Power of the Sword

by Wilbur Smith

  ‘Papa, the stones are evil.’

  ‘Promise me, my own son, promise me that I have not endured these captive years for nothing. Promise me you will go back for the stones.’

  ‘I promise, Papa,’ Manfred whispered, as the warder stepped into the cell.

  ‘Time is up. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Can I come and see my father again tomorrow?’

  The warder shook his head. ‘Only one visit a month.’

  ‘I’ll write to you, Papa.’ He turned back to embrace Lothar. ‘I’ll write to you every week from now on.’

  But Lothar nodded expressionlessly; his face had closed and his eyes were veiled. ‘Ja,’ he nodded. ‘You write to me sometime,’ he agreed, and shuffled out of the cell.

  Manfred stared at the closed green door until the warder touched his shoulder: ‘Come along.’ Manfred followed him to the visitors’ entrance in a tangle of emotions. Only when he stepped out of the gates into the sunlight and looked up at the towering blue African sky of which his father had spoken so yearningly did one emotion emerge to swamp all the others.

  It was rage, blind hopeless rage, and it grew stronger over the days that followed, seeming to climax as he marched down the aisle between the rows of screaming cheering spectators towards the brilliantly lighted ring of rope and canvas, dressed in shimmering silks with the crimson leather on his fists and bloody murder in his heart.

  Centaine woke long before Blaine did; she grudged every second they wasted in sleep. It was still dark outside for the cottage was close under the precipice of the high table-topped mountain and screened from dawn’s first glow by its bulk, though the birds in the tiny walled garden were already squeaking and chirping sleepily. She had ordered tacoma and honeysuckle to be trained over the stone walls to attract them, and on her orders the feeding-boxes were replenished every day by the gardener.

  She had taken months to find the perfect cottage. It had to be discreetly enclosed, with covered parking for her Daimler and Blaine’s new Bentley, both vehicles that attracted immediate attention. It had to be within ten minutes’ walk of Parliament and Blaine’s office in the wing of the imposing Herbert Baker building reserved for cabinet ministers. It had to have a view of the mountain, and must be set in one of the tiny lanes of an unfashionable suburb where none of their friends or business associates or fellow parliamentarians or enemies or members of the press were ever likely to stray. But above all it had to have that special feel.

  When at last she walked into it she did not even see the stained and faded wallpaper or the threadbare carpets on the floor. She stood in the central room and smiled softly. ‘Happy people have lived here. Yes, this is the one. I’ll take it.’

  She had registered the title deeds in one of her holding companies, but trusted no architect nor decorator with its renovation. She planned and executed the reconstruction entirely herself.

  ‘It’s got to be the most perfect love nest ever built.’ She set her usual unattainable standard for herself and consulted with the builder and his carpenters and plumbers and painters every single morning while the work was in hand. They tore down the walls between the four tiny bedrooms and fashioned them into a single boudoir with french windows and shutters opening onto the enclosed garden with its high wall of yellow Table Mountain sandstone and the view of the grey mountain cliff beyond.

  She built separate bathrooms for Blaine and herself, his finished in ruby-veined cream Italian marble with gold dolphin taps and fittings, hers like a Bedouin tent draped in rose silk.

  The bed was a museum piece, Italian Renaissance workmanship inlaid with ivory and gold leaf. ‘We can always play polo on it in the off-season,’ Blaine remarked when first he saw it, and she placed her magnificent Turner, all sunlight and golden sea, so that it was in full view from the bed. She hung the Bonnard in the dining-room and lit it with a chandelier which was a shimmering inverted Christmas tree of crystal, and placed the choicest pieces of her collection of Queen Anne and Louis Quatorze silver on the sideboard.

  She staffed the cottage with four permanent servants, including a valet for Blaine and a full-time gardener. The chef was a Malay who conjured up the most heavenly pilaffs and boboties and rystafels that Blaine, who had a spicy palate and was a connoisseur of curries, had ever tasted.

  A flowerseller from her pitch outside the Groote Kerk near the parliament buildings had a contract to deliver huge bunches of yellow roses to the cottage each day, and Centaine stocked the small wine cellar with the noblest vintages from Weltevreden’s own cavernous cellars and installed, at enormous expense, an electric walk-in cold room in the pantries to keep the hams and cheeses, the potted caviars and smoked Scotch salmon and other such necessities of life in prime condition.

