Power of the Sword

by Wilbur Smith

  Manfred De La Rey, the quiet stern young man, humourless and grave, slightly gauche in unaccustomed clothing and ill at ease in sophisticated company, had been transformed into a magnificent wild beast, and the primeval ferocity he seemed to exude, the blaze of those yellow eyes under the black brows as he slashed the Frenchman’s face into a distorted bleeding mask and then drove him down onto his knees in the centre of the sheet of spotless white canvas, excited her perversely so that she found she was clenching her thighs tightly together and her groin was hotly melting and dampening the expensive crêpe-de-chine skirt under her.

  That excitement persisted as she sat beside Manfred in the stalls of the state opera house that evening while Wagner’s heroic Teutonic music filled the auditorium with thrilling sound. She moved slightly in her seat until her bare upper arm touched Manfred’s. She felt him start, begin to pull away, then catch himself. The contact between them was gossamer-light but both of them were intensely aware of it.

  Once again Colonel Brandt had placed the Mercedes at her disposal for the evening. The driver was waiting for them when they came down the front steps of the opera house. As they settled into the back seat, she saw Manfred wince slightly.

  ‘What is it?’ she asked quickly.

  ‘It is nothing.’

  She touched his shoulder with firm strong fingers. ‘Here – does it hurt?’

  ‘A stiffness in the muscle – it will be all right tomorrow.’

  ‘Hans, take us to my apartment in the Hansa,’ she ordered the driver, and Manfred glanced at her, perturbed.

  ‘Mutti has passed down to me one of her special secrets. It is an embrocation made with wild ferns, and truly magical.’

  ‘It is not necessary—’ he protested.

  ‘My apartment is on the way back to the Olympic village. It will not take long and Hans can drop you back home afterwards.’

  She had been uncertain as to how she would get him alone without alarming him, but now he accepted her suggestion without further comment. He was silent for the rest of the drive and she could sense the tension in him, though she made no attempt to touch him again.

  Manfred was thinking of Sarah, trying to form the image of her face in his mind but it was blurred, a sweet and insipid blur. He wanted to order Hans to drive directly back to the village, but he could not find the will to do so. He knew what they were doing was incorrect – to be alone with a young attractive woman – and he tried to convince himself that it was innocent, but then he remembered the touch of her arm against him and he stiffened.

  ‘It does hurt?’ she misinterpreted the movement.

  ‘Just a little,’ he whispered, and his voice caught.

  It was always most difficult after he had fought. For many hours after a match he was strung up and nervously sensitive, and it was then that his body was likely to play Satan’s tricks upon him. He could feel it happening now, and his mortification and guilt forced hot blood up into his face. What would this pure clean German virgin think of him if she guessed at that obscene and wicked tumescence? He opened his mouth to tell her he would not go with her, but she was leaning forward in the seat.

  ‘Thank you, Hans. Drop us here on the corner and you can wait down the block.’ She was out of the car and crossing the sidewalk, and he had no option but to follow her.

  It was half dark in the entrance lobby of the building.

  ‘I’m sorry, Manfred, I am on the top floor and there is no elevator.’

  The climb allowed him to regain control of himself, and she let him into a small one-roomed flat.

  ‘This is my palace,’ she smiled apologetically. ‘Flats are so difficult to find in Berlin these days.’ She gestured to the bed. ‘Sit there, Manfred.’

  She slipped off the jacket she wore over her white blouse, and stood on tiptoe to hang it in the cupboard. Her breasts swung forward heavily as she lifted her pale smooth arms.

  Manfred looked away. There was a shelf of books on one wall; he saw a set of Goethe’s works and remembered how he had been his father’s favourite author. Think of anything, he told himself, anything but those big pointed breasts under the thin white cloth.

  She had gone through to the little bathroom and he heard running water and the clink of glass. Then she came back with a small green bottle in her hands and stood in front of him smiling.

  ‘You must take off your coat and your shirt,’ she said, and he could not reply. He had not thought of that.

  ‘That is not proper, Heidi.’

