Power of the Sword

by Wilbur Smith

  Manfred read the book in three successive nights, sitting up until long after midnight with a blanket over his shoulders, squinting in the flickering candlelight. It was five hundred pages of close print, larded with quotation from holy scripture, but it was written in strong simple language, not weighed down with adjectives or excessive description and it sang directly to Manfred’s heart. He finished it bursting with pride for the courage and fortitude and piety of his people, and burning with anger for the cruel manner in which they had been persecuted and dispossessed by their enemies. He sat with the closed book in his lap, staring into the wavering shadows, living in full detail the wanderings and suffering of his young nation, sharing the agony at the barricades when the black heathen hordes poured down upon them with war plumes tossing and the silver steel of the assegais drumming on rawhide shields like the surf of a gale-driven sea, sharing the wonder of voyaging out over the grassy ocean of the high continent into a beautiful wilderness unspoiled and unpeopled to take it as their own, finally sharing the bitter torment as the free land was wrested from them again by arrogant foreigners in their warlike legions and the final outrage of slavery, political and economic, was thrust upon them in their own land – the land that their fathers had won and in which they had been born.

  As though the lad’s rage had reached out and summoned him, Uncle Tromp came down the pathway, his footsteps crunching on the gravel, and stooped into the shed. He paused in the doorway, his eyes adjusting to the candlelight, and then he crossed to where Manfred crouched on the bed. The mattress sagged and squeaked as he lowered his bulk upon it.

  They sat in silence for a full five minutes before Uncle Tromp asked, ‘So, you managed to finish it then?’

  Manfred had to shake himself back to the present. ‘I think it is the most important book ever written,’ he whispered. ‘Just as important as the Bible.’

  ‘That is blasphemy, Jong.’ Uncle Tromp tried to look stern, but his gratification softened the line of his mouth and Manfred did not apologize.

  Instead he went on eagerly, ‘For the first time ever I know who I am – and why I am here.’

  ‘Then my efforts have not been wasted,’ Uncle Tromp murmured and they were silent again until the old man sighed. ‘Writing a book is a lonely thing,’ he mused. ‘Like crying with all your heart into the night when there is nobody out there in the darkness, nobody to hear your cry, nobody to answer you.’

  ‘I heard you, Uncle Tromp.’

  ‘Ja, Jong, so you did – but only you.’

  However, Uncle Tromp was wrong. There were other listeners out there in the darkness.

  The arrival of a stranger in the village was an event; the arrival of three strangers together was without parallel or precedent and raised a storm of gossip and speculation that had the entire population in a fever of curiosity.

  The strangers arrived from the south on the weekly mail train. Taciturn and granite-faced, dressed in severe dark broadcloth and carrying their own carpet bags, they crossed the road from the railway siding to the tiny iron-roofed boarding house run by the widow Vorster and were not seen again until Sunday morning when they emerged to stride down the rutted sidewalk, shoulder to shoulder, grim and devout, wearing the white neckties and black suits of deacons of the Dutch Reformed Church and carrying their black leatherbound prayer books under their right arms like sabres, ready to unsheath and wield upon Satan and all his works.

  They stalked down the aisle and took the front pew beneath the pulpit as if by right, and the families who had sat on those benches for generations made no demur but quietly found places for themselves at the rear of the nave.

  Rumours of the presence of the strangers – they had already been dubbed ‘the three wise men’ – had permeated to the remotest surrounding districts and even those who had not been inside the church in years, drawn by curiosity, now packed all the pews and even stood against the walls. It was a better turnout even than last Dingaan’s Day, the Day of the Covenant with God in thanksgiving for victory over the Zulu hordes and one of the most sacred occasions in the calendar of the Reformed Church.

  The singing was impressive. Manfred stood beside Sarah and was so touched by the crystalline beauty of her sweet contralto that he was inspired to underscore it with his untrained but ringing tenor. Even under the deep hood of her traditional Voortrekker bonnet Sarah looked like an angel, golden blonde and lovely, her features shining with religious ecstasy. At fourteen years her womanhood was just breaking into tender uncertain bloom so that Manfred felt a strange breathlessness when he glanced at her over the hymn book they were sharing and she looked up and smiled at him with so much trust and adoration.

