Power of the Sword

by Wilbur Smith

  Manfred’s Dutch blood, suspicious and broodingly introspective, responded to his promise of clandestine intrigue, while his Germanic side longed for the order and authority of a society of fierce warriors, modern-day Teutonic knights, hard and unrelenting for God and Country. And though he was unaware of it, the streak of flamboyance and love of theatrics he had inherited from his French mother was drawn to the military pomp, uniforms and eagles, that Roelf seemed to offer him.

  He reached out and seized Roelf’s shoulder and they held each other in the clasp of comrades, staring deeply into each other’s eyes.

  ‘With all my heart,’ Manfred said softly. ‘I will join you with all my heart.’

  The full moon stood high above the Stellenbosch mountains, silvering their sheer buttresses and plunging the gullies and ravines into deepest black. In the south the Great Cross stood high, but it was washed out into insignificance by the huge fiery cross that burned closer and fiercer at the head of the open forest glade. It was a natural amphitheatre, screened by the dense conifers that surrounded it, a secret place, hidden from curious or hostile eyes, perfect for the purpose.

  Beneath the fiery cross the ranks of storm-troopers were massed and their polished cross belts and buckles glinted in its light and in that of the burning torches each of them held high. There were not more than three hundred troopers present, for they were the elite, and their expressions were proud and solemn as they watched the tiny band of new recruits march out of the forest and down the slope of the glade to where the general waited to greet them.

  Manfred De La Rey was the first of them to come to attention before the leaders. He wore the black shirt and riding-breeches, the high polished riding-boots of this secret band of knights, but his head was bare and his uniform unadorned except for the sheathed dagger on his belt.

  The high commander stepped forward and stopped only a pace in front of Manfred. He was an imposing figure, a tall man with craggy weathered face and hard jutting jaw. Although thickened around the waist and big-bellied under his black shirt, he was a man in his prime, a black-maned lion in his pride and the aura of command and authority sat easily upon his broad shoulders.

  Manfred recognized him immediately, for his was a face often reproduced in the political columns of the national newspaper. He was high in government, the administrator of one of the country’s provinces, and his influence was deep and far-reaching.

  ‘Manfred De La Rey,’ the commander asked in a powerful voice, ‘are you ready to take the blood oath?’

  ‘I am,’ Manfred replied clearly, and drew the silver dagger from his belt.

  From the ranks behind him Roelf Stander, in full uniform, capped and booted and with the broken cross insignia on his right arm, stepped out and drew the pistol from his holster. He cocked the pistol and pressed the muzzle to Manfred’s chest, aiming for the heart, and Manfred did not flinch. Roelf was his sponsor. The pistol was symbolic of the fact that he would also be his executioner should Manfred ever betray the blood oath he was about to swear.

  Ceremoniously the commander handed Manfred a sheet of stiff parchment. Its head was illuminated by the crest of the order: a stylized powderhorn like those used by the Voortrekkers, the pioneers of his people. Below it was printed the oath, and Manfred took it in one hand and with the other held the bared dagger pointed at his own heart to signify his willingness to lay down his life for the ideals of the brotherhood.

  ‘Before Almighty God, and in the sight of my comrades,’ he read aloud, ‘I subject myself entirely to the dictates of my people’s divinely ordained destiny. I swear to be faithful to the precepts of the Ossewa Brandwag, the sentinels of the Afrikaner wagon train, and to obey the orders of my superiors. On my life I swear a deadly oath of secrecy, that I will cherish and hold sacred the affairs and proceedings of the Ossewa Brandwag. I demand that if I should betray my comrades, my oath or my Volk, vengeance shall follow me to my traitor’s grave. I call upon my comrades to hear my entreaty.

  If I advance, follow me.

  If I retreat, shoot me down.

  If I die, avenge me.

  So help me Almighty God!’

  And Manfred drew the silver blade across his wrist so that his blood sprang dark ruby in the torchlight, and he sprinkled the parchment with it.

  The high commander stepped forward to embrace him, and behind him the black ranks erupted in a jubilant warlike roar of approval. At his side Roelf Stander returned the loaded pistol to its holster, his eyelids stinging with the nettles of proud tears. As the commander stepped back, Roelf rushed forward to take Manfred’s right hand in his. ‘My brother.’ His whisper was choking. ‘Now we are truly brothers.’

