by Wilbur Smith
The dominie chuckled. ‘Who teaches you your Bible, Jong?’ He used the expression meaning ‘young’ or ‘young man’.
‘My father, Oom.’
‘Then God have mercy on your soul.’ He stood up and thrust his beard out at Lothar.
‘I would you had left the boy, rather than the girl,’ he told him, and Lothar tightened his grip on Manfred’s shoulder. ‘He is a likely looking lad, and we need good men in the service of God and the Volk.’
‘He is well taken care of.’ Lothar could not conceal his agitation, but the dominie dropped his compelling gaze back to Manfred.
‘I think, Jong, that you and I are destined by Almighty God to meet again. When your father drowns or is eaten by a lion or hanged by the English, or in some other fashion punished by the Lord God of Israel, then come back here. Do you hear me, Jong? I need you, the Volk need you, and God needs you! My name is Tromp Bierman, the Trumpet of the Lord. Come back to this house!’
Manfred nodded. ‘I will come back to see Sarah. I promised her.’
As he said it the girl’s courage broke and she sobbed and tried to pull free from Trudi’s grip.
‘Stop that, child.’ Trudi Bierman shook her irritably. ‘Stop blubbering.’ Sarah gulped and swallowed the next sob.
Lothar turned Manfred away from the door. ‘The child is hard-working and willing, cousin. You will not regret this charity,’ he called over his shoulder.
‘That we shall see,’ his cousin muttered dubiously, and Lothar started back down the path.
‘Remember the Lord’s word, Lothar De La Rey,’ the Trumpet of the Lord bugled after them. ‘I am the Way and the Light. Whosoever believeth in me—’
Manfred twisted in his father’s grip and looked back. The tall gaunt figure of the dominie almost filled the kitchen doorway, but at the level of his waist Sarah’s small face peered around him – in the light of the Petromax it was white as bone china and glistened with her tears.
Four men were waiting for them at the rendezvous. During the desperate years when they had fought together in guerilla commando, it had been necessary for every man to know the reassembly points. When cut up and separated in the running battles against the Union troops, they had scattered away into the veld and days later come together at one of the safe places.
There was always water at these assembly points, a seep in the rocky crevice of a hillside, a Bushman well or a dry riverbed where they could dig for the precious stuff. The assembly points were always sited with an all-round view so that a following enemy could never take them by surprise. In addition, there was always grazing nearby for the horses and shelter for the men, and they had laid down caches of supplies at these places.
The rendezvous that Lothar had chosen for this meeting had an additional advantage. It was in the hills only a few miles north of the homestead of a prosperous German cattle-rancher, a good friend of Lothar’s family, a sympathizer who could be relied upon to tolerate their presence on his lands.
Lothar entered the hills along the dried watercourse that twisted through them like a maimed puffadder. He walked in the open so that the waiting men could see him from afar, and they were still two miles from the rendezvous when a tiny figure appeared on the rocky crest ahead of them, windmilling his arms in welcome. He was quickly joined by the other three and then they came running down the rough hillside to meet Lothar’s party in the riverbed.
Leading them was ‘Vark Jan’, or ‘Pig John’, the old Khoisan warrior with his yellow wrinkled features that bespoke his mixed lineage of Nama and Bergdama and, so he boasted, of even the true Bushman. Allegedly, his grandmother had been a Bushman slave captured by the Boers in one of the last great slave raids of the previous century. But then he was a famous liar and opinion was divided as to the truth of this claim. He was followed closely by Klein Boy, Swart Hendrick’s bastard son by a Herero mother.
He came directly to his father and greeted him with the traditional deferential clapping of hands. He was as tall and as powerfully built as Hendrick himself, but with the finer features and slanted eyes of his mother, and his skin was not as dark. Like wild honey it changed colour as the sunlight played upon it. These two had worked on the trawlers at Walvis Bay, and Hendrick had sent them ahead to find the other men they needed and bring them to the rendezvous.
