Power of the Sword

by Wilbur Smith

  ‘Marvellous!’ Shasa’s kiss was full of gratitude and relief and genuine pleasure at being with her again, and he began to tell her all about it, but she cut him off.

  ‘Later,’ she said. ‘Right now I want you to arrange for the Rapide to be refuelled and checked. We are flying up to Johannesburg tomorrow.’

  In Johannesburg they stayed at the Carlton. Centaine owned thirty per cent of the equity in the hotel company, and the royal suite was at her disposal whenever she was in town.

  The hotel would soon be in need of major renovation, but it occupied a prime position in the centre of Johannesburg. While she dressed for dinner, Centaine weighed the possibility of having the old building pulled down and redeveloping the site. She would have her architects prepare a report, she decided, as she put business out of her mind and devoted the rest of the evening and all of her attention to Blaine.

  Taking a silly chance of alerting the gossips, she and Blaine danced until two in the morning in the nightclub on the top floor of the hotel.

  The next day Blaine had a full series of meetings at the Union Buildings in Pretoria, his excuse to Isabella for leaving Cape Town, so Centaine could spend the day with Shasa. In the morning there was a sale of yearlings at the showgrounds, but the prices were ridiculously high and they ended up without having bought a single animal. They lunched at the East African pavilion, where, more than the food, Centaine enjoyed the envious and speculative glances of the women at the surrounding tables.

  In the afternoon they went to the zoo. Between feeding the monkeys and rowing on the lake, they discussed Shasa’s plans for the future and she was delighted to learn that he had lost none of his determination to take up his duties and responsibilities with Courtney Mining and Finance as soon as he had obtained his Master’s degree.

  They arrived back at the Carlton with plenty of time to change for the boxing. Blaine, already in his dinner jacket, held a whisky and soda in his hand and he sprawled in one of the armchairs and watched Centaine complete her toilet. She enjoyed that. It was playing at being married again, and she called him to hook in her ear-rings and then paraded for his approval, pirouetting to spread her long skirts.

  ‘I have never been to a boxing match before, Blaine. Aren’t we terribly over-dressed?’

  ‘I assure you that black tie is de rigueur.’

  ‘Oh God, I’m so nervous. I don’t know what I’m going to say to him, even if I get a chance—’ she broke off. ‘You did manage to get tickets, didn’t you?’

  He showed them to her and smiled. ‘Front row, and I have arranged for a car and driver.’

  Shasa drifted into the suite with a white silk scarf draped casually over the shoulders of his dinner jacket, and his black tie minutely and artfully asymmetrical so that it could never be mistaken for one of the modern clip-on monstrosities.

  ‘He looks so magnificent.’ Centaine’s heart swelled at sight of him. ‘How ever am I going to preserve him from the harpies?’

  He kissed her before going to the cabinet and pouring her customary glass of champagne.

  ‘Can I freshen your whisky, sir?’ he asked Blaine.

  ‘Thanks, but one is my limit, Shasa,’ Blaine declined, and Shasa poured himself a dry ginger-ale. That was one thing she didn’t have to worry about, Centaine thought, liquor would never be one of Shasa’s weaknesses.

  ‘Well, Mater,’ Shasa raised his glass, ‘here’s to your newfound interest in the gentlemanly art of boxing. Are you versed in the general objectives of the game?’

  ‘I think two young men get into a ring and try to kill each other – is that right?’

  ‘That, Centaine, is exactly right,’ Blaine laughed. He never used an endearment in front of Shasa, and not for the first time she wondered what Shasa thought of her and Blaine. He must suspect, surely, but she had enough to worry about this evening without opening that dark door. She drank her champagne and then, gorgeous in diamonds and silks, on the arms of the two most important men in her world, she swept out to the waiting limousine.

  The streets of the campus of the University of the Witwatersrand around the gymnasium were solid with parked vehicles and others moving nose to tail up the hill, while the sidewalks were packed with a jostling excited crowd of students and fight fans from the general public hurrying towards the hall, so their driver was forced to drop them off two hundred yards short of the entrance, and they joined the throng on foot.