  In mid-November Manfred sat his end-of-year examinations and passed third in a law class of 153.

  Three days after the results were posted, the Stellenbosch boxing squad, led by its coach, left to take part in the Inter-Varsity Championships. This year the venue was the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, and boxers from the other universities of South Africa journeyed from every province and corner of the Union to take part.

  The Stellenbosch team travelled up by train, and there was a cheering, singing crowd of students and faculty members to see them off at the railway station on their thousand-mile journey.

  Uncle Tromp kissed his women farewell, beginning with Aunt Trudi and working his way down to Sarah, the youngest, at the end of the line, and Manfred followed him. He was wearing his colours blazer and straw basher and he was so tall and beautiful that Sarah could not bear it and she burst into tears as he stooped over her. She flung both arms around his neck and squeezed with all her strength.

  ‘Come along, don’t be a silly little duck,’ Manfred gruffed in her ear, but his voice was rough with the strange unaccustomed tumult that the contact of her hot silky cheek against his provoked beneath his ribs.

  ‘Oh, Manie, you are going so far away.’ She tried to hide her tears in the angle of his neck. ‘We have never been parted by such distance.’

  ‘Come on, monkey. People are looking at you,’ he chided her gently. ‘Give me a kiss and I’ll bring you back a present.’

  ‘I don’t want a present. I want you,’ she sniffed, and then lifted her sweet face and placed her mouth over his. Her mouth seemed to melt in its own heat, and it was moist and sweet as a ripe apple.

  The contact lasted only seconds, but Manfred was so intensely aware that she might have been naked in his arms and he was shaken with guilt and self-disgust at his body’s swift betrayal and at the evil that seemed to smoke in his blood and burst like a sky rocket in his brain. He pulled away from her roughly, and her expression was bewildered and hurt, her arms still raised as he scrambled up the steps onto the balcony of the coach and joined the noisy banter and horseplay of his team mates.

  As the train pulled out of the station she was standing a little apart from the other girls, and when they all turned and trooped away down the platform, Sarah lingered, staring after the train as it gathered speed and ran towards the mountains.

  At last a bend in the tracks carried him out of sight of her, and as Manfred drew his head back into the carriage he saw that Roelf Stander was watching him quizzically and now grinned and opened his mouth to speak, but Manfred flared at him furiously and guiltily:

  ‘Hou jou bek! Hold your jaw, man!’

  The Inter-Varsity Championships were held over ten days with five heats in each weight division; thus each contestant would fight every second day.

  Manfred was seeded number two in his division, which meant that he would probably meet the holder of the champion’s belt in the final round. The reigning champion was an engineering student who had just graduated from the Witwatersrand University. He was unbeaten in his career and had announced his intention of turning professional immediately after the Olympics for which he was considered a certain choice.

  ‘The Lion of the Kalahari meets the sternest test of his meteoric career. Can he take the same sort of punish
ment that he deals out? This is the question everyone is asking, and which Ian Rushmore will answer for us if all goes as expected,’ wrote the boxing correspondent of the Rand Daily Mail. ‘There does not seem to be any contestant in the division who will be able to prevent De La Rey and Rushmore meeting on Saturday night, 20 December 1935. It will be Rushmore’s right hand, made of granite and gelignite, against De La Rey’s swarming battering two-handed style, and your correspondent would not miss the meeting for all the gold that lies beneath the streets of Johannesburg.’

  Manfred won his first two bouts with insulting ease. His opponents, demoralized by his reputation, both dropped in the second round under the barrage of slashing red gloves, and the Wednesday was a rest day for Manfred.

  He left the residence on the host university’s campus before any of the others were up, missing breakfast to be in time for the early morning train from Johannesburg’s Central Station. It was less than an hour’s journey across the open grasslands.

  He ate a frugal breakfast in the buffet of the Pretoria station and then started out on foot with a leaden reluctance in his gait.

  Pretoria Central Prison was an ugly square building and the interior was as forbidding and depressing. Here all executions were carried out, and life imprisonments served.

