Power of the Sword Read online

  ‘You’ll lose your net,’ he howled at Lothar. ‘Only a crazy man would close the purse on this shoal – they’ll run away with your net. St Anthony and the blessed St Mark are my witnesses—’ But under Lothar’s terse direction the Herero crewmen were already into the routine of net recovery. Two of them lifted the main cork line off Da Silva’s shoulders and made it fast, while another was helping Lothar lead the purse line to the main winch.

  ‘It’s my net, and my fish,’ Lothar grunted at him as he started the winch with a clattering roar. ‘Get the bucky hooked on!’

  The net was hanging seventy feet deep into the clear green water, but the bottom was open. The first and urgent task was to close it before the shoal discovered this escape. Crouched over the winch, the muscles in his bare arms knotting and bunching beneath the tanned brown skin, Lothar was swinging his shoulders rhythmically as he brought the purse line in hand over hand around the revolving drum of the winch. The purse line running through the steel rings around the bottom of the net was closing the mouth like the drawstring of a monstrous tobacco pouch.

  In the wheelhouse Manfred was using delicate touches of forward and reverse to manoeuvre the stern of the trawler away from the net and prevent it fouling the propeller, while old Da Silva had worked the dinghy out to the far side of the cork line and hooked onto it to provide extra buoyancy for the critical moment when the oversized shoal realized that it was trapped and began to panic. Working swiftly, Lothar hauled in the heavy purse line until at last the bunch of steel rings came in glistening and streaming over the side. The net was closed, the shoal was in the bag.

  With sweat running down his cheeks and soaking his shirt, Lothar leaned against the gunwale so winded that he could not speak. His long silver-white hair, heavy with sweat, streamed down over his forehead and into his eyes as he gesticulated to Da Silva.

  The cork line was laid out in a neat circle on the gentle undulating swells of the cold green Benguela Current, with the bucky hooked onto the side farthest from the trawler. But as Lothar watched it, gasping and heaving for breath, the circle of bobbing corks changed shape, elongating swiftly as the shoal felt the net for the first time and in a concerted rush pushed against it. Then the thrust was reversed as the shoal turned and rushed back, dragging the net and the dinghy with it as though it were a scrap of floating seaweed.

  The power of the shoal was as irresistible as Leviathan.

  ‘By God, we’ve got even more than I reckoned,’ Lothar panted. Then, rousing himself, he flicked the wet blond hair from his eyes and ran to the wheelhouse.

  The shoal was surging back and forth in the net, tossing the dinghy about lightly on the churning waters, and Lothar felt the deck of the trawler list sharply under him as the mass of fish dragged abruptly on the heavy lines.

  ‘Da Silva was right. They are going crazy,’ he whispered, and reached for the handle of the foghorn. He blew three sharp ringing blasts, the request for assistance, and as he ran back onto the deck he saw the other three trawlers turn and race towards him. None of them had as yet plucked up the courage to throw their own nets at the huge shoal.

  ‘Hurry! Damn you, hurry!’ Lothar snarled ineffectually at them, and then at his crew, ‘All hands to dry up!’

  His crew hesitated, hanging back, reluctant to handle that net.

  ‘Move, you black bastards!’ Lothar bellowed at them, setting the example by leaping to the gunwale. They had to compress the shoal, pack the tiny fish so closely as to rob them of their strength.

  The net was coarse and sharp as barbed wire, but they bent to it in a row, using the roll of the hull in the low swell to work the net in by hand, recovering a few feet with each concerted heave.

  Then the shoal surged again, and all the net they had won was ripped from their hands. One of the Herero crew was too slow to let it go and the ringers of his right hand were caught in the coarse mesh. The flesh was stripped off his fingers like a glove, leaving bare white bone and raw flesh. He screamed and clutched the maimed hand to his chest, trying to staunch the spurt of bright blood. It sprayed into his own face and ran down the sweat-polished black skin of his chest and belly and soaked into his breeches.

  ‘Manfred!’ Lothar yelled. ‘See to him!’ and he switched all his attention back to the net. The shoal was sounding, dragging one end of the cork line below the surface, and a small part of the shoal escaped over the top, spreading like dark green smoke across the bright waters.

