Men of Men Read online

  The two boys saw his face, recognized his mood, and were immediately silent, applying themselves with complete absorption to the unappetizing grey gruel in their bowls.

  A shadow fell across the group, and Zouga looked up irritably, squinting into the early sunlight with the spoon half raised to his lips. ‘What is it, Bazo?’

  ‘Pick-ups, Bakela.’ The tall young Matabele used the English words. ‘Pick-ups.’ Zouga grunted.

  ‘Let me see it.’ Zouga was immediately uninterested. Almost certainly it would be a worthless chip of quartz or rock crystal. But Bazo placed a small bundle wrapped in a dirty scrap of cloth beside Zouga’s bowl.

  ‘Well, open it,’ Zouga ordered; and Bazo picked the knot, and spread the cloth.

  ‘Glass!’ thought Zouga disgustedly. There was almost a handful of it, chips and pieces, the biggest not much bigger than the head of a wax Vesta.

  ‘Glass!’ and he made the gesture of sweeping it away, and then stayed his hand as the sunlight fell on the pile and a shaft of it pricked his eyes in a rainbow burst of colours.

  Slowly, disbelievingly, he changed the gesture of dismissal and reached hesitantly, almost reverently for the glittering heap, but Jordan forestalled him.

  With a shriek of joy the child’s small graceful fingers danced over the pile.

  ‘Diamonds, Papa,’ he screamed. ‘They are diamonds, real diamonds.’

  ‘Are you sure, Jordie?’ Zouga asked the question unnecessarily, his voice hoarse, realizing it was too good to be true. There must be many hundreds of precious stones in the pile, small, very small, but of what superb colour, white, ice-white, seeming to crackle like lightning they were so bright.

  Still hesitantly Zouga took one of the largest stones from Jordan’s fingers.

  ‘Are you sure, Jordie?’ he repeated.

  ‘They are diamonds, Papa. All of them.’

  Zouga’s last doubts faded, to be replaced immediately by a deeper uncertainty.

  ‘Bazo,’ he said. ‘There are so many—’ And then something else puzzled him. Quickly he picked out twenty of the largest stones and stood them in a row across the top of the packing case.

  ‘The same colour, they are all the same colour, exactly!’

  Zouga shook his head, frowning, confused; and then suddenly the shadows in his eyes cleared.

  ‘Oh my God,’ he whispered, and slowly all blood drained from his face, leaving the skin dirty yellow like a man ten days gone in malaria fever.

  ‘The same; they are all the same. The breaks are clean and fresh.’

  Slowly he lifted his eyes to Bazo’s face.

  ‘Bazo, how big—’ his voice roughened and dried, so that he had to clear his throat, ‘how big was the stone before – before you cracked it?’

  ‘This big.’ Bazo clenched and showed his fist. ‘With my pick I made it into many stones, for you, Bakela, knowing how you value many stones.’

  Zouga’s voice was still a husky whisper. ‘I will kill you,’ he said in English. ‘For this, I will kill you.’

  The scar across his cheek turned slowly into an ugly inflamed weal, the stigmata of his rage, and now he was shaking, his lips trembling as he rose slowly to his feet.

  ‘I will kill you.’ His voice rose to a bellow, and Jordan shrieked again, this time with terror. He had never seen his father like this before; there was a terrifying maniacal quality about him.

  ‘That was the stone I was waiting for, you bastard, you black bastard, that was it. That was the key to the north.’

  Zouga snatched the Martini-Henry rifle from where it leaned against the bole of the camel-thorn tree beside the falcon carving. The steel clashed and snickered as he pumped a cartridge into the chamber and in the same moment swung up the barrel.

  ‘I’m going to kill you,’ be roared, and then checked.

  Ralph had jumped to his feet, and now he faced his father, stepping forward until the muzzle of the loaded and fully cocked rifle almost touched the entwined brass snakes of his belt buckle.

  ‘You will have to kill me first, Papa,’ he said. He was as pale as Zouga, his eyes the same deep haunted green.

  ‘Get out of the way.’ Zouga’s voice sank into that croaking, husky whisper and Ralph could not answer him, but he shook his head, his heavy jaw clenched so determinedly that his teeth grated audibly.