  Manfred went into the visitors’ entrance, spoke to the unsmiling senior warder at the enquiries desk and filled in an application form.

  He hesitated over the question, ‘Relationship to prisoner’, then boldly wrote ‘Son’.

  When he returned the form to the warder, the man read it through slowly and then looked up at him, studying him gravely and impersonally. ‘He has not had a visitor, not one in all these years,’ he said.

  ‘I could not come before.’ Manfred tried to excuse himself. ‘There were reasons.’

  ‘They all say that.’ Then the warder’s expression altered subtly. ‘You are the boxer, aren’t you?’

  ‘That’s right,’ Manfred nodded, and then on an impulse he gave the secret recognition signal of the OB and the man’s eyes flicked with surprise then dropped to the form in front of him.

  ‘Very well, then. Have a seat. I’ll call you when he is ready,’ he said, and under cover of the counter top he gave Manfred the counter signal of the Ossewa Brandwag.

  ‘Kill the rooinek bastard on Saturday night,’ he whispered, and turned away. Manfred was amazed but elated to have proof of how widely the brotherhood had spread its arms to gather in the Volk.

  Ten minutes later the warder led Manfred through to a greenpainted cell with high barred windows, furnished only with a plain deal table and three straight-backed chairs. There was an old man sitting on one of the chairs, but he was a stranger and Manfred looked beyond him expectantly.

  The stranger stood up slowly. He was bowed with age and hard work, his skin wrinkled and folded and spotted by the sun. His hair was thin and white as raw cotton, wisped over a scalp that was speckled like a plover’s egg. His thin scraggy neck stuck out of the coarse calico prison uniform like a turtle’s from the opening of its carapace, and his eyes were colourless, faded and red-rimmed and swimming with tears that gathered like dew on his lashes.

  ‘Papa?’ Manfred asked with disbelief as he saw the missing arm, and the old man began to weep silently. His shoulders shook and the tears broke over the reddened rims of his eyelids and slimed down his cheeks.

  ‘Papa?’ said Manfred, and outrage rose to choke him. ‘What have they done to you?’

  He rushed forward to embrace his father, trying to hide his face from the warder, trying to protect him, to cover his weakness and tears.

  ‘Papa! Papa!’ he repeated helplessly, patting the thin shoulders under the rough uniform, and he turned his head and looked back at the warder in silent appeal.

  ‘I cannot leave you alone.’ The man understood, but shook his head. ‘It is the rule, more than my job is worth.’

  ‘Please,’ Manfred whispered.

  ‘Do you give me your word, as a brother, that you will not try to help him escape?’

  ‘My word as a brother!’ Manfred answered.

  ‘Ten minutes,’ said the warder. ‘I can give you no more.’ He turned away, locking the green steel door as he left.

  ‘Papa.’ Manfred led the trembling old man back to the chair and knelt beside him.

  Lothar De La Rey wiped his wet cheeks with his open palm and tried to smile, but it wavered and his voice quivered. ‘Look at me, blubbering like an old woman. It was just the shock of seeing you again. I’m all right now. I’m fine. Let me look at you, let me just look at you for a moment.’

  He drew back and stared into Manfred’s face intently. ‘What a man you have become – strong and well favoured, just like I was at your age.’ He traced Manfred’s features with his fingertips. His hand was cold and the skin was rough as sharkskin.

  ‘I have read about you, my son. They allow us to have the newspapers. I have cut out everything about you and I keep them under my mattress. I’m proud, so proud. We all are, everybody in this place, even the narks.’

  ‘Papa! How are they treating you?’ Manfred cut him short.

  ‘Fine, Manie, just fine.’ Lothar looked down and his lips sagged with despair. ‘It’s just that – for ever is such a long time. So long, manie, so very long, and sometimes I think about the desert, about the horizons that turn to distant smoke and the high blue sky.’ He broke off and tried to smile. ‘And I think about you, every day – not a day that I don’t pray to God “Look after my son.”’

