Power of the Sword

by Wilbur Smith

  ‘If it’s him, he’s a dead man,’ Lothar promised and stood up. It was time to move at last, for the moon was clear of the horizon, horned and glowing like a horseshoe from the blacksmith’s forge.

  Lothar picked his way down the slope, and the mule snorted and blew through his nostrils, still standing miserably under his dreadful burden.

  ‘Almost over now.’ Lothar stroked his forehead. ‘You’ve done well, old fellow.’ He loosed the head halter, adjusted the Mauser slung over his shoulder and led the mule around the side of the kopje and down the bank to the river.

  There was no question of a stealthy approach, not with that great pale animal and his swaying load. Lothar unslung the rifle and rammed a cartridge into the breech as they plodded through the sand of the riverbed and he watched the line of trees on the bank ahead, even though he expected no challenge.

  The camp-fire had died down, and there was complete silence until they climbed the bank and Lothar heard the stamp of a hoof and the soft fluttering breath of one of the animals in the stockade ahead. The breeze was behind Lothar, steady still, and suddenly there was a shrill unhappy whinny.

  ‘That’s it – get a good whiff of it.’ Lothar led the mule towards the stockade.

  Now there was the trample of hooves and the sound of restless animals as they began to mill and jostle one another. Alarm transmitted by the rank smell of the bleeding lion carcass was spreading infectiously through the herd. A horse whinnied in terror, and immediately others reared in panic. Lothar could see their heads above the thornbush wall of the stockade, manes flying in the moonlight, front hooves lashing out wildly.

  Against the windward wall of the stockade Lothar held the mule, and then cut the rope that held the lion to its back. The carcass slid over and hit the ground, the wind from its lungs was driven up the dead throat with a low belching roar and the animals on the far side of the brush wall surged and screamed and began to swirl around the stockade in a living whirlpool of horseflesh.

  Lothar stooped and split the lion’s belly from the crotch of the back legs to the sternum of the ribs, driving his blade deeply so that it slashed through the bladder and guts, and instantly the stench was thick and rank.

  The horse herd was in chaos. He could hear them crashing into the far wall of the stockade as they attempted to escape from the awful scent. Lothar lifted the rifle to his shoulder, aiming only feet over the maddened horses, and emptied the magazine. The shots crashed out in quick succession, the muzzle-flashes lighting the stockade, and the herd in terrified concert burst through the wall of the stockade, pouring through it in a dark river, their manes tossing like foam as they galloped away into the night, heading downwind to where Hendrick waited with his men.

  Hurriedly Lothar tethered the mule, and reloading the rifle as he ran, headed for the dying camp-fire. One of the troopers, aroused by the escaping horses even from his drunken stupor, was on his feet, staggering determinedly towards the stockade.

  ‘The horses,’ he was screaming. ‘Come on you drunken thunders! We have to stop the horses!’ He saw Lothar. ‘Help me! The horses—’

  Lothar lifted the butt of the Mauser under his chin. The trooper’s teeth clicked together and he sat down in the sand and then slowly toppled over backwards again. Lothar stepped over him and ran forward.

  ‘Pig John!’ he called urgently. ‘Where are you?’ There was no reply and he went past the fire to the inert figure he had seen from the lookout. He rolled it over with his foot, and Pig John looked up at the moon with sightless eyes and a tranquil smile on his wrinkled yellow face.

  ‘Up!’ Lothar kicked him with a full swing of the boot. Pig John’s smile did not waver. He was far past any pain. ‘All right, I warned you!’

  Lothar worked the Mauser’s bolt and flicked over the safety-catch with his thumb. He put the muzzle of the rifle to Pig John’s head. If he was handed over to the police alive it would take only a few strokes of the hippo-hide sjambok whip to get Pig John talking. Though he did not know the full details of the plan, he knew enough to ruin their chances and to put Lothar on the wanted list for horse-theft and the destruction of army property. He took up the slack in the trigger of the Mauser.

  ‘It’s too good for him,’ he thought grimly. ‘He should be flogged to death.’ But his finger relaxed, and he swore at himself for his own foolishness as he flipped the safety-catch and ran back to fetch the mule.