  ‘Good riddance,’ Lothar muttered, but the vast bulk of the shoal was still trapped and the cork line bobbed to the surface. Again the shoal surged downwards, and this time the heavy fifty-foot trawler listed over dangerously so that the crew clutched for handholds, their faces turning ashy grey beneath their dark skin.

  Across the circle of cork line the dinghy was dragged over sharply, and it did not have the buoyancy to resist. Green water poured in over the gunwale, swamping it.

  ‘Jump!’ Lothar yelled at the old man. ‘Get clear of the net!’ They both understood the danger.

  The previous season one of their crew had fallen into the net. The fish had immediately pushed against him in unison, driving him below the surface, fighting against the resistance of his body in their efforts to escape.

  When, hours later, they had at last recovered the corpse from the bottom of the net, they had found that the fish had been forced by their own efforts and the enormous pressures in the depths of the trapped shoal into all the man’s body openings. They had thrust down his open mouth into his belly; they had been driven like silver daggers into the eye-sockets, displacing the eyeballs and entering the brain. They had even burst through the threadbare stuff of his breeches and penetrated his anus so that his belly and bowels were stuffed with dead fish and he was bloated like a grotesque balloon. It was a sight none of them would ever forget.

  ‘Get clear of the net!’ Lothar screamed again and Da Silva threw himself over the far side of the sinking dinghy just as it was dragged beneath the surface. He splashed frantically as his heavy seaboots began to drag him under.

  However, Swart Hendrick was there to rescue him. He laid his trawler neatly alongside the bulging cork line, and two of his crew hauled Da Silva up the side while the others crowded the rail and under Swart Hendrick’s direction hooked onto the far side of the net.

  ‘If only the net holds,’ Lothar grunted, for the two other trawlers had come up now and fastened onto the cork line. The four big boats formed a circle around the captive shoal and, working in a frenzy, the crewmen stooped over the net and started to ‘dry up’.

  Foot by foot they hauled up the net, twelve men on each trawler, even Manfred taking his place at his father’s shoulder. They grunted and heaved and sweated, fresh blood on their torn hands when the shoal surged and burning agony in their backs and bellies, but slowly, an inch at a time, they subdued the huge shoal, until at last it was ‘dried up’, and the upper fish were flapping helplessly high and dry on the compacted mass of their fellows, who were drowning and dying in the crush.

  ‘Dip them out!’ Lothar shouted, and on each of the trawlers the three dip-men pulled the long-handled dip-nets from the racks over the top of the wheelhouses and dragged them down the deck.

  The dip-nets were the same shape as a butterfly-net, or those little hand nets with which children catch shrimps and crabs in rock pools at the seaside. The handles of these nets, however, were thirty feet long and the net purse could scoop up a ton of living fish at a time. At three points around the steel ring that formed the mouth of the net were attached manila lines; these were spliced to the heavier winch line by which the dip-net was lifted and lowered. The foot of the net could be opened or closed by a purse line through a set of smaller rings, exactly the same arrangement as the closure of the great main net.

  While the dip-net was manhandled into position, Lothar and Manfred were knocking the covers off the hatch of the hold. Then they hurried to their positions, Lothar on the winch and Manfred holding the end of the
purse line of the dip-net. With a squeal and clatter Lothar winched the dip-net high onto the derrick above their heads while the three men on the long handle swung the net outboard over the trapped and struggling shoal. Manfred jerked hard on the purse line, closing the bottom of the dip-net.

  Lothar slammed the winch gear into reverse and with another squeal of the pulley block the heavy head of the net dropped into the silver mass of fish. The three dip-men leaned all their weight on the handle, forcing the net deeply into the living porridge of pilchards.

  ‘Coming up!’ Lothar yelled and changed the winch into forward gear. The net was dragged upwards through the shoal and burst out filled with a ton of quivering, flapping pilchards. With Manfred grimly hanging onto the purse line, the full net was swung inboard over the gaping hatch of the hold.

