Power of the Sword

by Wilbur Smith

  Hendrick started to rise to his feet, and then paused. He squinted into the heat haze and the glare. ‘Dust!’ he said. It was still five miles away, a pale haze above the trees.

  ‘Yes.’ Lothar had seen it minutes before. ‘It could be a herd of zebra, or a willy willy, but I wouldn’t bet my share of the loot on it. Move out now.’

  Hendrick did not obey immediately. He stared into the white man’s sapphire-yellow eyes.

  Hendrick had not argued nor protested when Lothar had explained what they must do. It was right, it was logical. They had always left their wounded, often with just a pistol at hand, for when the pain or the hyenas closed in. And yet, this time Hendrick felt the need to say something, but there were no words that could match the enormity of the moment. He knew he was leaving a part of his own life upon this sunblasted rock.

  ‘I will look after the boy,’ he said simply, and Lothar nodded.

  ‘I want to talk to Manie.’ He licked his dry, cracked lips and shivered briefly with the heat of the poison in his blood. ‘Wait for him at the bottom. It will take only a minute.’

  ‘Come.’ Hendrick jerked his head, and Klein Boy stood up beside him. Together they moved with the swiftness of hunting panthers to the cliff, and Klein Boy slipped over the edge. Hendrick paused and looked back. He raised his right hand.

  ‘Stay in peace,’ he said simply.

  ‘Go in peace, old friend,’ Lothar murmured. He had never called him friend before and Hendrick flinched at the word. Then he turned his head so Lothar could not see his eyes, and a moment later he was gone.

  Lothar stared after him for long seconds, then shook himself lightly, driving back the self-pity and the sickly sentiment and the fever mists which threatened to close in and unman him completely.

  ‘Manfred,’ he said, and the boy started. He had been sitting as close as he dared to his father, watching his face, hanging on every word, every gesture he made.

  ‘Pa,’ he whispered. ‘I don’t want to go. I don’t want to leave you. I don’t want to be without you.’

  Lothar made an impatient gesture, hardening his features to hide this softness in him. ‘You will do as I tell you.’

  ‘Pa—’

  ‘You have never let me down before, Manie. I have been proud of you. Don’t spoil it for me now. Don’t let me find out that my son is a coward—’

  ‘I’m not a coward!’

  ‘Then you will do what you have to do,’ he said harshly, and before Manfred could protest again he ordered, ‘Bring me the haversack.’

  Lothar placed the bag between his feet and with his good hand unbuckled the flap. He took one of the packages from it and tore open the heavy brown paper with his teeth. He spilled the stones into a small pile on the granite beside him and then spread them. He picked out ten of the biggest and whitest gems.

  ‘Take off your jacket,’ he ordered, and when Manfred handed the garment to him Lothar pierced a tiny hole in the lining with his clasp knife.

  ‘These stones will be worth thousands of pounds. Enough to see you full grown and educated,’ he said, as he stuffed them one at a time into the lining of the jacket with his forefinger.

  ‘But these others – there are too many, too heavy, too bulky to hide. Dangerous for you to carry them with you, a death warrant.’ He pushed himself to his feet with an effort. ‘Come!’

  He led Manfred amongst the cluster of huge boulders, bracing himself against the rock to keep himself from falling while Manfred supported him from the other side.

  ‘Here!’ He grunted and lowered himself to his knees, Manfred squatting down beside him. At their feet the granite cap was cracked through as though split with a chisel. At the top the crack was only as wide as two handspans, but it was deep, they could not see the bottom of it though they peered down thirty feet or more. The crack narrowed gradually as it descended and the depths of it were lost in shadow.

  Lothar dangled the haversack of diamonds over the aperture. ‘Mark this place well,’ he whispered. ‘Look back often when you go northwards so that you will remember this hill. The stones will be waiting for you when you need them.’

  Lothar opened his fingers and the haversack dropped into the crack. They heard the canvas scraping against the sides of the granite cleft as it fell, and then silence as it jammed deep down in the narrow throat of the crack.

  Side by side they peered down, and they could just make out the lighter colour and the contrasting texture of the canvas thirty feet down, but it would escape even the concentrated scrutiny of anyone who did not know exactly where to look for it.

