Men of Men

by Wilbur Smith

  ‘You could,’ she agreed. ‘But you never would. Both of us are tied, Zouga, by our own peculiar sense of duty and of honour.’

  ‘Louise—’

  ‘We have arrived,’ she said, with patent relief. ‘The crossroads. Turn off the road here.’

  From the bench she guided him as he threaded the cart through the scattered bush and the high wheels bumped over rock and rough ground. A quarter of a mile from the road there stood a massive camel-thorn tree, silver and high as a hill in the moonlight. Beneath its spread branches the moon shadow was black and impenetrable.

  From the darkness a hoarse voice challenged.

  ‘Stand where you are! Don’t come any closer.’

  ‘Mungo, it’s me and Zouga is with me.’

  Louise jumped down from the cart, lifted the lantern off its bracket and went forward, stooping under the branches. Zouga tethered the mules and then followed her. Louise was kneeling beside Mungo St John. He lay on a saddle blanket, propped on the silver ornamented Mexican saddle.

  ‘Thank you for coming,’ he greeted Zouga, and his voice was ragged with pain.

  ‘How badly are you hit?’

  ‘Badly enough,’ he admitted. ‘Do you have a cheroot?’

  Zouga lit one from the lantern and handed it to him. Louise was unwrapping the torn strips of shirt and petticoat that were bound about his chest.

  ‘Shotgun?’ Zouga asked tersely.

  ‘No, thank God,’ Mungo said. ‘Pistol.’

  ‘You are lucky,’ Zouga grunted. ‘Naaiman’s usual style is a sawed-off shotgun. He would have blown you in half.’

  ‘You know him – Naaiman?’

  ‘He’s a police trap.’

  ‘Police,’ Mungo whispered. ‘Oh God.’

  ‘Yes,’ Zouga nodded. ‘You are in trouble.’

  ‘I didn’t know.’

  ‘Does it really matter?’ Zouga asked. ‘You planned an I.D.B. switch, and you knew you might have to kill a man.’

  ‘Don’t preach to me, Zouga.’

  ‘All right.’ Zouga squatted next to Louise as she exposed the wound in Mungo’s back. ‘It looks as though it missed the lymph.’

  Between them they lifted Mungo into a sitting position.

  ‘Through and through,’ Zouga murmured, as he saw the exit wound in Mungo’s back. ‘And it looks as though it missed the lung. You are luckier than you’ll ever know.’

  ‘One stayed in,’ Mungo St John contradicted him, and reached down to his own leg. His breeches had been split down the leg, and now he pulled the bloodstained cloth aside to reveal a strip of pale thigh in the centre of which was another vicious little round opening from which fluid wept like blackcurrant juice.

  ‘The bullet is still in,’ Mungo repeated.

  ‘Bone?’ Zouga asked.

  ‘No.’ St John shook his head. ‘I don’t think so. I was still able to walk on it.’

  ‘There is no chance of trying to cut the bullet out. Louise knows where she can find a doctor, and I have told her how to get there.’

  ‘Louise?’ Mungo asked with a sardonic twist of his lips.

  She did not look up, concentrating on the task of painting the skin around the wounds with iodine.

  Mungo was staring at Zouga, his single eye gleaming, and Zouga felt the scar on his cheek throb and he did not trouble to hide his anger.

  ‘You don’t think I am doing this for you,’ he demanded. ‘I hate I.D.B. as much as any digger on the workings, and I’m not that complacent about deliberate robbery and murder.’ And he took the pistol from the blanket where it lay at Mungo’s side.

  He checked the load as he walked to where Shooting Star stood, head down in the moonlight beyond the camel-thorn tree.

  The stallion lifted his head, and blew a fluttery breath through his nostrils as Zouga approached; then he shifted his weight awkwardly and painfully on three legs.

  ‘There, boy. Easy, boy.’ Zouga ran his hands down the animal’s flank. It was sticky with drying blood, and Shooting Star whickered as he touched the wound.

  Behind the ribs, bullet hole, and Zouga sniffed at it quickly. The bullet had pierced the bowel or the intestines – he could smell it.

  Zouga went down on one knee and gently felt the foreleg that the stallion was favouring. He found the damage, another bullet wound. It had struck a few inches above the fetlock and the bone was shattered. Yet the horse had carried Mungo, a big heavy man, and it had brought him many miles. The agony must have been dreadful, but the stallion’s great heart had carried them through.