  The hymn ended and the congregation settled down through a scraping of feet and muted coughing into a tense expectant silence. Uncle Tromp’s sermons were renowned throughout South-West Africa, the best entertainment in the territory after the new moving-picture house in Windhoek which very few of them had dared to enter, and Uncle Tromp was in high fettle this day, provoked by the three sober-faced inscrutable gentlemen in the front row who had not even had the common decency to make a courtesy call at the pastory since arriving. He leaned his great gnarled fists on the rail of the pulpit and hunched over them like a prizefighter taking his guard, then he glanced down on his congregation with outraged contempt and they quailed before him with tremulous delight, knowing exactly what that expression presaged.

  ‘Sinners!’ Uncle Tromp let fly with a bellow that rang against the roof timbers and the three dark-suited strangers jumped in their seats as though a cannon had been fired under them. ‘The House of God is filled with unrepentant sinners—’ and Uncle Tromp was away; he flailed them with dreadful accusations, raking them with that special tone which Manfred thought of privately as ‘the voice’ and then lulling them with gentle sonorous passages and promises of salvation before again hurling threats of brimstone and damnation at them like fiery spears, until some of the women were weeping openly and there were hoarse spontaneous cries of ‘Amen’ and ‘Praise the Lord’ and ‘Hallelujah’ and in the end they went down trembling on their knees as he prayed for their very souls.

  Afterwards they streamed out of the church with a sort of nervous relief, garrulous and gay as though they had just survived some deadly natural phenomenon such as earthquake or gale at sea. The three strangers were the last to leave, and at the door where Uncle Tromp waited to greet them they shook his hand and each of them spoke quietly and seriously to him in their turn.

  Uncle Tromp listened to them gravely, then turned to consult briefly with Aunt Trudi before turning back to them.

  ‘I would be honoured if you would enter my home and sit at my board.’

  The four men paced in dignified procession up to the pastory, Aunt Trudi and the children following at a respectful distance. She muttered terse instructions to the girls as they walked and the minute they were out of public view they scampered away to open the drapes in the dining-room, which was only used on very special occasions, and to move the dinner setting from the kitchen to the heavy stinkwood dining-table that was Trudi’s inheritance from her mother.

  The three strangers did not allow their deep erudite discussion to interfere with their appreciation of Aunt Trudi’s cooking, and at the bottom of the table the children ate in dutiful but goggle-eyed silence. Afterwards the men drank their coffee and smoked a pipe on the front stoep, the drone of their voices soporific in the midday heat, and then it was time to return to divine worship.

  The text that Uncle Tromp had chosen for his second sermon was ‘The Lord has made straight a path for you in the wilderness’. He delivered it with all his formidable rhetoric and power, but this time he included passages from his own book, assuring his congregation that the Lord had chosen them particularly as a people and set aside a place for them. It remained only for them to reclaim that place in this land that was their heritage. More than once Manfred saw the three grim-faced strangers sitting in the front pew glance at o
ne another significantly as Uncle Tromp was speaking.

  The strangers left on the southbound mail train on Monday morning, and for the days and weeks that followed a brittle sense of expectancy pervaded the pastory. Uncle Tromp, breaking his usual custom, took to waiting at the front gate to greet the postman each morning. Quickly he would peruse the packet of mail, and each day his disappointment became more obvious.

  Three weeks passed before he gave up waiting for the postman. So he was in the toolshed with Manfred, drilling the Fitzsimmons shift into him, honing that savage left hand of Manfred’s, when the letter finally arrived.