  ‘I warn you, stand aside,’ Zouga choked, and they stood confronting each other, both trembling with tension and outrage.

  Then the muzzle of the heavy rifle wavered in Zouga’s hands, lowered slowly until it pointed to the dusty red earth between the toes of Ralph’s boots.

  The silence went on for many seconds; then Zouga took a full breath and the barrel of his chest swelled under the faded blue flannel shirt.

  With a gesture of utter frustration he hurled the rifle against the treetrunk and the butt snapped through. Then he sank back into his seat at the packing-case table and his golden head sank slowly into his hands.

  ‘Get out.’ All the fire and fury had gone from his voice; it was quiet and hopeless. ‘Get out, all of you.’

  Zouga sat on alone under the thorn tree. He felt burned out with emotion and anger, empty and blackened and devastated within, like the veld after fire has swept through it.

  When at last he lifted his head the first thing he saw was the falcon squatting opposite him on its greenstone plinth. It seemed to be smiling, a cruel and sardonic twist to the predator’s beak, but when he stared at it Zouga saw that it was merely a trick of shadow and sunlight through the thorn branches.

  The kopje-walloper was a small man, with legs so short that his polished high-heeled boots did not touch the floor when he sat on the swivel piano stool behind his desk.

  The desk filled most of the tiny galvanized-iron hut, and it was furnace-hot in the room; the heat quivered and danced down from the roof. On the raw deal planks of the desk stood the accoutrements of the kopje-walloper’s trade. The whisky bottle and shot-glasses to mellow the man with stones to sell; the sheet of white paper on which to examine the goods for colour; the wooden tweezers, the jeweller’s eye-glass, the balance and scales, and the cheque book.

  The cheque book was the size of a family Bible, each cheque form embossed in gold leaf and printed in multi-colours, the border depicting choirs of heavenly angels, sea nymphs riding in half clam shells drawn by teams of leaping dolphins, the Queen as Britannia with helmet, shield and trident, twisting cornucopia from which poured the treasures of Empire and a dozen other patriotic symbols of Victorian might.

  The cheque book was by far the most impressive item in the hut, not excepting the buyer’s flowing silk Ascot tie and the yellow spats that covered his boots. It was unlikely that a digger would be able to refuse payment offered in such flamboyant style.

  ‘How much, Mr Werner?’ Zouga asked.

  Werner had swiftly sorted the glittering heap of diamond chips into separate piles, grading them by size alone for each stone was of the same fine white colour.

  The smallest stones were three points, three hundredth parts of a carat, barely bigger than a grain of beach sand, the largest was almost a carat.

  Now Werner laid aside his tweezers and ran his hand through his dark locks.

  ‘Have another whisky,’ he murmured, and when Zouga refused, ‘Well, me, I’m having one now.’

  He poured both glasses full to the brim, and despite Zouga’s frown pushed one across to him.

  ‘How much?’ Zouga persisted.

  ‘The weight?’ Werner sipped the whisky and smacked his thick liver-coloured lips. ‘Ninety-six carats, all told. What a diamond it must have been. We will never see the likes again—’

  ‘How much in cash?’

  ‘Major, I would have offered you fifty thousand pounds, if that had been a single stone.’

  Zouga winced and blinked his eyes closed for an instant, as though he had been slapped across the face with an open hand.

  With fifty thousand pounds he could have taken Zambezia – mon
ey for men, horses and guns, money for wagons and bullock teams, machinery to mine the reef and mill the gold, money for the farms, the seed and implements. He opened his eyes again.

  ‘Damn you, I’m not interested in what might have been,’ he whispered. ‘Just tell me how much you will pay for that.’

  ‘Two thousand pounds; that’s my top price, and it’s not an “open” offer.’

  The stone had splintered into almost two hundred chips. That meant a ‘pick-up’ payment to Bazo of that many sovereigns. Zouga would intensely resent having to make that payment, but he owed it and he would make it. Of what remained after paying Bazo, at least a thousand would go for his share of the new stagings on the No. 6 Section.

  Eight hundred left, and it cost him a hundred a week to work his claims, so he had won himself two months. Sixty days, instead of a land. Sixty days instead of a hundred thousand square miles of rich land.

