Power of the Sword Read online

  Suddenly Lothar snatched the pack from Hendrick’s shoulder and threw it to the ground. He ripped it open angrily and snatched out the small canvas roll in which he kept his surgical instruments and store of medicines.

  ‘Take Manie,’ he ordered Hendrick. ‘Wait for me in the gorge of the Gamas river, at the same place we camped on the march from Usakos. You remember it?’

  Hendrick nodded. ‘How long will it be before you come?’

  ‘As long as it takes them to die,’ said Lothar. He stood up and looked at Manfred.

  ‘Do what Hendrick tells you,’ he ordered.

  ‘Can’t I come with you, Pa?’

  Lothar did not bother to reply. He turned and strode back amongst the moonlit thorn trees and they watched him until he disappeared. Then Hendrick dropped to his knees and began re-rolling the pack.

  Sarah squatted beside the fire, her skirts pulled up around her skinny brown thighs, slitting her eyes against the smoke as she waited for the soot-blackened billy to boil.

  She looked up and saw Lothar standing at the edge of the firelight. She stared at him, and then slowly her pale delicate features seemed to crumple and the tears streamed down her cheeks, glistening in the light of the flames.

  ‘I thought you weren’t coming back,’ she whispered. ‘I thought you had gone.’

  Lothar shook his head abruptly, still so angry with his own weakness that he could not trust himself to speak. Instead he squatted across the fire from her and spread the canvas roll. Its contents were pitifully inadequate. He could draw a rotten tooth, lance a boil or a snakebite, or set a broken limb, but to treat runaway enteric there was almost nothing. He measured a spoonful of a black patent medicine, Chamberlain’s Famous Diarrhoea Remedy, into the tin mug and filled it with hot water from the billy.

  ‘Help me,’ he ordered Sarah and between them they lifted the youngest child into a sitting position. She was without weight and he could feel every bone in her tiny body, like that of a fledgling taken from the nest. It was hopeless.

  ‘She’ll be dead by morning,’ he thought, and held the mug to her lips. She did not last that long; she slipped away a few hours before dawn. The moment of death was ill-defined, and Lothar was not certain it was over until he felt for the child’s pulse at the carotid and felt the chill of eternity in her wasted flesh.

  The little boy lasted until noon and died with as little fuss as his sister. Lothar wrapped them in the same grey, soiled blanket and carried them in his arms to the communal grave that had been already dug at the edge of the camp. They made a small lonely little package on the sandy floor of the square excavation, at the end of the row of larger bodies.

  Sarah’s mother fought for her life.

  ‘God knows why she should want to go on living,’ Lothar thought, ‘there isn’t much in it for her.’ But she moaned and rolled her head and cried out in the delirium of fever. Lothar began to hate her for the stubborn struggle to survive that kept him beside her foul mattress, forced to share in her degradation, to touch her hot fever-racked skin and dribble liquid into her toothless mouth.

  At dusk he thought she had won. Her skin cooled and she was quieter. She reached out feebly for Sarah’s hand and tried to speak, staring up at her face as though she recognized her, the words catching and cawing in the back of her throat and thick yellow mucus bubbling in the corners of her lips.

  The effort was too much. She closed her eyes and seemed to sleep. Sarah wiped her lips and held on to the thin bony hand with the blue veins swelling under the thin skin.

  An hour later the woman sat up suddenly, and said clearly: ‘Sarah, where are you, child?’ then fell back and fought for a long strangling breath. The breath ended in the middle and her bony chest subsided gradually, and the flesh seemed to droop from her face like warm candlewax.

  This time Sarah walked beside him as Lothar carried the woman to the grave site. He laid her at the end of the row of corpses. Then they walked back to the hut.

  Sarah stood and watched Lothar roll the canvas pack, and her small white face was desolate. He went half a dozen paces and then turned back. She was quivering like a rejected puppy, but she had not moved.

  ‘All right,’ he sighed with resignation. ‘Come on, then.’ And she scampered to his side.

  ‘I won’t be any trouble,’ she gabbled, almost hysterical with relief. ‘I’ll help you. I can cook and sew and wash. I won’t be any trouble.’

