Power of the Sword

by Wilbur Smith

  Blaine dragged Centaine to her feet and with one arm around her backed towards the beach, pointing the rifle like a pistol with his free hand. The crocodile was in monstrous convulsions, its primitive brain damaged by the bullet. It rolled and thrashed in uncontrolled erratic circles, snapping its jaws so that the jagged yellow teeth clashed like a steel gate slamming in a high wind.

  Blaine thrust Centaine behind him and with both hands lifted the rifle. His bullets rang against the scaly head, tearing away chunks of flesh and bone, and the reptile’s tail fluttered and lashed weakly. It dived over the edge of the shallow sandbank into the dark green beyond, came up in one last swirl and then was gone.

  Centaine was shaking with terror, her teeth chattering so she could hardly speak. ‘Horrible, oh what an awful monster!’ and she threw herself against his chest, and clung to him. ‘Oh Blaine, I was terrified.’ Her face was pressed to his chest so that her voice was blurred.

  ‘It’s all right now.’ He tried to calm her. ‘Easy, my darling, it’s all over. It’s gone.’ He propped the rifle against the rocks and enfolded her in his arms.

  He was stroking her and soothing her, at first without passion, as he would have gentled one of his own daughters when she woke from a nightmare screaming for him; then he became acutely aware of the silkiness of her bare wet skin under his hands. He could feel every plane of her back, the smooth curves of muscle on each side of her spine, and he could not prevent himself tracing with his fingertips the ridge of her spine. It felt like a string of polished beads beneath her skin; he followed it down until it disappeared into the divide of her small hard bottom.

  She was quiet now, only breathing in little choking gasps, but at his touch she curled her spine like a cat, inclining her pelvis towards him, and he seized one of her buttocks in each hand and pulled her to him. She did not resist, but her whole body thrust forward to meet his. ‘Blaine.’ She said his name and lifted her face.

  He kissed her savagely, with the anger of a man of honour who knows he can no longer keep his vows, and they locked together breathing each other’s breath, their tongues twisting together, kneading, pressing, so deep that they threatened to choke each other with their fervour.

  She pulled away. ‘Now,’ she stammered. ‘It has to be now,’ and he lifted her in his arms like a child and ran with her, back through the clinging white sand to the thatched shelter, and he fell onto his knees beside the mattress of papyrus fronds and lowered her gently onto the blanket that covered it.

  ‘I want to look at you,’ he blurted, pulling back onto his haunches, but she squirmed up and reached for him.

  ‘Later – I can’t wait – please, Blaine. Oh God, do it now.’ She was tearing at the buttons on his shirt front, clumsy with haste, desperate with haste.

  He ripped off his sodden shirt and threw it away, and she was kissing him again, smothering his mouth, while both of them fumbled with his belt buckle, getting in each other’s way, wildly laughing and gasping, bumping their noses together, bruising their lips between their teeth.

  ‘Oh God, hurry – Blaine.’

  He tore away from her and hopped on one leg as he tried to rid himself of his wet clinging breeches. He looked awkward and ungainly and he almost toppled over into the soft white sand in his haste. And she laughed wildly, breathlessly – he was so funny and beautiful and ridiculous and she wanted him so, and if he took a second longer something inside her would burst and she knew she would die.

  ‘Oh please, Blaine – quickly come to me.’

  Then at last he was naked as she was and as he came over her she seized his shoulder with one hand and fell backwards, pulling him with her, spreading her knees and lifting them high, with the other hand groping for him, finding him and guiding him.

  ‘Oh Blaine, you’re so – oh yes, like that, I can’t – I want to scream.’

  ‘Scream!’ He encouraged her as he plunged and rocked and thrust above her. ‘There is no one to hear you. Scream for both of us!’

  And she opened her mouth wide and gave vent to all her loneliness and wanting and incredulous joy in a rising crescendo that he joined at the end, roaring wildly with her in the most complete and devastating moment of her existence.

  Afterwards she wept silently against his bare chest and he was puzzled and compassionate and concerned.

