Men of Men (19 page)

‘Bakela is my father, the stone is his calf, given into my care.’

‘He will give you a single coin,’ Kamuza lamented, and Bazo seemed not to hear him.

He picked up the diamond again and turned it in his hand.

‘It is a large stone,’ he mused aloud, ‘a very large stone.’ He held it to his eye and looked into the stone as though it were a mountain pool, and he watched with awe
the fires and shapes move within it.

Still holding it to his eye, he said, ‘If I bring my father a newborn calf, he will be happy and give me a reward. But if I bring him one hundred calves how much greater will be his joy,
and one hundred times greater the reward that he will give me.’

He lowered the stone and gave a series of orders that sent his men hurrying out into the night, to return immediately with the tools Bazo had sent them to fetch.

Then in silence they watched him make his preparations.

Firstly he spread a kaross of silver jackal pelts on the earth floor and then in the centre of the fur he placed a small steel anvil at which he had watched Zouga shaping horse-shoes and working
the iron hoops to repair the wagon wheels.

On the anvil Bazo placed the diamond, and then he threw aside his cloak so that he stood stark naked in the firelight, tall and lean and hard, his belly muscles standing up in concentric ridges
under the dark satiny skin and the wide rangy shoulders overdeveloped by practice with shield and spear.

With his legs braced wide, he stood over the anvil, and hefted the sweat-polished handle of the pick, feeling the balance and weight of the steel head that had become so familiar.

Bazo narrowed his eyes, measuring his stroke, and then he reared back with the pick almost touching the thatched roof. He drove his body weight into the stroke, and the steel pick head came
hissing down from on high.

The point caught the diamond exactly on the high centre of its curved upper surface, and the great stone exploded as though a bucketful of mountain water had been dashed to the earth. The
sparkling drops, the shattered fragments, the glowing chips of priceless crystal, seemed to fill the whole hut with a burst of sunlight.

They pattered against the thatched walls, stung the naked skins of the watching Matabele, kicked little puffs of grey ash as they fell into the fire, and scattered on the lustrous fur of the
silver jackal kaross, shining there like live fish in the net.

‘Son of the Great Snake,’ hooted Kamuza joyously. ‘We are rich men.’ And the laughing Matabele flung themselves into the task of gathering up the fragments.

They picked them from the ashes, swept them up from the earthen floor, shook them out of the jackal skin kaross – and piled them into Bazo’s cupped hand until it was filled to
overflowing. Even then they missed some of the tiny chips that had fallen into the dust or the fire and were lost for ever.

‘You are a wise man,’ Kamuza told Bazo with unaffected admiration. ‘Bakela has his stones – a hundred calves – and we will have more coins than the yellow Bastaard
would give us.’

T
here was no work in the collapsed No. 6 Section, no need to rise before dawn, so the sun was clear of the horizon when Zouga strode out of the
tent, clinching his belt as he joined Jan Cheroot and the two boys under the camel-thorn tree.

The table was a packing-case, the lid stained with candle grease and spilled coffee, and breakfast was maize-meal porridge in chipped enamel bowls, unsweetened, for the price of sugar had
recently risen to a pound a pound on the diamond fields.

Zouga’s eyes were red-rimmed, for he had slept little the previous night, but had lain awake worrying and scheming, going over and over in his mind every detail of the plans for the new
staging – and coming back each time to the most important detail, the one for which there seemed to be no solution: the cost, the enormous cost of it all.

The two boys saw his face, recognized his mood, and were immediately silent, applying themselves with complete absorption to the unappetizing grey gruel in their bowls.

A shadow fell across the group, and Zouga looked up irritably, squinting into the early sunlight with the spoon half raised to his lips. ‘What is it, Bazo?’

‘Pick-ups, Bakela.’ The tall young Matabele used the English words. ‘Pick-ups.’ Zouga grunted.

‘Let me see it.’ Zouga was immediately uninterested. Almost certainly it would be a worthless chip of quartz or rock crystal. But Bazo placed a small bundle wrapped in a dirty scrap
of cloth beside Zouga’s bowl.

‘Well, open it,’ Zouga ordered; and Bazo picked the knot, and spread the cloth.

‘Glass!’ thought Zouga disgustedly. There was almost a handful of it, chips and pieces, the biggest not much bigger than the head of a wax Vesta.