  Yet with all her loving attention to detail and lavish planning, they were lucky if they could spend a single night there in a month – although there were other stolen hours, garnered like diamonds, and hoarded by Centaine as though she were the stingiest of misers: a private luncheon when parliament recessed or a midnight interlude after the house had sat late; the occasional afternoon – when his wife, Isabella, believed he was at polo practice or at a cabinet meeting.

  Now Centaine rolled her head carefully on the lace pillow and looked at him. The dawn light was silvery through the shutters and his features seemed carved in ivory. She thought that he looked like a sleeping Roman Caesar, with that imperial nose and wide commanding mouth.

  ‘In all but the ears,’ she thought, and stifled a giggle. Strange how after three years his presence could make her still feel like a girl. She rose quietly, careful not to rock the mattress and disturb him, picked up her wrap from the couch and slipped through to her bathroom.

  Swiftly she brushed her hair into thick dark plumes checking for grey and then, relieved, went on to clean her teeth and wash her eyes with the little blue glass bath of lotion until the whites were clear and sparkling. Then she creamed her face and wiped away the excess. Blaine liked her skin free of cosmetics. As she used her bidet she smiled again at Blaine’s mock amazement when he had first seen it.

  ‘Marvellous!’ he had cried. ‘A horse trough in the bathroom, how jolly useful!’

  Sometimes he was so romantic he was almost French. She laughed with anticipation, snatched a fresh silk wrap from the wardrobe and ran through to the kitchen. The servants were all astir, bubbling with excitement because the master was here and they all adored Blaine.

  ‘Did you get them, Hadji?’ Centaine demanded, using the title of respect for one who has made the pilgrimage to Mecca, and the Malay chef grinned like a butter-yellow gnome under his tasselled red fez and proudly displayed the pair of thick juicy kippers.

  ‘Come on the mail boat yesterday, madam,’ he boasted.

  ‘Hadji, you are a magician,’ she applauded. Scotch kippers were Blaine’s favourite breakfast. ‘You are going to do them his way, aren’t you?’ Blaine’s way was simmered in milk, and Hadji looked pained at the impropriety of the question as he turned back to his stove.

  For Centaine it was a marvellous game of make-believe, playing wife, pretending that Blaine truly belonged to her. So with a sharp eye she watched Miriam grind the coffee beans and Khalil finish sponging Blaine’s grey pinstripe suit and begin to put a military gleam on his shoes before she left them and crept back into the darkened bedroom.

  She felt quite breathless as she hovered beside the bed and studied his features. He still had that effect on her even after all this time.

  ‘I am more faithful than any wife,’ she gloated. ‘More dutiful, more loving, more—’

  His arm shot out so suddenly that she squealed with fright as he plucked her down beside him and flicked the sheet over her.

  ‘You were awake all along,’ she wailed. ‘Oh, you awful man, I can never trust you.’

  They could still, on occasion, drive each other into that mindless frenzy, those writhing sensual marathons that exploded at the end in a great burst of light and colour like the T
urner on the wall before them. But more often it had become as it was this morning, a fortress of love, solid and impregnable. They left it with reluctance, coming apart slowly, lingeringly, as the day filled the room with gold and they heard the clink of Hadji’s breakfast dishes on the terrace beyond the shutters.

  She brought him his robe, full-length brocaded China silk, royal blue lined in crimson with a belt of embroidered seed pearls and velvet lapels. She had chosen it because it was so outlandish, so different from his usual severe style of dress.

  ‘I wouldn’t wear it in front of anybody else in the world,’ he had told her, holding it gingerly at arm’s length, when she presented it to him on his birthday.

  ‘If you do, you’d better not let me catch you at it!’ she warned, but after the first shock he had come to enjoy wearing it for her.

  Hand in hand they went out onto the terrace and Hadji and Miriam beamed with delight and bowed them to their seats at the table in the morning sunlight.

  With a rapid but steely survey, Centaine made sure everything was perfect, from the roses in the Lalique vase to the snowy linen and the Fabergé jug of silver gilt and crystal filled with freshly squeezed grapefruit juice, before she opened the morning paper and began to read to him.