  The atmosphere in the hall was noisy and expectant, and as they took their reserved seats Centaine was relieved to see that everyone in the first three rows was wearing evening dress and that there were almost as many ladies as gentlemen in the crowd. She had had nightmares about being the only female in the hall.

  She sat through the preliminary bouts, trying to appear interested in the lecture she was receiving from both Blaine and Shasa on the finer points of the contests, but the fighters in the lower weight divisions were so small and scrawny that they reminded her of underfed game cocks, and the flurry of action was fast enough to trick the eye. Besides, her mind and expectations were racing ahead to her first sight of the man she had come to see.

  Another bout ended; the fighters, bruised and slick with sweat, climbed down from the ring, and an expectant hush fell on the hall, and heads began craning around towards the dressing-room.

  Blaine checked his programme and murmured, ‘This is it!’

  Then a bloodthirsty roar went up from the mass of spectators.

  ‘Here he comes.’ Blaine touched her arm, but she found she could not turn her head.

  ‘I wish I had never come,’ she thought, and shrank down in her seat. ‘I don’t want him to see me.’

  The light heavyweight challenger, Manfred De La Rey, came down to the ring first, attended by his coach and his two seconds, and the block of Stellenbosch students let out a roar and brandished their colour banners, launching into the Varsity war cry. They were immediately answered by the Wits students opposite with cheers and jeers and stamping of feet. The pandemonium was painful to the eardrums as Manfred climbed up into the ring and did a little shuffling dance, holding his gloved hands above his head, the silk gown swinging from his shoulders like a cloak.

  His hair had grown longer and unfashionably it was not dressed with Brylcreem, but rippled around his head like a gilded cloud as he moved. His jaw was strong, stopping just short of heaviness, and the bones of forehead and cheek were prominent and cleanly chiselled, but his eyes dominated all his other features – pale and implacable as those of one of the big predatory cats, emphasized by his dark brows.

  His shoulders were wide, descending in an inverted pyramid to his hips and the long clean lines of his legs, and his body had been pared of all fat and loose flesh, so that each individual muscle was visible beneath the skin.

  Shasa stiffened in his seat as he recognized him. He chewed angrily, grinding his teeth together as he remembered the impact of those fists into his flesh and the suffocating slime of dead fish engulfing him as clearly as if the intervening years had never been.

  ‘I know him, Mater,’ he growled between clenched teeth. ‘He is the one I fought on the jetty at Walvis Bay.’ Centaine laid a hand on his arm to restrain him, but she did not look at him nor speak. Instead, she stole a single glance at Blaine’s face, and what she saw distressed her.

  Blaine’s expression was grim, and she could feel the anger and the hurt in him. He might have been understanding and magnanimous a thousand miles from here, but with the living proof of her wantonness before him, he could only be thinking of the man who had made this bastard on her, and her acquiescence – nay, her joyous participation in the act. He was thinking of her body which should be his alone, used by a stranger, by an enemy against whom he had risked his life in battle.

  ‘Oh God, why did I come?’ She tortured herself, and then she felt something melt and change shape inside of her and knew the answer.

  ‘Flesh of my flesh,’ she thought. ‘Blood of my blood.’


  And she remembered the weight of him in her womb, and the spasm of burgeoning life deep within her, and all the instincts of motherhood welled and threatened to choke her, and the angry birth cry rang again in her head, deafening her.

  ‘My son!’ she almost cried aloud. ‘My own son.’

  The magnificent fighting man in the ring turned his head in her direction and saw her for the first time. He dropped his hands to his sides, and he lifted his chin and stared at her with such concentrated venom, with such bitter hatred in those yellow eyes that it was like the blow of a spiked mace in her unprotected face. Then Manfred De La Rey deliberately turned his back on her and strode to his corner.

  The three of them, Blaine, Shasa and Centaine, sat rigid and silent in the midst of the roaring, chanting, heaving multitude. Not one of the three looked at the others, and only Centaine moved, twisting the corner of her sequined shawl in her lap and chewing on her lower lip to prevent it quivering.

