by Wilbur Smith
‘Go on, Pa, go on!’
When Lothar reached the description of the first battle in which Jannie Smuts’ troops had smashed the rebellion with machine-guns and artillery, the boy’s eyes clouded with sorrow.
‘But you fought like demons, didn’t you, Pa?’
‘We fought like madmen, but there were too many of them and they were armed with great cannons and machine-guns. Then your grandpa was hit in the stomach and I put him up on my horse and carried him off the battlefield.’ Fat tears glistened in the boy’s eyes now as Lothar ended.
‘When at last he was dying your grandfather took the old black Bible from the saddle bag on which his head was pillowed, and he made me swear an oath upon the book.’
‘I know the oath,’ Manfred cut in. ‘Let me tell it!’
‘What was the oath?’ Lothar nodded agreement.
‘Grandpa said: “Promise me, my son, with your hand upon the book, promise me that the war with the English will never end.”’
‘Yes,’ Lothar nodded again. ‘That was the oath, the solemn oath I made to my father as he lay dying.’ He reached out and took the boy’s hand and squeezed it hard.
Old Da Silva broke the mood; he coughed and hawked and spat through the wheelhouse window.
‘You should be ashamed – filling the child’s head with hatred and death,’ he said, and Lothar stood up abruptly.
‘Guard your mouth, old man,’ he warned. ‘This is no business of yours.’
‘Thank the Holy Virgin,’ Da Silva grumbled, ‘for that is devil’s business indeed.’
Lothar scowled and turned away from him. ‘Manfred, that’s enough for today. Put the books away.’
He swung out of the wheelhouse and scrambled up onto the roof. As he settled comfortably against the coaming, he took a long black cheroot from his top pocket and bit off the tip. He spat the stub overside and patted his pockets for the matches. The boy stuck his head over the edge of the coaming, hesitated shyly and when his father did not send him away – sometimes he was moody and withdrawn and wanted to be alone – Manfred crept up and sat beside him.
Lothar cupped his hands around the flare of the match and sucked the cheroot smoke down deeply into his lungs and then he held up the match and let the wind extinguish it. He flicked it overboard, and let his arm fall casually over his son’s shoulders.
The boy shivered with delight, physical display of affection from his father was so rare, and he pressed closer to him and sat still as he could, barely breathing so as not to disturb or spoil the moment.
The little fleet ran in towards the land, and turned the sharp northern horn of the bay. The seabirds were returning with them, squadrons of yellow-throated gannets in long regular lines skimming low over the cloudy green waters, and the lowering sun gilded them and burned upon the tall bronze dunes that rose like a mountain range behind the tiny insignificant cluster of buildings that stood at the edge of the bay.
‘I hope Willem has had enough sense to fire up the boilers,’ Lothar murmured. ‘We have enough work here to keep the factory busy all night and all tomorrow.’
‘We’ll never be able to can all this fish,’ the boy whispered.
‘No, we will have to turn most of it to fish oil and fish meal—’ Lothar broke off and stared across the bay. Manfred felt his body stiffen and then, to the boy’s dismay, he lifted his arm off his son’s shoulders and shaded his eyes.
‘The bloody fool,’ he growled. With his hunter’s vision he had picked out the distant stack of the factory boiler-house. It was smokeless. ‘What the hell is he playing at?’ Lothar leapt to his feet and balanced easily against the trawler’s motion. ‘He has let the boilers go cold. It will take five or six hours to refire them and our fish will begin to spoil. Damn him, damn him to hell!’ Raging still, Lothar dropped down to the wheelhouse. As he yanked the foghorn to alert the factory, he snapped, ‘With the money from the fish I’m going to buy one of Marconi’s new-fangled shortwave radio machines so we can talk to the factory while we are at sea; then this sort of thing won’t happen.’
He broke off again and stared. ‘What the hell is going on!’ He snatched the binoculars from the bin next to the control panel and focused them. They were close enough now to see the small crowd at the main doors of the factory. The cutters and packers in their rubber aprons and boots. They should have been at their places in the factory.
