Power of the Sword

by Wilbur Smith

  Late in the afternoon the train stopped for half an hour at a small siding and a food barrow was loaded into the leading coach. Under the pale eyes of the white overseer the two black boss-boys wheeled the barrow down the crowded coaches and each of the recruits was handed a small tin dish of white maize cake over which a dollop of bean stew had been spooned.

  When they reached Swart Hendrick’s seat, the white overseer shouldered the boss-boy aside and took the dish from his hands to serve Hendrick’s portion himself.

  ‘We must look after this kaffir,’ he said loudly. ‘We want him to be strong for his work at Goldi.’ And he spooned an extra portion of bean stew into the dish and offered it to Hendrick.

  ‘Here, kaffir.’ But as Hendrick reached for the dish, he deliberately let it drop onto the floor. The hot stew splashed over Hendrick’s feet and the overseer stepped into the mess of maize porridge and ground it under his boot. Then he stood back with one hand on the billy club in his belt and grinned.

  ‘Hey, you clumsy black bugger, you only get one ration. If you want to eat it off the floor, that’s up to you.’

  He waited expectantly for Hendrick to react, and then grimaced with disappointment when Hendrick dropped his eyes, leaned forward and began to scrape the mashed cake into the dish with his fingers, then scooped a ball of it into his mouth and munched on it stolidly.

  ‘You bloody niggers will eat anything, even your own dung,’ he snarled and went on down the coach.

  The windows of the coaches were barred, and the doors at both ends were locked and bolted from the outside. The overseer carried the ring of keys on his belt, carefully securing all doors behind him as he passed. From experience he knew that many of the recruits would begin to have misgivings as soon as the journey began, and driven by homesickness and increasing fear of the unknown, by the disturbing unfamiliarity of all about them, would begin to desert, some of them even leaping from the speeding coach. The overseer made his rounds every few hours, meticulously counting heads, even in the middle of the night, and he stood over Hendrick deliberately shining the beam of his lantern into his face, waking him every time he passed down the coach.

  The overseer never tired of his efforts to provoke Hendrick. It had become a challenge, a contest between them. He knew it was there; he had seen it in Hendrick’s eyes, just a flash of the violence and menace and power, and he was determined to bring it out, flush it into the open where he could crush it and destroy it.

  ‘Patience, my brother,’ Moses whispered to Hendrick. ‘Hold your anger. Cherish it with care. Let it grow until it is full term, until you can put it to work for you.’

  Hendrick was coming to rely more on his brother’s advice and counsel with each day that passed. Moses was intelligent and persuasive, his tongue quick to choose the right word, and that special presence which he possessed made other men listen when he spoke.

  Hendrick saw these special gifts of his demonstrated clearly in the days that followed. At first he spoke only to the men that sat near him in the hot crowded coach. He told them what it would be like at the place where they were going, and how the white men would treat them, what would be expected of them and what the consequences would be if they disappointed their new employers.

  The black faces around him were intent as they listened, and soon those further up the benches were craning to catch his words and calling softly. ‘Speak, louder, Gama. Speak, that all of us may hear your words.’

  Moses Gama raised his voice, a clear compelling baritone, and they listened with respect. ‘There will be many black men at Goldi. More than you ever believed possible, Zulus and Xhosas and N’debeles and Swazis and Nyasas, fifty different tribes speaking so many languages that you have never heard before. Tribes as different from you as you are different from the white man. Some of them will be traditional blood enemies of our tribe, waiting and watching like hyenas for a chance to turn upon you and savage you. There will be times when you are deep in the earth, down there where it is always night, that you will be at the mercy of such men. To protect yourselves you must surround yourselves with men you can trust; you must place yourself under the protection of a strong leader; and in return for this protection you must give this chieftain your obedience and loyalty.’ And very soon they came to recognize that Moses Gama was this strong leader. Within days he was the undisputed chieftain of all the men in coach three, and while he was talking to them and answering their queries, stilling their fears and misgivings, Moses was in his turn assessing their individual worth, watching and weighing each of them, selecting, evaluating and discarding. He began to rearrange the seating in the coach, ordering those whom he had chosen to move closer to his own seat in the centre, gathering around him the pick of the recruits. And immediately the men he had singled out gained prestige; they formed an élite praetorian guard around their new emperor.

