by Wilbur Smith
He rushed back at Zouga, swinging wildly with both fists meeting only air, and the blows that landed on his own head and face sounded as though somebody far away was chopping down a tree with a steel axe.
Zouga fell away neatly before each charge, swaying his head back or to the side, deflecting a blow with his arms, ducking carefully under a flying fist, and counter-punching only with his left hand, flicking it in with deceptive lightness, for at each shot Ralph's head snapped backwards sharply and the blood from his nose and his swollen lips slowly turned his face into a running red mess.
"Stop it, oh please stop it!"Jordan crouched against the verandah wall with the yellow vomit staining his shirt front. "Please stop it!"
He wanted to cover his face with his hands, to blot out the violence and the blood and the terrible black hatred, but he could not. He was locked in an awful fascination, watching every stinging cruel blow, every droplet of flung blood from his brother's face.
Like a corrida bull Ralph came up short at last, and stood with his feet wide apart, his knees giving like reeds overweighted with dew, trying feebly to shake the blackness from his head and the blood from his eyes, his fists bunched up still but too heavy and weak to lift above his waist, his chest heaving for air, swaying and catching his balance every few seconds with an uncontrolled stagger, peering blindly about him for his tormentor.
"Here," said Zouga quietly, and Ralph lurched towards the voice and Zouga used his right hand for the first time. He chopped him cleanly under the ear, a short measured blow, and Ralph flopped face forward into the dust and snored into it, blowing little red puffs with each breath.
Jordan flew down the steps and dropped to his knees beside his brother, turning his head to one side so he could breathe freely and dabbing ineffectually at the blood with his fingers.
"Jan Cheroot," Zouga called. He was breathing deeply but slowly; there was colour in his cheeks above his beard, and he touched a few beads of perspiration on his forehead with the kerchief from around his throat.
"Jan Cheroot!"he called again irritably, and this time the little Hottentot roused himself and hurried down the steps.
"Get a bucket of water," Zouga told him.
Jan Cheroot dashed the contents of a gallon bucket into Ralph's face, washing away the bloody mask, and Ralph gasped and snorted and tried to crawl to his knees.
Jan Cheroot dropped the bucket and grabbed his arm; Jordan stooped and got his head under Ralph's other armpit and between them they lifted him to his feet.
They were both much smaller than Ralph and he hung between them like a dirty blanket on a washline, with the mixture of water and blood dripping to form pale pink rosettes on his shirt front.
Zouga lit a cheroot, studied the ash to be sure it was drawing evenly, then replaced it between his teeth.
He stepped up to his eldest son. With his thumb he pulled down each lower eyelid in turn and peered into his pupils, then grunted with satisfaction. He studied the cut in Ralph's eyebrow, then took his nose between his fingers and moved it gently from side to side to check it for damage, then finally he pulled back Ralph's lip and inspected his teeth for chips or breakage and stepped back.
"Jan Cheroot, take him down to Jameson's surgery. Ask Doc to stitch that eye and give him a handful of mercury pills for the pox."
Jan Cheroot started to lead Ralph away but Zouga went on, "Then on your way back stop at Barnato's Gymnasium and sign him up for a course of boxing lessons.
He'll have to learn to fight a bit better than that or he's going to get his head beaten in even before he dies of the clap."
on the way back from Market Square Jan Cheroot and Ralph walked with their heads together, talking seriously.
"Why do you think they call him Bakela, the Fist?" Jan Cheroot asked, and Ralph grimaced painfully.
His face was lumpy and the colour was coming up in his bruises, deep plum and cloudy blue like summer thunderclouds. The horsehair stitches stuck up stiffly out of his eyebrow and lip, and the cuts were soft-scabbed like cranberry jam.
Jan Cheroot grinned and clucked with sympathy, and then asked the question that had burned his tongue since first he had learned the cause of Zouga's wrath.
"So how did you like your first taste of pink sugar?"
The question stopped Ralph in his tracks while he considered it seriously, then he answered without moving his damaged lip.
"It was bloody marvellous," he said.
