Men of Men b-2

by Wilbur Smith

  He knew that Rhodes was leaving in the next few weeks, to keep his term at Oxford University. Perhaps his imminent departure would make his judgement hasty.

  "Let's hope so, anyway." And his mount flicked his ears back to listen to his voice.

  Steady, old man." Zouga touched his withers, feeling a quick twist of guilt at his intentions. He knew he was going to try and sell faulty goods, and he steeled himself against his own conscience.

  He touched his mount's flank with his knee and turned him off the rutted dusty track through the break in the milkwood fence and into Rhodes" camp.

  Rhodes sat with his back to the mud wall of the shack, a mug in his hand, the big shaggy leonine head cocked to something that Pickering was saying.

  The talk of the diggings was that he was already a multimillionaire, at least on paper, and Zouga had seen the champagne bucket of uncut diamonds poured out onto his lunch table. Yet here Rhodes was sitting on a soap box in the dusty yard, dressed in shabby ill-fitting clothes, drinking from a chipped enamel mug.

  Zouga dropped his reins and his horse stopped obediently, and when he slipped off its back there was no need for him to tether it. It would stand as long as Zouga wanted it to.

  He crossed the yard towards the small group of men, and Zouga smiled to himself. Rhodes mug might be chipped, but it contained a twenty-year-old cognac. Rhodes' seat might be a soapbox, but he sat it as though it were a throne, and the men that sat around him like courtiers or supplicants were all rich and powerful men, the new aristocracy of the diggings.

  One of these rose now and came to meet Zouga, laughing lightly and brandishing a rolled newspaper.

  "By god, Major, they say you need only speak of the devil." He clapped Zouga's shoulder. "I hope you are taking this assault on our masculine pride as seriously as we are, and have come to offer to champion our cause."

  "I don't understand." Zouga's protest was lost in the laughter and friendly pummelling as they came to crowd around him. Only Rhodes had not left his seat against the wall, but even he was smiling.

  "Let him read it for himself, Pickling," Rhodes suggested mildly, and Pickering handed Zouga the news sheet with a flourish.

  It was a copy of the Diamond Fields Advertiser, so newly printed that the ink smudged beneath Zouga's fingers.

  "Front page," said Pickering gleefully. "The headline."

  GAUNTLET THROWN DOWN LADY INSULTED SEEKS SATISFACTION This morning your editor was privileged to receive a visit from a beautiful and distinguished visitor to Kimberley. missis Louise Sint John is the wife of a hero of the American Civil War, and in her own right a noted equestrienne.

  Her stallion "Shooting Star" is a remarkable example of the recently developed American breed known as Palqminumber He is a former Louisiana champion of breed, and quite one of the most magnificent animals ever to be seen on the Diamond Fields.

  missis Sint John attempted to enter her mount in the regular point-to-point meetings organized by the Kimberley Sporting Club, but was informed by Major Ballantyne, the Club President, that she was barred from riding Zouga skipped quickly over the next few paragraphs: "Simply because I happen to be a woman... insufferable masculine arrogance."

  He smiled and shook his head.

  ,"Challenge the good major to ride against me over any course of his choice for any purse he stipulates."

  Now Zouga laughed delightedly, and tossed the paper back to Pickering.

  "The lady has good bottom", he admitted, "in both senses of the word."

  "I will lend you King Chaka,"Beit promised. He was a strong hunter, English and Arab blood, from one of the famous Cape studs. Beit had paid three hundred guineas for him.

  Zouga shook his head and shot an affectionate glance at his own hunting horse standing across " the yard. "That won't be necessary, I shan't be riding."

  There was a howl of jovial protest from them all.

  "By God, Ballantyne, you can't let us down."

  "This damned vixen will say you funked it, old man."

  "My wife will crow for a week, you'll ruin my marriage."

  Zouga held up his hands. "I'm sorry, gentlemen. This is merely a bit of female nonsense, and you can quote me.

  You won't ride, then?"

  "Certainly not." Zouga was smiling, but his voice had a brittle edge. "I have more serious matters to concern me.

