Power of the Sword

by Wilbur Smith

  When they reached the last stage that evening, the bath water was so hot that even Centaine who enjoyed her bath at the correct temperature for boiling lobster was forced to add cold before she could bear it. The champagne was that marvellous 1928 Krug, pale and chilled to the temperature she preferred, just low enough to frost the bottle, and though there was ice, she would not allow the barbaric habit of standing the bottle in a bucket of it.

  ‘Cold feet, hot head – bad combination for both men and wine,’ her father had taught her. As always she drank only a single glass from the bottle and afterwards there was the cold collation that Twentyman-Jones had provided for her and stored in the paraffin refrigerator, fare suitable for this heat and which he knew she enjoyed – rock lobster from the green Benguela Current with rich white flesh curled in their spiny red tails and salad vegetables grown in the cooler highlands of Windhoek, lettuce crackling crisp, tomatoes crimson ripe and pungent onions purple tinted – then, as the final treat, wild truffles gleaned from the surrounding desert by the tame Bushmen who tended the milk herd. She ate them raw and the salty fungus taste was the taste of Kalahari.

  They left again in the pitch darkness before dawn, and at sunrise they stopped and brewed coffee on a fire of camel-thorn branches; the grainy red wood burned with an intense blue flame and gave to the coffee a peculiar and delicious aroma. They ate the picnic breakfast that the rest-house cook had provided and washed it down with the smoky coffee and watched the sunrise smearing the sky and desert with bronze and gilding it with gold leaf. As they went on, so the sun rose higher and drained the land of colour, washing it with its silver-white bleach.

  ‘Stop here!’ Centaine ordered suddenly, and when they climbed up onto the roof of the Daimler and stared ahead, Shasa was puzzled.

  ‘What is it, Mater?’

  ‘Don’t you see it, chéri?’ She pointed, ‘There! Above the horizon.’

  ‘It floated in the sky, indistinct and ethereal.

  ‘It’s standing in the sky,’ Shasa exclaimed, discerning it at last.

  ‘The mountain that floats in the sky,’ Centaine murmured. Each time she saw it like this the wonder of it was still as fresh and enchanting as the first time. ‘The place of All Life.’ She gave the hills their Bushman name.

  As they drove on so the shape of the hills hardened, becoming a sheer rock palisade below which were spread the open mopani forests. In places the cliffs were split and riven with gulleys and gorges. In others they were solid and tall and daubed with bright lichens, sulphur yellow and green and orange.

  The H’ani Mine was nestled beneath one of these sheer expanses of rock, and the buildings seemed insignificant and incongruous in this place.

  Centaine’s brief to Twentyman-Jones had been to make them as unobtrusive as possible, without, of course, affecting the productivity of the workings, but there was a limit to just how far he had been able to follow her instructions. The fenced compounds of the black workers and the weathering grounds for the blue diamondiferous earth were extensive, while the steel tower and elevator of the washing gear stuck up high as the derrick of an oil rig.

  However, the worst depredation had been caused by the appetite of the steam boiler, hungry as some infernal Baal for cordwood. The forest along the foot of the hills had been cut down to satisfy it, and the second growth had formed a scraggly unsightly thicket in place of the tall grey-barked timber.

  Twentyman-Jones was waiting for them as they climbed out of the dusty Daimler in front of the thatched administration building.

  ‘Good trip, Mrs Courtney?’ he asked, lugubrious with pleasure. ‘You’ll want a rest and clean up, I expect.’

  ‘You know better than that, Dr Twentyman-Jones. Let’s get down to work.’ Centaine led the way down the wide verandah to her own office. ‘Sit beside me,’ she ordered Shasa as she took her seat at the stinkwood desk.

  They began with the recovery reports, then went on to the cost schedules; and as Shasa struggled to keep up with the quick calling and discussion of figures, he wondered how his mother could change so swiftly from the girl companion who had hopped around in imitation of a springbok only the previous day.

