Power of the Sword

by Wilbur Smith

  He lay and listened for them to try to reach the water, and he wondered as he had so often before at the mystic sounds of the African night, the gentle muted orchestra of insect and bird, the piping of the hunting bats flitting around the dome of rock and out on the plain the plaintive yip of jackal and the occasional outlandish grunting bark of the nocturnal honey badger. Lothar had to try to discount these distractions and listen for manmade sounds in the darkness directly below the cliff.

  It was only the clink of a stirrup iron that alerted him, and he tossed the grenade with a full swing of his arm out over the abyss. The heavy crump of the explosion blew a puff of air into his face, and by the sudden flare of flame he saw far below the dark figures standing over the dead horse. He made out two of them, though he could not be certain there were not others, and he tossed the second grenade.

  In the brief burst of orange light he saw them racing back towards the trees; they ran so lightly that they could not have been burdened by water bottles.

  ‘Sweat it out,’ he taunted them, but he had only the one remaining grenade. He held it to his chest as though it were some rare treasure. ‘Must be ready when they come again. Can’t let them get the water.’ He was talking aloud, and he knew it was a sign of his delirium. Every time he felt the swimming dizziness he lifted his head and tried to focus on the stars.

  ‘Got to hold out,’ he told himself seriously. ‘If I can only keep them here until noon tomorrow.’ He tried to make the calculations of time and distance but it was too much for him. ‘Must be eight hours since Hendrick and Manie left. They will keep going all night. They haven’t got me to hold them back. They can make the river before dawn. If only I can hold them another eight hours they will get clear away—’ But the weariness and the fever overwhelmed him and he cradled his forehead in the curve of his elbow.

  ‘Lothar!’ It was his imagination, he knew that, but then his name was called again. ‘Lothar!’ And he lifted his head and shivered with the cold of the night and the memories that her voice summoned up.

  He opened his mouth and then closed it. He would not reply, would give nothing away. But he listened avidly for Centaine Courtney to call again.

  ‘Lothar, we have a wounded man.’ He judged that she was at the edge of the forest. He could imagine her, determined and brave, that small firm chin lifted, those dark eyes.

  ‘Why do I still love you?’ he whispered.

  ‘We must have water for him.’ Strange how clearly her voice carried. He could pick out the inflection of her French accent and somehow he found that touching. It brought tears to his eyes.

  ‘Lothar! I am coming out to fetch the water.’

  Her voice was closer, stronger – clearly she had left the shelter of the trees.

  ‘I’m alone, Lothar.’ She must be halfway across the open ground.

  ‘Go back!’ He tried to shout, but it was a mumble. ‘I warned you. I have to do it.’ He fumbled for the grenade. ‘Can’t let you take the water – for Manie’s sake. I have to do it.’

  He hooked his finger through the firing ring of the grenade.

  ‘I have reached the first horse,’ she called. ‘I am taking the bottle. Just one bottle, Lothar.’

  She was in his power. She was standing at the foot of the cliff. It wouldn’t need a long throw. All he had to do was roll the grenade over the edge and it would fly out like a toboggan along the curve of the cliff and land at her feet.

  He imagined the flash of the explosion, that sweet flesh that had cradled his, and harboured his son, torn and rent by razor-edged shrapnel. He thought how much he hated her – and realized that he loved her as much, and the tears in his eyes blinded him.

  ‘I’m going back now, Lothar. I have one bottle,’ she called, and he heard in her voice gratitude and an acknowledgement of the bond between them that no deed, no passage of time could sever. She spoke again, dropping her voice so it reached him as a faint whisper.

  ‘May God forgive you, Lothar De La Rey.’ And then no more.

  Those gentle words wounded him as deeply as any he had ever heard from her. There was a finality to them that he found unbearable, and he dropped his head onto his arm to smother the cry of despair which rose in his throat, and the darkness rustled in his head like the wings of a black vulture as he felt himself falling, falling, falling.

  ‘This one is dead,’ Blaine Malcomess said quietly, standing over the prostrate figure. They had climbed the cliff at two places in the darkness; then in the dawn they had carried the summit in a concerted rush only to find it undefended. ‘Where are the others?’