Jan Cheroot giggled and hugged himself with delight.
"Now you listen to me, boy, and you listen good. I love your daddy, we been together so many years I can't count, and when he tells you something you can believe it, nearly every time. But me, I have never in my life assed up a chance for a slice of that warm stuff, never once, old or young or in between, ugly as a monkey or so pretty it would break your heart, whenever it was offered and lots of times when it wasn't, old Jan Cheroot grabbed it, boy."
"And it never killed you." Ralph supplied the summation.
"I guess I would have died without it."
Ralph started walking again. "I hope Bazo will fight his fancy again next Sunday. I'm going to need ten guineas pretty badly by then."
The moon was hpping the horizon, putting the stars to pale shame. It was still a few days short of full, but on the stoep of Zouga's cottage it was light enough to read the headlines of a crumpled copy of the Diamond Fields Advertiser that lay beside Zouga's empty riempie chair.
The only sounds were the distant baying of a mooncrazy hound, and the flirt of bats" wings as they spun high parabolas in the moonlight or came fluttering in under the overhang of the verandah roof to pick a moth from the air. The front door was stopped wide open to allow the night's cool to penetrate the inner rooms of the cottage. Jordan crept through it timidly.
He was bare-footed, and the old flannel shirt he wore as a nightdress was one of Zouga's cast-offs. The tails flapped around his bare knees as he moved down the verandah and stopped before the tall falcon-headed carving that stood on its pedestal at the end of the covered stoep.
The slanting moonlight lit the graven bird image from the side, leaving half of it in black mysterious shadow.
Jordan stopped before the image. The clay floor was cold on his bare soles, and he shivered not entirely from the cold, and looked about him surreptitiously.
Zouga's camp slept, that deep pre-dawn sleep.
Jordan's curls, bushed wildly from the pillow, sparkled like a halo in the moonlight, and his eyes were in shadow, dark holes like those of a skull. All night he had lain rigid in his narrow bed and listened to his brother's heavy breathing through his swollen nose.
Lack of sleep made Jordan feel light-headed and fey.
He opened the little twist of newspaper which he had hidden under his pillow when he went to bed.
it contained half a handful of rice and a thin slice of cold roasted lamb. He laid it at the foot of the soapstone column, and stepped back.
Once more he looked about him to make sure that he was alone and unobserved. Then he sank down to his bare knees with the book held against his chest, and bowed his head.
The book was bound in blue leather with gold leaf titling on its spine: Religions of the American Indians.
"I greet you, Panes," Jordan whispered, his swollen eyelids tightly closed.
"The Indians of California, the Acagchemem tribe adore the great buzzard Panes." The book Jordan held to his breast had become far and away the most precious of all his possessions. He did not like to remember how he had obtained it. It was the only thing he had ever stolen in his life, but he had been forgiven for that sin.
He had prayed to the goddess and been forgiven.
"The Panes was a woman, a young and beautiful woman, who had run off into the mountains and been changed into a bird by the god Chinigchinich."
Jordan knew with all his being whom this description depicted. His mother had been young and beautiful, and she had run away to the black mountain of Death without h
im.
Now he opened the book and bowed his head over it.
It was not light enough to read the fine print of the text, but Jordan knew the invocation to the goddess by heart.
"Why did you run away?" he whispered. "You would have been better with us. Are we not the ones who love you? "It was better that you stayed, for now you are Panes. If we make you a sacrifice of rice and meat, will you not come back to us? See the sacrifice we set for you, great Panes."
The morning wind stirred, and Jordan heard the branch of the camel-thorn scrape upon the roof before the wind touched him. It was a warm, soft wind, and it ruffled his hair.
Jordan clenched his eyes even tighter, and the little insects of awe crawled upon his skin. The goddess had many ways of showing her presence. This was the first time she had come as a soft warm wind.
"Oh great Panes, I don't want to wallow in filth like Ralph. I don't ever want to smell the trough where a thousand pigs have wallowed. I don't want to go mad, and have my teeth rot out of my mouth." He whispered softly but ardently, and then the tears began to squeeze out from between his lids.