  Even though Pig John was a skinny little man, it took all of Lothar’s strength to swing his relaxed rubbery body over the mule’s back. He hung there like a piece of laundry on the drying line, arms and legs dangling on opposite sides. Lothar leapt up behind him, whipped the mule into his top gait, a laboured lumbering trot, and steered him directly down the wind.

  After a mile Lothar thought he must have missed them, and slowed the mule just as Hendrick stepped out of the moon shadows ahead of him.

  ‘How goes it? How many did you get?’ Lothar called anxiously, and Hendrick laughed.

  ‘So many we ran out of halters.’

  Once each of his men had captured one of the escaped horses, he had gone up on its bare back and cut off the bunches of fleeing animals, turning them and holding them while Manfred ran in and slipped the halters over their heads.

  ‘Twenty-six!’ Lothar exulted as he counted the strings of roped horses. ‘We’ll be able to pick and choose.’ He tempered his own jubilation. ‘All right, we’ll move out right away. The army will be after us as soon as they can get troops up here.’

  He slipped the halter off the mule’s head and slapped his rump. ‘Thank you, old fellow,’ he said. ‘You can get on back home.’ The mule accepted the offer with alacrity and actually managed to gallop the first hundred yards of his homeward journey.

  Each of them picked a horse and mounted bareback with a string of three or four loose horses behind him, and Lothar led them back towards the rock shelter in the hills.

  At dawn they paused briefly while Lothar checked over each of the stolen horses. Two had been injured in the mêlée in the stockade and he turned them loose. The others were of such fine quality and condition that he could not choose between them though they had many more than they required.

  While they were sorting the horses Pig John regained consciousness and sat up weakly. He muttered prayers to his ancestors and Hottentot gods for a release from his suffering and then vomited a painful gush of vile brandy.

  ‘You and I still have business to settle,’ Lothar promised him unsmilingly, then turned to Hendrick. ‘We’ll take all these horses. We are certain to lose some in the desert.’ Then he raised his right arm in the cavalry command: ‘Move out!’

  They reached the rock shelter a little before noon, but they paused only to load the waiting pack-saddles onto the spare horses and then each of them chose a mount and saddled up. They led the horses down the hill and watered them, allowing them to drink their fill.

  ‘How much of a start do we have?’ Hendrick asked.

  ‘The coloured troopers can do nothing without their white officers and it might take them two or three days to get back. They will have to telegraph Windhoek for orders, and then they will have to make up a patrol. I’d say three days at least, more likely four or five.’

  ‘We can go a long way in three days,’ Hendrick said with satisfaction.

  ‘Nobody can go further,’ Lothar agreed. It was a fact not a boast. The desert was his dominion. Few white men knew it as well as he, and none better.

  ‘Shall we mount up?’ Hendrick asked.

  ‘One more chore.’ Lothar took the spare leather reins out of his saddle-bag and looped them over his right wrist with the brass buckles hanging to his ankles as he crossed to where Pig John sat miserably in the shade of the riverbank with his face buried in his hands. In his extremity he did not hear Lothar’s tread in the soft sand until he stood over him.

  ‘I promised you,’ Lothar told him flatly, and shook out the heavy leather thongs.

  ‘Master, I cou
ld not help it,’ shrieked Pig John and he tried to scramble to his feet.

  Lothar swung the thongs and the brass buckles blurred in a bright arc in the sunlight. The blow caught Pig John around the back and the buckles snapped around his ribs and gouged out a groove in his flesh below the armpit.

  Pig John howled. ‘They forced me. They made me drink—’

  The next blow knocked him off his feet. He kept screaming, although now the words were no longer coherent, and the leathers cracked on his yellow skin, the weals rising in thick shiny ridges and turning purple-red as ripe grapeskins. The sharp buckles shredded his shirt as though it had been torn off him by lion’s claws, and the sand clotted his blood into wet balls as it dribbled into the riverbed.

  He stopped screaming at last and Lothar stood back panting and wiped the wet red leather thongs on a saddle cloth and looked at the faces of his men. The beating had been for them as much as for the man curled at his feet. They were wild dogs and they understood only strength, respected only cruelty.