‘Glass!’ and he made the gesture of sweeping it away, and then stayed his hand as the sunlight fell on the pile and a shaft of it pricked his eyes in a rainbow burst of colours.

Slowly, disbelievingly, he changed the gesture of dismissal and reached hesitantly, almost reverently for the glittering heap, but Jordan forestalled him.

With a shriek of joy the child’s small graceful fingers danced over the pile.

‘Diamonds, Papa,’ he screamed. ‘They are diamonds, real diamonds.’

‘Are you sure, Jordie?’ Zouga asked the question unnecessarily, his voice hoarse, realizing it was too good to be true. There must be many hundreds of precious stones in the pile,
small, very small, but of what superb colour, white, ice-white, seeming to crackle like lightning they were so bright.

Still hesitantly Zouga took one of the largest stones from Jordan’s fingers.

‘Are you sure, Jordie?’ he repeated.

‘They are diamonds, Papa. All of them.’

Zouga’s last doubts faded, to be replaced immediately by a deeper uncertainty.

‘Bazo,’ he said. ‘There are so many—’ And then something else puzzled him. Quickly he picked out twenty of the largest stones and stood them in a row across the top
of the packing case.

‘The same colour, they are all the same colour, exactly!’

Zouga shook his head, frowning, confused; and then suddenly the shadows in his eyes cleared.

‘Oh my God,’ he whispered, and slowly all blood drained from his face, leaving the skin dirty yellow like a man ten days gone in malaria fever.

‘The same; they are all the same. The breaks are clean and fresh.’

Slowly he lifted his eyes to Bazo’s face.

‘Bazo, how big—’ his voice roughened and dried, so that he had to clear his throat, ‘how big was the stone before – before you cracked it?’

‘This big.’ Bazo clenched and showed his fist. ‘With my pick I made it into many stones, for you, Bakela, knowing how you value many stones.’

Zouga’s voice was still a husky whisper. ‘I will kill you,’ he said in English. ‘For this, I will kill you.’

The scar across his cheek turned slowly into an ugly inflamed weal, the stigmata of his rage, and now he was shaking, his lips trembling as he rose slowly to his feet.

‘I will kill you.’ His voice rose to a bellow, and Jordan shrieked again, this time with terror. He had never seen his father like this before; there was a terrifying maniacal
quality about him.

‘That was the stone I was waiting for, you bastard, you black bastard, that was it. That was the key to the north.’

Zouga snatched the Martini-Henry rifle from where it leaned against the bole of the camel-thorn tree beside the falcon carving. The steel clashed and snickered as he pumped a cartridge into the
chamber and in the same moment swung up the barrel.

‘I’m going to kill you,’ be roared, and then checked.

Ralph had jumped to his feet, and now he faced his father, stepping forward until the muzzle of the loaded and fully cocked rifle almost touched the entwined brass snakes of his belt buckle.

‘You will have to kill me first, Papa,’ he said. He was as pale as Zouga, his eyes the same deep haunted green.

‘Get out of the way.’ Zouga’s voice sank into that croaking, husky whisper and Ralph could not answer him, but he shook his head, his heavy jaw clenched so determinedly that
his teeth grated audibly.

‘I warn you, stand aside,’ Zouga choked, and they stood confronting each other, both trembling with tension and outrage.

Then the muzzle of the heavy rifle wavered in Zouga’s hands, lowered slowly until it pointed to the dusty red earth between the toes of Ralph’s boots.

The silence went on for many seconds; then Zouga took a full breath and the barrel of his chest swelled under the faded blue flannel shirt.

With a gesture of utter frustration he hurled the rifle against the treetrunk and the butt snapped through. Then he sank back into his seat at the packing-case table and his golden head sank
slowly into his hands.

‘Get out.’ All the fire and fury had gone from his voice; it was quiet and hopeless. ‘Get out, all of you.’

Zouga sat on alone under the thorn tree. He felt burned out with emotion and anger, empty and blackened and devastated within, like the veld after fire has swept through it.

When at last he lifted his head the first thing he saw was the falcon squatting opposite him on its greenstone plinth. It seemed to be smiling, a cruel and sardonic twist to the predator’s
beak, but when he stared at it Zouga saw that it was merely a trick of shadow and sunlight through the thorn branches.

T
he kopje-walloper was a small man, with legs so short that his polished high-heeled boots did not touch the floor when he sat on the swivel piano
stool behind his desk.