  Zouga shrugged off his greatcoat and wrapped it around the pistol in his right hand. A shot could alert the searching bands on the not too distant road.

  ‘There, boy,’ Zouga whispered, and touched the muzzle to the forehead between the horse’s eyes.

  The cloth muffled the shot. It was a dull blurt of sound, and the stallion dropped heavily on his side and never even kicked.

  Louise was still bowed over Mungo, tying the knots in the bandage, but Zouga saw that her eyes were bright with tears in the moonlight.

  ‘Thank you,’ she whispered. ‘I couldn’t have done it myself.’

  Zouga helped her lift Mungo to the cart. Mungo’s breath whistled in his chest and the sweat of agony drenched his shirt and smelled rancid and gamey.

  They settled him into the nest of thatching grass and spread a screen of it over him. Then Zouga led the mules on over the veld until they struck the track that led northwards towards the Vaal river, and beyond it Kuruman and the vast Kalahari Desert.

  ‘Travel at night, and hobble the mules to graze during the day,’ Zouga told her. ‘There is more than enough meal and biltong; but you will have to spare the coffee and sugar.’

  ‘Words cannot thank you enough,’ she whispered.

  ‘Don’t attempt the main drift of the Vaal.’

  ‘Somehow I know that this is not goodbye.’ She seemed not to have heard the advice. ‘And when we meet again—’ she broke off.

  ‘Go on,’ he said, but she shook her head and took the reins from his hand and led the mules onto the track.

  The cart seemed to merge into the night, and the wheels made no sound in the thick pale sand. Zouga stood staring after them, long after they had disappeared – and then Louise came back.

  She came silent as a wraith, running with a kind of terrible desperation, the long tresses of hair had fallen out from under the cap and were streaming down her back. Her face was pale and stricken in the moonlight.

  The grip of her arms about his neck was fierce, almost painful, and her mouth was shockingly hot and wet as it spread over his. But the taste of it he would never forget, and her sharp white teeth crushed his lips.

  For seconds only they clung to each other, while Zouga thought his heart would burst; then she tore herself from his arms, and with neither a word nor a backward glance, she flew into the night – and was gone.

  Ten days after Neville Pickering’s funeral, Zouga signed the transfer deeds to the Devil’s Own claims, and watched while one of Rhodes’ secretaries registered them in favour of the Central Diamond Company. Then he walked out into the cold.

  For the first time in living memory it was snowing over the diamond fields. Big soft flakes came twisting down like feathers from a shimmering white egret struck by birdshot.

  The snowflakes vanished as they touched the earth, but the cold was a vindictive presence and Zouga’s breath steamed in the air and condensed on his beard as he trudged up to the workings to watch the shift come off the Devil’s Own claims for the last time. As he walked he tried to compose the words to tell Ralph that this was the last shift.

  They were coming up in the skip. Zouga could make out Ralph, for he was the only man who wore a coat. The other men with him were almost naked.

  Once again Zouga wondered idly that the men had not rebelled against the harsh measures of the new Diamond Trade Act, enforced by Colonel John Fry of the recently recruited Diamond Police, and aimed at stamping ou
t I.D.B. on the fields.

  Nowadays the black workers were compounded behind barbed wire; there were new curfew regulations to keep them in the compounds after nightfall; and there were spot searches and checks of the compounds, of men on the streets even during daylight, and body searches of each shift coming out of the pit.

  Even the diggers, or at least a few of them, had protested at the most draconian of John Fry’s new regulations. All black workers had been forced to go into the pit stark naked, so that they would not be able to hide stones in their clothing.

  John Fry had been amazed when Zouga and a dozen other diggers had demanded to see him.

  ‘Good Lord, Ballantyne, but they are a bunch of naked savages anyway. Modesty, forsooth!’

  In the end, with the co-operation of Rhodes, they had forced him to compromise.

  Grudgingly Fry had allowed every worker a strip of seamless cotton ‘limbo’ to cover himself.

  Thus Bazo and his Matabele wore only a strip of loincloth each as they rode up beside Ralph in the skip. The wind threw an icy noose about them, and Bazo shivered as goose-bumps rose upon the smooth dark skin of his chest and upper arms.

