Power of the Sword

by Wilbur Smith

  ‘He is going to finish me off,’ he thought, and only then realized that he still had the Beretta in his right hand.

  Desperately he hooked his left elbow over the pine sapling and pointed the Beretta up at the rim of the cliff above his head.

  Once more the killer’s head and shoulders appeared against the sky, and he was swinging the long barrel of the Mauser downwards; but the weapon was awkward to point at this angle and Shasa fired an instant before it could bear. He heard the light bullet of the pistol strike against flesh, and the killer grunted and disappeared from view. A moment afterwards he heard someone else shout from a distance, and recognized Blaine’s voice.

  Then the killer’s running footsteps moved swiftly away as he set off along the path once more, and a minute later Blaine looked down at Shasa from the clifftop.

  ‘Hold on!’ Blaine’s face was flushed with exertion and his voice unsteady. He pulled the thick leather belt from his trouser top and buckled it into a loop.

  Lying flat on his belly at the top of the cliff, he lowered the looped belt and Shasa hooked his arm through it. Even though Blaine was a powerful man with abnormal arm and chest development from polo practice, they struggled for minutes before he could drag Shasa over the top of the cliff.

  They lay together for a few moments; and then Shasa pulled himself unsteadily to his feet and staggered off along the pathway in pursuit of the fugitive. Within a dozen paces Blaine pulled ahead of him, running strongly and his example spurred Shasa. He kept up, and Blaine gasped over his shoulder.

  ‘Blood!’ He pointed to the wet red speckles on a flat stone in the pathway. ‘You hit him!’

  They came out onto the wide bridle path, and started down, running shoulder to shoulder now, helped by the gradient of the descent, but they had not reached the first hairpin bend when they heard an engine start in the forest below.

  ‘He’s got a car!’ Blaine panted as the engine whined into a crescendo, then the sound of it receded swiftly. They pulled up and listened to it dwindle into silence. Shasa’s legs could hold him up no longer. He sank into a heap in the middle of the road.

  There was a telephone at the Cecilia Forestry Station and Shasa got through to Inspector Nel at CID headquarters and gave him a description of the killer.

  ‘You’ll have to move fast. The man has obviously got his escape planned.’

  The mountain club kept a lightweight stretcher at the forestry station, for this mountain took many human lives each year. The forester gave them six of his black labourers to carry it, and accompanied them back up the bridle path and along the mountain rim to the head of Skeleton Gorge.

  The women were there. Centaine and Anna were in tears, clinging to each other for comfort. They had spread one of the rugs over the dead man.

  Shasa knelt beside the body and lifted the corner of the rug. In death Sir Garry Courtney’s features had fallen in, so that his nose was arched and beaky, his closed eyelids were in deep cavities, but there was about him a gentle dignity so that he resembled the death mask of a fragile Caesar.

  Shasa kissed his forehead and the skin was cool and velvety smooth against his lips.

  When he stood up, Field-Marshal Smuts laid a hand of comfort on his shoulder. ‘I’m sorry, my boy,’ the old field-marshal said. ‘That bullet was meant for me.’

  Manfred De La Rey pulled off the road, steering with one hand. He did not leave the driver’s seat of the Morris, and he kept the engine running while he unbuttoned the front of his overalls.

  The bullet had entered just below and in front of his armpit, punching into the thick pad of the pectoral muscle and it had angled upwards. He could find no exit wound, the bullet was still lodged in his body, and when he groped gently around the back of his own shoulder, he found a swelling that was so tender that he almost screamed involuntarily as he touched it.

  The bullet was lying just under the skin, but it did not appear to have penetrated the chest cavity. He wadded his handkerchief over the wound in his armpit and buttoned the overalls. He checked his watch. It was a few minutes before eleven o’clock, just twenty-three minutes since he had fired the shot that would set his people free.

  A sense of passionate soaring triumph overrode the pain of his wound. He pulled back onto the road and drove sedately around the base of the mountain, down the main road through Woodstock. At the gates of the railway yards he showed his pass to the gatekeeper and went through to park the Morris outside the restrooms for off-duty firemen and engine drivers.