  "You are right, of course." Rhodes" piping voice stifled them all into respectful silence. "That pale brute is a flying devil and the lady rides like a witch, we have all seen that."

  "The scar on Zouga's cheek turned pale pink, and there was a sudden green glint in his eye; but the smile stayed on his lips.

  "That fancy high-stepper moves well on the flat, I grant you, but over the course I would choose she would be lucky to finish, let alone win., "You'll ride then?" They were clamouring again immediately.

  "No, gentlemen. That's my final word."

  Long after the others had left, the three of them sat on: Pickering, Rhodes and Zouga. The sun had set, and just the orange glow of the fire lit their faces. The first bottle of cognac was empty and Pickering had opene another. Now Rhodes was staring into his mug, and spoke without lifting his eyes.

  "So, Major, at last you are ready to sell, and I ask myself a question, a simple little question, why?"

  Zouga did not reply, and after a moment Rhodes lifte his head.

  "Why, Major?"he repeated. "Why now suddenly?"

  Zouga found that the lie he had prepared would not come to his lips.

  He was dumb, but he held the gaze of those pale blue eyes, and it was Rhodes who broke the silence.

  "I have trusted very few men in my life," and involu tarily his eyes flickered to Pickering and then back to Zouga, "but now, Major, you are one of them."

  He picked up the cognac bottle and spilled a little of the honey-dark liquor into Zouga's mug.

  "Once you were offered a hundred thousand pounds: illicit diamonds, and you couldn't bring yourself to take them." Rhodes was speaking so softly that Zouga had to lean forward to catch the words. "Yesterday your son brought up the first hunk of blue ground from the Devils Own, and still you could not bring yourself to lie."

  "You knew!" Zouga whispered, and Rhodes nodded and then sighed.

  "By God, I wish I knew more like you." He shook the big curling head and his voice was becoming brusque and businesslike. "Once I offered you five thousand poun for your claims. All right, I will make the same price, "and he lifted one meaty hand to still Zouga, "Wait! Listen to the rest of it, before you thank me. the"

  bird goes with the claims."

  "What?" For a moment Zouga did not understand.

  "The stone bird, the statue. It becomes part of the deal "Damn it!"Zouga half rose from the log on which he was sitting.

  "Wait!"Rhodes stopped him again. "Listen, before you refuse," and Zouga sank back. "You'll ride for it."

  Zouga shook his head, not understanding.

  You'll ride against this woman, Sint John, on her terms, and if you win you keep the claims and the bird and my five thousand., The silence stretched out for a full minute, and then Zouga asked with a harsh gravelly sound in the back of his throat: "And if I lose?"

  "You yourself have said there is little chance of that," Rhodes reminded him.

  "And if I lose?" Zouga persisted.

  "Then you leave these fields as you came, with nothing."

  Zouga looked away to the horse standing at the edge of the shadows. He had named him Tom, after a friend, the old hunter who had first told Zouga about the land to the north and how to reach it, Tom Harkness, now dead these many years.

  The horse was part of Zouga's dream of the north, the mount that would carry him back to Zambezia. Zouga had selected him with more care than a man usually gives to choosing his wife, and beauty was the last thing he looked for.

  Tom was a mixture of many bloodlines, the wide nostrils and big chest of the Arab for staying power, the sturdy legs and sure feet of the Basuto, the
canny eye and hammer head of a wild Mustang, the heart and strength of an English hunter. However, Tom was a drab unrelieved dun-colour. His coat was long and thick, brushed but not curried, protection from the night frost and the noon sun, from flying pebbles thrown by frantic hooves of the quarry in a stem chase or from the zip of red-tipped "wait-a-bit" thorns.

  Tom had proved that the intelligent gleam in his eye was no illusion. He learned swiftly and well. He learned to stand when the reins were dropped on his neck, giving his rider both hands for the rifle, and he remained stonestill while gunfire crashed about his head, only the twitching of his ears signalling his consternation.

  When Zouga took him out into the open veld to continue his training Tom displayed nimble feet on the rocky slopes of the kopje and a buffalo skin through the thorn bush; he learned to hunt, and seemed to enjoy it the way a good polo pony revels in the crack of the bamboo root and the riotous chase.