  Sergeant Hansmeyer hurried out of the shadowy cluster of boulders. ‘There is no one else on the hill, sir. They must have got clean away.’

  ‘Blaine!’ Centaine called urgently. ‘Where are you? What is happening?’ He had insisted that she remain at the foot of the kopje until they had captured the summit. He had not yet signalled her to come up, but here she was, only a minute behind their attack.

  ‘Over here,’ he snapped. And then, as she ran towards him, ‘You disobeyed an order, madam.’

  She ignored the accusation. ‘Where are they?’ She broke off as she saw the body. ‘Oh God, it’s Lothar.’ She went down beside him.

  ‘So this is De La Rey. Well, he’s dead, I’m afraid,’ Blaine told her.

  ‘Where are the others?’ Centaine looked up at him anxiously. She had been both dreading and anticipating finding Lothar’s bastard; she still tried to avoid using the boy’s name, even to herself.

  ‘Not here.’ Blaine shook his head. ‘Given us the slip. De La Rey fooled us and put up a good rearguard delay. They have got clear away. They’ll be across the river by now.’

  Manfred. Centaine capitulated and thought of him by name. Manfred, my son. And her disappointment and sense of loss was so strong that it shocked her. She had wanted him to be there. To see him at last. She looked down at his father, and other emotions, long buried and suppressed, rose in her.

  Lothar lay with his face cradled in the crook of his elbow. The other arm, bound up in strips of stained blanket, was outflung. She touched his neck below the ear, feeling for the carotid artery, and exclaimed immediately she felt the fever heat of his skin.

  ‘He’s still alive.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ Blaine squatted beside her. Between them they rolled Lothar onto his back, and they saw the grenade lying under him.

  ‘You were right,’ Blaine said softly. ‘He did have another grenade. He could have killed you last night.’

  Centaine shivered as she stared down at Lothar’s face. He was no longer beautiful and golden and brave. The fever had ruined him, his features had collapsed like those of a corpse and he was shrunken and grey.

  ‘He is badly dehydrated,’ she said. ‘Is there water left in that bottle?’ While Blaine dribbled water into his mouth, Centaine unwrapped the festering rags from his arm.

  ‘Blood poisoning.’ She recognized the livid lines beneath the skin and the stench of his rotting flesh. ‘That arm will have to come off.’ Though her voice was steady and business-like, she was appalled at the damage she had wrought. It seemed impossible that a single bite could have caused that. Her teeth were one of her good features and she was proud of them, always kept them clean and white and cared for. That arm looked as though it had been savaged by one of the carrion eaters, by a hyena or a leopard.

  ‘There is a Portuguese Roman Catholic mission at Cuangar on the river,’ Blaine said. ‘But he’ll be lucky if we can get him there alive. With all but one of the horses dead, we’ll all be lucky to make it as far as the river ourselves.’ He stood up. ‘Sergeant, send one of your men to fetch the first-aid kit and then have the rest of them search every inch of this hilltop. A million pounds’ worth of diamonds are missing.’

  Hansmeyer saluted and hurried away, rapping out orders at his troopers.

  Blaine sank down beside Centaine. ‘While we are waiting for the medical kit, I suppose we had better search his clothing a
nd equipment in the off-chance that he kept any of the stolen diamonds with him.’

  ‘It’s an off-chance all right,’ Centaine agreed with bitter resignation. ‘The diamonds are almost certainly with his son and that big black Ovambo ruffian of his. And without our Bushmen trackers—’ She shrugged.

  Blaine spread Lothar’s dusty stained tunic on the rock and began examining the seams, while Centaine bathed Lothar’s injured arm and then bound it up with clean white bandages from the medical kit.

  ‘Nothing, sir.’ Hansmeyer reported back. ‘We’ve gone over every inch of this rock, every nook and cranny.’

  ‘Very well, Sergeant. Now we have to get this beggar off the kopje without letting him fall and break his neck.’

  ‘Not that he doesn’t deserve it.’

  Blaine grinned. ‘He does deserve it. But we don’t want to do the hangman out of his five guineas, do we now, Sergeant?’