"Please save me, great Panes." He poured out all his horror and disgust to the sacred bird-woman. "They were hitting each other. They were hating each other, and the blood, oh the blood At last he was silent, head bowed, shivering, and then he rose to his bare feet, and for the first time looked at the image.
The bird stared back at him stonily, but Jordan cocked his lovely golden head as though he were listening, and the moonlight silvered his skin.
He turned, still clutching the book, and crept back along the verandah. As he turned the far corner there was a furry rush of dark bodies out of the shadows, and the soft squeals of the bush rats as they squabbled over the sacrifice.
Jordan pushed open the door of the kitchen and it smelled of woodsmoke and curry powder and carbolic soap.
He stooped to the ashbox of the black iron stove, and when he blew lightly through the grating the ashes glowed.
He pushed a long wax taper through the bars and blew again and a little blue flame popped into life. He carried it carefully across the kitchen, sheltering it with his cupped hand, and transferred the flame to the stump of candle in the neck of the dark green champagne bottle.
Then he blew out the taper and placed the bottle on the scrubbed yellow deal table and stepped back.
For a few seconds longer he hesitated, then he took the skirts of the faded and patched nightshirt, lifted them as high as his shoulders and looked down at his body.
The puppy fat had disappeared from his belly and hips.
His navel was a dark eye in the flat clean plain of his trunk, and his legs were gracefully shaped. His buttocks lean and tight, like immature fruit.
His body was smooth and hairless except for the golden wisps at the juncture of his legs. It was not yet thick enough to curl, and was sparse and fine as silk thread freshly spun upon the cocoon.
From the centre of this cloudy web his penis hung down limply. It had grown alarmingly in the last few months, and in Jordan's horrified imagination, he foresaw the day when it would be thick and heavy as his arm, a huge shameful burden to carry through life.
At this moment it looked so soft and white and innocent, but when he woke in the mornings it was hard as bone, hot and throbbing with a sinfully pleasurable ache.
That was bad, but in these last weeks that terrible swelling and stiffening had come upon him at the most unexpected times: at the dinner table with his father seated opposite him, in the schoolroom when the new schoolmistress had leaned over him to correct his spelling, seated at the sorting-table beside Jan Cheroot, on the gelding's back when the friction of the saddle had triggered it, and that awful stiff thing had thrust out the front of his breeches.
He took it in his hand now and it seemed helpless and soft as a newborn kitten, but he was not deceived. He stroked it softly back and forth and instantly he felt it change shape between his fingers. He released it quickly.
The joint of mutton that the family had dined off the previous evening stood on the deal table, under a steel mesh fly-cover. Jordan lifted the cover, and the leg was hacked down to the bone.
His father's hunting knife lay beside the cold joint.
The handle was stag-horn and the blade was nine inches long, sweeping up to a dagger point, and the white mutton fat had congealed upon the blade.
Jordan picked up the knife in his right hand.
The previous evening he had watched his father flicking the edge of the blade across the long steel. It always fascinated him, because Zouga held the razor edge towards his own fingers as he worked.
The proof of his father's expertise with the steel was the way in which the heavy knife seemed to glide effortlessly through the meat of the joint. It was wickedly sharp.
Jordan looked down again at that long white thing that stuck out of his body. The loose skin at the tip was half retracted so that the pink acorn pushed out from beneath it.
He tucked the tail of his shirt under his chin to free both hands and seized himself at the root, enclosing within the circle of his fingers the wrinkled bag with its tender marbles of flesh, and he pulled it out, stretching it out like the neck of the condemned man upon the headsman's block, while with the other hand he brought the knife down and laid the blade against his own belly, just above the fine golden fluff of pubic hair.
The blade was so cold that he gasped, and the mutton fat left a little greasy smear on his belly. He took a long breath to steel himself, and then slowly began to draw the blade downwards, to free himself for ever of that shameful wormlike growth.
"Jordie, what are you doing?" The voice from the doorway behind him startled him so that he cried out aloud.