  He seemed instinctively to understand stalking, keeping his own body between Zouga and the game, angling off his approach, never heading directly at the quarry, and the herds of springbuck let the seemingly riderless horse walk up into easy rifle shot. Then Tom would carry the freshly killed carcass on his back, without shying and fussing about the blood.

  Tom was ugly, with a Roman nose, ears a little too long, legs a little too short, and he ran with an awkward hump-backed gait, which he could keep up all day, over any ground.

  He was an incorrigible thief. Jordan's vegetable garden had to be fenced, but still Tom left tufts of his drab hair on the spikes of the barbed wire. He had a trick of plucking the carrots out of the ground with a delicate grip between his square white teeth, and then knocking the earth off them against his forehooves.

  He learned to push open the kitchen window and reach the fresh loaves of bread that were cooling on the marble sink, and once when Jan Cheroot left the door to the storeroom off the latch, Tom got in and ate half a bag of sugar, at twenty shillings a pound.

  However, he would follow like a dog, and when ordered he would stand for hours, and Zouga, who was not sentimental about animals, had come to love him.

  Zouga looked back from the horse to the young man across the log fire.

  "Agreed," he said without emphasis. "Do we need to have further witnesses?"

  "I don't think so, Major," said Rhodes. "Do you?"

  "At the gun the competitor will ride out to the first flag-" Neville Pickering was the steward-in-chief, and his voice through the speaking trumpet carried to every member of the huge Sunday crowd that spilled out across the dry veld below the Magersfontein hills.

  "At the first red flag they will fire upon the standing targets. When they have demolished all four targets to the satisfaction of the stewards, they will be free to round the second yellow flag, and thereafter to return to the finish line." He pointed to the twin poles each with its crown of coloured bunting. "The first rider to pass between them will be declared the winner."

  Pickering paused and drew fresh breath before going on.

  "Are there any questions?"

  "Would you recite the rules, please, mister Pickering," Louise Sint John called. She looked like a child on the great glistening pale stallion's back. She was walking him in circles, leaning forward to pat his neck for the crowds had made him nervous. He was chewing the light snaffle and sweating in dark patches on the rippling muscled shoulders.

  "There are no other rules, ma'am." Pickering answered her loudly enough for those at the back of the crowd to hear.

  "No rules, barging and fouling?"

  "There are no fouls, ma'am," Pickering replied. "Though if one of you deliberately shoots an opponent, he or she might have to face criminal charges, but not disqualification."

  Louise turned her head towards the figure on the front seat of the high-wheeled phaeton which was parked beyond the course markers. Her face was pale, the freckles standing out on her cheeks; and her head was bared so that the thick dark braid of hair thumped against her shoulder.

  Mungo Sint John smiled back at her over the heads of the crowd, and shrugged slightly, so that Louise was forced to turn back to Pickering.

  "Very well, then," she agreed. "But the stake. We have not agreed the stake."

  "Major Ballantyne," Pickering called to where Zouga stood at Tom's head. "You have laid out the course. Now will you be good enough to name the stake."

  Then a strange thing happened. For the first time since Zouga had met her, Louise Sint John was uncertain of herself. Nobody else seemed to notice it, perhaps it was merely that Zouga had become highly receptive to every shade of her voice and expression. But he was certain that he saw something dark move in the blue depths of her eyes, like the shadow of a shark beneath the surface of the sea, and she took a pinch of her soft lower lip between her white teeth and again she glanced almost furtively at Mungo Sint John.

  It was not Zouga's imagination. Mungo Sint John did not return Louise's glance with his usual amused indulgence.

  He was looking at Zouga and under his calm was a small undercurrent of unease, like an eddy at highwater when the tide turns.

  Zouga raised his voice so that it would carry to Sint John.

  "Firstly, the loser will publish at his or her own expense upon the front page of the Advertiser in terms dictated by the winner, an acknowledgement of defeat."

  "A composition I shall enjoy." Louise had swiftly recovered her poise. "And what else, Major?""A payment by the loser to a charity of the winner's choice of," Zouga paused, and both man and woman watched his face with outward calm, "of the sum of one shilling!"