  She laughed softly, a throaty little sound, and through the laughter she murmured, ‘Don’t be shy, Manfred. Just think of me as a nurse.’ Gently she lifted the coat off his shoulders, helping him out of it. Her breasts swung forward again and almost brushed against his face before she stepped back and hung his coat over the back of the single chair and then, a few seconds later, folded his shirt on top of it. She had warmed the bottle in the basin and the lotion was instantly soothing on his skin, her fingers cunning and strong.

  ‘Relax,’ she whispered. ‘There, I can feel it. It’s all hard and knotted. Relax, let the pain just wash away.’ Gently she drew his head forward. ‘Lean against me, Manfred. Yes, like that.’

  She was standing in front of him and she thrust her hips forward so that his forehead was pressed against her lower torso. Her belly was soft and warm and her voice hypnotic, he felt waves of pleasure spreading out from the contact of her kneading fingers.

  ‘You are so hard and strong, Manfred, so white and hard and beautiful—’ It was moments before he realized what she had said, but her fingers were stroking and caressing, and all rational thought ebbed out of his mind. He was conscious only of the hands and the murmured endearments and praise, then he was aware of something else, a warm musky odour wafted up from her belly against which his face was pressed. Though he did not recognize it as the smell of a healthy young woman physically aroused and ripe for love, yet his own reaction to it was instinctive and no longer to be denied.

  ‘Heidi,’ his voice shook wildly. ‘I love you. Forgive me, God, but I love you so.’

  ‘Yes, mein Schatz, I know,’ she whispered. ‘And I love you also.’

  She pushed him back gently upon the bed and standing over him began slowly to unbutton the front of the white blouse. As she came over him, her big silky white breasts, tipped with ruby, were the most beautiful things he had ever seen.

  ‘I love you,’ he cried so many times during that night, each time in a different voice of wonder and awe and ecstasy, for the things she did with him and for him surpassed all his imaginings.

  For the first day of the finals of the track and field events, Shasa had managed to finagle team tickets for the girls, but the seats were high in the north stand. Mathilda Janine had borrowed Shasa’s binoculars and was anxiously scanning the great arena far below them.

  ‘I can’t see him,’ she wailed.

  ‘He’s not out yet,’ Shasa reassured her. ‘They are running the hundred metres first—’ But he was as strung out as she was. In the semi-final heat of the 200-metre dash, David Abrahams had run second to the great American athlete Jesse Owens, ‘the Ebony Antelope’, and so had secured his place in the final event.

  ‘I’m so nervous I think I am going to have a fit of the vapours,’ Mathilda Janine gasped without lowering the binoculars; on Shasa’s other side Tara was as agitated, but for different reasons.

  ‘It’s outrageous,’ she said, so vehemently that Shasa turned to her surprised.

  ‘What is?’

  ‘Haven’t you been listening to a word?’

  ‘I’m sorry, you know David will be coming out at any moment—’ He was drowned out by a deafening thunder of applause and the banks of spectators rose to their feet as the finalists in the hundred-metre dash sprang from the blocks and sped down their lanes; as they crossed the finish line, the quality of the sound changed, groans mixed with the ovation for the winner.

  ‘There!’ Tara caught Shasa’s arm. ‘Listen to
them.’

  Near them in the crowd a voice called, ‘Another American negro wins.’ And closer still, ‘The Americans should be ashamed to let the black animals wear their colours.’

  ‘These bigots are disgusting.’ Tara glared around her, trying to identify the speakers in the sea of faces that surrounded them and when she failed turned back to Shasa. ‘The Germans are threatening to disallow all medals won by what they call the inferior races, the blacks and the Jews,’ she said in a loud voice. ‘They are disgusting.’

  ‘Cool down,’ Shasa whispered.

  ‘Don’t you care?’ Tara challenged him. ‘David is a Jew.’

  ‘Of course I care,’ he said quietly, glancing around in embarrassment. ‘But do shut up, Tara, there’s a brick.’

  ‘I think—’ Tara’s voice rose in direct response to Shasa’s appeal, but Mathilda Janine screamed even more piercingly.

  ‘There he is – there’s David!’

  With relief Shasa sprang to his feet. ‘There he is – go it, Davie boy. Run like a hairy springbok!’

  The finalists for the 200-metre dash had clustered at the far end of the arena and were jogging on the spot, windmilling their arms and going through their warm-up routines.

  ‘Isn’t David just indescribable?’ Mathilda Janine demanded.