  Above him stood Ralph Ballantyne, balancing easily on the rim of the steel skip, ignoring the wind and the deadly drop below him.

  Ralph glanced down at Bazo crouching below the side of the steel bucket, and on impulse slipped the scrap of stained canvas off his own shoulders. Under it Ralph wore an old tweed jacket and dusty cardigan. He dropped the canvas over Bazo’s neck.

  ‘It’s against the white man’s law,’ Bazo demurred, and made as if to shrug it off.

  ‘There are no police in this skip,’ Ralph grunted, and Bazo hesitated a moment and then crouched lower and gratefully pulled the canvas over his head and shoulders.

  Ralph took the butt of a half-smoked cheroot from his breast pocket, and carefully reshaped it between his fingers; the dead ash flaked away on the wind and wafted down into the yawning depths below. He lit the butt and drew the smoke down deeply, exhaled and drew again, held the smoke and passed the butt to Bazo.

  ‘You are not only cold, but you are unhappy,’ Ralph said, and Bazo did not answer. He cupped the stubby cheroot in both hands and drew carefully upon it.

  ‘Is it Donsela?’ Ralph asked. ‘He knew the law. Bazo. He knows what the law says of those who steal the stones.’

  ‘It was a small stone,’ murmured Bazo, the words and blue smoke mingled on his lips. ‘And fifteen years is a long time.’

  ‘He is alive,’ Ralph pointed out and took the cheroot that Bazo passed back to him. ‘In the old days before the Diamond Trade Act, he would be dead by now.’

  ‘He might as well be dead,’ Bazo whispered bitterly. ‘They say that men work like animals, chained like monkeys, on the breakwater wall at Cape Town harbour.’

  He drew again on the cheroot and it burned down with a fierce little glow that scorched his fingers. He crushed it out on the workhardened calluses of his palm and let the shreds of tobacco blow away.

  ‘And you, Henshaw – are you then so happy?’ he asked quietly, and Ralph shrugged.

  ‘Happy? Who is happy?’

  ‘Is not this pit’ – with a gesture Bazo took in the mighty excavation over which they dangled – ‘is not this your prison, does it not hold you as surely as the chains that hold Donsela as he places the rocks on the breakwater over the sea?’

  They had almost reached the high stagings and Bazo slipped off his canvas covering before he could be spotted by one of the black constables who patrolled the area inside the new security fences.

  ‘You ask me if I am unhappy.’ Bazo stood up, and did not look at Ralph’s face. ‘I was thinking of the land in which I am a prince of the House of Kumalo. In that land the calves I tended as a boy have grown into bulls and have bred calves which I have never seen. Once I knew every beast in my father’s herds, fifteen thousand head of prime cattle, and I knew each of them, the season of its birth, the twist of its horns and the markings of its hide.’

  Bazo sighed and came to stand beside Ralph on the rim of the skip. They were of a height, two tall young men, well formed, and each, in the manner of his race, comely.

  ‘Ten times I have not been with my impi when it danced the Festival of Fresh Fruits, ten times I did not witness my king throw the war-spear and send us out on the red road.’

  Bazo’s sombre mood deepened, and his voice sank lower.

  ‘Boys have grown to men since I left, and some of them wear the cowtails of valour on their legs and arms.’ Bazo glanced down at his own naked body with its single dirty rag at the waist. ‘Little girls have grown into maidens, with ripe bellies, ready to be claimed by the warriors who have won the honour on the red road of war.’ And both of them thought of the lonely nights when the phantoms came to haunt them. Then Bazo folded his arms across his wide chest and went on.

  ‘I think of my father, and I wonder if the snows of age have yet settled upon his head. Every man of my tribe that comes down the road from the north brings me the words of Juba, the Dove, who is my mother. She has twelve sons, but I am the first and the eldest of them.’

  ‘Why have you stayed so long?’ Ralph asked harshly.

  ‘Why have you stayed so long, Henshaw?’ The young Matabele challenged him quietly, and Ralph had no answer.

  ‘Have you found fame and riches in this hole?’ Again they both glanced down into the pit, and from this height the off-shift waiting to come up in the skips were like columns of safari ants.