Lothar turned to these men now. It was twelve years since last he had seen them. He remembered them as wild fighting men – his hunting dogs, he had called them with affection and total lack of trust. For like wild dogs they would have turned and savaged him at the first sign of weakness.
Now he greeted them by their old noms de guerre: ‘Legs’, the Ovambo with legs like a stork and ‘Buffalo’, who carried his head hunched on his thick neck like that animal. They clasped hands, then wrists and then hands again in the ritual greeting of the band reserved for special occasions, as after long separation or a successful foray, and Lothar studied them and saw how twelve years and easy living had altered them. They were fat and soft and middle-aged but, he consoled himself, the tasks he had for them were not demanding.
‘So!’ He grinned at them. ‘We have pulled you off the fat bellies of your wives, and away from your beer-pots.’ And they roared with laughter.
‘We came the same minute that Klein Boy and Pig John spoke your name to us,’ they assured him.
‘Of course, you came only because of the love and loyalty you bear me—’ Lothar’s sarcasm was biting, ‘the way the vulture and the jackal come for love of the dead, not of the feast.’
They roared again. How they had missed the whip of his tongue.
‘Pig John did mention gold,’ the Buffalo admitted, between sobs of laughter. ‘And Klein Boy whispered that there might be fighting again.’
‘It is sad, but a man of my age can pleasure his wives only once or twice a day, but he can fight and enjoy old companions and plunder day and night without end – and the loyalty we bear you is wide as the Kalahari,’ Stork Legs said, and they hooted with laughter and beat each other upon the back.
Still rumbling with occasional laughter, the group left the riverbed and climbed up to the old rendezvous point. It was a low overhanging shelf of rock, the roof blackened with the soot of countless campfires and the rear wall decorated with the ochre-coloured designs and drawings of the little yellow Bushmen who, before them, had used this shelter down the ages. From the entrance of the shelter there was a sweeping view out across the shimmering plains. It would be almost impossible to approach the hilltop undetected.
The four firstcomers had already opened the cache. It had been hidden in a cleft of rock further down the side of the hill, and the entrance closed with boulders and plastered over with clay from the riverbank. The contents had survived the years better than Lothar had expected. Of course, the canned food and the ammunition cases had all been sealed, while the Mauser rifles were packed in thick yellow grease and wrapped in greasepaper. They were in perfect condition. Even most of the spare saddlery and clothing had been preserved by the desert’s dry air.
They feasted on fried bully beef and toasted ship’s biscuit, food they had once hated for its monotony but now was delicious and evocative of countless other meals, back in those desperate days rendered attractive by the passage of the years.
After they had eaten they picked over the saddlery and boots and clothing, rejecting those items damaged by insects and rodents or dried out like parchment, cannibalizing and re-stitching and polishing with dubbin until they had equipment and arms for all of them.
While they worked Lothar considered that there were dozens of these caches, scattered through the wilderness, while in the north at the secret coastal base from which he had refuelled and re-equipped the German U-boats there must still be thousands of pounds’ worth of stores. Until now it had never occurred to him to raid them for his own account – somehow they had always been in patriotic trust.
He felt the prickle of temptation: ‘Perhaps if I chartered a boat at Walvis and
sailed up the coast—’ But then with a sudden chill he remembered that he would never see Walvis Bay or this land again. There would be no return after they had done what they were setting out to do.
He jumped to his feet and strode to the entrance of the rock shelter. As he stared out across the dun and heatshot plain with its dotted camel-thorn trees, he felt a premonition of terrible suffering and unhappiness.
‘Could I ever be happy elsewhere?’ he wondered. ‘Away from this harsh and beautiful land?’ His resolve wavered. He turned and saw Manfred watching him with a troubled frown. ‘Can I make this decision for my son?’ He stared back at the boy. ‘Can I condemn him to the life of an exile?’
He thrust the doubts aside with an effort, shaking them off with a shudder like a horse driving the stinging flies from its hide, and called Manfred to him. He led him away from the shelter, and when they were out of earshot of the others told him what lay ahead of them, speaking to him as an equal.