‘There is Willem.’ The factory manager was standing on the end of the long wooden unloading jetty that thrust out into the still waters of the bay on its heavy teak pilings. ‘What the hell is he playing at – the boilers cold and everybody hanging about outside?’ There were two strangers with Willem, standing one on each side of him. They were dressed in dark civilian suits and they had that self-important, puffed-up look of petty officialdom that Lothar knew and dreaded.
‘Tax collectors or other civil servants,’ Lothar whispered, and his anger cooled and was replaced with unease. No minion of the government had ever brought him good news.
‘Trouble,’ he guessed. ‘Just now when I have a thousand tons of fish to cook and can—’
Then he noticed the motor cars. They had been screened by the factory building until Da Silva made the turn into the main channel that would bring the trawler up to the off-loading jetty. There were two cars. One was a battered old ‘T’ model Ford, but the other, even though covered with a pale coating of fine desert dust, was a much grander machine – and Lothar felt his heart trip and his breathing alter.
There could not be two similar vehicles in the whole of Africa. It was an elephantine Daimler, painted daffodil yellow. The last time he had seen it, it had been parked outside the offices of the Courtney Mining and Finance Company in the Main Street of Windhoek.
Lothar had been on his way to discuss an extension of his loans from the company. He had stood on the opposite side of the wide dusty unpaved street and watched as she came down the broad marble steps, flanked by two of her obsequious employees in dark suits and high celluloid collars; one of them had opened the door of the magnificent yellow machine for her and bowed her into the driver’s seat while the other had run to take the crank handle. Scorning a chauffeur, she had driven off herself, not even glancing in Lothar’s direction, and left him pale and trembling with the conflicting emotions that the mere sight of her had evoked. That had been almost a year before.
Now he roused himself as Da Silva laid the heavily burdened trawler alongside the jetty. They were so low in the water that Manfred had to toss the bow mooring-line up to one of the men on the jetty above him.
‘Lothar, these men – they want to speak to you.’ Willem called down. He was sweating nervously as he jerked a thumb at the man who flanked him.
‘Are you Mr Lothar De La Rey?’ the smaller of the two strangers demanded, pushing his dusty fedora hat onto the back of his head and mopping the pale line of skin that was exposed beneath the brim.
‘That’s right.’ Lothar glared up at at him with his clenched fists upon his hips. ‘And who the hell are you?’
Are you the owner of the South West African Canning and Fishing Company?’
‘Ja!’ Lothar answered him in Afrikaans. ‘I am the owner – and what of it?’
‘I am the sheriff of the court in Windhoek, and I have here a writ of attachment over all the assets of the company.’ The sheriff brandished the document he held.
‘They’ve closed the factory,’ Willem called down to Lothar miserably, his moustaches quivering. ‘They made me draw the fires on my boilers.’
‘You can’t do that!’ Lothar snarled, and his eyes slitted yellow and fierce as those of an angry leopard. ‘I’ve got a thousand tons of fish to process.’
‘Are these the four trawlers registered in the company’s name?’ the sheriff went on, unperturbed by the outburst, but he unbuttoned his dark jacket and pulled it back as he placed both hands on his hips. A heavy Webley service revolver hung on a leather holster from his belt. He turned his head to watch
the other trawlers mooring at their berths on each side of the jetty, then without waiting for Lothar to answer he went on placidly, ‘My assistant will place the court seals on them and their cargoes. I must warn you that it will be a criminal offence to remove either the boats or their cargoes.’
‘You can’t do this to me!’ Lothar swarmed up the ladder onto the jetty. His tone was no longer belligerent. ‘I have to get my fish processed. Don’t you understand? They’ll be stinking to the heavens by tomorrow morning—’
‘They are not your fish.’ The sheriff shook his head. ‘They belong to the Courtney Mining and Finance Company.’ He gestured to his assistant impatiently. ‘Get on with it, man.’ And he began to turn away.
‘She’s here,’ Lothar called after him, and the sheriff turned back to face him again.
‘She’s here,’ Lothar repeated. ‘That’s her car. She has come herself, hasn’t she?’
The sheriff dropped his eyes and shrugged, but Willem gobbled a reply.