  Always in the same order: the headlines and then the parliamentary reports, waiting for him to comment on each, adding her own ideas, and then going on to the financial pages and stock exchange reports, and finally to the sports pages with special emphasis on any mention of polo.

  ‘Oh, I see you spoke yesterday: “a forceful reply from the minister without portfolio”, they say.’

  And Blaine smiled as he lifted a fillet off his kipper. ‘Hardly forceful,’ he demurred. ‘“Pissed off” better describes it.’

  ‘What’s this about secret societies?’

  ‘A bit of a flap over these militant organizations, inspired it would seem by the charming Herr Hitler and his gang of political thugs.’

  ‘Anything in it?’ Centaine sipped at her coffee. She still couldn’t get her stomach to accept these English breakfasts. ‘You seem to have dismissed the whole thing rather lightly.’ Then she looked up at him with narrowing eyes. ‘You were covering up, weren’t you?’ She knew him so well, and he grinned guiltily at her.

  ‘Don’t miss a thing, do you?’

  ‘Can you tell me?’

  ‘Shouldn’t really.’ He frowned, but she had never betrayed his trust. ‘We are very worried indeed,’ he admitted. ‘In fact the Ou Baas considers it the most serious threat since the 1914 rebellion when De Wet called out his commandos to fight for the Kaiser. The whole thing is a political nettle, and a potential minefield.’ He paused, and she knew there was more, but she waited quietly for him to make up his mind to tell her. ‘All right,’ he decided. ‘The Ou Baas has ordered me to head a commission of enquiry – cabinet level and confidential – into the Ossewa Brandwag, which is the most extreme and flourishing of them all. Worse than the Broederbond even.’

  ‘Why you, Blaine? It’s a nasty one, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, it’s a nasty one, and he picked me as a non-Afrikaner. The impartial judge.’

  ‘Of course, I’ve heard of the OB. There has been talk for years but nobody seems to know much.’

  ‘Extreme right-wing nationalists, anti-Semitic, antiblack, blaming all the ills of their world on perfidious Albion, secret blood oaths and midnight rallies, a sort of Neanderthal boy scout movement with Mein Kampf as its inspiration.’

  ‘I haven’t yet read Mein Kampf. Everyone is talking about it. Is there an English or French translation?’

  ‘Not officially published, but I have a Foreign Office translation. It’s a rag-bag of nightmares and obscenities, a manual of naked aggression and bigotry. I would lend you my copy but it is appallingly bad literature and the sentiments would sicken you.’

  ‘He may not be a great writer,’ Centaine conceded. ‘But, Blaine, whatever else he has done, Hitler has put Germany on its feet again after the disaster of the Weimar Republic. Germany is the only country in the world with full employment and a booming economy. My shares in Krupp and Farben have almost doubled in the last nine months.’ She stopped as she saw his expression. ‘Is something wrong, Blaine?’

  He had laid his knife and fork down and was staring at her.

  ‘You have shares in the German armaments industry?’ he asked quietly, and she nodded.

  ‘The best investment I have made since gold went off—’ She broke off; they had never mentioned that again.

  ‘I have never asked you to do anything for me, have I?’ he asked, and she considered that carefully.

  ‘No, you haven’t – ever.’

  ‘Well, I’m asking you now. Sell your shares in German armaments.’

  She looked puzzled. ‘Why, Blaine?’

  ‘Because it is like investing in the propagation of cancer, or like financing Genghis Khan’s campaigns.’

  She did not reply, but her expression went blank and her eyes went out of focus, crossing into a slightly myopic squint. The first time he had seen that happen he had been alarmed; it had taken him some time to realize that when she squinted like that she was involved in mental arithmetic, and it had fascinated him to see how quickly she made her calculations.

  Her eyes flicked back into focus and she smiled agreement. ‘On yesterday’s prices, I’ll show a profit of a hundred and twenty-six thousand pounds. It was time to sell anyway. I’ll cable my London broker as soon as the post office opens.’

  ‘Thank you, my love.’ Blaine shook his head sorrowfully. ‘But I do wish you’d made your profit somewhere else.’

  ‘You may be misjudging the situation, chéri,’ she suggested tactfully. ‘Hitler may not be as bad as you think he is.’