  ‘What are you going to do with her?’ Hendrick asked. ‘She can’t stay with us. We could never do what we have to do with a child of her age.’

  ‘I could not leave her there,’ Lothar defended himself, ‘in that death camp.’

  ‘It would have been better for us.’ Hendrick shrugged. ‘But what do we do now?’

  They had left the camp in the bottom of the gorge and climbed to the top of the rocky wall. The children were far below on the sandbank at the edge of the only stagnant green pool in the gorge that still held water.

  They squatted side by side, Manfred with his right hand extended as he held the handline. They saw him lean back and strike, then heave the line in hand over hand. Sarah jumped up and her excited shrieks carried up to where they sat. They watched Manfred swing the kicking slippery black catfish out of the green water. It squirmed on the sand, glistening with wetness.

  ‘I will decide what to do with her,’ Lothar assured him, but Hendrick interrupted.

  ‘It better be soon. Every day we waste the waterholes in the north are drying out, and we still don’t even have the horses.’

  Lothar stuffed his clay pipe with fresh shag and thought about it. Hendrick was right; the girl complicated everything. He had to get rid of her somehow. Suddenly he looked up from the pipe and smiled.

  ‘My cousin,’ he said, and Hendrick was puzzled.

  ‘I did not know you had a cousin.’

  ‘Most of them perished in the camps, but Trudi survived.’

  ‘Where is she, this beloved cousin of yours?’

  ‘She lives on our road to the north. We’ll waste no time in dumping the brat with her.’

  ‘I don’t want to go,’ Sarah whispered miserably. ‘I don’t know your aunt. I want to stay here with you.’

  ‘Hush,’ Manfred cautioned her. ‘You’ll wake Pa and Henny.’ He pressed closer to her and touched her lips to quieten her. The fire had died down and the moon had set. Only the desert stars lit them, big as candles against the black velvet curtain of the sky.

  Sarah’s voice was so small now that he could barely make out the words, though her lips were inches from his ear. ‘You are the only friend I have ever had,’ she said, ‘and who will teach me to read and write?’

  Manfred felt an enormous weight of responsibility conferred upon him by her words. His feelings for her to this moment had been ambivalent. Like her he had never had friends of his own age, never attended a school, never lived in a town. His only teacher had been his father. He had lived all his life with grown men; his father and Hendrick and the rough hard men of the road camps and trawler fleet. There had been no woman to caress or gentle him.

  She had been his first female companion, though her weakness and silliness irritated him. He had to wait for her to catch up when they climbed the hills and she wept when he beat a squirming catfish to death or wrung the neck of a fat feathered brown francolin taken in one of his noose snares. However, she could make him laugh and he enjoyed her voice when she sang, thin but sweet and melodious. Then again although her adulation was sometimes cloying and excessive, he experienced an unaccountable sense of wellbeing when she was with him. She was quick to learn and in the few days they had been together she already had the alphabet by heart and the multiplication tables from two to ten.

  It would have been much better if she had been a boy, but then there was something else. The smell of her skin and the softness of her intrigued him. Her hair was so fine and silky. Sometimes he would touch it as though by accident and she would freeze and keep very still und
er his fingers, so that he was embarrassed and dropped his hand self-consciously.

  Occasionally she would brush against him like an affectionate cat and the strange pleasure this gave him was out of all proportion to the brief contact; and when they slept under the same blanket, he would awake in the night and listen to her breathing and her hair tickled his face.

  The road to Okahandja was long and hard and dusty. They had been on it for five days now. They travelled only in the early morning and late evening. In the noonday the men would rest up in the shade, and the two children could sneak away to talk and set snares or go over Sarah’s lessons. They did not play games of make-believe as other children of their age might have done. Their lives were too close to harsh reality. And now a new threat had been thrust upon them: the threat of separation which grew more menacing with each mile of road that fell behind them. Manfred could not find the words of comfort for her. His own sense of coming loss was aggravated by her declaration of friendship. She snuggled against him under the single blanket and the heat that emanated from her thin frail body was startling. Awkwardly he slipped an arm around her thin shoulders and her hair was soft against his cheek.