  ‘No, Papa – please,’ Manfred pleaded. ‘Don’t! You will have me weeping too.’ He pushed himself off his knees and pulled the other chair close to his father’s. ‘I’ve thought about you also, Papa, everyday. I wanted to write to you. I spoke to Uncle Tromp, but he said it was best if—’

  Lothar seized his hand to silence him. ‘Ja, Manie, it was best. Tromp Bierman is a wise man; he knows best.’ He smiled more convincingly. ‘How tall you have grown, and the colour of your hair – just like mine used to be. You will be all right, I know. What have you decided to do with your life? Tell me quickly. We have so little time.’

  ‘I am studying law at Stellenbosch. I passed third in the first year.’

  ‘That is wonderful, my son, and afterwards?’

  ‘I am not sure, Papa, but I think I must fight for our nation. I think I have been called to the fight for justice for our people.’

  ‘Politics?’ Lothar asked, and when Manfred nodded, ‘A hard road, full of turns and twists. I always preferred the straight road, with a horse under me and a rifle in my hand.’ Then he chuckled sardonically. ‘And look where that road has led me.’

  ‘I will fight too, Papa. When the time is right, on a battleground of my own choosing.’

  ‘Oh, my son. History is so cruel to our people. Sometimes I think with despair that we are doomed always to be the underdogs.’

  ‘You are wrong!’ Manfred’s expression hardened and his voice crackled. ‘Our day will come, is already dawning. We will not be the underdogs for much longer.’ He wanted to tell his father, but then he remembered his blood oath and he was silent.

  ‘Manie.’ His father leaned closer, glancing around the cell like a conspirator before he tugged at Manfred’s sleeve. ‘The diamonds – have you still got your diamonds?’ he demanded, and immediately saw the answer in Manfred’s face.

  ‘What happened to them?’ Lothar’s distress was hard to watch. ‘They were my legacy to you, all I could leave you. Where are they?’

  ‘Uncle Tromp – he found them years ago. He said they were evil, the coin of the devil, and he made me destroy them.’

  ‘Destroy them?’ Lothar gaped at him.

  ‘Break them on an anvil with a sledgehammer. Crush them to powder, all of them.’

  Manfred watched his father’s old fierce spirit flare up. Lothar leapt to his feet and raged around the cell. ‘Tromp Bierman, if I could get my hand on you! You were always a stubborn sanctimonious hypoc
rite—’ He broke off and came back to his son.

  ‘Manie, there are the others. Do you remember – the kopje, the hill in the desert? I left them there for you. You must go back.’

  Manfred turned his head away. Over the years he had tried to drive the memory from his mind. It was evil, the memory of great evil, associated with terror and guilt and grief. He had tried to close his mind to that time in his life. It was long ago, and he had almost succeeded, but now at his father’s words he tasted again the reek of gangrene in the back of his throat and saw the package of treasure slide down into the cleft in the granite.

  ‘I have forgotten the way back, Papa. I could never find the way back.’

  Lothar was pulling at his arm. ‘Hendrick!’ he babbled. ‘Swart Hendrick! He knows – he can lead you.’

  ‘Hendrick.’ Manfred blinked. A name, half-forgotten, a fragment from his past; then suddenly and clearly an image of that great bald head, that black cannonball of a head, sprang into his mind. ‘Hendrick,’ he repeated. ‘But he is gone. I don’t know where. Gone back into the desert. I could never find him.’

  ‘No! No! Manie, Hendrick is here, somewhere close here on the Witwatersrand. He is a big man now, a chief among his own people.’

  ‘How do you know, Papa?’

  ‘The grapevine! In here we hear everything. They come in from the outside, bringing news and messages. We hear everything. Hendrick sent word to me. He had not forgotten me. We were comrades. We rode ten thousand miles together and fought a hundred battles. He sent word to me, to set a place where I could find him if ever I escaped these damned walls.’ Lothar leaned forward and seized his son’s head, pulling it close, placing his lips to his ear, whispering urgently and then drawing back. ‘You must go and find him there. He will lead you back to the granite hill below the Okavango river – and, oh sweet God, how I wish I could be there to ride into the desert with you again.’

  There was the clink of keys in the lock and Lothar shook his son’s arm desperately. ‘Promise me you will go, Manie.’