‘All we have worked for has been stolen from us, Manie, not in the sight of the law but in the sight of God and natural justice. The Bible gives us redress against those who have deceived or cheated us – an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. We will take back what has been stolen from us. But, Manie, the English law will look upon us as criminals. We will have to fly, to run and hide, and they will hunt us like wild animals. We will survive only by our courage and our wits.’
Manfred stirred eagerly, watching his father’s face with bright eager eyes. It all sounded romantic and exciting and he was proud of his father’s trust in discussing such adult matters with him.
‘We will go north. There is good farming land in Tanganyika and Nyasaland and Kenya. Many of our own Volk have already gone there. Of course, we will have to change our name, and we can never return here, but we will make a fine new life in a new land.’
‘Never come back?’ Manfred’s expression changed. ‘But what about Sarah?’
Lothar ignored the question. ‘Perhaps we will buy a beautiful coffee shamba in Nyasaland or on the lower slopes of Kilimanjaro. There are still great herds of wild game upon the plains of Serengeti, and we will hunt and farm.’
Manfred listened dutifully but his expression had dulled. How could he say it? How could he tell his father: ‘Pa, I don’t want to go to a strange land. I want to stay here.’?
He lay awake long after the others were snoring and the camp-fire had burned down to a red smear of embers, and he thought about Sarah, remembering the pale pixie face smeared with tears and the hot thin little body under the blanket beside him: ‘She is the only friend I’ve ever had.’
He was jerked back to reality by a strange and disturbing sound. It came from the plain below them but it seemed that distance could not take the fierce edge from the din.
His father coughed softly and sat up, letting his blanket fall to his waist. The awful sound came again, rising to an impossible crescendo and then dying away in a series of deep grunts, the death rattle of a strangling monster.
‘What is it, Pa?’ The hair at the back of Manfred’s neck had risen and prickled as though to the touch of a nettle.
‘They say even the bravest of men is afraid the first time he hears that sound,’ his father told him softly. ‘That is the hunting roar of a hungry Kalahari lion, my son.’
In the dawn when they climbed down the hillside and reached the plain, Lothar, who was leading, stopped abruptly and beckoned Manfred to his side.
‘You have heard his voice – now here is the track of his feet.’ He stooped and touched one of the pad marks, the size of a dinner plate, that was pressed deeply into the soft yellow earth.
‘An old maanhar, a solitary, old, maned male.’ Lothar traced the outline of the spoor. Manfred would see him do that often in the months ahead, always touching the sign as though to draw out its secrets through his fingertips. ‘See how his pads are worn smooth, and how he walks with his weight back towards his ankles. He favours his right fore, a cripple. He will find a meal hard to take, perhaps that is why he keeps close to the ranch. Cattle are easier to kill than wild game.’
Lothar reached out and plucked something from the lowest branch of thorns. ‘Here, Manie,’ he placed a small tuft of coarse red-gold hair in Manfred’s palm. ‘There is a tress of his mane he left for you.’ Then he stood up and stepped over the spoor. He led them on down into the broad saucer of land, watered by a string of natural artesian springs, where the grass grew thick and green and high as their knees, and they passed the first herds of cattle, humpbacked and with dewlaps that almost brushed the earth, their coats shiny in the early sunlight.
The homestead of the ranch stood on the higher ground beyond the wells, in a plantation of exotic date palms imported from Egypt. It was an old colonial German fort, a legacy from the Herero war of 1904 when the whole territory had erupted in rebellion against the excesses of German colonization. Even the Bondelswarts and Namas had joined the Herero tribe and it had taken 20,000 white troops and an expenditure of £60 million to quell the rebellion. Added to the cost, in the final accounting, were the 2,500 German officers and men killed and the 70,000 men, women and children of the Herero people shot, burned and starved to death. This casualty list constituted almost precisely seventy per cent of the entire tribe.
The homestead had originally been a frontier fort, built to hold off the Herero regiments. Its thick whitewashed outer walls were crenellated and even the central tower was furnished with battlements and a flagstaff upon which the German imperial eagle still defiantly flew.