  ‘Shasa, what did we establish was the cost per carat if we average twenty-three carats per load?’ She fired the question at Shasa suddenly, and when he muffed it she frowned. ‘This isn’t the time for dreams.’ And she turned her shoulder to him to emphasize the rebuke. ‘Very well, Dr Twentyman-Jones, we have avoided the unpleasant long enough. Let us consider what economies we have to institute to meet the quota cut and still keep the H’ani Mine working and turning a profit.’

  It was dusk before Centaine broke off and stood up. ‘We’ll pick it up from there tomorrow.’ She stretched like a cat and then led them out onto the wide verandah.

  ‘Shasa will be working for you as we agreed. I think he should begin on the haulage.’

  ‘I was about to suggest it, Ma’am.’

  ‘What time do you want me?’ Shasa asked.

  ‘The shift comes on at five am but I expect Master Shasa will want to come on later?’ Twentyman-Jones glanced at Centaine. It was, of course, a challenge and a test, and she remained silent, waiting for Shasa to make the decision on his own account. She saw him struggling with himself. He was at that stage of growth when sleep is a drug and rising in the morning a brutal penance.

  ‘I’ll be at the main haulage at four-thirty, sir,’ he said, and Centaine relaxed and took his arm.

  ‘Then it had best be an early night.’

  She turned the Daimler into the avenue of small iron-roofed cottages which housed the white shift bosses and artisans and their families. The orders of society were strictly observed on the H’ani Mine. It was a microcosm of the young nation. The black labourers lived in the fenced and guarded compounds where whitewashed buildings resembled rows of stables. There were separate, more elaborate quarters for the black boss-boys, who were allowed to have their families living with them. The white artisans and shift bosses were housed in the avenues laid out at the foot of the hills, while the management lived up the slopes, each building larger and the lawns around it more extensive the higher it was sited.

  As they turned at the end of the avenues there was a girl sitting on the stoep of the last cottage and she stuck her tongue out at Shasa as the Daimler passed. It was almost a year since Shasa had last seen her and nature had wrought wondrous changes in her during that time. Her feet were still bare and dirty to the ankles, and her curls were still wind-tousled and sun-streaked, but the faded cotton of her blouse was now so tight that it constricted her blossoming breasts. They were forced upwards and bulged out over the top in a deep cleavage and Shasa wriggled in the seat as he realized that the twin red-brown coin-shaped marks on the blouse, though they looked like stains, were in fact showing through the thin cloth from beneath.

  Her legs had grown longer, her knees were no longer knobbly, and they shaded from coffee brown at the ankles to smooth cream on the inside of her thighs. She sat on the edge of the verandah with her knees apart and her skirts pulled high and rucked up between her legs. As Shasa’s gaze dropped, she let her knees fall a little further open. Her nose was snubbed and sprinkled with freckles, and she wrinkled it as she grinned. It was a sly cheeky grin, and her tongue was bright pink between white teeth.

  Guiltily Shasa jerked his eyes away and stared ahead through the windshield. But he remembered vividly every last detail of those forbidden minutes behind the pump-house and the heat rose in his cheeks. He could not help glancing at his mother. She was looking ahead at the road and had not noticed. He felt relief until she murmured, ‘She is a common little hussy, ogling everything in pants. Her father is one of the men we are retrenching. We’ll be rid of her before she causes real trouble for us and herself.’

  He should have known she had not missed that brief exchange. She saw everything, he thought, and then he felt the impact of her words. The girl was being sent away, and he was surprised by his feeling of d
eprivation. It was a physical ache in the floor of his stomach.

  ‘What will happen to them, Mater?’ he asked softly. ‘I mean, the people we are firing.’ While he had listened to his mother and Twentyman-Jones discussing the retrenchments, he had thought of them merely as numbers; but with that glimpse of the girl, they had become flesh and blood. He remembered his adversary the blond boy, and the little girl that he had seen from the window of the railway coach, standing beside the tracks in the hobo camp, and he imagined Annalisa Botha in the place of that strange girl.

  ‘I don’t know what will become of them.’ His mother’s mouth tightened. ‘I don’t think it is anything that should concern us. This world is a place of harsh reality, and each of us has to face it in his own way. I think we should rather consider what would be the consequences if we did not let them go.’

  ‘We would lose money.’