  The champion jumped up into the ring. Ian Rushmore was an inch shorter than Manfred, but broader and deeper in the chest, with long simian arms heavily muscled, and a neck so short and thick that his head seemed to ride directly on his shoulders. Thick, coarse black hair curled out of the top of his vest and he looked powerful and dangerous as a wild boar.

  The bell rang and in the blood roar of the crowd the two fighters came together in the middle of the ring. Centaine gasped involuntarily at the thud of gloved fist on flesh and bone. Compared to the flickering blows of the lighter smaller men in the preceding bouts, this was like the meeting of gladiators.

  She could not see any advantage between the two men as they wheeled and came together and their fists struck those terrible blows that bounced off solid guards of arms and gloves. Then they weaved and ducked and joined again while the crowd around her bellowed in a mindless frenzy.

  As abruptly as it had begun, it ended, and the fighters separated and went back to the little groups of white-clad seconds who hovered over them, tending them lovingly, sponging and kneading their flesh, fanning and massaging and whispering to them.

  Manfred took a mouthful from the bottle that his big black bearded coach held to his mouth. He sluiced it around his mouth and then turned and looked at Centaine again, singling her out of the crowd with those pale eyes, and deliberately spat the mouthful of water into the bucket at his feet without breaking his gaze. She knew that it was for her, he was spitting his anger at her. She quailed before his rage and she barely heard Blaine murmur beside her.

  ‘I scored that round as a draw. De La Rey gave nothing away, and Rushmore is wary of him.’

  Then the boxers were on their feet again, circling and jabbing and pumping leather-clad fists, grunting like labouring bulls at punches thrown and received, their bodies shining with the running sweat of their exertions and bright red patches glowing on their bodies where blows landed. It went on and on, and Centaine felt a sickness rising in her at the primeval savagery of it, at the sounds and smell and spectacle of violence and pain.

  ‘Rushmore took that one,’ Blaine said quietly, as the round ended, and she actually hated him for his calmness. She felt a clammy sweat break out on her face and her nausea threatened to overwhelm her as Blaine went on, ‘De La Rey will have to end it in the next two rounds. If he doesn’t, Rushmore is going to grind him down. He’s getting more confident all the time.’

  She wanted to jump to her feet and hurry out of the hall, but her legs would not function. Then the bell rang and the two men were out there again in the glare of floodlights, and she tried to look away but could not – so she stared in sick fascination and saw it happen, saw every vivid detail of it, and knew she would never forget it.

  She saw the red leather glove blur as it tore through a tiny gap in the defending circle of arms, and she saw the other man’s head snap as though it had reached the limit of the hangman’s noose as his body fell through the trap. She saw each individual droplet of sweat burst from his sodden locks, as though a heavy stone had been flung into a deep pool, and the features below twisted grotesquely out of shape by the impact into a carnival mask of agony.

  She heard the blow, and the snap of something breaking, teeth or bone or sinew, and she screamed, but her scream was lost and swallowed up in the high surf of sound that burst from a thousand throats around her, and she thrust her fingers into her own mouth as the blows kept coming, so fast that they dissolved before her eyes, so fast that the shocking thuds of impact blended like the sound of an eggbeater in thick cream, and flesh turned to red ruin beneath them. She went on screaming as she watched the terrible killing yellow rage in the eyes of the son she had borne, watched him become a ravening murderous beast, and the man before him wilted and broke, and reeled away on boneless legs, and went down twisting as he fell and rolled onto his back, staring up at the overhead lights with blind eyes, snoring in the thick bright flood that throbbed from his crushed nose into his open mouth. Manfred De La Rey danced over him, still possessed by the killing rage, so that Centaine expected him to throw back his head and howl like a wolf, or throw himself upon the broken thing at his feet and rip the bleeding scalp from its head and brandish it high in obscene triumph.

  ‘Take me away, Blaine,’ she sobbed. ‘Get me out of this place,’ and his arms lifted her to her feet and carried her out into the night.

  Behind her the blood roar faded, and she gulped down the cold sweet highveld air as though she had been rescued at the very point of drowning.

  ‘The Lion of the Kalahari writes his own ticket I to Berlin,’ the headlines crowed, and Centaine shuddered with the memory, and dropped the newspaper over the edge of the bed and reached for the telephone.