‘Yes, she’s here – she’s waiting in my office.’
Lothar turned away from the group and strode down the jetty, his heavy oilskin breeches rustling and his fists still bunched as though he were going into a fight.
The agitated crowd of factory hands was waiting for him at the head of the jetty.
‘What is happening, Baas?’ they pleaded. ‘They won’t let us work. What must we do, Ou Baas?’
‘Wait!’ Lothar ordered them brusquely. ‘I will fix this.’
‘Will we get our pay, Baas? We’ve got children—’
‘You’ll be paid,’ Lothar snapped, ‘I promise you that.’ It was a promise he could not keep, not until he had sold his fish, and he pushed his way through them and strode around the corner of the factory towards the manager’s office.
The Daimler was parked outside the door, and a boy leaned against the front mudguard of the big yellow machine. It was obvious that he was disgruntled and bored. He was perhaps a year older than Manfred but an inch or so shorter and his body was slimmer and neater. He wore a white shirt that had wilted a little in the heat, and his fashionable Oxford bags of grey flannel were dusty and too modish for a boy of his age, but there was an unstudied grace about him, and he was beautiful as a girl, with flawless skin and dark indigo eyes.
Lothar came up short at the sight of him, and before he could stop himself, he said, ‘Shasa!’
The boy straightened up quickly and flicked the lock of dark hair off his forehead.
‘How do you know my name?’ he asked, and despite his tone the dark blue eyes sparkled with interest as he studied Lothar with a level, almost adult self-assurance.
There were a hundred answers Lothar could have given, and they crowded to his lips: ‘Once, many years ago, I saved you and your mother from death in the desert . . . I helped wean you, and carried you on the pommel of my saddle when you were a baby . . . I loved you, almost as much as once I loved your mother . . . You are Manfred’s brother – you are half brother to my own son. I’d recognize you anywhere, even after all this time.’
But instead he said, ‘Shasa is the Bushman word for “Good Water”, the most precious substance in the Bushman world.’
‘That’s right.’ Shasa Courtney nodded. The man interested him. There was a restrained violence and cruelty in him, an impression of untapped strength, and his eyes were strangely light coloured, almost yellow like those of a cat. ‘You’re right. It’s a Bushman name, but my Christian name is Michel. That’s French. My mother is French.’
‘Where is she?’ Lothar demanded, and Shasa glanced at the office door.
‘She doesn’t want to be disturbed,’ he warned, but Lothar De La Rey stepped past him, so closely that Shasa could smell the fish slime on his oilskins and see the small white fish scales stuck to his tanned skin.
‘You’d best knock—’ Shasa dropped his voice, but Lothar ignored him and flung the door of the office open so that it crashed back on its hinges. He stood in the open door and Shasa could see past him. His mother rose from the straight-backed chair by the window and faced the door.
She was slim as a girl, and the yellow crêpe-de-chine of her dress was draped over her small fashionably flattened breasts and was gathered in a narrow girdle low around her hips. Her narrow-brimmed cloche hat was pulled down, covering the dense dark bush of her hair, and her eyes were huge and almost black.
She looked very young, not much older than her son, until she raised her chin and showed the hard, determined line of her jaw and the corners of her eyes lifted also and those honey-coloured lights burned in their dark depths. Then she was formidable as any man Lothar had ever met.
They stared at each other, assessing the changes that the years had wrought since their last meeting.
‘How old is she?’ Lothar wondered, and then immediately remembered. ‘She was born an hour after midnight on the first day of the century. She is as old as the twentieth century – that’s why she was named Centaine. So she’s thirty-one years old, and she still looks nineteen, as young as the day I found her, bleeding and dying in the desert with the wounds of lion claws deep in her sweet young flesh.’
‘He has aged,’ Centaine thought. ‘Those silver streaks in the blond, those lines around the mouth and eyes. He’ll be over forty now, and he has suffered – but not enough. I am glad I didn’t kill him, I’m glad my bullet missed his heart. It would have been too quick. Now he is in my power and he’ll begin to learn the true—’
Suddenly, against her will and inclination, she remembered the feel of his golden body over hers, naked and smooth and hard, and her loins clenched and then dissolved so she could feel their hot soft flooding, as hot as the blood that mounted to her cheeks and as hot as her anger against herself and her inability to master that animal corner of her emotions. In all other things she had trained herself like an athlete, but always that unruly streak of sensuality was just beyond her control.