  ‘I was too rough – forgive me! I did not mean to hurt you.’

  She shook her head and gulped back her tears. ‘No, you never hurt me, it was the most beautiful—’

  ‘Then why do you cry?’

  ‘Because everything that is good seems so fleeting, the more wonderful it is, the sooner it is past, while the wretched vile times seem to last for ever.’

  ‘Don’t think like that, my little one.’

  ‘I don’t know how I will go on living without you. It was hell before, but this will only make it a thousand times worse.’

  ‘I don’t know where I will find the strength to walk away from you,’ he whispered in agreement. ‘It will be the hardest thing I ever have to do in my life.’

  ‘How much longer do we have?’

  ‘Another day – then we will be at Rundu.’

  ‘When I was a little girl my father gave me a brooch of amber with an insect embedded in it. I wish we could preserve this moment like that, capture it eternally in the precious amber of our love.’

  Their parting was a gradual process, not a merciful guillotine stroke, but over the following days a slow intrusion of events and people that prised them apart so that they must suffer the smallest tear, each new wrench, in all its detailed agony.

  From the morning they reached the border post at Rundu and went ashore to meet the police sergeant who was in command, they seemed constantly to be with strangers, always on their guard so that every glance that passed between them, every word or stolen caress, made them more dreadfully aware of impending separation. Only when the dusty police truck carried them down the last hills into Windhoek was the torturous process completed.

  The world awaited them: Isabella, lovely and tragic in her wheelchair, and her daughters bubbling with laughter, mischievous and enchanting as elves, competing for Blaine’s embraces; the superintendent of police and the territorial secretary and droves of petty officials and reporters and photographers; Twentyman-Jones and Abe Abrahams, Sir Garry and Lady Courtney, who had hurried up from their estate at Ladyburg the moment they heard of the robbery, and piles of messages of concern and congratulation, telegrams from the prime minister and from the Ou Baas, General Smuts, and from a hundred friends and business associates.

  Yet Centaine felt detached from the hubbub. She watched it all through a screen of gossamer which muted sound and shape and gave it a dreamlike quality as though half of her was far away, drifting upon a beautiful green river, making love in the warm soft night while the mosquitoes whined outside the protective net, walking hand in hand with the man she loved, a tall strong gentle man with soft green eyes, the hands of a pianist and lovely sticky-out ears.

  From her railway coach she telephoned Shasa and tried to sound enthusiastic about the fact that he was now the captain of his cricket eleven and about his mathematics marks which had at last taken an upward turn.

  ‘I don’t know when I will be back at Weltevreden, chéri. I have so many things to see to. We never recovered the diamonds, I’m afraid. There will have to be talks with the bank and I’ll have to make new arrangements. No, of course not, silly boy! Of course we aren’t poor, not yet, but a million pounds is a lot of money to lose, and then there will be the trial. Yes, he is an awful man, Shasa – but I don’t know if they will hang him. Good Lord, no! They won’t let us watch—’

  Twice that first day of their separation she telephoned the residency in the forlorn hope that Blaine would answer, but it was a woman, either a secretary or Isabella, and each time she hung up without speaking.

  They met again at the administrator’s office the next day. Blaine had called a press conference and the
re was a crowd of journalists and photographers packed into the ante-chamber. Once again Isabella was there in her wheelchair, with Blaine attentive and dutiful and unbearably handsome behind her. It took all Centaine’s acting ability to shake hands in a friendly fashion, and then to joke lightly with the members of the press, even posing with Blaine for the photographs, and at no time to allow herself to moon at him. But afterwards as she drove herself back to the offices of the Courtney Mining and Finance Company, she had to pull off into a side road and sit quietly for a while to compose herself. There had been no opportunity for a single private exchange with Blaine.

  Abe was waiting for her the moment she walked in through the front doors and he followed her up the stairs and into her office. ‘Centaine, you are late. They have been waiting in the boardroom for almost an hour. I can’t say with any great display of patience either.’

  ‘Let them wait!’ she told him with bravado she did not feel. ‘They had better get accustomed to it.’ The bank was her single largest creditor.