  ‘That is right, and if we lose money, we have to close down the mine, which would mean that all the others would lose their jobs, not just the few that we have to fire. Then we all suffer. If we did that with everything we own, in the end we would lose everything. We would be like the rest of them. Would you prefer that?’

  Suddenly Shasa had a new mental image. Instead of the blond boy standing in the hobo camp, it was himself, barefoot in dusty, tattered khakis, and he could almost feel the night chill through the thin shirt and the rumble of hunger in his guts.

  ‘No!’ he said explosively, and then dropped his voice. ‘I wouldn’t like that.’ He shivered at the persistent images her words had invoked. ‘Is that going to happen, Mater? Could it happen? Might we also be poor?’

  ‘We could be, chéri. It could happen quickly and cruelly if we are not on guard every minute. A fortune is extremely difficult to build but very easy to destroy.’

  ‘Is it going to happen?’ he insisted, and he thought about the Midas Touch, his yacht, and the polo ponies, and his friends at Bishops, and the vineyards of Weltevreden and he was afraid.

  ‘Nothing is certain.’ She reached across and took his hand. ‘That’s the fun of this game of life, if it was then it wouldn’t be worth playing.’

  ‘I wouldn’t like to be poor.’

  ‘No!’ She said it as vehemently as he had. ‘It will not happen, not if we are cunning and bold.’

  ‘What you said about the trade of the world coming to a halt. People no longer able to buy our diamonds . . .’ Before those had been merely words, now they were a dreadful possibility.

  ‘We must believe that the wheels will one day begin to turn again, one day soon, and we must play the golden rules. Do you remember them?’ She swung the Daimler through the climbing turns up the slope and around the spur of the hills so that the mine buildings disappeared behind the rock wall of the cliff.

  ‘What was the first golden rule, Shasa?’ she prompted him.

  ‘Sell when everybody else is buying and buy when everybody else is selling,’ he repeated.

  ‘Good. And what is happening now?’

  ‘Everybody is trying to sell.’ It dawned upon him and his grin was triumphant.

  ‘He’s so beautiful, and he has the sense and the instinct,’ she thought as she waited for him to follow the coils of the serpent until he reached its head and discovered the fangs. His expression changed as it happened. He looked at her crestfallen.

  ‘But, Mater, how can we buy if we haven’t got the money?’

  She pulled to the side of the track and cut the engine. Then turned to him seriously and took both his hands.

  ‘I am going to treat you as a man,’ she said. ‘What I tell you is our secret, our private business that we share with nobody. Not Grandpater or Anna, or Abraham Abrahams or Twentyman-Jones. It’s our thing, yours and mine alone.’ He nodded and she drew a deep breath. ‘I have a premonition that this catastrophe that has engulfed the world is our pivot, an opportunity that very few are ever offered. For the last few years I have been preparing to exploit it. How did I do that, chéri?’

  He shook his head, staring at her fascinated.

  ‘I have turned everything, with the exception of the mine and Weltevreden, into cash, and even on those I have borrowed heavily, very heavily.’

  ‘That’s why you called all the loans. That’s why we went to Walvis for that fish factory and the trawlers – you wanted the money.’

  ‘Yes, chéri, yes,’ she encouraged him, unconsciously shaking hands, willing him to see it. And his face lit again.

  ‘You are going to buy!’ he exclaimed.

  ‘I have already begun,’ she told him. ‘I have bought land and mining concessions, fishing concessions and guano concessions, buildings. I have even bought the Alhambra Theatre in Cape Town and the Coliseum in Johannesburg. But most of all I have bought land, and the option to buy more land, tens and hundreds of thousands of acres, chéri, at two shillings an acre. Land is the only true store of wealth.’

  He could not really grasp it, but he sensed the enormity of what she told him and she saw it in his eyes.

  ‘Now you know our secret,’ she laughed. ‘If I have guessed right, we will double and redouble our fortune.’

  ‘And if it doesn’t change. If the,’ he searched for the word, ‘if the Depression goes on and on for ever, what then, Mater?’

  She pouted and dropped his hands. ‘Then, chéri, nothing will matter very much, one way or the other.’