  It was lying on the hall table when Uncle Tromp went up to the house to wash for supper, and Manfred, who had walked up with him, saw him blanch when he observed the seal of the high moderator of the church on the flap of the envelope. He snatched up the envelope and hurried into his study, slamming the door in Manfred’s face. The lock turned with a heavy clunk. Aunt Trudi had to wait supper almost twenty minutes before he emerged again, and his grace, full of praise and thanksgiving, was twice its usual length. Sarah rolled her eyes and squinted comically across the table at Manfred, and he cautioned her with a quick frown. At last Uncle Tromp roared Amen’. Yet he still did not take up his soupspoon but beamed down the length of the table at Aunt Trudi.

  ‘My dear wife,’ he said. ‘You have been patient and uncomplaining all these years.’

  Aunt Trudi blushed scarlet. ‘Not in front of the children, Meneer,’ she whispered, but Uncle Tromp’s smile grew broader still.

  ‘They have given me Stellenbosch,’ he told her, and the silence was complete. They stared at him incredulously. Every one of them understood what he was saying.

  ‘Stellenbosch,’ Uncle Tromp repeated, mouthing the word, rolling it over his tongue, gargling it in his throat as though it were the first taste of a rare and noble wine.

  Stellenbosch was a small country town thirty miles from Cape Town. The buildings were gabled in the Dutch style, thatched and whitewashed, as dazzling as snow. The streets were broad and lined with the fine oaks that Governor Van Stel had ordered his burghers to plant back in the seventeenth century. Around the town the vineyards of the great châteaux were laid out in a marvellous patchwork and the dark precipices of the mountains rose in a heaven-high backdrop beyond.

  A small country town, pretty and picturesque, but it was also the very citadel of Afrikanerdom, enshrined in the university whose faculties were grouped beneath the green oaks and the protecting mountain barricades. It was the centre of Afrikaner intellectualism. Here their language had been forged and was still being crafted. Here their theologians pondered and debated. Tromp Bierman himself had studied beneath Stellenbosch’s dreaming oaks. All the great men had trained here: Louis Botha, Hertzog, Jan Christian Smuts. No one who was not Stellenbosch had ever headed the government of the Union of South Africa. Very few who were not Stellenbosch men had even served in the cabinet. It was the Oxford and Cambridge of southern Africa, and they had given the parish to Tromp Bierman. It was an honour unsurpassed, and now the doors would open before him. He would sit at the centre; he would wield power, and the promise of greater power; he would become one of the movers, the innovators. Everything now became possible: the Council of the Synod, the moderatorship itself; none of these were beyond his grasp. There were no limits now, no borders nor boundaries. Everything was possible.

  ‘It was the book,’ Aunt Trudi breathed. ‘I never thought. I never understood—’

  ‘Yes, it was the book,’ Uncle Tromp chuckled. ‘And thirty years of hard work. We will have the big manse on Eikeboom Straat and a thousand a year. Each of the children will have a separate room and a place at the university paid for by the church. I will preach to the mighty men of the land and our brightest young minds. I will be on the University Council. And you, my dear wife, will have professors and ministers of government at your table; their wives will be your companions—’ he broke off guiltily, ‘and now we will all pray. We will ask God for humility; we will ask him to save us from the mortal sins of pride and avarice. Down everybody!’ he roared. ‘Down on your knees.’

  The soup was cold before he allowed them up again.

  They left two months later, after Uncle Tromp had handed over his duties to the young dominie fresh from the theology faculty of the university where the old man was now taking them.

  It seemed that every man and woman and child from within a hundred miles was at the station to see them off. Manfred had not realized until that moment just how high was the affection and esteem in which the community held Uncle Tromp. The men all wore their church suits and each of them shook his hand, gruffly thanked him and wished him Godspeed. Some of the women wept and all of them brought gifts – they had baskets of jams and preserves, of milk tarts and koeksisters, bags of kudu biltong – and enough food to feed an army on the journey southwards.

  Four days later the family changed trains at the central Cape Town railway station. There was barely time for them to troop out into Adderley Street and gape up at the legendary flat-topped massif of Table Mountain that towered over the city before they had to rush back and clamber aboard the coach for the much shorter leg of the journey across the Cape flats and through the sprawling vineyards towards the mountains.