  ‘I’ll take it,’ he said quietly, picked up the whisky glass and drained it. It burned away the bitter taste at the back of his throat.

  Ralph’s bird was a lanner, one of the true members of the family Falco, long-winged and perfect for hunting the open plains of Griqualand. At last, after many attempts, he had found her and taken her for his own, a falcon and therefore bigger than the male bird, which was not a falcon but a tercel or, in the case of a lanner, a ‘lanneret’.

  She was ‘eyas’, the falconers’ term for a wild bird taken at the nest when almost full-fledged. Ralph had climbed to the nest high on the top branches of a giant acacia and brought the bird down in his shirt, bleeding where she had raked him with her talons across his belly.

  Bazo had helped him fashion the hood and jesses of soft glove leather for the proud head, but it was Ralph who walked her on his hand, hour after hour, day after day, stroking and gentling her, calling her ‘darling’ and ‘beauty’ and ‘lovely’ until she would eat from his fist and greet him with a soft ‘Kweet! Kweet!’ of recognition when she saw him. Then he introduced her to the lure of stuffed pigeon feathers, teaching her to hit it as he swung it on its long cord.

  Finally, in the traditional ritual of the falconer, he sat up all night with the bird on his fist and a candle burning beside him. He sat with her in the trial of wills which would prove his domination over her, staring into her fierce yellow eyes, in the candlelight, hour after hour, outlasting her until the lids closed over her eyes and she slept perched upon his fist and Ralph had won. Then at last he could hunt her.

  Jordan loved the bird for her beauty, and once she was trained Ralph occasionally let him carry her and stroke the hot sleek plumage under his gentle fingers. It was Jordan who found her name. He took it from Plutarch’s Lives, which he was re-reading, and so the falcon was named Scipio, but Jordan accompanied the hunt only once, disgracing himself irretrievably by bursting into tears at the moment of the kill. Ralph never invited him again.

  The same rains that had undermined the No. 6 causeway had flooded every depression and vlei for a hundred miles around the New Rush diggings. Slowly, in the hot dry months since that deluge, the shallower pools and swamps had dried out; but five miles south on the Cape Road, halfway to the low line of blue Magersfontein hills, there was still a wide body of open water, and already reed-beds had grown up around its perimeter and colonies of scarlet and ebony bishop birds had woven their hanging basket nests on the nodding reed staffs. Amongst the reeds Ralph and Bazo built their blind.

  They drew the long, leafy fronds down over their own heads, careful not to slice their hands on the razor-edged leaves; the fluffy white silks snowed down on them from the laden seed heads of the reeds, and they plaited the roof of stems in place, concealing themselves from the open sky.

  Ralph scooped a handful of black mud and smeared it over his face. He knew that his white face turned upwards would shine like a mirror, catching the eye of even a high-flighted bird.

  ‘You should have been born Matabele, then you would not need mud.’ Bazo chuckled as he watched him, and Ralph made an obscene sign at him with his fingers before they settled down to wait.

  It was fascinating to see how Scipio, blind under the leather hood, could still pick up the beat of approaching wings long before the men could see or hear them, and they were alerted by the set of her head and the anticipatory stretch of her talons.

  ‘Not yet, darling,’ Ralph whispered. ‘Soon now, darling.’

  Then Bazo whistled sharply and pointed with his chin.

  Across the swamp, still two miles out, very high against the empty sky, Ralph saw them. There were three of them, big black wings curving on the downbeat in that characteristic unhurried, weighty action.

  ‘Here they come, my love,’ Ralph murmured to Scipio, and touched the russet-dappled breast with his lips and felt the beat of the fierce heart against his face.

  ‘God, but they are big,’ Ralph murmured, and the tiny shapely body on his arm was feather light. He had never flown her against geese before, and he was torn with doubts.

  The V-shaped flight of geese went far out across the swamp in a leisurely descending circle and then they were coming back, low, flying into the sun. It was perfect. Scipio would have the sun behind her when she towered, and Ralph thrust his doubts aside.