  Hendrick watched him doing it, manipulating the men around him, subjecting them to the force of his will and personality, and he was filled with admiration and pride for his younger brother, giving up his own last reservations and willingly according to him his full loyalty and love and obedience.

  By association with Moses, Hendrick himself was accorded the respect and veneration of the other men in the coach. He was Moses’ captain and henchman and they recognized him as such, and quite slowly it dawned upon Hendrick that in a few short days Moses Gama had forged himself an impi, a band of warriors on whom he could rely implicitly, and that he had done it with almost no apparent effort.

  Sitting in the crowded coach that was already stinking like an animal cage with the rancid sweat of a hundred hot bodies and with the stench from the latrine cubicle, and mesmerized by the Messianic eyes and words of his own brother, Hendrick thought back to the other great black rulers who had emerged from the mists of African history, to lead first a tiny band, then a tribe and finally a vast horde of warriors across the continent, ravaging and plundering and laying waste.

  He thought of Mantatisi and Chaka and Mzilikazi, of Shangaan and Angoni, and with a flash of clairvoyance he saw them at their beginnings, sitting like this at some remote camp-fire in the wilderness, surrounded by a small group of men, weaving the spell over them, capturing their imagination and spirit with a silken noose of words and ideas, inflaming them with dreams.

  ‘I stand at the beginning of an enterprise which I do not yet understand,’ he thought. ‘All I have done up until this time was only my initiation, all the fighting and killing and striving was but a training. Now I am ready for the endeavour, whatever it may be, and Moses Gama will lead me to it. I do not need to know what it is. It is sufficient only that I follow where it leads.’

  And he was listening avidly as Moses spoke names that he had never heard and expounded ideas that were new and strangely exciting.

  ‘Lenin,’ said Moses, ‘not a man, but a god come down to earth.’ And they thrilled to the tale of a land to the north where the tribes had united under this man-god Lenin, had smitten down a king and in doing so had become part of the godhead themselves.

  They were enchanted and aroused as he told them of a war such as the earth had never seen before, and their atavistic battlelust scalded their veins and pumped up their hearts, hard and hot as the head of the fighting axe when it comes red and glowing from the ironsmith’s forge. The ‘revolution’ Moses called this war, and as he explained it to them, they saw that they could be part of this glorious battle, they too could be slayers of kings and become part of the godhead.

  The door at the head of the coach crashed back on its slide and the white overseer stepped through and stood with his hands on his hips, grinning mirthlessly at them, and they lowered their heads and stared at the floor, hooding and screening their eyes. But those sitting close to Moses, the chosen ones, the élite, they began to understand then where the battle would be fought and who were the kings that would be slain.

  The white overseer sensed the charged atmosphere in the coach. It was thick as the odour of unw
ashed black bodies and the stink of the latrine in the corner of the coach; it was as electric as the air at noon in the suicide days of November just before the great rains break, and he searched quickly for Hendrick sitting in the centre of the coach.

  ‘One rotten potato,’ he thought bitterly, ‘and the whole sackful is spoiled.’ He touched the billy club in his belt. He had found out the difficult way that the lash of the sjambok was too long to wield effectively in the confines of the coaches. The billy was a stopper, fourteen inches of hard wood, the end drilled and filled with lead shot. He could break bone with it, crush in a skull to kill a man instantly if he needed to, or with a delicate alteration of the weight of the blow merely stun him. He was an artist with the billy club, as he was with the sjambok, but each had its place and time. It was the billy’s time now, and he moved slowly down the coach, pretending to ignore Hendrick, examining the faces of each of the other men as he passed, seeing the new rebelliousness in their sullen faces and becoming more angry with the man who had made his task more difficult.