  ‘I think that describes him perfectly,’ Shasa agreed, and she punched his arm.

  ‘You know what I mean.’

  Then the group of athletes spread out to their blocks and the starter stepped forward. Once more silence descended on the vast arena, and the runners were crouched down, frozen in a rigour of concentration.

  The pistol fired, at this distance a pop of sound, and the athletes hurled themselves forward; in a perfect line, long legs flashing, arms pumping high, they sped away on a rising wave of sound, and the line lost its perfection, bulged in the centre; a lean dark panther of a man pulled out ahead and the roar of the crowd became articulate.

  ‘Je-Se O-wens!’ repeated in a soaring chant, while the dark man flashed over the finish line pulling a bunch of other runners behind him.

  ‘What happened?’ Mathilda Janine screamed.

  ‘Jesse Owens won,’ Shasa shouted to make himself heard in the uproar.

  ‘I know that – but David, what happened to David?’

  ‘I don’t know. I couldn’t see. It was all so close.’

  They waited in a fever until the loudspeakers boomed their stentorian command.

  ‘Achtung! Achctung!’ and they heard the names in the jumble of German.

  ‘Jesse Owens, Carter Brown—’ and then, stunningly, ‘David Abrahams.’

  Mathilda Janine shrieked. ‘Catch me, I’m going to faint. David got the bronze!’

  She was still shrieking, and hopping up and down on the spot, tears of wild joy running unheeded down her cheeks and dripping off her chin, while on the green field below a thin gangling figure in shorts and running vest climbed up onto the inferior step of the victors’ pyramid and bowed his head as the ribbon with the bronze medal dangling from it was draped around his neck.

  The four of them began their celebration that evening in the salon of Centaine’s suite at the Bristol. Blaine made a short speech of congratulation while David stood in the middle of the floor looking bashful and self-conscious as they toasted him in champagne. Because it was for David, Shasa drank the whole glass of the magnificent 1929 Bollinger that Centaine provided for the occasion.

  He drank another full glass of Sekt at the Café am Kudamm, on the corner of the Kurfürstendamm just down the street from the hotel and then the four of them linked arms and set off down Berlin’s notorious fun street. All the signs of decadence that the Nazis had banned – the Coca-Cola bottles on the sidewalk tables, and the strains of jazz from the café bands, the movie posters of Clark Gable and Myrna Loy – were once more in evidence, allowed back under special dispensation for the duration of the Olympics only.

  They stopped at another café, and this time Shasa ordered a schnapps.

  ‘Slow down,’ David whispered to him, he knew that Shasa seldom drank alcohol, and then never more than a single glass of wine or beer.

  ‘Davie my boy, it’s not every day that an old mate of mine wins an Olympic medal.’ He was flushed under his tan and his eyes had a feverish glitter.

  ‘Well, I for one refuse to carry you home,’ David warned.

  They went on down the Ku-damm and Shasa had the girls in fits of giggles at his nonsense humour.

  ‘Ach so, meine lieblings, dis is de famousa Kranzlers coffee house, no? We will enter and drink a leetle champagne, yes?’

  ‘That’s Italian, not German,’ Tara pointed out. ‘And I think you are sloshed.’

  ‘Sloshed is a foul word on fair lips,’ Shasa told her, and marched her into the elegant coffee shop.

  ‘Not more champagne, Shasa,’ David protested.

  ‘My dear boy, you don’t suggest I should drink everlasting life to you in beer, now do you?’ Shasa snapped his fingers to summon the waitress and she poured four tulip glasses of the seething yellow wine.

  They were all four laughing and chattering so that for some seconds none of them was aware of the sudden tense silence that had descended on the crowded coffee shop.

  ‘Oh dear,’ Tara murmured. ‘Here come the cavalry.’

  Six brown-uniformed storm troopers had entered the room. They had obviously been to some ceremony or function of their regiment, for two of them carried furled banners. It was just as obvious that they had already been drinking; their attitude was bellicose and swaggering, and some of the other customers of the coffee shop hurriedly gathered their hats and coats, paid their bills and left the room.