  They were ready to move out within the hour. Lothar De La Rey was strapped into a drag litter of mopani saplings behind their single remaining horse, and the wounded trooper, the grenade shrapnel still in his back and shoulder, rode up in Centaine’s saddle.

  Centaine lingered on at the foot of the kopje after the column had started northwards towards the river once more, and Blaine came back to stand beside her.

  He took her hand and she sighed and leaned lightly against his shoulder. ‘Oh, Blaine, for me so much has ended here in this Godforsaken wilderness, on this sun-blasted lump of rock.’

  ‘I think I can understand how much the loss of the diamonds means.’

  ‘Do you, Blaine? I don’t think so. I don’t think even I can take it in yet. Everything has changed – even my hatred for Lothar—’

  ‘There is still a chance we will recover the stones.’

  ‘No, Blaine. You and I both know there is no chance. The diamonds are gone.’

  He did not attempt to deny it, did not offer false comfort.

  ‘I have lost it all, everything I ever worked for – for me and my son. It’s all gone.’

  ‘I didn’t realize—’ he broke off and looked down at her with pity and deep concern. ‘I understood it would be a hard blow, but everything? Is it that bad?’

  ‘Yes, Blaine,’ she said simply. ‘Everything. Not all at once, of course, but now the whole edifice will start to crumble and I will struggle to shore it up. I will borrow and beg and plead for time, but the foundation is gone from under me. A million pounds, Blaine, it’s an enormous sum of money. I will stave off the inevitable for a few months, a year perhaps, but it will go faster and faster, like a house of cards, and at the end it will come crashing down around me.’

  ‘Centaine, I am not a poor man,’ he began. ‘I could help you—’ She reached up and laid her forefinger on his lips.

  ‘There is one thing I would ask from you,’ she whispered. ‘Not money – but in the days ahead, I will need some comfort. Not often, just when it gets very bad.’

  ‘I will be there whenever you need me, Centaine. I promise you that. You have only to call.’

  ‘Oh, Blaine.’ She turned to him. ‘If only!’

  ‘Yes, Centaine – if only.’ And he took her in his arms. There was no guilt nor fear, even the terrible threat of ruin and destitution that hung over her seemed to recede when she was in his arms.

  ‘I wouldn’t even mind being poor again, if only I had you beside me always,’ she whispered, and he could not reply. In desperation he bowed his head over her and stopped her lips with his mouth.

  The Portuguese priest doctor at Cuangar Mission took off Lothar De La Rey’s arm two inches below the elbow. He operated by the bright flat white light of the Petromax lantern, and Centaine stood at his side, sweating behind the surgical mask, responding to the doctor’s requests in French, trying to prevent herself freezing in horror at the rasping of the bone saw and the suffocating stench of chloroform and gangrene that filled the daub and thatch hut that served as an operating theatre. When it was over, she slipped away to the earthpit lavatory and vomited up her revulsion and pity. Alone in the mission hut that had been allocated to her, under the billowing ghostly mosquito net, she could still taste it in the back of her throat. The gangrene smell seemed to have impregnated her skin and lingered in her hair. She prayed that she might never smell it again, nor ever be forced to live through another hour as harrowing as watching the man she had once loved shorn of a limb, turned into a cripple before her eyes.

  The prayer was in vain, for at noon the following day the priest doctor murmured regretfully, ‘Désolé, mais j’ai manqué l’infection. Il faut couper encore une fois – I am sorry, but I have missed the infection. It is necessary to cut again.’

  The second time, because she now knew what to expect, seemed even worse than the first. She had to press her fingernails into the palms of her hands to prevent herself fainting as the priest took up the gleaming silver saw and cut through the exposed bone of Lothar’s humerus only inches below the great joint of the shoulder. For three days afterwards Lothar lay in a pale coma, seeming already to have passed the division between life and death.

  ‘I cannot say.’ The priest shrugged away her anxious plea for reassurance. ‘It is up to the good Lord now.’

  Then on the evening of the third day when she entered his hut, the sapphire-yellow eyes swivelled towards her in their deep coloured sockets, and she saw recognition flare for an instant before Lothar’s eyelids dropped down over them.

  However, it was two days more before the priest allowed Blaine Malcomess to enter the hut. Blaine cautioned Lothar and placed him under formal arrest.