  The deacons of the church and half the congregation were on the platform at Stellenbosch station to welcome them, and the family discovered very swiftly that the pace of all their lives had changed dramatically.

  From almost the first day, Manfred was totally immersed in preparations for the entrance examinations of the university. He studied from early morning until late every night for two months and then sat the examinations over a single painful week and lived through an even more painful week waiting for the results to be posted. He passed first in German language, third in mathematics and eighth overall, the habits of study he had learned over the years in the Bierman household now bearing full fruit, and was accepted into the faculty of law for the semester beginning at the end of January.

  Aunt Trudi was strongly opposed to his leaving the manse and entering one of the university residences for men. As she pointed out, he had a fine room to himself now; the girls would miss him to the point of distraction – by implication she was included amongst those who would suffer – and even on Uncle Tromp’s now princely stipend, the residence fees would be a burden on the family exchequer.

  Uncle Tromp called upon the university registrar and made some financial arrangements which were never discussed in the family and then came down strongly on Manfred’s side.

  ‘Living in a house full of women will drive the boy mad in time. He should go where he can benefit from the company of other young men and from the full life of the university.’

  So, on 25 January, Manfred eagerly presented himself at the imposing Cape Dutch style residence for gentlemen students, Rust en Vrede. The name translated as ‘Rest and Peace’, and within the first few minutes of arrival he realized just how ironic was the choice for he was caught up in the barbaric ritual of freshman initiation.

  His name was taken from him and he was given instead the sobriquet of Poep; which he shared with the nineteen other freshmen of the house. This translated freely as ‘flatus’. He was forbidden to use the pronouns ‘I’ or ‘me’ but only ‘this flatus’, and he had to request permission not only of the senior men for every action but also of all inanimate objects he encountered in the residence. Thus he was obliged to utter endless inanities: ‘Honourable door, this flatus wishes to pass through,’ or ‘Honourable toilet, this flatus wishes to sit upon you.’

  Within the residence he and his fellow freshmen were not allowed normal means of perambulation but were made to walk backwards, even down stairs, at all times. They were held incommunicado from friends and family and in particular were most strenuously forbidden to talk to anybody of the opposite sex; if they were caught so much as looking in the general direction of a pretty girl a warning notice was hung around their nec
ks and could not be removed even in the bath. ‘Beware! Sex maniac at large.’

  Their rooms were raided by the seniors every hour, on the hour, from six in the evening until six in the morning. All their bedding was piled in the middle of the floor and soaked with water, their books and possessions were swept from the shelves and turned out of the drawers and piled on the sodden blankets. The senior men performed this duty in shifts until the shivering freshmen took to sleeping on the bare tiles of the passage outside their bedrooms, leaving the chaos within to mould and fester. Whereupon the senior student, a lordly fourth-year honours man named Roelf Stander, held a formal house committee inspection of the rooms.

  ‘You are the most disgusting cloud of flatus ever to disgrace this university,’ he told them at the end of the inspection. ‘You have one hour in which to make your rooms spotless and put them in perfect order, after which you will be taken on a route march as punishment for your slovenly attitude.’

  It was midnight when Roelf Stander finally announced that he was satisfied with the condition of their bedrooms and they were prepared for the route march.

  This involved stripping them to their underpants, placing a pillow case over their heads, tying them in Indian file with a rope around their necks and their hands strapped behind their backs and marching them through the streets of the sleeping town and out into the mountains. The chosen route was rough and stony and when one of them fell he brought down the freshmen in front and behind. At four in the morning they were led back into town on bleeding feet and with their throats chafed raw from the coarse hemp rope to find their rooms had been raided once again and that Roelf Stander’s next inspection would take place at five o’clock. The first lecture of the university day began at seven. There was no time for breakfast.

  All this came under the heading of good clean fun; the university authorities turned a blind eye upon the rites on the grounds that boys will be boys and that the initiation ritual was a ‘university tradition’, instilling a community spirit into the new arrivals.