  He slipped the soft leather hood off Scipio’s beautiful dove-grey head, and the yellow eyes opened like full moons, focusing swiftly. She shook out her feathers, swelling in size for a moment, puffing out her breast – until she saw the thick black skein of geese against the sky, and her plumage flattened, going sleek and polished, steely in the early sunlight, and she crouched forward on Ralph’s wrist.

  Turning with her to follow the flight of the geese, Ralph could feel the rapier points of her talons through the cuff of his leather gauntlet and sense the tension of the small neat body. She seemed to vibrate like a violin’s strings as the bow is drawn lightly across them.

  With his free hand he broke the quick-release knot that secured the jesses to Scipio’s leg.

  ‘Hunt!’ he cried, and launched her, throwing her clear of the reed; and she went on high like a javelin, towering swiftly for the sun on wings shaped like the wicked blades of a pair of fighting knives.

  The geese saw her instantly, and stalled back on great wings that were suddenly ungainly with shock. Their tight V-formation broke up as each bird turned away – two of them rising, driving hard for height while the third bird swung north again towards the river, dropped height steeply to pick up the speed he had lost in the initial stall of shock, and then levelled out low and winged hard, neck outstretched, webbed feet tucked up under his tail.

  Scipio was still towering, going up on wings that blurred with speed and turned to golden discs in the early slanting sunlight.

  Her tactics were those of the instinctive killer. She needed every inch of height that she could achieve. She needed it to exchange for speed when she began her stoop, her body weight was many times lighter than the huge birds she was hunting, and she had to kill with shock and speed.

  Even as she went up her head was twisted to the side, watching, judging, as the game scattered away below her.

  ‘Don’t duck, my sweeting,’ Ralph called to her.

  There was very real danger of it, for though Scipio was hungry to hunt, she had never been flown against birds such as these. Geese were not her natural prey; nature had not equipped her for the shock of binding to something so massive.

  As she climbed so the difference in size of hunter and hunted was emphasized; and then abruptly Scipio was at the height she judged sufficient and she hovered, ten beats of Ralph’s own heart as he watched her standing in the air.

  She was daunted, the game was too big, she was going to duck.

  ‘Hunt, darling, hunt!’ he called to her and she seemed to have heard him. She screamed that terrible death cry of the falcon, high and shrill and fierce, and then she folded her wings and dropped into her stoop.

  ‘She’s taking the low bird,’ Ralph shouted his triumph; she wa
s not going to duck, she had selected the goose that had dropped close to earth and was now crossing her front at an acute angle.

  ‘There is the liver of a lion in that small body.’ Bazo’s voice was full of wonder as he stared upwards at the tiny deadly dart that fell against the blue.

  They could hear the wind hissing through her half-cocked wings, see the infinitesimal movements of her tip feathers with which she controlled that terrible headlong plunge.

  The goose flogged at the air, heavy, massive, black flashed with frosty white, its panic evident in every beat of its frantic wings.

  The speed with which Scipio closed was chilling. Ralph felt the hair on the nape of his neck come erect as though an icy wind had touched him as Scipio reached forward with her steely talons.

  This was the moment for which he and the bird had worked and trained so long. The supreme moment of the kill – an involuntary cry burst from his throat, a primeval and animal sound, as Scipio bound to the great goose and the sound of the hit was like a single beat of a bass drum that seemed to shake the very air about Ralph’s head.

  The goose’s spread wings spun like the spokes of a wheel, and a burst of black feathers filled the air as though a shrapnel shell had been fired from a heavy cannon; and then the goose’s body collapsed under the shock, one wing snapped and trailed down the sky as it fell, the long serpentine goose neck was arched back in the convulsion of death, and Scipio was bound to the gigantic black body, her talons locked deep into the still frantically beating heart. The impetus of Scipio’s stoop had shattered bone in the big body and burst the pulsing blood vessels around the goose’s heart.

  Ralph started to run, whooping with excitement, and Bazo was at his shoulder, laughing, head thrown back, watching the birds fall, leaving a tracery of feathers like the plume of a comet in the sky behind them.

  A hawk binds to its prey, from the moment of strike unto the earth. A falcon does not. Scipio should break, and let the goose fall, but she had not; she was still locked in, and Ralph felt the first frost of worry cool his excitement. Had his bird broken bone, or otherwise injured herself in that frightful impact?