  ‘I should have gone after him at the beginning,’ he told himself bitterly. ‘I’ve almost left it too late. Me, who loves the quiet life and the easy way. Well, we’ll have to make the best of it now.’

  He glanced casually at Hendrick as he passed, and then from the corner of his eye saw the big Ovambo relax slightly as he went on down the aisle between the seats.

  ‘You are expecting it, my boy. You know it has to happen, and I’m not going to disappoint you.’

  At the far door of the coach he paused, as if he had an afterthought, and he came back down the aisle slowly, grinning to himself. Now he stopped in front of Hendrick again, and sucked noisily at the cavity in his tooth.

  ‘Look at me, kaffir,’ he invited pleasantly and Hendrick lifted his chin and stared at him.

  ‘Which is your m’pahle?’ he asked. ‘Which is your luggage?’ and Hendrick was taken off-guard. He was acutely conscious of the treasure of diamonds in the rack above his head and now he glanced up at the leather sack instinctively.

  ‘Good.’ The white overseer lifted the sack off the rack and dropped it onto the floor in front of Hendrick.

  ‘Open it,’ he ordered, still grinning, one hand on his hip the other on the handle of the billy.

  ‘Come on.’ The grin became cold and wolfish as Hendrick sat without moving. ‘Open it, kaffir. Let’s see what you are hiding.’

  It had never failed him yet. Even the most docile of men would react to protect their belongings, no matter how worthless and insignificant.

  Slowly Hendrick leaned forward and untied the neck of the leather sack. Then he straightened again and sat passively.

  The white overseer stooped, seized the bottom of the sack and straightened up again, never taking his eyes off Hendrick’s face. He shook the sack vigorously, spilling the contents onto the floor.

  The blanket roll fell out first, and using the toe of his boot the overseer spread it open. There was a sheepskin gilet and other spare clothing in the roll, and a nine-inch knife in a leather sheath.

  ‘Dangerous weapon,’ said the overseer. ‘You know that no dangerous weapons are allowed in the coaches.’ He picked up the knife, pressed the blade into the niche of the window and snapped it off; then he tossed the two separate pieces out between the bars of the window behind Hendrick’s head.

  Hendrick did not move, although the overseer waited for almost a minute, staring at him provocatively. The only sound was the clackety-clack of the bogey over the cross ties of the steel lines and the faint huffing of the locomotive at the head of the train. None of the other black passengers was watching the small drama develop; they were all staring straight ahead of them, faces closed, eyes unseeing.

  ‘What is this rubbish?’ the overseer asked and touched one of the hard flat millet cakes with his toe, and though Hendrick did not move a muscle, the white man saw the first spark in those black smoky eyes.

  ‘Yes,’ he thought gleefully. ‘That’s it. Now he will move.’ And he picked up a loaf and sniffed it thoughtfully.

  ‘Kaffir bread,’ he murmured. ‘Not allowed. Company rules – no food allowed on the train.’ And he turned the flat loaf on edge so that it would pass between the bars and he tossed it through the open window. The loaf bounced on the embankment below the racketing steel wheels and then shattered into fragments, and the overseer chuckled and stooped for the next loaf.

  It snapped in Hendrick’s head. He had held it in check too long and the loss of the diamonds drove him berserk. He went for the white man, launching himself out of the seat, but the overseer was ready for him. He straightened his right arm and drove the point of the billy club into Hendrick’s throat. Then, as Hendrick fell back choking and clutching at his throat, he whipped the club into the front of his skull, judging it finely, not a killing blow, and Hendrick’s hand dropped from his damaged throat as he toppled forward. However, the overseer would not let him fall, and with his left hand shoved him back against the seat, holding him upright while he worked with the club.

  It rang like an axe on wood as it bounced off the bone of Hendrick’s skull, and it opened the thin skin of his scalp and the blood sprang up in little ruby-bright fountains. The overseer hit him three times, measured calculated blows, and then he thrust the point of the club into Hendrick’s slack gaping mouth, snapping off both his incisor teeth level with the gums.