  He left the Mauser under the seat of the Morris. Both the weapon and the vehicle would be taken care of. He crossed quickly to the back door of the restroom and they were waiting for him inside.

  Roelf leapt to his feet anxiously as he saw the blood on the blue overalls.

  ‘Are you all right? What happened?’

  ‘Smuts is dead,’ Manfred said, and his savage joy was transmitted to them. They did not cheer or speak, but stood quietly, savouring the moment on which history would hinge.

  Roelf broke the silence after a few seconds. ‘You are hurt.’

  While one of the stormjagters went out and drove the Morris away, Roelf helped Manfred strip off his soiled overalls. There was very little blood now, but the flesh around the wound was swollen and bruised. The bullet-hole itself was a black puncture that wept watery pink lymph. Roelf dressed and bound it up with bandages from a railway first-aid kit.

  Because Manfred had very little use of his left arm, Roelf lathered the black beard and shaved it off with a straight razor for him. With the beard gone Manfred was years younger, handsome and clean-cut once again, but pale from loss of blood and the weakness of his wound. They helped him into a clean pair of overalls and Roelf set the fireman’s cap on his head.

  ‘We will meet again soon,’ Roelf told him. ‘And I am proud to be your friend. From now on glory will follow you all the days of your life.’

  The engine driver came forward. ‘We must go,’ he said. Roelf and Manfred shook hands and then Manfred turned away and followed the driver out of the restroom and down the platform to the waiting locomotive.

  The police stopped the northbound goods train at Worcester Station. They opened and searched all the trucks and a constable climbed into the cab of the locomotive and searched that also.

  ‘What is the trouble?’ the engine driver demanded.

  ‘There has been a murder. Some bigwig was shot on Table Mountain this morning. We’ve got a description of the killer. There are police roadblocks on all the roads and we are searching every motor vehicle and ship and train—’

  ‘Who was killed?’ Manfred asked, and the constable shrugged.

  ‘I don’t know, my friend, but judging by the fuss it’s somebody important.’ He climbed down from the cab, and a few mintues later the signals changed to green and they rolled out of the station heading north.

  By the time they reached Bloemfontein, Manfred’s shoulder had swollen into a hard purple hump and the pain was insupportable. He sat hunched in a corner of the cab, moaning softly, teetering on the brink of consciousness, the rustle of dark wings filling his head.

  Roelf had telephoned ahead, and there were friends to meet him and smuggle him out of the Bloemfontein railway yards.

  ‘Where are we going?’

  ‘A doctor,’ they told him, and reality broke up into a patchwork of darkness and pain.

  He was aware of the choking reek of chloroform, and when he woke he was in a bed in a sunny but monastically furnished room. The shoulder was bound up in crisp white bandages, and despite the lingering nausea of the anaesthetic, he felt whole again.

  There was a man sitting in the chair beside the window, and as soon as he realized Manfred was awake, he came to him.

  ‘How do you feel?’

  ‘Not too bad. Has it happened – the rising? Have our people seized power?’

  The man looked at him strangely. ‘You do not know?’ he asked.

  ‘I only know that we have succeeded—
’ Manfred began, but the man fetched a newspaper and laid it on the bed. He stood beside Manfred as he read the headlines:

  ASSASSINATION ON TABLE MOUNTAIN

  OB BLAMED FOR KILLING OF PROMINENT HISTORIAN

  SMUTS ORDERS ARREST AND INTERNMENT OF 600

  Manfred stared uncomprehendingly at the news-sheet, and the man told him, ‘You killed the wrong man. Smuts has the excuse he wanted. All our leaders have been seized, and they are searching for you. There is a manhunt across the land. You cannot stay here. We expect the police to be here at any minute.’

  Manfred was passed on and he left the city riding in the back of a truck under a load of stinking dry hides. The Ossewa Brandwag had been decimated by the arrests, and those members remaining at liberty were shaken and afraid, all of them running for cover. None of them wanted to take the risk of harbouring the fugitive. He was passed on again and again.