  ‘That is my legacy to you, Manie,’ Lothar whispered, and crawled back from the aperture. ‘All right, Hendrick is waiting for you. It is time for you to go. Go quickly now.’

  He wanted to embrace his son for the last time, to kiss his eyes and his lips and press him to his heart, but he knew it would undo them both. If they clung to each other now, they could never bring themselves to part.

  ‘Go!’ he ordered, and Manfred sobbed and flung himself at his father.

  ‘I want to stay with you,’ he cried.

  Lothar caught his wrist and held him at arm’s length.

  ‘Do you want me to be ashamed?’ he snarled. ‘Is that how you want me to remember you, snivelling like a girl?’

  ‘Pa, don’t send me away, please. Let me stay.’

  Lothar drew back, released his grip on Manfred’s wrist and immediately whipped his open palm across his face and then swung back with his knuckles. The double slap knocked Manfred onto his haunches, leaving livid red blotches on his pale cheeks, and a tiny serpent of bright blood crawled from his nostril down over his upper lip. He stared at Lothar with shocked and incredulous eyes.

  ‘Get out of here,’ Lothar hissed at him, summoning all his courage and resolve to make his voice scornful and his expression savage. ‘I won’t have a blubbering little ninny hanging around my neck. Get out of here before I take the strap to you!’

  Manfred scrambled to his feet and backed away, still staring with horrified disbelief at his father.

  ‘Go on! Get away!’ Lothar’s expression never wavered, and his voice was angry and disdainful and unrelenting. ‘Get out of here!’

  Manfred turned and stumbled to the edge of the cliff. There he turned once more and held out his hands. ‘Pa! Please don’t—’

  ‘Go, damn you. Go!’ The boy scrambled over the edge, and the sounds of his clumsy descent dwindled into silence.

  Only then Lothar let his shoulders droop, and he sobbed once, then suddenly he was weeping silently, his whole body shaking.

  ‘It’s the fever,’ he told himself. ‘The fever has weakened me.’ But the image of his son’s face, golden and beautiful and destroyed with grief, still filled his mind and he felt something tearing in his chest, an unbearable physical pain. ‘Forgive me, my son,’ he whispered through his tears. ‘There was no other way to save you. Forgive me, I beg you.’

  Lothar must have relapsed into unconsciousness, for he awoke with a start and could not remember where he was or how he had got there. Then the smell of his arm, sick and disgusting, brought it back to him, and he crawled to the edge of the cliff and looked out towards the south. He saw his pursuers then for the first time, and even at the distance of a mile or more he recognized the two wraithlike little figures that danced ahead of the column of horsemen.

  ‘Bushmen,’ he whispered. Now he understood how they had come so swiftly. ‘She has put her tame Bushmen onto me.’ He realized then that there had never been any chance of throwing them off the spoor; all that time Lothar had used in covering their sign and in anti-tracking subterfuges had been wasted. The Bushmen had followed them with barely a check over the worst going and most treacherous tracking terrain.

  Then he looked beyond the trackers and counted the number of men coming against him. ‘Seven,’ he whispered, and his eyes narrowed as he tried to pick out a smaller feminine figure amongst them, but they were dismounted leading their ho
rses and the intervening mopani obscured his vision.

  He transferred all his attention from the approaching horsemen to his own preparations. His only concern now was to delay the pursuit as long as possible, and to convince the pursuers that all of his band were still together here upon the summit. Every hour he could win for them would give Hendrick and Manie just that much more chance of escape.

  It was slow and awkward working with one hand, but he jammed Klein Boy’s rifle into a niche of the granite with the muzzle pointing down towards the plain. He looped a strap from one of the water bottles over the trigger and led the other end to his chosen shooting stance in the shadows, protected by a flare of the granite ledge.

  He had to pause for a minute to rest, for his vision was starring and breaking up into patches of blackness, and his legs felt too weak to support his weight. He peeped over the edge and the horsemen were much closer, on the point of emerging from the mopani forest into the open ground. Now he recognized Centaine, slim and boyish in her riding-breeches, and he could even make out the bright yellow speck of the scarf around her throat.