  ‘The loss of the stones has frightened ten different shades of yellow out of them, Centaine.’

  The bank directors had been demanding this meeting since the minute they heard she had arrived back in town.

  ‘Where is Dr Twentyman-Jones?’

  ‘He is in there with them, pouring oil on the troubled waters.’ Abe laid a thick folder in front of her. ‘Here are the schedules of the interest repayments.’

  She glanced at them. She already knew them by heart. She could recite dates and amounts and rates. She had already prepared her strategy in detail but it was all dreamy and unreal, like a children’s game.

  ‘Anything new that I should know about before we go into the lions’ den?’ she asked.

  ‘A long cable from Lloyd’s of London. They have repudiated the claim. No armed escort.’

  Centaine nodded. ‘We expected that. Will we take them to court? What do you advise?’

  ‘I am taking silk’s opinion on that, but my own feeling is that it will be a waste of time and money.’

  ‘Anything else?’

  ‘De Beers,’ he said. ‘A message from Sir Ernest Oppenheimer himself.’

  ‘Sniffing around already, is he?’ She sighed, trying to make herself care, but she thought of Blaine instead. She saw him bending over the wheelchair. She pushed the image from her mind and concentrated on what Abe was telling her.

  ‘Sir Ernest is coming up from Kimberley. He will be arriving in Windhoek on Thursday.’

  ‘By some lucky chance,’ she smiled cynically.

  ‘He requests a meeting at your earliest convenience.’

  ‘He has a nose like a hyena and the eyesight of a vulture,’ Centaine said. ‘He can smell blood and pick out a dying animal from a hundred leagues.’

  ‘He is after the H’ani Mine, Centaine. He has been lusting after the H’ani for thirteen years.’

  ‘They are all after the H’ani, Abe. The bank, Sir Ernest, all the predators. By God, they’ll have to fight me for it.’

  They stood up and Abe asked, ‘Are you ready?’

  Centaine glanced at herself in the mirror over the mantel, touched her hair, wet her lips with the tip of her tongue, and suddenly it all clicked into crisp focus again. She was going into battle, her mind cleared, her wits sharpened and she smiled a bright, confident, patronizing smile at herself. She was ready again.

  ‘Let’s go!’ she said, and as they marched into the long boardroom with its stinkwood table and the six huge magically lyrical Pierneef murals of the desert places decorating the walls, she lifted her chin and her eyes sparkled with assumed confidence.

  ‘Do forgive me, gentlemen,’ she cried lightly, attacking immediately with the full force of her personality and sexual allure and watching them wilt before it, ‘but I assure you that you now have me, and my full attention, for as long as you want me.’

  Deep inside her there was still that empty aching place which Blaine had filled for a few fleeting moments, but it was buttressed and fortified, she was impregnable once again, and as she took the leather upholstered chair at the head of the table she recited silently to herself like a mantra: ‘The H’ani belongs to me – no one shall take it from me.’

  Manfred De La Rey moved as swiftly through the darkness as the two grown men who led him northwards. The humiliation and pain of his father’s dismissal had invoked within him a new defiance and steely determination. His father had called him a blubbering ninny.

  ‘But I am a man now,’ he told himself, striding onwards after the dark figure of Swart Hendrick. ‘I will never cry again. I am a man, and I will prove it every day I live. I will prove it to you, Pa. If you are watching over me still, you will never have to be ashamed of me again.’

  Then he thought of his father alone and dying upon the hilltop, and his grief was overwhelming. Despite his resolution, his tears rose to swamp him and it took all his strength and his will to thrust them down.

  ‘I am a man now.’ He fixed his mind upon it, and indeed he stood as tall as a man, almost as tall as Hendrick, and his long legs thrust him forward tirelessly. ‘I will make you proud of me, Papa. I swear it. I swear it before God.’

  He neither slackened his pace nor uttered a single complaint throughout that long night, and the sun was clear of the treetops when they reached the river.