  ‘Do you have a woman with hair as long and pale as the winter grass to give you comfort in the night, Henshaw? Do you have the music of your sons’ laughter to cheer you, Henshaw? What keeps you here?’

  Ralph lifted his eyes and stared at Bazo, but before he could find an answer the skip came level with the platform on the first ramp of the stagings. The jerk brought Ralph back to reality and he waved to his father on the platform above them.

  The roar of the steam winch subsided. The skip slowed and Bazo led the party of Matabele workers onto the ramp. Ralph saw them all clear before he jumped across the narrow gap to the wooden platform and felt it tremble under the combined weight of twenty men.

  Ralph signalled again. Then the winch growled, and the steel cable squealed in its sheaves. The heavy-laden skip ran on until it hit the striker blocks. Ralph and Bazo drove the jumper bars under it, and threw their full weight on them. The skip tipped over, and the load of gravel went roaring down the chute into the waiting cart.

  Ralph looked up to see his father’s encouraging smile and to hear his shouted congratulations.

  ‘Well done, boy! Two hundred tons today!’

  But the staging was deserted. Zouga had gone.

  Zouga had packed a single chest, the chest that had belonged to Aletta and which had come up with her from the Cape. Now it was going back, and it was almost all that was going back.

  Zouga put Aletta’s Bible in the bottom of the chest, and with it her diary and the trinket box which contained the remaining pieces of her jewellery. The more valuable pieces had long ago been sold, to support the dying dream.

  Over these few mementoes he packed his own diaries and maps, and his books. When he came to the bundled pile of his unfinished manuscript, he paused to weigh it in his hand.

  ‘Perhaps I shall find time to finish it now,’ he murmured, and laid it gently in the chest.

  On top of that went his clothing, and there was so little of that – four shirts, a spare pair of boots – barely an armful.

  The chest was only half-full, and he carried it easily down the steps into the yard. That was all that he was taking – the rest of it, the meagre furnishings of the bungalow he had sold to one of the auctioneers in Market Square. Ten pounds the lot. As Rhodes had predicted, he was leaving as he had come.

  ‘Where is Ralph?’ he demanded of Jan Cheroot, and the little Hottentot paused in chaining the cooking-pot and black iron kettle onto the tailboard of the cart.

&
nbsp; ‘Perhaps he stopped at Diamond Lil’s. The boy has got a right to his thirst – he worked hard enough for it.’

  Zouga let it pass, and instead ran an appraising eye over the cart. It was the newest and strongest of the three vehicles he owned. One cart had gone with Louise St John, and she had taken the best mules – but this rig would get them back to Cape Town, even under the additional burden that he was planning to put into it.

  Jan Cheroot ambled across to Zouga and took the other handle of the chest, ready to boost it up into the body of the cart.

  ‘Wait,’ Zouga told him. ‘That first.’ And he pointed to the roughly-hewn block of blue mottled rock that lay below the camel-thorn tree.

  ‘My mother—’ Jan Cheroot gaped. ‘This I don’t believe. In twenty-two years I’ve seen you do some stupid crazy things—’

  Zouga strode across to the block of blue ground that Ralph had brought up from the Devil’s Own and put his foot on it. ‘We’ll hoist it up with the block and tackle.’ He glanced at the sturdy branch above his head from which the sheave block and manila rope hung. ‘And we’ll back the cart up under it.’

  ‘That’s it!’ Jan Cheroot sat down on the chest and folded his arms. ‘This time I refuse. Once before I broke my back for you, but that was when I was young and stupid.’

  ‘Come on, Jan Cheroot, you are wasting time.’

  ‘What do you want with that – piece of ugly bloody stone? With another piece of thundering nonsense.’

  ‘I have lost the bird – I need a household god.’

  ‘I have heard of someone putting up a monument to a brave man, or a great battle – but to put up a stone to stupidity,’ Jan Cheroot mourned.

  ‘Back the cart up.’

  ‘I refuse – this time I refuse. I won’t do it. Not for anything. Not for any price.’

  ‘When we get it loaded – you can have a bottle of Smoke all to yourself to celebrate.’

  Jan Cheroot sighed, and stood up. ‘That’s my price.’ He shook his head and came across to stand beside Zouga. He glared at the block of blue stone venomously. ‘But don’t expect me to like it.’