  Despite the fever heat and the darkness in his head, despite his desperate circumstances, he still found a bittersweet admiration for her. ‘By God, she never gives up,’ he muttered. ‘She’ll follow me over the other side to the frontiers of hell.’

  He crawled to the pile of discarded water bottles and dragging them after him, arranged them in three separate piles along the lip of the ledge, and he knotted the leather straps together so that he could agitate all the piles simultaneously with a single twitch of the strap in his hand.

  ‘Nothing else I can do,’ he whispered, ‘except shoot straight.’ But his head was throbbing and his vision danced with the hot mirage of his fever. Thirst was an agony in his throat and his body was a furnace.

  He unscrewed the stopper on the water bottle and drank, carefully controlling himself, sipping and holding it in his mouth before swallowing. Immediately he felt better, and his vision firmed. He closed the water bottle and placed it beside him with the spare ammunition clips. Then he folded his jacket into a cushion on the lip of granite in front of him and laid the Mauser on top of it. The pursuers had reached the foot of the kopje and were clustered about his abandoned horse.

  Lothar held up his good hand in front of his eyes with fingers extended. There was no tremor, it was steady as the rock on which he lay and he cuddled the butt of the Mauser in under his chin.

  ‘The horses,’ he reminded himself. ‘They can’t follow Manie without horses—’ and he drew a long breath, held it, and shot Blaine Malcomess’ chestnut mare in the centre of the white blaze.

  As the echoes of the shot still bounced from the cliffs of the surrounding hills, Lothar flicked the bolt of the Mauser and fired again, but this time he jerked the strap attached to the other rifle and the report of the two shots overlapped. The double report would deceive even an experienced soldier into believing there was more than one man on the summit.

  Strangely, in this moment of deadly endeavour, the fever had receded. Lothar’s vision was bright and clear, the sights of the Mauser starkly outlined against each target and his gun hand steady and precise as he swung the rifle from one horse to the next and sent each one crashing to earth with a head shot. Now they were all down except one: Centaine’s mount.

  He picked Centaine up in the field of his gunsight. She was galloping back towards the mopani, lying flat over her horse’s neck, her elbows pumping, a man hanging from her stirrup, and Lothar lifted his forefinger from the curve of the trigger. It was an instinctive reaction; he could not bring himself to send a bullet anywhere near her.

  Instead he swung the barrel away from her. The riders of the downed horses, all four of them, were straggling away towards the mopani. Their thin cries of panic carried to the summit. They were easy marks; he could have knocked them down with a single bullet for each, but instead he made it a game to see how close he could come without touching one of them. They ducked and cavorted as the Mauser fire whipped around them. It was comical, hilarious. He was laughing as he worked the bolt, and suddenly he heard the wild hysterical quality of his laughter ringing hollowly in his own skull and he bit it off. ‘I’m losing my head,’ he thought. ‘Got to last it out.’

  The last of the running men disappeared into the forest and he found himself shaking and sweating with reaction.

  ‘Got to be ready,’ he encouraged himself. ‘Got to think. Can’t stop now. Can’t let go.’

  He crawled to the second rifle and reloaded it, then rolled back to his shooting stance in the shadow of the summit boulders.

  ‘Now they are going to try and mark me,’ he guessed. ‘They’ll draw fire and watch for—’

  He saw the helmet being offered invitingly above the lip of the ravine at the edge of the forest and grinned. That was a hoary old trick; even the red-necked pommy soldiers had learned not to fall for it as far back as the opening years of the Boer War. It was almost insulting that they should try to entice him with it now.

  ‘All right then!’ he taunted them. ‘We’ll see who foxes who!’

  He fired both rifles simultaneously, and a moment later jerked the straps attached to the piles of empty water bottles. At that range the movement of the round felt-covered bottles would show against the skyline just like the heads of hidden riflemen.

  ‘Now they will send men to circle the hill,’ he guessed, and watched for movement amongst the trees on his flanks, the Mauser ready, blinking his eyes rapidly to clear them.

  ‘Five hours until dark,’ he told himself. ‘Hendrick and Manie will be at the river by dawn tomorrow. Got to hold them until then.’