  She started the Daimler and drove up the last pitch of the road to the bungalow standing alone in its wide lawns, with lights burning in the windows and the servants lined up respectfully on the front verandah in their immaculate white livery to welcome her.

  She parked at the bottom of the steps, turned off the engine and turned to him again.

  ‘No, Shasa chéri, we are not going to be poor. We are going to be richer, much richer than we ever were before. And then later, through you, my darling, we will have power to go with our wealth. Great fortune, enormous power. Oh, I have it all planned, so carefully planned!’

  Her words filled Shasa’s head with turbulent thoughts. He could not sleep.

  ‘Great fortune, enormous power.’ The words excited and disturbed him. He tried to visualize what they meant and saw himself like a strongman at the circus, in leopardskins and leather wristbands, standing with arms akimbo, huge biceps flexed, upon a pyramid of golden sovereigns, while a congregation in white robes knelt and made obeisance before him.

  He ran the images through his head over and over, each time altering some detail, all of them pleasurable but lacking the final touch until he bestowed upon one of his white-robed worshippers a crown of unruly wind-tousled sun-streaked curls. He placed her in the front rank, and she lifted her forehead from the ground and stuck her tongue out at him.

  His erection was so quick and hard that it made him gasp, and before he could prevent himself he had slipped his hand under the sheet and prised it out of the fly of his pyjamas.

  Jock Murphy had warned him about it. ‘It will spoil your eye, Master Shasa. I have seen many a good man with a bat or a polo stick ruined by Mrs Palm and her five daughters.’

  But in his fantasy Annalisa was sitting up, her long legs apart, and she was slowly drawing up the skirt of her white robe. The skin of her legs was smooth as butter, and he moaned softly. She was staring at the front of his leopard-skin costume, her tongue whisking lightly over her parted lips, and the white skirt rose higher and higher, and his fist began to jerk rhythmically. He could not prevent it.

  Up and up rode the white skirt, never quite reaching the fork of her crotch. Her legs seemed to stretch forever, like the railway tracks across the desert, running on and on and never meeting. He choked and jerked into a sitting position on the feather mattress, doubled over his flying fist, and when it came it was sharp and painful as a bayonet driven up into his intestines, and he cried out and fell back against the pillows.

  Annalisa’s sly grinning freckled face receded, and the wet front of his pyjamas began to turn icy cold, but he did n
ot have the will to strip them off.

  When the servant woke him with a tray of coffee and a dish of hard sweet rusks, he felt dazed and exhausted. It was still dark outside, and he rolled over and pulled the pillows over his head.

  ‘Madam your mother, she says I wait here until you get up,’ said the Ovambo servant darkly, and Shasa dragged himself to the bathroom trying to conceal the dry stain on the front of his pyjamas.

  One of the grooms had his pony saddled and waiting at the front steps of the bungalow. Shasa took a moment to joke and laugh with the groom and then greet and caress his pony, rubbing foreheads with him and blowing softly into his nostrils.

  ‘You are getting fat, Prester John,’ he chided the pony. ‘We’ll have to work that off you with the polo sticks.’

  He swung up into the saddle and took the short cut, following the pipe track around the shoulder of the hill. The pipeline carried the water from the spring around the hills to the mine and the washing gear. He passed the pumphouse and felt a guilty pang at its associations with last night’s depravity, but then the dawn lit the plains below the cliffs and he forgot that in the pleasure of watching the veld come alive and greet the sun.

  On this side of the hills Centaine had ordered that the forest be left untouched and the mopani was tall and stately. A covey of francolin were dawn-crying in the thicket down the slope, and a grey duiker, returning from the spring, bounded across the track under the pony’s nose. Shasa laughed as he shied theatrically.

  ‘Stop that, you old show-off!’

  He turned the corner of the cliff and the contrast was depressing. The desecrated forest, the deforming scar of the workings on the hillside, the graceless square iron buildings and the stark skeletal girders of the washing gear, how ugly they were.

  He gave the pony a touch with his heels and they galloped the last mile and reached the main haulage just as Twentyman-Jones’ old Ford came up the track from the village with headlights still burning. He checked his watch as he stepped out and looked sad as he saw that Shasa was three minutes ahead of time.