She looked beyond the man in the doorway, and she saw Shasa standing out in the sunlight, her beautiful child, watching her curiously, and she was ashamed and angry to have been caught in that naked and unguarded moment when she was certain that her basest feelings had been on open display.
‘Close the door,’ she ordered, and her voice was husky and level. ‘Come in and close the door.’ She turned away and stared out of the window, bringing herself under complete control once more before turning back to face the man she had set herself to destroy.
The door closed and Shasa suffered an acute pang of disappointment. He sensed that something vitally important was taking place. That blond stranger with the cat-yellow eyes who knew his name and its derivation stirred something in him, something dangerous and exciting. Then his mother’s reaction, that sudden high colour coming up her throat into her cheeks and something in her eyes that he had never seen before – not guilt, surely? Then uncertainty, which was totally uncharacteristic. She had never been uncertain of anything in the world that Shasa knew of. He wanted desperately to know what was taking place behind that closed door. The walls of the building were of corrugated galvanized iron sheeting.
‘If you want to know something, go and find out.’ It was one of his mother’s adages, and his only compunction was that she might catch him at it as he crossed to the side wall of the office, stepping lightly so that the gravel would not crunch under his feet, and laid his ear against the sun-heated corrugated metal.
Though he strained, he could only hear the murmur of voices. Even when the blond stranger spoke sharply, he could not catch the words, while his mother’s voice was low and husky and inaudible.
‘The window,’ he thought, and moved quickly to the corner. As he stepped around it, intent on eavesdropping at the open window, he was suddenly the subject of attention of fifty pairs of eyes. The factory manager and his idle workers were still clustered at the main doors, and they fell silent and turned their full attention upon him as he appeared round the corner.
Shasa tossed his head and ve
ered away from the window. They were all still watching him and he thrust his hands into the pockets of his Oxford bags and, with an elaborate show of nonchalance, sauntered down towards the long wooden jetty as though this had been his intention all along. Whatever was going on in the office now was beyond him, unless he could wheedle it out of his mother later, and he didn’t think there was much hope of that. Then suddenly he noticed the four squat wooden trawlers moored alongside the jetty, each lying low in the water under the glittering silver cargo they carried, and his disappointment was a little mollified. Here was something to break the monotony of his hot dreary desert afternoon and his step quickened as he went onto the timbers of the jetty. Boats always fascinated him.
This was new and exciting. He had never seen so many fish, there must be tons of them. He came level with the first boat. It was grubby and ugly, with streaks of human excrement down the sides where the crew had squatted on the gunwale, and it stank of bilges and fuel oil and unwashed humanity living in confined quarters. It had not even been graced with a name: there were only the registration and licence numbers painted on the wave-battered bows.
‘A boat should have a name,’ Shasa thought. ‘It’s insulting and unlucky not to give it a name.’ His own twenty-five-foot yacht that his mother had given him for his thirteenth birthday was named The Midas Touch, a name that his mother had suggested.
Shasa wrinkled his nose at the smell of the trawler, disgusted and saddened by her disgracefully neglected condition.
‘If this is what Mater drove all the way from Windhoek for—’ He did not finish the thought for a boy stepped around the far side of the tall angular wheelhouse.
He wore patched shorts of canvas duck, his legs were brown and muscled and he balanced easily on the hatch coaming on bare feet.
As they became aware of each other both boys bridled and stiffened, like dogs meeting unexpectedly; silently they scrutinized each other.
‘A dandy, a fancy boy,’ Manfred thought. He had seen one or two like him on their infrequent visits to the resort town of Swakopmund up the coast. Rich men’s children dressed in ridiculous stiff clothing, walking dutifully behind their parents with that infuriating supercilious expression upon their faces. ‘Look at his hair, all shiny with brilliantine, and he stinks like a bunch of flowers.’