  The plan had seen no further ahead than the assassination and successful revolt, after which Manfred would have emerged as a Volk hero and taken his rightful place in the councils of the republican government. Now it was run and hide, sick and weak, a price of five thousand pounds on his head. Nobody wanted him; he was a dangerous risk and they passed him on as quickly as they could find someone else to take him.

  In the published lists of those arrested and interned in the government crackdown, he found many names he knew, and with dismay he read Roelf’s name, and that of the Reverend Tromp Bierman amongst them. He wondered how Sarah, Aunt Trudi and the girls would fare now, but he found it difficult to think or concentrate, for despair had unmanned him, and he knew the terror of a hunted and wounded animal.

  It took eight days to make the journey to Johannesburg. He had not deliberately set out for the Witwatersrand, but circumstances and the whim of his helpers led him that way. By rail and truck and, later, when the wound began to heal and his strength returned, at night and on foot across the open veld, he at last reached the city.

  He had an address, his last contact with the brotherhood and he took the tramcar from the main railway station along the Braamfontein ridge and watched the street numbers as they passed.

  The number he needed was 36. It was one in a row of semi-detached cottages, and he started to rise to leave the tramcar at the next stop. Then he saw the blue police uniform in the doorway of number 36 and he sank down in his seat again and rode the tramcar to its terminus.

  He left it there and went into a Greek café across the road. He ordered a cup of coffee, paying for it with his last few coins, and sipped it slowly, hunched over the cup, trying to think.

  He had avoided a dozen police roadblocks and searches in these last eight days, but he sensed that he had exhausted his luck. There was no hiding-place open to him any longer. The road led from here on to the gallows.

  He stared out of the greasy plate-glass window of the café and the street sign across the road caught his eye. Something stirred in his memory, but it eluded his first efforts to grasp it. Then suddenly he felt the lift of his spirits and another weak glimmer of hope.

  He left the café and followed the road whose name he had recognized. The area deteriorated quickly into a slum of shanties and hovels and he saw no more white faces on the rutted unmade street. The black faces at the windows or in the reeking alleyways watched him impassively across that unfathomable void which separates the races in Africa.

  He found what he was looking for. It was a small general dealer’s store crowded with black shoppers, noisy and laughing, the women with their babies strapped upon their backs, bargaining across the counter for sugar and soap, paraffin and salt, but the hubbub descended into silence when a white man entered the shop, and they gave way for him respectfully, not looking directly at him.

  The proprietor was an elderly Zulu with a fluffy beard of white wool, dressed in a baggy Western-style suit. He left the black woman he was serving and came to Manfred, inclining his head deferentially to listen to Manfred’s request.

  ‘Come with me, Nkosi.’ He led Manfred through to the storeroom at the back of the shop.

  ‘You will have to wait,’ he said, ‘perhaps a long time,’ and he left him there.

  Manfred slumped down on a pile of sugar sacks. He was hungry and exhausted and the shoulder was starting to throb again. He fell asleep and was roused by a hand on his shoulder and a deep voice in his ear.

  ‘How did you know where to look for me?’

  Manfred struggled to his feet. ‘My father told me where to find you,’ he answered. ‘Hello, Swart Hendrick.’

  ‘It has been many years, little Manie.’ The big Ovambo grinned at him through the black gap of missing teeth; his head, laced with scars, was black and shiny as a cannonball. ‘Many years, but I never doubted we would meet again. Never once in all those years. The gods of the wilderness have bound us together, little Manie. I knew you would come.’

  The two men sat alone in the back room of Swart Hendrick’s house. It was one of the few brick-built dwellings in the shanty town of Drake’s Farm. However, the bricks were unbaked and the building was not so ostentatious as to stand out from the hovels that crowded close around it. Swart Hendrick had long ago learned not to draw the attention of the white police to his wealth.