  ‘Always mark them.’ It was one of his maxims. ‘Mark them so they don’t forget.’

  Only then did he release the unconscious man and let him topple, head first, into the centre of the aisle.

  Instantly he whipped around and poised on his toes like a puffadder cocking itself into the threatening ‘S’ of the strike. With the billy club ready in his right hand he stared down the shocked eyes of the black men around him. Quickly they dropped their gaze from his and the only movement was the jerking of their bodies in time to the swaying clatter of the coach beneath them.

  Hendrick’s blood was puddling under his head, and then running in little dark red snakes across the floor of the aisle. The overseer smiled again, looking down with an almost paternal expression at the recumbent figure. It had been a beautiful performance, quick and complete, exactly as he had planned it, and he had enjoyed it. The man at his feet was his own creation and he was proud of it.

  He picked up the other millet loaves out of the blood puddle and one at a time tossed them out between the bars of the window. Finally he squatted over the man at his feet and on the back of his shirt carefully wiped the last traces of blood from his billy. Then he stood up, replaced the club in his belt and walked slowly down the aisle.

  It was all right now. The mood had changed, the atmosphere was defused. There would be no more trouble. He had done his job, and done it well.

  He went out onto the balcony of the coach, and smiling thinly, locked the sliding door behind him again.

  The moment the door closed the men in the carriage came back to life. Moses gave his orders crisply and two of them lifted Hendrick back into his seat; another went to the water tank beside the latrine door, while Moses opened his own pack and brought out a stoppered buckhorn.

  While they steadied Hendrick’s lolling head, Moses poured a brown powder from the buckhorn into the wounds in his scalp. It was a mixture of ash and herbs, powdered finely, and he rubbed it into the open flesh with his finger. The bleeding stopped, and with a wet cloth he cleaned his brother’s broken mouth. Then he cradled his unconscious head in his arms, and waited.

  Moses had watched the conflict between his brother and the white man with almost clinical interest, deliberately restraining and directing Hendrick’s reaction until the drama had reached this explosive climax. His attachment to his brother was still tenuous. Their father had been a prosperous and lusty man and had brought all of his fifteen wives regularly to the child-bed. Moses had over thirty brothers and sisters. Towards very few of them he felt any special affection beyond vague tribal and family duty.
Hendrick was many years his senior and had left the kraal when Moses was still a child. Since then the tales of his exploits had filtered back to him, and Hendrick’s reputation had grown on these accounts of wild and desperate deeds. But tales are only tales until they are proven and reputations can be built on words and not deeds.

  The testing time was at hand. Moses would consider the results of the test and upon them would depend their future relationship. He needed a hard man as his lieutenant, one of the steely men. Lenin had chosen Joseph Stalin. He would choose a man of steel also, a man like an axe, and with him as a weapon he would hack and shape his own plans out of the hard wood of the future. If Hendrick failed the test Moses would toss him aside with as little compassion as he would an axe whose blade had shattered at the first stroke against the trunk of a tree.

  Hendrick opened his eyes and looked at his brother with dilated pupils; he moaned and touched the open wounds on his scalp. He winced at the pain and his pupils shrank and focused, and the rage flamed in their depths as he struggled upright.

  ‘The diamonds?’ His voice was low and sibilant as the hiss of one of those deadly little horned adders of the desert.

  ‘Gone,’ Moses told him quietly.

  ‘We must go back – find them.’ But Moses shook his head.

  ‘They are scattered like the seeds of the grass; there is no way to mark their fall. No, my brother, we are prisoners in this coach. We cannot go back. The diamonds are lost for ever.’

  Hendrick sat quietly, with his tongue exploring his shattered mouth, running it over the jagged stumps of his front teeth, considering his brother’s cold logic. Moses waited quietly. This time he would give no orders, point no direction, no matter how subtle. Hendrick must come to it of his own accord.

  ‘You are right, my brother,’ Hendrick said at last. ‘The diamonds are gone. But I am going to kill the man that did this to us.’