  ‘I’ll come back for you.’ He had not meant to say that. He had not even thought it before that moment.

  ‘Promise me.’ She twisted so that her lips were by his ear. ‘Promise me you will come back to fetch me.’

  ‘I promise I will come back to you,’ he repeated solemnly, appalled at what he was doing. He had no control over his future, could never be certain of honouring a promise like that.

  ‘When?’ She fastened on it eagerly.

  ‘We have something to do.’ Manfred did not know the details of what his father and Henny were planning. He only understood that it was arduous and somehow dangerous. ‘Something important. No, I can’t tell you about it. But, when it is over, we will come back for you.’

  It seemed to satisfy her. She sighed, and he felt the tension go out of her limbs. Her whole body softened with sleepiness, and her voice drifted into a low murmur.

  ‘You are my friend, aren’t you, Manie?’

  ‘Yes. I’m your friend.’

  ‘My best friend?’

  ‘Yes, your best friend.’

  She sighed again and fell asleep. He stroked her hair, so soft and fluffy under his hand, and he was assailed by the melancholy of impending loss. He felt that he would weep, but that was a girlish thing and he would not let it happen.

  The following evening they trudged ankle-deep in the floury white dust up another fold in the vast undulating plain, and when the children caught up with Lothar at the crest, he pointed wordlessly ahead.

  The cluster of iron roofs of the little frontier town of Okahandja shone in the lowering sunlight like mirrors, and in their midst was the single spire of a church. Also clad in corrugated iron, it barely topped the trees which grew around it.

  ‘We’ll be there after dark.’ Lothar eased his pack to his other shoulder and looked down at the girl. Her fine hair was plastered with dust and sweat to her forehead and cheeks, and her untidy sunstreaked blond pigtails stuck out behind her ears like horns. The sun had burned her so dark that were it not for the fair hair she might have been a Nama child. She was dressed as simply and her bare feet were white with floury dust.

  Lothar had considered and then rejected the idea of buying her a new dress and shoes at one of the little general-dealer’s stores along the road. The expense might have been worthwhile, for if the child were rejected by his cousin – He did not follow the thought further. He would clean her up a little at the borehole that supplied the town’s water.

  ‘The lady you will be staying with is Mevrou Trudi Bierman. She is a very kind religious lady.’

  Lothar had little in common with his cousin. They had not met in thirteen years. ‘She is married to the dominie of the Dutch Reformed Church here at Okahandja. He is also a fine God-fearing man. They have children your age. You will be very happy with them.’

  ‘Will he teach me to read like Manie does?’

  ‘Of course he will.’ Lothar was prepared to give any assurance to rid himself of the child. ‘He teaches his own children and you will be like one of them.’

  ‘Why can’t Manie stay with me?’

  ‘Manie has to come with me.’

  ‘Please, can’t I come with you too?’

  ‘No, you cannot. You’ll stay here – and I don’t want to go over that again.’

  At the reservoir of the borehole pump Sarah bathed the dust from her legs and arms and dampened her hair before re-plaiting her pigtails.

  ‘I’m ready,’ she told Lothar at last, and her lips trembled while he looked her over critically. She was a grubby little urchin, a burden upon them, but somehow a fondness for her had crept in upon him. He could not help but admire her spirit and her courage. Suddenly he found himself wondering if there was no other way than abandoning the child and it took an effort to thrust the idea aside and steel himself to what must be done.

  ‘Come on then.’ He took her hand and turned to Manfred. ‘You wait here with Henny.’

  ‘Please let me come with you, Pa,’ Manfred begged. ‘Just as far as the gate. Just to say goodbye to Sarah.’

  Lothar wavered and then agreed gruffly. ‘All right, but keep your mouth shut and remember your manners.’

  He led them down the narrow sanitary lane at the rear of the row of cottages until they came to the back gate of a larger house beside the church and obviously attached to it. There was no mistaking that it was the pastory. There was a light burning in the back room, the fierce white light of a Petromax lamp, and the bugs and moths were drumming against the wire screening that covered the back door.

