into his mug, and he spoke without lifting his eyes.

  ‘So, Major, at last you are ready to sell, and I ask myself a question, a simple little question – why?’

  Zouga did not reply, and after a moment Rhodes lifted his head.

  ‘Why, Major?’ he repeated. ‘Why now suddenly?’

  Zouga found that the lie he had prepared would not come to his lips. He was dumb, but he held the gaze of those pale blue eyes – and it was Rhodes who broke the silence.

  ‘I have trusted very few men in my life,’ and involuntarily his eyes flickered to Pickering and then back to Zouga, ‘but now, Major, you are one of them.’

  He picked up the cognac bottle and spilled a little of the honey-dark liquor into Zouga’s mug.

  ‘Once you were offered a hundred thousand pounds in illicit diamonds – and you couldn’t bring yourself to take them.’ Rhodes was speaking so softly that Zouga had to lean forward to catch the words. ‘Yesterday your son brought up the first hunk of blue ground from the Devil’s Own – and still you could not bring yourself to lie.’

  ‘You knew!’ Zouga whispered, and Rhodes nodded and then sighed.

  ‘By God, I wish I knew more like you.’ He shook the big curling head and his voice was become brusque and businesslike. ‘Once I offered you five thousand pounds for your claims. All right, I will make the same price—’ and he lifted one meaty hand to still Zouga. ‘Wait! Listen to the rest of it, before you thank me. The bird goes with the claims.’

  ‘What?’ For a moment Zouga did not understand.

  ‘The stone bird, the statue. It becomes part of the deal.’

  ‘Damn it!’ Zouga half rose from the log on which he was sitting.

  ‘Wait!’ Rhodes stopped him again. ‘Listen – before you refuse,’ and Zouga sank back. ‘You’ll ride for it.’

  Zouga shook his head, not understanding.

  ‘You’ll ride against this woman, St John, on her terms, and if you win you keep the claims and the bird and my five thousand.’

  The silence stretched out for a full minute – and then Zouga asked with a harsh gravelly sound in the back of his throat:

  ‘And if I lose?’

  ‘You yourself have said there is little chance of that,’ Rhodes reminded him.

  ‘And if I lose?’ Zouga persisted.

  ‘Then you leave these fields as you came – with nothing.’

  Zouga looked away to the horse standing at the edge of the shadows. He had named him Tom, after a friend, the old hunter who had first told Zouga about the land to the north and how to reach it, Tom Harkness, now dead these many years.

  The horse was part of Zouga’s dream of the north, the mount that would carry him back to Zambezia. Zouga had selected him with more care than a man usually gives to choosing his wife – and beauty was the last thing he looked for.

  Tom was a mixture of many bloodlines, the wide nostrils and big chest of the Arab for staying power, the sturdy legs and sure feet of the Basuto, the canny eye and hammer head of a wild Mustang, the heart and strength of an English hunter. However, Tom was a drab unrelieved dun-colour. His coat was long and thick, brushed but not curried, protection from the night frost and the noon sun, from flying pebbles thrown by frantic hooves of the quarry in a stern chase or from the rip of red-tipped ‘wait-a-bit’ thorns.

  Tom had proved that the intelligent gleam in his eye was no illusion. He learned swiftly and well. He learned to stand when the reins were dropped on his neck, giving his rider both hands for the rifle, and he remained stone-still while gunfire crashed about his head, only the twitching of his ears signalling his consternation.

  When Zouga took him out into the open veld to continue his training, Tom displayed nimble feet on the rocky slopes of the kopje and a buffalo skin through the thorn bush; he learned to hunt, and seemed to enjoy it the way a good polo pony revels in the crack of the bamboo root and the riotous chase.

  He seemed instinctively to understand stalking, keeping his own body between Zouga and the game, angling off his approach, never heading directly at the quarry, and the herds of springbuck let the seemingly riderless horse walk up into easy rifle shot. Then Tom would carry the freshly killed carcass on his back, without shying and fussing about the blood.

  Tom was ugly, with a Roman nose, ears a little too long, legs a little too short, and he ran with an awkward humpbacked gait – which he could keep up all day, over any ground.

  He was an incorrigible thief. Jordan’s vegetable garden had to be fenced, but still Tom left tufts of his drab hair on the spikes of the barbed wire. He had a trick of plucking the carrots out of the ground with a delicate grip between his
square white teeth, and then knocking the earth off them against his forehooves.

  He learned to push open the kitchen window and reach the fresh loaves of bread that were cooling on the marble sink, and once when Jan Cheroot left the door to the storeroom off the latch, Tom got in and ate half a bag of sugar – at twenty shillings a pound.

  However, he would follow like a dog, and when ordered he would stand for hours – and Zouga, who was not sentimental about animals, had come to love him.

  Zouga looked back from the horse to the young man across the log fire.

  ‘Agreed,’ he said without emphasis. ‘Do we need to have further witnesses?’

  ‘I don’t think so, Major,’ said Rhodes. ‘Do you?’

  ‘At the gun the competitor will ride out to the first flag—’ Neville Pickering was the steward-in-chief, and his voice through the speaking trumpet carried to every member of the huge Sunday crowd that spilled out across the dry veld below the Magersfontein hills.

  ‘At the first red flag they will fire upon the standing targets. When they have demolished all four targets to the satisfaction of the stewards, they will be free to round the second yellow flag, and thereafter to return to the finish line.’ He pointed to the twin poles each with its crown of coloured bunting. ‘The first rider to pass between them will be declared the winner.’

  Pickering paused and drew fresh breath before going on.

  ‘Are there any questions?’

  ‘Would you recite the rules, please, Mr Pickering,’ Louise St John called. She looked like a child on the great glistening pale stallion’s back. She was walking him in circles, leaning forward to pat his neck for the crowds had made him nervous. He was chewing the light snaffle and sweating in dark patches on the rippling muscled shoulders.

  ‘There are no other rules, ma’am.’ Pickering answered her loudly enough for those at the back of the crowd to hear.

  ‘No rules – barging and fouling?’