  The six troopers came strutting across to the vacant table next to where the four of them were sitting, and ordered tankards of beer from the waitress. The owner of the coffee shop, anxious to avoid trouble, came to their table, and greeted them obsequiously. They talked for a short while. Then the proprietor took his leave of them by standing at attention and giving the Nazi salute. Immediately the six storm troopers jumped to their feet and returned the salute, cracking the heels of their jackboots together and shouting, ‘Heil Hitler!’

  Mathilda Janine, who had drunk at least one full glass of champagne, let out a shriek of laughter and dissolved into helpless giggles, and the full attention of all the troopers was instantly focused upon her.

  ‘Shut up, Matty,’ David implored, but that only made it worse. Mathilda Janine rolled her eyes and went scarlet in the face with the effort of trying to contain her giggles, but in the end they exploded out of her with a wild snorting whoop and the storm troopers exchanged glances and then moved across in a bunch and stood shoulder to shoulder surrounding their table.

  The leader, a hefty middle-aged sergeant, said something and Tara answered in schoolgirl German.

  ‘Ah,’ said the sergeant in heavily accented English, ‘you are English.’

  ‘My sister is very young and silly.’ Tara glared at Mathilda Janine who let out another muffled snort through her handkerchief.

  ‘They are English,’ said the sergeant, an explanation of all madness, and would have turned away, but one of the younger troopers had been staring at David.

  Now he asked in passable English, ‘You are the runner? You are the winner of the bronze medal. David Abrahams.’

  David looked bashful and nodded.

  ‘You are David Abrahams, the Jew runner.’ The trooper enlarged on the theme, and David’s face went pale and set. The two English-speaking storm troopers explained to the others, the word Juden was repeated, and then they all stared at David with hostile faces and fists clenched on their hips as the sergeant asked loudly, ‘Are not the English and Americans ashamed to let the Jews and the negroes win their medals for them?’

  Before they could answer Shasa had risen to his feet, smiling politely.

  ‘I say, you chaps are barking up the wrong tree. He isn’t a Jew at all, he’s a Zulu.’


  ‘How is this possible?’ The sergeant looked puzzled. ‘Zulus are black.’

  ‘Wrong again, old chap. Zulus are born white. They only go black when they’ve been left out in the sun. We’ve always kept this one in the shade.’

  ‘You are joking,’ accused the sergeant.

  ‘Of course I am choking!’ Shasa imitated his pronunciation. ‘Wouldn’t you be, looking at what I’m looking at?’

  ‘Shasa, for goodness’ sake sit down,’ David told him. ‘There is going to be trouble.’ But Shasa was inebriated with champagne and his own wit and he tapped the sergeant on the chest.

  ‘Actually, my dear fellow, if you are looking for Jews, I am the only Jew here.’

  ‘You are both Jews?’ the sergeant demanded, narrowing his eyes threateningly.

  ‘Don’t be a clot. I’ve explained already – he’s the Zulu and I’m the Jew.’

  ‘That is a lie,’ said the sergeant.

  By this time the entire clientele of the coffee shop was listening to this exchange with full attention, and for those who did not understand English their companions were translating.

  Shasa was encouraged by all this attention, and reckless with champagne. ‘I see I shall have to prove my case to you. Therefore to convince you that I am privy to all the age-old secrets of Judaism, I will reveal one of our best-kept secrets to you. Have you ever wondered what we do with that little piece the rabbi snips off the end of us?’

  ‘Shut up, Shasa,’ said David.

  ‘What is he talking about?’ Mathilda Janine asked with interest.

  ‘Shasa Courtney, don’t be disgusting,’ said Tara.

  ‘Bitte?’ said the storm trooper, looking uneasy, but the other customers of the coffee house were grinning with anticipation. Bawdy humour was common currency on the Ku-damm and they were revelling in the unaccustomed discomfiture of the storm troopers.

  ‘Very well, I shall tell you.’ Shasa ignored David and Tara. ‘We pack them in salt, like kippers, and send them off to Jerusalem. There in the sacred grove on the Mount of Olives on the day of the Passover, the chief rabbi plants them in rows and makes a magic sign over them and a miracle takes place – a miracle! They begin to grow.’ Shasa made a gesture to describe the growing. ‘Higher and higher, they grow.’ The storm troopers watched his hand rise with mystified expressions. ‘Then do you know what happens?’ Shasa asked and the sergeant shook his head involuntarily.