  Hendrick spoke for them all. ‘He was paid a fair price. Shall I finish him?’

  ‘No! Leave a horse for him.’ Lothar turned away. ‘When he comes round he can follow us, or he can go to hell where he belongs.’ He swung up into the saddle of his own mount and avoided his son’s stricken eyes as he raised his voice. ‘All right – we are moving out.’

  He rode with long stirrups in the Boer fashion, slouched down comfortably in the saddle, and Hendrick pushed his mount up on one side of him and Manfred on the other.

  Lothar felt elated; the adrenalin of violence was like a drug in his blood still and the open desert lay ahead of him. With the taking of the horses he had crossed the frontier of law – he was an outlaw once again, free of society’s restraint, and he felt his spirit towering on high like a hunting falcon.

  ‘By God. I’d almost forgotten what it was like to have a rifle in my hand and a good horse between my legs.’

  ‘We are men once again,’ Hendrick agreed, and leaned across to embrace Manfred. ‘You too. Your father was your age when he and I first rode out to war. We are going to war again. You are a man as he was.’ And Manfred forgot the spectacle he had just witnessed and swelled with pride at being counted in this company. He sat up straight in the saddle and lifted his chin.

  Lothar turned his face into the north-east, towards the hinterland where the vast Kalahari brooded, and led them away.

  That night while they camped in a deep gorge which shielded the light of their small fire, the sentinel roused them with a low whistle. They rolled out of their blankets, snatched up their rifles and slipped away into the darkness.

  The horses stirred and whickered, and then Pig John rode in out of the darkness and dismounted. He stood wretchedly by the fire, his face swollen and discoloured with bruises like a cur dog expecting to be driven away. The others came out of the shadows and without looking at him or otherwise acknowledging his existence climbed back into their blankets.

  ‘Sleep on the other side of the fire from me,’ Lothar told him harshly. ‘You stink of brandy.’ And Pig John wriggled with relief and gratification that he had been accepted back into the band.

  In the dawn they mounted again and rode on into the wide hot emptiness of the desert.

  The road out to H’ani Mine was probably one of the most rugged in South West Africa and every time she negotiated it Centaine promised herself: We must really do something about having it repaired. Then Dr Twentyman-Jones would give her an estimate of the cost of resurfacing hundreds of miles of desert track and of erecting bridges over the river courses and consolidating the passes through the hills, and Centaine’s good frugal sense would reassert itself.

  ‘After all it only takes three days, and I seldom have to drive it more than three times a year, and it is really quite an adventure.’

  The telegraph line that connected the mine to Windhoek had been expensive enough. After an estimate of fifty pounds it had finally cost her a hundred pounds for every single mile and she still felt resentment every time she looked at that endless line of poles strung together with gleaming copper wire that ran beside the track. Apart from the cost, it spoiled the view, detracting from the feeling of wildness and isolation which she so treasured when she was out in the Kalahari.

  She remembered with a twinge of nostalgia how they had slept on the ground and carried their water in the first years. Now there were regular stages at each night’s stop, thatched rondavels and windmills to raise water from the deep bores, servants living permanently at each station to service the rest houses, providing meals and hot baths and a log fire in the hearth on those crisp frosty nights of the Kalahari winter – even paraffin refrigerators manufacturing heavenly ice for the sundowner whisky in the fierce summer heat. The traffic on the road was heavy, the regular convoy under Gerhard Fourie carrying out fuel and stores had cut deep ruts in the soft earth and churned up the crossings in the dried river-beds, and worst of all the gauge of the tyres of the big Ford trucks was wider than that of the yellow Daimler so that she had to drive with one wheel in the rut and the other bouncing and jolting over the uneven middle ridge.

  Added to all this it was high summer and the heat was crushing. The metal of the Daimler’s coachwork could raise blisters on the skin, and they were forced to halt regularly when the water in the radiator boiled and blew a singing plume of steam high in the air. The very heavens seemed to quiver with blue fire, and the far desert horizons were washed away by the shimmering glassy whirlpools of heat mirage.