The count saw them from afar, coming down the dusty road past the springs, and sent out a trap to bring them in. He was of Lothar’s mother’s generation, but still tall and lean and straight. A white duelling scar puckered the corner of his mouth and his manners were old-fashioned and formal. He sent Swart Hendrick to quarters in the servants’ wing and then led Lothar and Manfred through to the cool dark central hall where the countess had black bottles of good German beer and jugs of homemade ginger beer already set out for them.
Their clothes were whisked away by the servants while they bathed, and were returned within an hour, laundered and ironed, their boots polished until they gleamed. For dinner there was a baron of tender beef from the estate, running with its own fragrant juices, and marvellous Rhine wines to wash it down. To Manfred’s unqualified delight, this was followed by a dozen various tarts and puddings and trifles, while for Lothar the greater treat was the civilized discourse of his host and hostess. It was a deep pleasure to discuss books and music, and to listen to the precise and beautifully enunciated German of his hosts.
When Manfred could eat not another spoonful, and had to use both hands to cover his yawns, one of the Herero servingmaids led him away to his room, and the count poured schnapps for Lothar and brought a box of Havanas for his approval while his wife fussed over the silver coffee pot.
When his cigar was drawing evenly the count told Lothar: ‘I received the letter you sent me from Windhoek, and I was most distressed to hear of your misfortune. Times are very difficult for all of us.’ He polished his monocle upon his sleeve before screwing it back into his eye and focusing it upon Lothar again. ‘Your sainted mother was a fine lady. There is nothing that I would not do for her son.’ He paused and drew upon the Havana, smiled thinly at the flavour and then said, ‘However—’
Lothar’s spirits dropped at that word, always the harbinger of denial and disappointment.
‘However, not two weeks before I received your letter the purchasing officer for the army remount department came out to the ranch and I sold him all our excess animals. I have retained only sufficient for our own needs.’
Though Lothar had seen at least forty fine horses in the herd grazing on the young pasture that grew around the ranch, he merely nodded in understanding.
‘Of course, I have a pair of excellent mules – big, strong beasts, that I could let you have at a nominal price – say fifty pounds.’
‘The pair?’ Lo
thar asked deferentially.
‘Each,’ said the count firmly. ‘As to the other suggestion in your letter, I make it a firm rule never to lend money to a friend. That way one avoids losing both friend and money.’
Lothar let that slide by, and instead returned to the count’s earlier remarks. ‘The army remount officer – he has been buying horses from all the estates in the district?’
‘I understand he has purchased almost a hundred.’ The count showed relief at Lothar’s gentlemanly acceptance of his refusal. ‘All excellent animals. He was interested only in the best – desert-hardened and salted against the horse-sickness.’
‘And he has shipped them south on the railway, I expect?’
‘Not yet,’ the count shook his head. ‘Or he had not done so when last I heard. He is holding them on the pool of the Swakop river on the far side of the town, resting them and letting them build up their strength for the rail journey. I heard that he plans to send them down the line when he has a hundred and fifty altogether.’
They left the fort the following morning after a gargantuan breakfast of sausage and prepared meats and eggs, all three of them riding up on the broad back of the grey mule for which Lothar had finally paid twenty pounds with the head halter thrown in to sweeten the bargain.
‘How were the servants’ quarters at the fort?’ Lothar asked.
‘Slave quarters, not servants’ quarters,’ Hendrick corrected him. ‘In them a man could starve to death or, from what I heard, be flogged to death by the count.’ Hendrick sighed. ‘If it had not been for the generosity and good nature of the youngest of the Herero maids—’
Lothar nudged him sharply in the ribs and shot a warning glance towards Manfred, and Hendrick went on smoothly.
‘So do we all escape on one sway-backed ancient mule,’ he observed. ‘They will never catch us on this gazelle-swift creature.’ He slapped the fat rump and the mule maintained its easy swaying gait, its hooves plopping in the dust.