  In the front room the women were cooking and working, while the children bawled or shouted with laughter round their feet. As befitted his station in life, Swart Hendrick had six town wives who lived together in an amiable symbiotic relationship. The possessive jealousy of monogamistic Western women was totally alien to them. Senior wives took a major part in the selection of the junior wives and gained considerable prestige from their multiplicity, nor did they resent the maintenance sent to the country wives and their offspring or their spouse’s periodic visits to the country kraal to add to the number of those offspring. They considered themselves all part of one family. When the children from the country were old enough to be sent into the city for the furtherance of their education and fortune, they found themselves with many fostermothers and could expect the same love and discipline as they had received in the kraal.

  The smaller children had the run of the house and one of them crawled mother-naked into Swart Hendrick’s lap as he sat on his carved stool, the sign of rank of a tribal chieftain. Although he was deep in discussion with Manfred, he fondled the little one casually, as he would a favourite puppy, and when the beer pot was empty, he clapped his hands and one of the junior wives, the pretty moon-faced Zulu or the nubile Basuto with breasts as round and hard as ostrich eggs, would bring in a new pot and kneel before Hendrick to present it to him.

  ‘So, little Manie, we have spoken of everything, and said all that is to be said, and we come back to the same problem.’ Swart Hendrick lifted the beer pot and swallowed a mouthful of the thick white bubbling gruel. He smacked his lips, then wiped the half moon of beer from his upper lip with the back of his forearm and handed the pot across to Manfred. ‘That problem is this. At every railway station and on every road the white police are searching for you. They have even offered a price for you – and what a price, little Manie. They will give five thousand pounds for you. How many cattle and women could a man buy with that amount of money?’ He broke off to consider the question and shook his head in wonder at the answer. ‘You ask me to help you to leave Johannesburg and to cross the great river in the north. What would the white police do if they caught me? Would they hang me on the same tree as they hang you – or would they only send me to break rocks in the prison of Ou Baas Smuts and King Georgy?’ Swart Hendrick sighed theatrically. ‘It is a heavy question, little Manie. Can you give me an answer?’

  ‘You have been as a father to me, Hennie,’ Manfred said quietly. ‘Does a father leave his son for the hyena and the vultures?’

  ‘If I am your father, little Manie, why then is your face white and mine black?’ Hendrick smiled. ‘There are no debts between us, they were all paid long ago.’

  ‘My father and you were brothers.’

&nb
sp; ‘How many summers have burned since those days,’ Hendrick mourned the passage of time with a sorrowful shake of his head. ‘And how the world and all those in it have changed.’

  ‘There is one thing that never changes – not even over the years, Hennie.’

  ‘What is that, oh child with a white face who claims my paternity?’

  ‘A diamond, my black father. A diamond never changes.’

  Hendrick nodded. ‘Let us speak then of a diamond.’

  ‘Not one diamond,’ Manfred said. ‘Many diamonds, a bagful of diamonds that lie in a faraway place that only you and I know of.’

  ‘The risks are great,’ Hendrick told his brother. ‘And doubt lurks in my mind like a man-eating lion lying in thick bush. Perhaps the diamonds are where the white boy says they are, but the lion of doubt still waits for me. The father was a devious man, hard and without mercy – I sense that the son has grown to be like the father. He speaks of friendship between us, but I no longer feel the warmth in him.’

  Moses Gama stared into the fire; his eyes were dark and inscrutable. ‘He tried to kill Smuts,’ he mused aloud. ‘He is of the hard Boers like those of old, the ones that slaughtered our people at Blood river and shattered the power of the great chiefs. They have been defeated this time, as they were in 1914, but they have not been destroyed. They will rise to fight again, these hard Boers, when this white men’s war across the sea ends, they will call out their impis and carry the battle to Smuts and his party once again. It is the way of the white man – and I have studied his history – that when peace comes, they often reject those who fought hardest during the battle. I sense that in the next conflict the whites will reject Smuts and that the hard Boers will triumph – and this white boy is one of them.’