  The sound of voices raised in a dolorous religious chant carried to them as they opened the gate and went up the kitchen path. When they reached the screen door they could see in the lighted kitchen beyond a family seated at a long deal table, singing together.

  Lothar knocked on the door and the hymn trailed away. From the head of the table a man rose and came towards the door. He was dressed in a black suit that bagged at the knees and elbows but was stretched tightly across his broad shoulders. His hair was thick and long, hanging in a greying mane to his shoulders and sprinkling the dark cloth with a flurry of dandruff.

  ‘Who is it?’ he demanded, in a voice trained to boom out from the pulpit. He flung open the screen door and peered out into the dark. He had a broad intelligent forehead with the arrowhead of a sharp widow’s peak emphasizing its depth, and his eyes were deep-set and fierce as those of a prophet from the Old Testament.

  ‘You!’ He recognized Lothar, but made no attempt to greet him further. Instead he looked back over his shoulder. ‘Mevrou, it is your godless cousin come in from the wilderness like Cain!’

  The fair-headed woman rose from the foot of the table, hushing the children and signalling them to remain in their seats. She was almost as tall as her husband, in her forties and well fleshed, with a rosy complexion and braids piled on top of her head in the Germanic fashion. She folded her thick creamy-skinned arms across her bulky shapeless bosom.

  ‘What do you want with us, Lothar De La Rey?’ she demanded. ‘This is the God-fearing home of Christian folk; we want nothing of your wanton ways and wild behaviour.’ She broke off as she noticed the children and stared at them with interest.

  ‘Hello, Trudi.’ Lothar drew Sarah forward into the light. ‘It has been many years. You look well and happy.’

  ‘I am happy in God’s love,’ his cousin agreed. ‘But you know I have seldom been well.’ She assumed an expression of suffering and Lothar went on quickly.

  ‘I am giving you another chance of Christian service.’ He pushed Sarah forward. ‘This poor little orphan – she is alone. She needs a home. You could take her in, Trudi, and God will love you for it.’

  ‘Is it another of your—’ His cousin glanced back into the kitchen at the interested faces of her own two daughters, and
then lowered her voice and hissed at him, ‘Another of your bastards?’

  ‘Her family died in the typhoid epidemic.’

  It was a mistake. He saw her recoil from the girl. ‘That was weeks ago. She is free of the disease.’

  Trudi relaxed a little and Lothar went on quickly. ‘I cannot care for her. We are travelling, and she needs a woman.’

  ‘We have too many mouths already—’ she began, but her husband interrupted her.

  ‘Come here, child,’ he boomed and Lothar shoved Sarah towards him. ‘What is your name?’

  ‘Sarah Bester, Oom.’

  ‘So you are of the Volk?’ the tall dominie demanded. ‘One of the true Afrikaner blood?’

  Sarah nodded uncertainly.

  ‘And your dead mother and father were wed in the Reformed Church?’ She nodded again. ‘And you believe in the Lord God of Israel?’

  ‘Yes, Oom. My mother taught me,’ Sarah whispered.

  ‘Then we cannot turn the child away,’ he told his wife. ‘Bring her in, woman. God will provide. God always provides for his chosen people.’

  Trudi Bierman sighed theatrically and reached for Sarah’s arm. ‘So thin, and filthy as a Nama piccaninny.’

  ‘And you, Lothar De La Rey,’ the dominie pointed a finger at him. ‘Has not the merciful Lord yet shown you the error of your ways, and placed your feet on the path of righteousness?’

  ‘Not yet, dear cousin.’ Lothar backed away from the door, his relief undisguised.

  The dominie’s attention flicked to the boy standing in the shadows behind Lothar. ‘Who is this?’

  ‘My son, Manfred.’ Lothar placed a protective arm over the boy’s shoulder, and the dominie came closer and stooped to study his face closely. His great dark beard bristled and his eyes were wild and fanatical, but Manfred stared directly into them, and saw them change. They warmed and lightened with the sparkle of good humour and compassion.

  ‘Do I frighten you, Jong?’ His voice mellowed, and Manfred shook his head.

  ‘No, Oomie – or not too much anyway.’