  ‘He doesn’t have to be as bad as I think he is, Centaine. He only has to be as bad as he says he is in Mein Kampf to qualify for the chamber of horrors.’ Blaine took a mouthful of his kipper and closed his eyes with mild ecstasy. She watched him with a pleasure almost equal to his own. He swallowed, opened his eyes, and declared the subject closed with a wave of his fork.

  ‘Enough horrors for such a splendid morning.’ He smiled at her. ‘Read me the sports pages, woman!’

  Centaine rustled the pages portentously and then composed herself to read aloud, but suddenly the colour drained from her face and she swayed in her seat.

  Blaine dropped his knife and fork with a clatter and jumped up to steady her. ‘What is it, darling?’ He was desperately alarmed and almost as pale as she was. She shrugged his hands away and stared at the open newspaper which trembled in her grip.

  Blaine moved quickly behind her, and scanned the page over her shoulder. There was an article on the previous weekend’s racing at Kenilworth. Centaine’s entry, a good stallion named Bonheur, had lost the feature race by a short head, but that could not have occasioned her distress.

  Then he saw that she was looking at the foot of the page and he followed her gaze to a quarter-column photograph of a boxer, in shorts and vest, facing the camera in a formal pose, bare fists raised and a grim expression on his handsome features. Centaine had never evinced the slightest interest in boxing, and Blaine was puzzled. He read the heading of the article which accompanied the photograph:

  FEAST OF FISTICUFFS

  CLASSY FIELD FOR INTER-VARSITY

  CHAMPIONSHIPS

  which did nothing to alleviate his puzzlement. He glanced at the footnote beneath the photograph: ‘The Lion of the Kalahari, Manfred De La Rey, the Challenger for the Inter-Varsity Light Heavyweight Belt. Hard pounding ahead.’

  ‘Manfred De La Rey.’ Blaine said the name softly, trying to remember where last he had heard it. Then his expression cleared and he squeezed Centaine’s shoulders.

  ‘Manfred De La Rey! The boy you were looking for in Windhoek. Is this him?’

  Centaine did not look round, but she nodded jerkily.

  ‘What is he to you, Centaine?’

  She was
shaken into an emotional turmoil; otherwise she might have answered differently. But now it was out before she could bite down on the words. ‘He’s my son. My bastard son.’

  Blaine’s hands dropped from her shoulders and she heard the sharp hissing intake of his breath.

  ‘I must be mad!’ Her reaction was immediate, and she thought, ‘I should never have told him. Blaine will never understand. He’ll never forgive me.’

  She dared not look round at the shock and accusation she knew she would find on his face. She dropped her head and cupped her hands over her eyes.

  ‘I’ve lost him,’ she thought. ‘Blaine is too upright, too virtuous to accept it.’

  Then his hands touched her again, and they lifted her to her feet and turned her gently to face him.

  ‘I love you,’ he said simply, and her tears choked her and she flung herself against his chest and held him with all her strength.

  ‘Oh Blaine, you are so good to me.’

  ‘If you want to tell me about it, I’m here to help you. If you’d rather not talk, then I understand. There is just one thing – whatever it was, whatever you did, makes no difference to me and my feelings for you.’

  ‘I want to tell you.’ She fought back her tears of relief and looked up at him. ‘I’ve never wanted to keep secrets from you. I’ve wanted to tell you for years now, but I am a coward.’

  ‘You are many things, my love, but never a coward.’ He seated her again and drew his own chair close so that he could hold her hand while she talked.

  ‘Now tell me,’ he commanded.

  ‘It’s such a long story, Blaine – and you have a cabinet meeting at nine.’

  ‘Affairs of state can wait,’ he said. ‘Your happiness is the most important thing in the world.’

  So she told him, from the time that Lothar De La Rey had rescued her to the discovery of the H’ani diamond mine and the birth of Manfred in the desert.

  She held nothing back: her love for Lothar, the love of a lonely forsaken girl for her rescuer. She explained how it had changed to bitter hatred when she discovered that Lothar had murdered the old Bushman woman who was her foster mother, and how that hatred had focused on Lothar’s child that she was carrying in her womb, and how she had refused even to look upon the newborn infant but had made the father take it from the childbed still wet from the act of birth.