  "Done!"

  There was a slightly jarring note in Louise's laugh, relief perhaps, and though Mungo Sint John's expression did not alter, the tension went out of his shoulders.

  "missis Sint John. You are under starter's orders," Pickering called through his speaking trumpet. "Be so good as to bring your mount under control."

  "He is under perfect control, sir," she called back, and Shooting Star put his head down and lashed out with both back hooves towards the crowd.

  "If he is under control, Missus, then so is my motherin-law," called a wag, and there was a hoot of laughter.

  "On the count of three then," Pickering intoned, his voice hollow and solemn through the trumpet. "One."

  Shooting Star backed up against the crowd, and they scattered as he bucked.

  "Two."

  He went into a tortured high-stepping circle, so tight that his nose almost touched the toe of Louise's boot in the fancy silver stirrup.

  "And three." Louise lifted her left hand. Shooting Star came smoothly out of the circle, for the first time facing the start line, beginning to pace towards it majestically, and the pistol shot was a brief blurt of sound which sent the stallion sweeping away with an irresistible rush that made the slight figure on his wide back seem vulnerable and childlike.

  There was no horse on the diamond fields that could match that first blazing burst of speed, the gap between the two horses opened, but not so dramatically as the watchers had expected. Tom's awkward gallop took him over the ground at surprising speed, and he was not following directly in Shooting Star's tracks.

  "She's going wide, Thomas," Zouga told him with satisfaction, and Tom cocked his ears back to listen. "They aren't going to chance the river. Well, we didn't really think they would, did we?"

  Directly ahead of Zouga the river started a lazy series of loops, symmetrical hairpin turns, winding back upon itself like a dying python.

  Zouga had placed the red flag so that the direct line would cross the river-bed twice, and like most southern African rivers the banks were sheer, dropping ten feet to the dry sand and isolated rocky pools strung along the course. Each crossing was a trap in which a horse could break a leg and a rider his neck.

  The alternative to the crossings was to ride wide, taking a circuit out beyond the meandering river course; but that almost doubled the distance to run to the first flag.

  Already Shoot
ing Star was a distant flying shape far out on the right, showing at intervals through gaps in the thorn scrub, marked by a little pale feather of dust flung up by his hooves.

  "Here we are," said Zouga, and under Tom's ugly Roman nose the ground opened abruptly.

  Zouga gave him a slack rein, and Tom hardly checked on the brink of the steep day bank. He sat down, and skidded over the edge on his fat round haunches, his forelegs sticking out stiffly ahead of him, and they toboganed down into the river bed and hit the sand in a scrambling tangle; and then Tom was up and lunging for the far bank, going half up before the dried clay crumbled under his hooves and they slid back again, Tom stifflegged and trembling with exertion.

  Zouga circled him once in the clinging white sand and then put him to the bank again, and he went up in a determined series of buck-jumps, shifting his weight before the clay could break under his hooves, and they flew out over the top and were running again, the next bend of the river a quarter of a mile ahead.

  At the next crossings Tom had the knack of it and they went down the bank and out the other side without a check. Under Tom's hooves the grass exploded into a whirl of noisy wings, and, with a wild harsh cry that would have panicked another horse, a big black-bellied bustard shot up into the air. Tom rolled a disdainful eye at the bird, steadied and gathered himself on the river bank of the last crossing and went down into it in a slide of dust and rolling pebbles.

  As they came up the far bank the red flag was two hundred paces dead ahead.

  Zouga swivelled in the saddle and looked out on his right hand.

  "Good for you, Tom," he called. "You'"We made a mile on them."

  Far out across the plain, the golden horse was just swinging wide of the last bend of the river, and Louise was bent low on his neck, pushing him at reckless speed over the rough going.

  "If she rides like that for a shilling, "Zouga broke off, and himself leaned into the rhythm of Tom's gallop. A mile was such a slim margin, and the stakes he was riding for were enormous. His fortune, his dream, nay his very existence, was at stake.

  "Go, Thomas, go!"Zouga whispered grimly into the long furry ears, and Tom stabbed at the earth with his awkward hump-backed gait.