Power of the Sword

by Wilbur Smith

  ‘Kill me, rather!’ She knew that plea would stay with her for the rest of her life. She bowed her head and covered her eyes with her hands. In the eye of her mind she saw Lothar as he had been when she first met him, hard and lean as one of the red Kalahari lions, with pale eyes that looked to far horizons shaded blue by distance, a creature of those great spaces washed with white sunlight. And she thought of him now, locked in a tiny cell, deprived for the rest of his life of the sun and the desert wind.

  ‘Oh Lothar,’ she cried in the depths of her soul. ‘How could something once so good and beautiful have ended like this? We have destroyed each other, and destroyed also the child that we conceived in that fine noon of our love.’

  She opened her eyes again. The courtroom had emptied and she thought she was alone until she sensed a presence near her and she turned quickly and Blaine Malcomess was there.

  ‘Now I know how right it was to love you,’ he said softly. He stood behind her, his head bowed over her, and she looked up at him and felt the terrible regret and sorrow begin to lift.

  Blaine took her hand that lay along the back of the bench and held it between both of his. ‘I have been struggling with myself all these last days since we parted, trying to find the strength never to see you again. I almost succeeded. But you changed it all by what you did today. Honour and duty and all those other things no longer mean anything to me when I look at you now. You are part of me. I have to be with you.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘As soon as possible,’ he said.

  ‘Blaine, in my short life I have done so much damage to others, inflicted so much cruelty and pain. No more. I also cannot live without you, but nothing else must be destroyed by our love. I want all of you, but I will accept less – to protect your family.’

  ‘It will be hard, perhaps impossible,’ he warned her softly. ‘But I accept your conditions. We must not inflict pain on others. Yet I want you so much—’

  ‘I know,’ she whispered, and stood up to face him. ‘Hold me, Blaine, just for a moment.’

  Abe Abrahams was searching for Centaine through the empty passages of the courthouse. He reached the double doors of the courtroom and pushed one leaf open quietly.

  Centaine and Blaine Malcomess stood in the aisle between the tiers of oak benches. They were in each other’s arms, oblivious to anything around them, and he stared for a moment without comprehension, then softly closed the door again and stood guard before it, wracked by fear and happiness for her.

  ‘You deserve love,’ he whispered. ‘Pray God, this man can give it to you.’

  ‘Eden must have been like this,’ Centaine thought. ‘And Eve must have felt the way I do today.’

  She drove slower than her usual frantic pace. Although her heart cried out for haste, she denied it to make the anticipation keener.

  ‘I have been without sight of him for five whole months,’ she whispered. ‘Five minutes longer will only make it sweeter when at last I am in his arms again.’

  Despite Blaine’s assurances and best intentions, the conditions that Centaine had placed upon them had prevailed. They had not been alone together since those stolen moments in the empty courtroom. During most of that time they had been separated by hundreds of miles, Blaine shackled by his duties in Windhoek, Centaine at Weltevreden, fighting desperately day and night for the survival of her financial empire which was now in its death throes, stricken by the loss of the diamond shipment, no part of which had ever been recovered. In her mind she compared it to the hunting arrow of O’wa, the little yellow Bushman: a tiny reed, frail and feather-light, but tipped with virulent poison which not the greatest game of the African veld could withstand. It weakened and slowly paralysed the quarry, which first reeled and swayed on its feet, then dropped and lay panting, unable to rise, waiting for the cold lead of death to seep through the great veins and arteries or for the swift mercy stroke of the hunter.

  ‘That is where I am now, down and paralysed, while the hunters close in on me.’

  All these months she had fought with all her heart and all her strength, but now she was tired – tired to every last fibre of muscle and mind, sick tired to her bones. She looked up at the rearview mirror above her head and hardly recognized the image that stared back at her with stricken eyes, dark with the heavy mascara of fatigue and despair. Her cheekbones seemed to gleam through the pale skin, and there were chiselled lines of exhaustion at the corners of her mouth.

  ‘But today I will set despair aside. I won’t think about it again, not for a minute. Instead I will think of Blaine and this magical display that nature has laid out for me.’