He threw the knife onto the table and at the same time dropped the shirt to cover himself.
"Jordie!"
He turned swiftly, breathing in sharp little gasps, and Ralph came towards him from the kitchen door. He wore only a pair of baggy shorts, and there were goose-bumps on the smooth bare skin of his chest from the pre-dawn chill.
"What were you doing?" he repeated.
"Nothing. I wasn't doing anything." Jordan shook his head wildly.
"You were whacking your old winker, weren't you?" Ralph accused and grinned. "You dirty little bugger."
Jordan let out a choking sob and fled past him to the door, and Ralph chuckled and shook his head.
Then he picked up the stag-handled knife and cut a thick slab of mutton off the joint, dipped the blade into the stone pot and smeared a gob of yellow mustard over the meat, and munched it as he went about building up the fire in the stove and setting the coffee water to boil.
The following Sunday afternoon on the white sand of the fighting arena, Inkosikazi, the spider, died an agonizing death in the ghastly embrace of a smaller more agile adversary.
Bazo mourned her as he would a lover, and Kamuza sang the dirge with him just as sadly, for the Matabele syndicate had lost twenty sovereigns with her passing.
The return from Market Square to Zouga's camp resembled Napoleon's retreat from Moscow, headed by Ralph and Bazo bearing between them the basket and its sorry contents.
Opposite Diamond Lil's canteen, Ralph halted the cortege for a moment and wistfully contemplated the painted windows across the street, and listened for a moment to the sounds of laughter from beyond the green door, imagining that he could distinguish Lil's tinkling chimes.
When they reached the thatched beehive communal hut, Kamuza passed Ralph the clay pot of bubbling millet beer.
"How much did you lose, Henshaw?"
"Everything," Ralph replied tragically. "The very reason for living." He took a long swallow of the thick gruellike beer.
"That is bad; only a foolish man keeps all his cows in the same kraal."
"Kamuza, your words are always a great solace," Ralph told him bitterly. "But I am unworthy of such wisdom.
Keep those treasures for yourself alone."
; Kamusa looked smug and turned to Bazo. "Now you know why I would not lay fifty gold queens, as you bid me."
Bazo shot a glance at Ralph, and they acted together.
Ralph draped a seemingly brotherly arm over Kamuza's shoulders, but it was a steely yoke that held him helpless, and with the other hand he pulled open the front of Kamuza's loincloth, and Bazo scooped the soft furry carcass of the great spider out of the basket and dropped it into the opening.
As Ralph released him, Kamuza went up into the air, rearing like an unbroken stallion feeling the saddle and spur for the first time, whinnying wildly with horror, beating at his own loins with both hands.
If Ralph had not caught him, Bazo, in a shaking paralysis of mirth, might have fallen into the fire in the centre of the hut.
Kamuza had been gone almost three years.
When Bazo and the other Matabele had signed their contracts for a third period, Kamuza alone had asked Bakela to "Bala Isitupa", to write off the contract as complete, and he had taken the road north back to Matabeleland.
Bazo had missed him deeply. He had missed the spiked tongue and shrewd acerbic counsel. He had missed Kamuza's intuitive understanding of the white man's ways of thinking, ways which Bazo still found unfathomable.
Even though Henshaw was his friend, had worked at Bazo's shoulder for all those long years, though they had hawked and hunted together, dipped into the same baking of maize porridge and drunk from the lip of the same beer-pot, though Henshaw spoke his language so easily that sitting in the darkness when the fire had burned down to embers it might have been a young Matabele buck talking, so faithfully did Henshaw echo the deep cadence of the north, so complete was his command of the colloquial, so poetic the imagery he used yet Henshaw would never be Matabele as Kamuza was Matabele, could never be brother as Kamuza was, had never shared the initiation rites with Bazo as Kamuza had, had never formed the "horns of the bull" with him as the impi closed for the kill, and had never driven the assegai deep and seen the bright blood fly as Kamuza had.
Thus Bazo was filled with joy when he heard the word.