The desk filled most of the tiny galvanized-iron hut, and it was furnace-hot in the room; the heat quivered and danced down from the roof. On the raw deal planks of the desk stood the
accoutrements of the kopje-walloper’s trade. The whisky bottle and shot-glasses to mellow the man with stones to sell; the sheet of white paper on which to examine the goods for colour; the
wooden tweezers, the jeweller’s eye-glass, the balance and scales, and the cheque book.

The cheque book was the size of a family Bible, each cheque form embossed in gold leaf and printed in multi-colours, the border depicting choirs of heavenly angels, sea nymphs riding in half
clam shells drawn by teams of leaping dolphins, the Queen as Britannia with helmet, shield and trident, twisting cornucopia from which poured the treasures of Empire and a dozen other patriotic
symbols of Victorian might.

The cheque book was by far the most impressive item in the hut, not excepting the buyer’s flowing silk Ascot tie and the yellow spats that covered his boots. It was unlikely that a digger
would be able to refuse payment offered in such flamboyant style.

‘How much, Mr Werner?’ Zouga asked.

Werner had swiftly sorted the glittering heap of diamond chips into separate piles, grading them by size alone for each stone was of the same fine white colour.

The smallest stones were three points, three hundredth parts of a carat, barely bigger than a grain of beach sand, the largest was almost a carat.

Now Werner laid aside his tweezers and ran his hand through his dark locks.

‘Have another whisky,’ he murmured, and when Zouga refused, ‘Well, me, I’m having one now.’

He poured both glasses full to the brim, and despite Zouga’s frown pushed one across to him.

‘How much?’ Zouga persisted.

‘The weight?’ Werner sipped the whisky and smacked his thick liver-coloured lips. ‘Ninety-six carats, all told. What a diamond it must have been. We will never see the likes
again—’

‘How much in cash?’

‘Major, I would have offered you fifty thousand pounds, if that had been a single stone.’

Zouga winced and blinked his eyes closed for an instant, as though he had been slapped across the face with an open hand.

With fifty thousand pounds he could have taken Zambezia – money for men, horses and guns, money for wagons and bullock teams, machinery to mine the reef and mill the gold, money for the
farms, the seed and implements. He opened his eyes again.

‘Damn you, I’m not interested in what might have been,’ he whispered. ‘Just tell me how much you will pay for that.’

‘Two thousand pounds; that’s my top price, and it’s not an “open” offer.’

The stone had splintered into almost two hundred chips. That meant a ‘pick-up’ payment to Bazo of that many sovereigns. Zouga would intensely resent having to make that payment, but
he owed it and he would make it. Of what remained after paying Bazo, at least a thousand would go for his share of the new stagings on the No. 6 Section.

Eight hundred left, and it cost him a hundred a week to work his claims, so he had won himself two months. Sixty days, instead of a land. Sixty days instead of a hundred thousand square miles of
rich land.

‘I’ll take it,’ he said quietly, picked up the whisky glass and drained it. It burned away the bitter taste at the back of his throat.

R
alph’s bird was a lanner, one of the true members of the family
Falco
, long-winged and perfect for hunting the open plains of
Griqualand. At last, after many attempts, he had found her and taken her for his own, a falcon and therefore bigger than the male bird, which was not a falcon but a tercel or, in the case of a
lanner, a ‘lanneret’.

She was ‘eyas’, the falconers’ term for a wild bird taken at the nest when almost full-fledged. Ralph had climbed to the nest high on the top branches of a giant acacia and
brought the bird down in his shirt, bleeding where she had raked him with her talons across his belly.

Bazo had helped him fashion the hood and jesses of soft glove leather for the proud head, but it was Ralph who walked her on his hand, hour after hour, day after day, stroking and gentling her,
calling her ‘darling’ and ‘beauty’ and ‘lovely’ until she would eat from his fist and greet him with a soft ‘Kweet! Kweet!’ of recognition when she
saw him. Then he introduced her to the lure of stuffed pigeon feathers, teaching her to hit it as he swung it on its long cord.

Finally, in the traditional ritual of the falconer, he sat up all night with the bird on his fist and a candle burning beside him. He sat with her in the trial of wills which would prove his
domination over her, staring into her fierce yellow eyes, in the candlelight, hour after hour, outlasting her until the lids closed over her eyes and she slept perched upon his fist and Ralph had
won. Then at last he could hunt her.