  As soon as they had drunk Hendrick had them up again and moving northwards. They travelled in a series of loops, swinging away from the river during the day, hiding out in the dry mopani, and then turning back to slake their thirst and follow the riverbank all the hours of darkness.

  It was twelve of these nights of hard marching before Hendrick judged them clear of any pursuit.

  ‘When will we cross the river, Hennie?’ Manfred asked.

  ‘Never,’ Swart Hendrick told him.

  ‘But it was my father’s plan to cross to the Portuguese, to Alves De Santos the ivory trader, and then to travel to Luanda.’

  ‘That was your father’s plan,’ Hendrick agreed. ‘But your father is not with us. There is no place for a strange black man in the north. The Portuguese are even harder than the Germans or the English or the Boers. They will cheat us out of our diamonds, and beat us like dogs and send us to work on their labour gangs. No, Manie, we are going back – back to Ovamboland and our brothers of the tribe, where everyone is a friend and we can live like men and not animals.’

  ‘The police will find us,’ Manie argued.

  ‘No man saw us. Your father made certain of that.’

  ‘But they know you were my father’s friend. They will come for you.’

  Hendrick grinned. ‘In Ovamboland my name is not Hendrick, and a thousand witnesses will swear I was always in my kraal and knew no white robber. To the white police all black men look the same, and I have a brother, a clever brother, who will know how and where to sell our diamonds for us. With these stones I can buy two hundred fine cattle and ten fat wives. No, Manie, we are going home.’

  ‘And what will happen to me, Hendrick? I cannot go with you to the kraals of the Ovambo.’

  ‘There is a place and a plan for you.’ Hendrick placed his arm around the white boy’s shoulders, a paternal gesture. ‘Your father has entrusted you to me. You do not have to fear. I will see you safe before I leave you.’

  ‘When you go, Hendrick, I will be alone. I will have nothing.’ And the black man could not answer him. He dropped his arm and spoke brusquely. ‘It is time to march again; a long, hard road lies ahead of us.’

  They left the river that night and turned back towards the south-west, skirting the terrible wastes of Bushmanland, keeping to the gentler, better watered lands, striking a more leisurely pace but still avoiding all habitation or human contact until, on the twentieth day after leaving Lothar De La Rey on his fatal hilltop, they followed a wooded ridge through well-pastured country and at last in the dusk looked down on a sprawling Ovambo village.

  The conical huts of thatch were built in haphazard
clusters of four or five, each surrounded by an enclosure of woven grass matting, and these were grouped around the big central cattle kraal with its palisade of poles set into the earth. The smell of woodsmoke drifted up to them on pale blue wisps, and it mingled with the ammoniacal scent of cattle dung and the floury smell of maize cakes baking on the coals. The cries of children’s laughter and the voices of the women were melodious as wild bird calls. They picked out the gaudy flashes of the skirts of bright trade cotton as the women came up in single file from the water-hole with brimming clay pots balanced gracefully upon their heads.

  However, they made no move to approach the village. Instead they lay concealed upon the ridge, watching for strangers or any sign of the unusual, even the smallest hint of danger, Hendrick and Klein Boy quietly discussing each movement they spotted, each sound that carried up from the village until Manfred grew impatient.

  ‘Why are we waiting, Hennie?’

  ‘Only the stupid young gemsbok rushes eagerly into the pitfall,’ Hendrick grunted. ‘We will go down when we are certain.’

  In the middle of the afternoon a small black urchin drove a herd of goats up the slope. He was stark naked except for the slingshot hanging around his neck, and Hendrick whistled softly.

  The child started and stared at their hiding-place fearfully. Then, when Hendrick whistled again, he crept towards them cautiously. Suddenly he crinkled into a grin too big and white for his grubby face and he rushed straight at Hendrick.

  Hendrick laughed and lifted him onto his hip, and the child gabbled at him in ecstatic excitement.

  ‘This is my son,’ Hendrick told Manie, and then he questioned the child and listened to his piping replies with attention.

  ‘There are no strangers in the village,’ he grunted. ‘The police were here, asking for me, but they have gone.’