  She had left Weltevreden at dawn and was now one hundred and twenty miles north of Cape Town, driving through the vast treeless plains of Namaqualand, heading down to where the green Benguela current caressed Africa’s rocky western shores, but she was not yet in sight of the ocean.

  The rains had come late this year, delaying the spring explosion of growth, so that although it was only weeks before Christmas, the veld was ablaze with its royal show of colour. For most of the year these plains were dun and windswept, sparsely populated and uninviting. But now the undulating expanses were clothed in an unbroken mantel so bright and vividly coloured that it confused and tricked the eye. Wild blooms of fifty different varieties and as many hues covered the earth in banks and flocks and stands, massed together with their own kind so that they resembled a divine patchwork quilt, so bright that they seemed to burn with an incandescent light that was reflected from the very heavens and the eye ached with so much colour.

  Closer at hand the earthen road, rough and winding, was the only reference point in this splendid chaos, and even it was soon obliterated by flowers. The twin tracks were separated by a dense growth of wild blooms that filled the middle ridge between them and swept the underside of the old Ford with a soft rushing sound like the water of a mountain stream as Centaine drove slowly up another gentle undulation and stopped abruptly at the top. She switched off the engine.

  The ocean lay before her, its green expanse flecked with brilliant white and lapped by this other ocean of blazing blooms. Through the open window the sea wind ruffled Centaine’s hair and caused the fields of wild flowers to nod and sway in unison, keeping time to the swells of ocean beyond.

  She felt the care and terrible strain of those last months recede in the face of so much vibrant beauty, and she laughed spontaneously at the joy of it and shaded her eyes from the glare of orange and red and sulphur-yellow flower banks and searched the seashore eagerly.

  ‘It’s a shack,’ Blaine had warned her in his last letter. ‘Two rooms and no running water, an earth latrine and an open hearth. But I have spent my holidays there since a child and I love it. I have shared it with nobody else since my father’s death. I go there alone whenever I can. You will be the first.’ And he had drawn a map of the road to it.

  She picked it out immediately, standing on the edge of the ocean, perched upon the horn of rock where the shallow bay turned. The thatched roof had blackened with age but the thick adobe walls were whitewashed as bright as the foam that curled out on the green sea, and a wisp of smoke smeared towards her from the chimney.

  Beyond the building she saw movement and picked out a tiny human shape on the rocks at the edge of the sea, and suddenly she was desperate with haste.

  The engine would not fire, though she cranked the starter until the battery faltered.

  ‘Merde! And double merd!’ It was an old vehicle, used and abused by one of her under-managers on the estate until she had commandeered it to replace the ruined Daimler, and now its failure was an unwelcome reminder of her financial straits, so different from when she had driven a new daffodil-yellow Daimler every year.

  She let off the handbrake and let the Ford trundle down the slope, gathering speed until she jumped the clutch and the engine started with a shudder and roar of blue smoke and she flew down the hill and parked behind the whitewashed shack.

  She
ran out onto the black rocks above the water and the swaying beds of black-stemmed kelp that danced to the scend of the sea, and she waved and shouted, her voice puny on the wind and the rumble of the ocean but he looked up and saw her and came at a run, jumping from rock to slippery wet rock.

  He wore only a pair of khaki shorts, and he carried a bunch of live rock lobsters in one hand. His hair had grown since last she had seen him. It was damp and curly with sea salt, and he was laughing, his mouth open and his big teeth flashing whitely and he had grown a moustache. She wasn’t sure whether she liked that, but the thought was lost in the tumult of her own emotions and she ran to meet him and flung herself against his bare chest.

  ‘Oh Blaine,’ she sobbed. ‘Oh God, how I’ve missed you.’ Then she lifted her mouth to him. His face was wet with seaspray and it was salty on his lips. His moustache prickled. She had been right first time, she didn’t like it – but then he lifted her high and was running with her towards the shack, and she held him tightly with both arms around his neck, bouncing in his arms, jolted by his long strides, and laughing breathlessly with her own fierce need of him.