  ‘My sergeant will have complete charge of you until you are passed fit to travel by Father Paula. At that time you will be brought by boat downriver to the border post at Runtu under strict guard, and from there by road to Windhoek where you will stand your trial.’

  Lothar lay against the bolster, pale and skeletal thin. His stump, wrapped in a turban of gauze bandage, the end stained yellow with iodine, looked like a penguin’s wing. He stared at Blaine expressionlessly.

  ‘Now, De La Rey, you don’t need me to tell you that you will be a lucky man to escape the gallows. But you will give yourself a fighting chance of leniency if you tell us where you have hidden the diamonds, or what you have done with them.’

  He waited for almost a minute, and it was difficult not to be ruffled by that flat yellow stare with which Lothar regarded him.

  ‘Do you understand what I’m trying to tell you, De La Rey?’ he broke the silence, and Lothar rolled his head away, stared out of the paneless window of the hut down towards the riverbank.

  ‘I think you know that I am administrator of the territory. I have power to review your sentence; my recommendation for clemency would almost certainly be acceded to by the minister of justice. Don’t be a fool, man. Give up the diamonds. They are no use to you where you are going, and I will guarantee you your life in return.’

  Lothar closed his eyes.

  ‘Very well, De La Rey. We understand each other then. Don’t expect any mercy from me.’ He called Sergeant Hansmeyer into the hut. ‘Sergeant, the prisoner has no privileges, none at all. He will be under guard day and night, twenty-four hours a day, until you hand him over to the appropriate authority in Windhoek. You will be directly responsible to me. You understand?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ Hansmeyer drew himself to attention.

  ‘Look after him, Hansmeyer. I want this one. I want him badly.’

  Blaine strode out of the hut, down to where Centaine sat alone under the open-sided thatched setengi on the riverbank. He dropped into the camp chair beside hers and lit a cheroot. He inhaled the smoke, held it a moment and then blew it out forcefully and angrily.

  ‘The man is intransigent,’ he said. ‘I offered him my personal guarantee of leniency in exchange for your diamonds. He didn’t even deign to reply. I don’t have the authority to offer him a free pardon but, believe me, if I did I wouldn’t hesitate. As it is there is noth
ing more I can do.’ He drew on the cheroot again and glared out across the wide green river. ‘I swear he will pay for what he has done to you – pay in full measure.’

  ‘Blaine.’ She laid her hand lightly on his muscular brown forearm. ‘Spite is too petty an emotion for a man of your stature.’

  He glanced sideways and, despite his rancour, he smiled. ‘Don’t credit me with too much nobility, madam. I am many things, but not a saint.’

  He looked boyish when he grinned like that, except that his green eyes took on a wicked slant and his ears stuck out at the most endearing angle.

  ‘Oh la, sir, it might be amusing to test the limits of your nobility and sanctity – one day.’

  He chuckled with delight. ‘What a shameless but interesting proposal.’ And then he became serious again. ‘Centaine, you know that I should never have come on this expedition. At this moment my duties are being sadly neglected, and I will certainly have incurred the justified wrath of my superiors in Pretoria. I must get back to my office just as soon as I can. I have arranged with Father Paulus for canoes and paddlers to take us downriver to the border post at Runtu. I hope we will be able to requisition a police truck from there. Hansmeyer and his troopers will stay on to guard De La Rey and bring him in as soon as he is fit enough to travel.’

  Centaine nodded. ‘Yes, I also have to get back and start picking up the pieces, papering over the cracks.’

  ‘We can leave first light tomorrow.’

  ‘Blaine, I would like to speak to Lothar – to De La Rey, before we leave.’ When he hesitated, she went on persuasively: ‘A few minutes alone with him, please Blaine. It’s important to me.’

  Centaine paused in the doorway of the hut while her eyes adjusted to the gloom.

  Lothar was sitting up, bare to the waist, a cheap trade blanket spread over his legs. His body was thin and pale; the infection had burned the flesh off his bones and his ribs were a gaunt rack.

  ‘Sergeant Hansmeyer, will you leave us alone for a minute?’ Centaine asked, and she stood aside.