  He saw a flash of movement out on the right flank: men crouching and running forward in short bursts, outflanking the kopje, and he aimed for the trunks over their heads. Mauser fire whiplashed and bark exploded from the mopani, leaving wet white wounds on the standing timber.

  ‘Keep your heads down, myne heeren!’

  Lothar was laughing again, hysterical, delirious cackles. He forced himself to stop it, and immediately the image of Manie’s face appeared before him, the beautiful topaz eyes swimming with tears and the flash of blood on his upper lip.

  ‘My son,’ he lamented. ‘Oh God, how will I live without you!’

  Even then he would not accept that he was dying, but blackness filled his skull and his head dropped forward onto the filthy pus-stained bandage that swaddled his arm. The stench of his own decaying flesh became part of the delirious nightmares which continued to torment him even in unconsciousness.

  He came back to reality gradually, and he was aware that the sunlight had mellowed and the terrible heat had passed. There was a tiny breeze fanning the hilltop and he panted for the cooler air, sucking it gratefully into his lungs. Then he became aware of his thirst and his hand shook as he reached for the water bottle; it required an enormous effort to remove the stopper and lift it to his lips. One gulp and the bottle slipped from his grip and precious water splashed the front of his shirt and glugged from the bottle, pooling on the rock, evaporating almost immediately. He had lost fully a pint before he could retrieve the bottle and the loss made him want to weep. Carefully he screwed the stopper closed, then lifted his head and listened.

  There were men on the hill. He heard the distinct crunch of a steel-shod boot biting into a granite foothold and he reached for one of the ‘potato masher’ grenades. With the Mauser over his shoulder he crawled back from the edge and used the rock to pull himself to his feet. He could not stand unassisted, and he had to lean his way around the boulder. He crept forward cautiously with the grenade ready.

  The summit was clear; they must still be climbing the cliff. He held his breath and listened with all his being. He heard it again, close at hand, the scrape and slide of cloth against granite and a sharp involuntary inhalation of breath, a gasp of effort as somebody missed and then retrieved a foothold just below the summit.

  ‘They are coming up fr
om behind,’ he told himself as though explaining to a backward child. Every thought required an effort. ‘Seven-second delay on the fuse of the grenade.’ He stared down at the clumsy weapon that he held by its wooden handle. ‘Too long. They are very close.’

  He lifted the grenade and tried to pull the firing-pin. It had corroded and was firmly stuck. He grunted and heaved at it and the pin came away. He heard the primer click and he began to count.

  ‘A thousand and one, a thousand and two—’ And at the fifth second he stooped and rolled the grenade over the edge. Out of sight, but close by, someone shouted an urgent warning.

  ‘Christ! It’s a grenade!’ And Lothar laughed wildly.

  ‘Eat it, you jackals of the English!’ He heard them sliding and slipping as they tried to escape and he braced himself for the explosion, but instead he heard only the clatter and rattle of the grenade as it bounced and dropped down the slope.

  ‘Misfire!’ He stopped laughing. ‘Oh damn it to hell.’

  Then abruptly, but belatedly, the grenade exploded, far down the cliff. A crash of sound followed by the rattle and whine of shrapnel on the rock, and a man cried out.

  Lothar fell to his knees and crawled to the edge. He looked over. There were three khaki-uniformed men on the cliff, sliding and scrambling downwards. He propped the Mauser on the lip and fired rapidly. His bullets left lead smears on the rock close beside the terrified troopers. They dropped the last few feet and started back towards the trees. One of them was hurt, hit by shrapnel; his companions supported him on each side and dragged him away.

  Lothar lay exhausted by the effort for almost an hour before he could drag himself back to the south side of the summit. He looked down at the dead horses lying in the sun. Already their bellies were swelling, but the water bottles were still strapped to their saddles. ‘The water is the magnet,’ he whispered. ‘By now they will be really thirsty. They will come for the water next.’

  At first he thought the darkness was only in his mind again, but when he rolled his head and looked into the west he saw the last orange flash of the sunset in the sky. Before his eyes it faded and the sudden African night was upon them.