  Blaine sat on a three-legged stool in front of the open hearth on which a fire of milkwood burned and perfumed the air with its fragrant incense. Centaine stood before him, working up a lather in the china shaving mug with his badger-hair brush, while Blaine complained.

  ‘It took five months to grow – and I was so proud of it.’ He twirled the ends of his moustache for the last time. ‘It’s so dashing, don’t you think?’

  ‘No,’ said Centaine firmly. ‘I do not. I’d prefer to be kissed by a porcupine.’ She bent over him and lathered both sides of his upper lip with a thick foam, and then stood back and surveyed her handiwork with a critical eye.

  Perched on the stool Blaine was still stark naked from their love-making, and suddenly Centaine grinned wickedly. Before he could fathom her intentions or move to protect himself, she had stepped forward again and daubed his most intimate extremity with a white blob of lather from the brush.

  He looked down at himself, appalled. ‘Him too?’ he demanded.

  ‘That would be cutting off my nose to spite my own face,’ she giggled. ‘Or something like that.’ Then she put her head on one side and gave her considered opinion. ‘The little devil looks a lot better with a moustache than you do.’

  ‘Careful with that adjective “little”,’ he admonished her, and reached for his towel. ‘Come along, old fellow, you don’t have to put up with this disrespect.’ He wrapped the towel around his waist and Centaine nodded.

  ‘That’s better. Now I can concentrate on the job without distraction,’ and she took up the cut-throat razor that lay ready on the table-top and stropped it on the leather with quick practised strokes.

  ‘Where did you learn that? I am beginning to feel jealous.’

  ‘My papa,’ she explained. ‘I always trimmed his moustaches. Now hold still!’

  She took the tip of his large nose between thumb and forefinger and lifted it.

  ‘For what we are about to receive—’ Blaine’s voice was muffled by her grip on his nose. He closed his eyes and winced as the steel rustled over his upper lip, and a few moments later Centaine stepped back and wiped the lather and hair from the blade, laid the razor aside and came back to dry his upper lip and then stroke the smooth skin with her fingertip.

  ‘It looks better; it feels better,’ she told him. ‘But there is still the final test.’ And she kissed him.

  ‘Hmmm!’ She murmured her approval, and then still without breaking the kiss she wriggled round and sat on his lap.

  It went on for a long time until she broke away and looked down. The towel had slipped. ‘I say, here comes the little moustached devil again, obviously spoiling for trouble.’ She reached down and gently wiped away the last traces of lather from the tip.

  ‘You see! Even he looks a lot better cleanshaven.’

  Blaine stood up with her in his arms. ‘I think it is time, woman, that you learned the hard way that you can get away with just so much and then we must establish who is the boss around here.’ And he carried her to the bunk against the far wall.

  Much later they sat side by side cross-legged on the bunk with a single brightly coloured Basuto blanket draped over their bare shoulders, leaning together and watching the fire shadows flicker along the rough plastered walls, listening to the wind off the ocean soughing around the eaves of the thatched roof in the darkness outside, cupping their hands around steaming mugs of fish soup.

  ‘One of my specialities,’ Blaine had boasted, and it was thick with chunks of fresh galjoen fish and lobster that he had caught that day. ‘Wonderful powers of rejuvenation for those suffering from over-exertion.’

  Blaine recharged the mugs twice, for they were both ravenous, and then Centaine went to the fire, her naked body gleaming in the ruddy glow of the firelight, to bring him a smouldering twig to light his cheroot. When it was burning evenly, she climbed under the blanket again and snuggled against him.

  ‘Did you ever find that young boy you were looking for?’ he asked lazily. ‘Abe Abrahams came to me for help, you know.’

  He was unaware how the question had affected her, for she controlled the reflex stiffening of her body and simply shook her head. ‘No. He disappeared.’

  ‘He was Lothar De La Rey’s son. I deduced that.’

  ‘Yes,’ she agreed. ‘I was worried about him. He must have been deserted and alone after his father’s sentence.’

  ‘I’ll keep looking for him,’ Blaine promised. ‘And let you know if anything comes up.’ He stroked her hair. ‘You are a kind person,’ he murmured. ‘There was no reason why you should concern yourself with the boy.’