  ‘Let go!’ Lothar shouted at his son, and Manfred released the purse line. The bottom of the net opened and a ton of pilchards showered down into the open hold. The tiny scales had been rubbed from the bodies of the fish by this rough treatment and now they swirled down over the men on the deck like snowflakes, sparkling in the sunlight with pretty shades of pink and rose and gold.

  As the net emptied, Manfred jerked the purse line closed and the dip-men swung the handle outboard, the winch squealed into reverse and the net dropped into the shoal for the whole sequence to be repeated. On each of the other three trawlers the dip-men and winch driver also were hard at work, and every few seconds another ton load of fish, seawater and clouds of translucent scales streaming from it, was swung over the waiting hatches and poured into them.

  It was heartbreaking, back-straining work, monotonous and repetitive, and each time the net swung overhead the crew were drenched with icy seawater and covered with scales. As the dip-men faltered with exhaustion, the skippers changed them without breaking the rhythm of swing and lift and drop, spelling the men working on the main net with those on the handle of the dip-net, although Lothar remained at the winch, tall and alert and indefatigable, his white-blond hair, thick with glittering fish scales, shining in the sunlight like a beacon fire.

  ‘Silver threepennies.’ He grinned to himself, as the fish showered into the holds on all four of his trawlers. ‘Shiny threepenny bits, not fish. We will take in a deckload of tickeys today.’ ‘Tickey’ was the slang for a threepenny coin.

  ‘Deckload!’ he bellowed across the diminishing circle of the main net to where Swart Hendrick worked at his own winch, stripped to the waist and glistening like polished ebony.

  ‘Deckload!’ he bellowed back at Lothar, revelling in the physical effort which allowed him to flaunt his superior strength in the faces of his crew. Already the holds of the trawlers were brimming full, each of them had over a hundred and fifty tons aboard, and now they were going to deckload.

  Again it was a risk. Once loaded, the boats could not be lightened again until they reached harbour and were pumped out into the factory. Deckloading would burden each hull with another hundred tons of dead weight, far over the safe limit. If the weather turned, if the wind switched into the north-west, then the giant sea that would build up rapidly would hammer the overloaded trawlers into the cold green depths.

  ‘The weather will hold,’ Lothar assured himself as he toiled at the winch. He was on the crest of a wave; nothing could stop him now. He had taken one fearsome risk and it had paid him with nearly a thousand tons of fish, four deckloads of fish, worth fifty pounds a ton in profits. Fifty thousand pounds in a single throw. The greatest stroke of fortune of his life. He could have lost his net or his boat or his life – instead he had paid off his debts with one throw of the net.

  ‘By God,’ he whispered, as he slaved at the winch, ‘nothing can go wrong now, nothing can touch me now. I’m free and clear.’

  So with the holds full they began to deckload the trawlers, filling them to the tops of the gunwales with a silver swamp of fish into which the crew sank waist-deep as they dried the net and swung the long handle of the dip.

  Over the four trawlers hovered a dense white cloud of seabirds, adding their voracious squawking and screeching to the cacophony of the winches, diving into the purse of the net to gorge themselves until they could eat no more, could not even fly but drifted away on the current, bloated and uncomfortable, feathers started and throats straining to keep down the contents of their swollen crops. At the bows and stern of each trawler stood a man with a sharpened boathook, with which he stabbed and hacked at the big sharks that thrashed at the surface in their efforts to reach the mass of trapped fish. Their razor-sharp triangular fangs could cut through even the tough mesh of the net.

  While the birds and sharks gorged, the hulls of the trawlers sank lower and still lower into the water, until at last a little after the sun had nooned even Lothar had to call enough. There was no room for another load; each time they swung one aboard it merely slithered over the side to feed the circling sharks.

  Lothar switched off the winch. There was probably another hundred tons of fish still floating in the main net, most of them drowned and crushed. ‘Empty the net,’ he ordered. ‘Let them go! Get the net on board.’

  The four trawlers, each of them so low in the water that seawater washed in through the scuppers at each roll, and their speed reduced to an ungainly waddling motion like a string of heavily pregnant ducks, turned towards the land in line astern with Lothar leading them.