  ‘Shasa, how soon can we leave for home?’ she demanded, as soon as his voice, blurred with sleep, sounded in her earpiece, and Blaine came through from the bathroom of the hotel suite with shaving lather on his cheeks.

  ‘You have decided?’ he asked as soon as she hung up.

  ‘There is no point in even trying to speak to him,’ she replied. ‘You saw how he looked at me.’

  ‘Perhaps there will be another time—’ he tried to comfort her. But he saw the despair in her eyes and he went to hold her.

  David Abrahams improved his best time for the 200-metre sprint by almost a second on the first day of the Olympic trials. However, in reaction he did not do as well as expected on the second day when he could only just win his final heat in the 400 by half a metre. Still, his name was high on the list that was read out at the banquet and ball that closed the five days of the track and field trials, and Shasa, who was sitting beside him, was the first to shake his hand and pound him between the shoulder blades. David was going to Berlin.

  Two weeks later the polo trials were held at the Inanda Club in Johannesburg and Shasa was selected for the ‘B’ team of ‘possibles’ against Blaine’s ‘A’ team of ‘probables’ for the last match of the final day.

  Sitting high in the grandstand, Centaine watched Shasa play one of the most inspired games of his career, but with despair in her heart knew that it was still not good enough. Shasa never missed an interception, nor mishit a stroke during the first five chukkas, and once even took the ball out from under the nose of Blaine’s pony with a display of audacious riding that brought every person in the grandstand to their feet. Still it was not good enough, she knew.

  Clive Ramsay, Shasa’s rival for the position of number two in the team that would go to Berlin, had played well all week. He was a man of forty-two years, with a record of solid achievement behind him, and he had seconded Blaine Malcomess in almost thirty international matches. His polo career was just reaching its peak, and Centaine knew that the selectors could not afford to drop him in favour of the younger, more dashing, probably more gifted, but certainly less experienced and therefore less reliable rider.

  She could almost see them nodding their heads sagely, puffing their cigars and agreeing. ‘Young Courtney will get his chance next time,’ and she was hating them for it
in advance – Blaine Malcomess included – when suddenly there was a howl from the crowd around her and she jumped to her feet with them.

  Shasa, thank God, was out of it, galloping wide down the sideline ready to take the cross as his own number one, another thrusting young player, challenged Clive Ramsay in centre field.

  It was probably not deliberate, more likely the consequence of a reckless urge to shine, but Shasa’s team-mate fouled Clive Ramsay murderously on the interception, knocking his pony onto its knees and sending Clive somersaulting from the saddle onto the iron-hard ground. Later that afternoon X-ray examination confirmed a multiple fracture of Ramsay’s femur which the orthopaedic surgeon was subsequently forced to open up and wire.

  ‘No polo for at least a year,’ he ordered, when Clive Ramsay came out of the anaesthetic.

  So when the selectors went into conclave, Centaine waited anxiously, allowing herself renewed hope. As he had warned Centaine he would, Blaine Malcomess excused himself from the selectors’ room when Shasa’s name came up. But when he was called back in, the chairman grunted.

  ‘Very well, young Courtney gets the ride in Clive’s place.’ And despite himself he felt a lift of elation and pride, Shasa Courtney was the closest he would ever get to having a son of his own.

  As soon as he could, Blaine telephoned Centaine with the news. ‘It won’t be announced until Friday, but Shasa has got his ticket.’

  Centaine was beside herself. ‘Oh Blaine, darling, how will I contain myself until Friday?’ she cried. ‘Oh, won’t it be fun going to Berlin together, the three of us! We can take the Daimler and drive across Europe. Shasa has never visited Mort Homme. We can spend a few days in Paris, and you can take me to dinner at Laserre. There is so much to arrange, but we can talk about it when I see you on Saturday.’

  ‘Saturday?’ He had forgotten, she could hear it in his voice.

  ‘Sir Garry’s birthday – the picnic on the mountain!’ She sighed with exasperation. ‘Oh Blaine, it’s one of the few times in the year we can be together – legitimately!’