  They were silent again, but reference to the outside world had broken the spell and started a trail of thought that was unpleasant but had to be followed to the end.

  ‘How is Isabella?’ she asked, and felt the muscles of his chest tighten and swell beneath her cheek, but he inhaled a puff from the cheroot before he answered.

  ‘Her condition is deteriorating. Atrophy of the nerves of her lower body. Ulceration. She has been in Groote Schuur hospital since Monday. The ulcers at the base of her spine will not heal.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Blaine.’

  ‘That is how I have managed to get away these few days. The girls are with their grandmother.’

  ‘That makes me feel awful.’

  ‘I would feel worse if I couldn’t see you,’ he replied.

  ‘Blaine, we must keep to our resolution. We must never hurt her or the girls.’

  He was silent again, then abruptly he flicked the stub of the cheroot across the room into the fire. ‘It looks as though she will have to go to England. There is a surgeon at Guy’s Hospital who has performed miracles.’

  ‘When?’ Her heart felt like a cannonball in her chest, suffocating her with its weight.

  ‘Before Christmas. It depends on the tests they are doing now.’

  ‘You will have to go with her, of course.’

  ‘That would mean resigning as administrator and damaging my chances—’ he broke off; he had never discussed his ambitions with her.

  ‘Your chances of a place in a future cabinet and possibly one day the premiership,’ she finished for him.

  He stirred, taking her face between his hands and turning it gently so he could look into her eyes. ‘You knew?’ he asked, and Centaine nodded.

  ‘Do you think that cruel of me?’ he asked. ‘That I could let Isabella go on her own, for my selfish ambitions?’

  ‘No,’ she said seriously. ‘I know about ambition.’

  ‘I offered,’ he said, while unquiet shadows clouded the green of his eyes. ‘Isabella would not accept it. She insisted that I stay here.’ He laid her head back against his chest and stroked the hair back from her temple. ‘She is an extraordinary person – such courage. The pain is almost unceasing now. She cannot sleep without laudanum, and always more pain and more
laudanum.’

  ‘It makes me feel so guilty, Blaine, but no matter what, I am glad for the opportunity to be with you. I am taking nothing from her.’

  But that was not true, and she knew it. She lay awake long after he was asleep. She lay with her ear pressed to his chest and listened to his heart and the slow filling and emptying of his lungs.

  When she woke he was dressed in the old pair of khaki shorts and taking down a bamboo fishing rod with an old Scarborough reel from the rack on the wall above the hearth. ‘Breakfast in twenty minutes,’ he promised, leaving her cuddled down in the bunk, but he was back before then carrying a gleaming gunmetal and silver fish almost as long as his arm. He arranged it on a grid over the embers and then came to her and pulled the blanket off.

  ‘Swim!’ he grinned sadistically, and she screamed.

  ‘You are crazy. It’s freezing! I’ll die of pneumonia.’ She protested as wildly all the way down to the deep rock-lined pool in which he dunked her.

  The water was clear as air and so cold that when they clambered out their bodies glowed bright pink all over and her nipples were standing out as hard and dark as ripe olives. But the icy water had honed their appetites and they sprinkled lemon juice on the hot succulent white flesh of the Galjoen and wolfed it down with chunks of brown bread and salty yellow farm butter.

  Satiated at last they sat back and Blaine looked at her. She wore only one of his navy blue roll-necked fisherman’s jerseys but the hem reached almost to her knees. She had piled her damp unruly tangle of hair on top of her head and tied it there with a yellow ribbon.

  ‘We could go for a walk,’ he suggested. ‘Or—’

  She thought about that for a few seconds and then decided. ‘I rather think I’ll settle for the “or”.’

  ‘Your wish, madam, is my command,’ he replied courteously, and stood over her to lift the heavy jersey off over her head.

  In the middle of the morning he lay flat on his back on the bunk while Centaine was propped on an elbow above him, tickling his lips and closed eyelids with a feather that she had plucked from the seam of one of the pillows.