  Behind them they left an area of almost half a square mile of the ocean carpeted with dead fish, floating silver belly up, as thick as autumn leaves on the forest floor. On top of them drifted thousands of satiated seagulls and beneath them the big sharks swirled and feasted still.

  The exhausted crews dragged themselves through the quicksands of still quivering kicking fish that glutted the deck to the forecastle companionway. Below deck they threw themselves still soaked with fish-slime and seawater onto their cramped bunks.

  In the wheelhouse Lothar drank two mugs of hot coffee then checked the chronometer above his head.

  ‘Four hours’ run back to the factory,’ he said. ‘Just time for our lessons.’

  ‘Oh, Pa!’ the boy pleaded. ‘Not today, today is special. Do we have to learn today?’

  There was no school at Walvis Bay. The nearest was the German School at Swakopmund, thirty kilometres away. Lother had been both father and mother to the boy from the very day of his birth. He had taken him wet and bloody from the childbed. His mother had never even laid eyes upon him. That had been part of their unnatural bargain. He had reared the boy alone, unaided except for the milk that the brown Nama wetnurses had provided. They had grown so close that Lothar could not bear to be parted from him for a single day. He had even taken over his education rather than send him away.

  ‘No day is that special,’ he told Manfred. ‘Every day we learn. Muscles don’t make a man strong.’ He tapped his head. ‘This is what makes a man strong. Get the books!’

  Manfred rolled his eyes at Da Silva for sympathy but he knew better than to argue further.

  ‘Take the wheel.’ Lothar handed over to the old boatman and went to sit beside his son at the small chart-table. ‘Not arithmetic.’ He shook his head. ‘It’s English today.’

  ‘I hate English!’ Manfred declared vehemently. ‘I hate English and I hate the English.’

  Lothar nodded. ‘Yes,’ he agreed. ‘The English are our enemies. They have always been and always will be our enemies. That is why we have to arm ourselves with their weapons. That is why we learn the language – so when the time comes we will be able to use it in the battle against them.’

  He spoke in English for the first time that day. Manfred started to reply in Afrikaans, the South African Dutch patois that had only obtained recognition as a separate language and been adopted as an official language of the Union of South Africa in 1918, over a year before Manfred was born. Lothar held up his hand to stop him.

  ‘English,’ he admonished. ‘Speak English only.’

  For an hour they worked together, r
eading aloud from the King James version of the Bible and from a two-month-old copy of the Cape Times, and then Lothar set him a page of dictation. The labour in this unfamiliar language made Manfred fidget and frown and nibble his pencil, until at last he could contain himself no longer.

  ‘Tell me about Grandpa, and the oath!’ he wheedled his father.

  Lothar grinned. ‘You’re a cunning little monkey, aren’t you. Anything to get out of work.’

  ‘Please, Pa—’

  ‘I’ve told you a hundred times.’

  ‘Tell me again. It’s a special day.’

  Lothar glanced out of the wheelhouse window at the precious silver cargo. The boy was right, it was a very special day. Today he was free and clear of debt, after five long hard years.

  ‘All right.’ He nodded. ‘I’ll tell you again, but in English.’ And Manfred shut his exercise book with an enthusiastic snap and leaned across the table, his amber eyes glowing with anticipation.

  The story of the great rebellion had been repeated so often that Manfred had it by heart and he corrected any discrepancy or departure from the original, or called his father back if he left out any of the details.

  ‘Well then,’ Lothar started, ‘when the treacherous English King George V declared war on Kaiser Whilhelm of Germany in 1914, your grandpa and I knew our duty. We kissed your grandmother goodbye—’

  ‘What colour was my grandmother’s hair?’ Manfred demanded.

  ‘Your grandmother was a beautiful German noblewoman, and her hair was the colour of ripe wheat in the sunlight.’

  ‘Just like mine,’ Manfred prompted him.

  ‘Just like yours,’ Lothar smiled. ‘And Grandpa and I rode out on our warhorses to join old General Maritz and his six hundred heroes on the banks of the Orange river where he was about to go out against old Slim Jannie Smuts.’ Slim was the Afrikaans word for tricky or treacherous, and Manfred nodded avidly.