  If only they could make a machine small enough to cool the air in the Daimler, she thought, like the one in the railway coach – and then she burst out laughing. Tiens: I must be getting soft! She remembered how, with the two old Bushmen who had rescued her, she had travelled on foot through the terrible dune country of the Namib and they had been forced to cover their bodies with a plaster of sand and their own urine to survive the monstrous heat of the desert noons.

  ‘Why are you laughing, Mater?’ Shasa demanded.

  ‘Oh, just something that happened long ago, before you were born.’

  ‘Tell me, oh please tell me.’ He seemed unaffected by the heat and the dust and the merciless jolting of the chassis. But then why should he be? She smiled at him. This is where he was born. He too is a creature of the desert.

  Shasa took her smile for acquiescence. ‘Come on, Mater. Tell me the story.’

  ‘Pourquoi pas? Why not?’ And she told him and watched the shock in his expression.

  ‘Your own pee-pee?’ He was aghast.

  ‘That surprises you?’ She mocked him. ‘Then let me tell you what we did when the water in our ostrich-egg bottles was finished. Old O’wa, the Bushman hunter, killed a gemsbok bull with his poisoned arrow and we took out the first stomach, the rumen, and we squeezed out the liquid from the undigested contents and we drank that. It kept us going just long enough to reach the sip-wells.’

  ‘Mater!’

  ‘That’s right, chéri, I drink champagne when I can, but I’ll drink whatever keeps me alive when I have to.’

  She was silent while he considered that, and she glanced at his face and saw the revulsion turn to respect.

  ‘What would you have done, chéri, drunk it or died?’ she asked, to make sure the lesson was learned.

  ‘I would have drunk,’ he answered without hesitation, and then with affectionate pride, ‘You know, Mater, you really are a crackerjack.’ It was his ultimate accolade.

  ‘Look!’ She pointed ahead to where the lion-coloured plain, its far limits lost in the curtains of mirage, seemed to be covered with a gauzy cinnamon-coloured veil of thin smoke.

  Centaine pulled the Daimler off the track and they climbed out onto the running-board for a better view.

  ‘Springbok. The first we have seen on this trip.’ The beautiful gazelle were moving steadily across the flats, all in the same direction.

  ‘There must be tens of thousands.’

  The springbok
were elegant little animals with long delicate legs and lyre-shaped horns.

  ‘They are migrating into the north,’ Centaine told him. ‘There must have been good rains up there, and they are moving to the water.’

  Suddenly the nearest gazelles took fright at their presence and began the peculiar alarm display that the Boers called ‘pronking’. They arched their backs and bowed their long necks until their muzzles touched their fore hooves, and they bounced on stiff legs, flying high and lightly into the shimmering hot air while from the fold of skin along their backs they flashed a flowing white crest of hair.

  This alarm behaviour was infectious and soon thousands of gazelle were bounding across the plain like a flock of birds. Centaine jumped down from the running-board and mimicked them, forking the fingers of one hand over her head as horns and with the fingers of the other showing the crest hair down her back. She did it so skilfully that Shasa hooted with laughter and clapped his hands.

  ‘Bully for you, Mater!’ He jumped down and joined her, and they pranced in a circle, until they were weak with laughter and exertion. Then they leaned against the Daimler and clung to each other for support.

  ‘Old O’wa taught me that,’ Centaine gasped. ‘He could imitate every animal of the veld.’

  When they drove on she let Shasa take the wheel, for the crossing of the plain was one of the easier stretches of the journey and he drove well. She lay back in the corner of her seat and after a while Shasa broke the silence.

  ‘When we are alone you are so different.’ He searched for the words. ‘You are such jolly good fun. I wish we could just be like this forever.’

  ‘Anything you do too long becomes a bore,’ she told him gently. ‘The trick is to do it all, not just one thing. This is good fun but tomorrow we will be at the mine and there will be another type of excitement for us to experience and after that there will be something else. We’ll do it all, and we will wring from each moment the last drop it has to offer.’

  Twentyman-Jones had gone ahead to the mine while Centaine stayed on for three days in Windhoek to go over the paperwork with Abraham Abrahams. So he had alerted the servants at the rest houses as he passed through.