Men of Men Page 5

  He had beaten back the engulfing panic, but he was left with a terrible sense of despondency, and a weariness that ached in his bones so that he hardly had strength enough to climb the swaying rope ladder and his feet dragged and scuffed the ochre-red earth of the track, while around him the encampment swam and wavered in the heat and dust as he started back towards the outspan.

  Above the hubbub of the camp a clear childish voice rang, and Zouga lifted the golden beard from his chest, his mood lightening as he recognized his son’s sweet piping tones.

  ‘Papa! Oh Papa!’

  Jordan was racing towards him, wild abandon in every frantic pace, his arms pumping and his feet flying over the rutted track, while the mass of silken curls flew about his lovely face.

  ‘Oh Papa, we have searched for you – all night, all day.’

  ‘What is it, Jordan?’ The child’s distress alarmed Zouga afresh, and he started forward.

  Jordan reached him and threw both arms about Zouga’s waist, he pressed his face to Zouga’s coat front so that his voice was muffled and he trembled like a frightened little wild animal.

  ‘It’s Mama! Something has happened to Mama! Something terrible has happened.’

  The delirium of typhoid fever came upon Aletta in hot grey fog banks that blotted out reality and filled her head with phantoms and fantasies which cleared abruptly, leaving her too weak to sit upright, but with her senses enhanced so that her hot skin was hypersensitive to the touch of the clammy flannel against her face and the oppressive weight of her clothing threatened to smother her.

  Her vision was sharp and the images enlarged as though seen through a fine reading glass. She could study each long curved eyelash that made up the dense fringe about Jordan’s beautiful green eyes. She could see each individual pore in the satiny skin of his cheeks, could delight in the texture of his perfectly bowed lips that trembled now with his agitation and fear as he stooped over her.

  She was lost in wonder at her son’s beauty, and then the roaring started in her ears again and the beloved child’s face receded, until she was looking at it down a long narrow tunnel through the roaring darkness.

  She clung desperately to the image, but it began to turn, slowly at first like the wheel of a carriage, then faster still until Jordan’s face blurred dizzily and she felt herself tumbling down into the humid darkness again like a leaf upon the roaring wind.

  Again the darkness opened, a veil drawn aside in some deep place in her head, and with joy she sought the boy’s face again – but instead she saw the falcon high above her.

  It was the bird figure of the graven idol that had always been a part of her life since Zouga had come into it. At every cottage, at every outspan or room that they had called home for a day or a week or a month, that stone idol seemed to have been there with them, silent, implacable, heavy with a brooding and ancient malevolence. She had always hated that idol, had always sensed the aura of evil that surrounded it – but now her hatred and her fear could focus fully upon the stone bird that stood tall above the cot on which she lay.

  She cursed it weakly, silently, lying on her back on the narrow cot, the robe she wore clinging damply to her skin with the fever sweat; and she mouthed her hatred at the stone image that towered above her on its polished green soapstone column. Again her vision narrowed, became concentrated so that the falcon head was her whole existence.

  Then miraculously the blank stone eyes began to glow with a strange golden light; they revolved slowly in the sockets of the polished stone skull, and suddenly they were looking down at her. The pupils were black and glossy, alive and seeing – but cruel and so truly evil that she quailed in terror, staring up at the bird.

  The curved stone beak opened, the tongue was sharp as an arrowhead, and from its tip was suspended a single perfect ruby drop of blood in which a star of light glowed – and Aletta knew it was the blood of the sacrifice. The darkness about the bird was filled with moving shadows, the wraiths of the sacrificial victims, the shades of the falcon-priests dead these thousand years, gathering again to reinforce the powers, gathering again to welcome her—

  She screamed, again and again, her terror ringing insanely in her own ears – and then firm hands were shaking her gently, tenderly. Her vision cleared again, but not completely. Everything was dim and blurred, so she screwed up her eyes, still panting wildly from her screams.

  ‘Ralph, is that you?’ The strong dark features, already taking on the set of manhood, so different from the sweet angel face of his brother, were close above her.

  ‘Don’t take on so, Mama.’

  ‘Ralphie, why is it so dark?’ she mumbled.

  ‘It’s night time.’

  ‘Where is Jordie?’

  ‘He is asleep, Mama; he could not keep awake. I sent him to sleep.’

  ‘Call Papa,’ she whispered.

  ‘Jan Cheroot is searching for him – he will come soon.’

  ‘I’m cold.’ She was trembling violently, and felt him draw the rough blanket up beneath her chin before she sank back into the darkness.

  In the darkness she saw the shapes of men hurrying forward, pressing about her; she caught their urgency, the passion of their terrible purpose, and she saw their arms glint in the shadows, the flash of white steel, bared and honed for war. She heard the snick of breech-block, the rattle of bayonet in the scabbard, and here and there in the press she recognized a face, faces she had never seen before but which she recognized instantly with a clairvoyant flash of intuition. One was a man full grown, bearded, strong, who was her son – riding into war – and others, so many others, her blood, her flesh, her bones going forward in that awful expectant throng. She was consumed with terrible grief for them, but she could not weep. Instead, she lifted her eyes and saw the falcon on high, clear in the single brilliant shaft of sunshine that pierced the sombre and ominous clouds that rolled from horizon to horizon, the dun and terrible clouds of war.

  The falcon hovered on outstretched pinions against the belly of the clouds, twisting the cruelly beautiful head to peer down, then the long pointed wings folded and the bird dropped in a stoop like a lightning bolt, the great talons reaching forward in the strike. She saw them hook into living flesh, saw the grimace on the face that she had never seen before but knew as deeply as she did her own.

  And she screamed again. Then strong arms held her, the familiar beloved arms for which she had waited so long. She looked up at him. The clear emerald eyes so close to hers, the powerful jut of his jawline half-masked by the full golden-streaked beard.

  ‘Zouga,’ she breathed.

  ‘I am here, my love.’

  The phantoms receded, the terrible nightmare world of her delirium was gone, and she found herself in a tent upon a dusty plain beneath a half-ruined hillock, and the bright African sunlight through the tent opening cut a stark slash of white light across the powdered red dust floor. She was mildly amazed by the swift transition from night to noonday, from fantasy to reality, and her mouth and throat were filled with the dry chalk of terrible thirst.

  ‘I am thirsty,’ she whispered huskily.

  He held the pitcher to her cracked lips, and the coolness and the sweetness of the liquid in her throat made her vision swim with delight.

  But immediately afterwards, the memory of the nightmares assailed her and she darted a fearful glance across the tent at the silent statue. It seemed suddenly harmless, insignificant, the image blind and dumb, but a flicker of the night’s terror remained.

  ‘Beware the falcon,’ she whispered, and she saw in his green eyes that he thought her words were still fever ravings. She wanted to convince him but she was terribly, deadly tired, and she closed her eyes and slept in his arms.

  When she awoke, the sun’s rays had mellowed to a glorious orange light that filled the whole tent and lit little stars in Zouga’s beard and curls. She was filled with a deep sense of peace. His arms were so strong, so all-encompassing.

  ‘Look after my babies,’ she said
softly, but very clearly, and then she died.

  Aletta’s grave was just another mound of red dirt in the long, neat row of freshly turned mounds.

  After he had buried her, Zouga sent the boys back to the outspan with Jan Cheroot. Jordan was weeping inconsolably, his lovely face smudged with grief. Ralph sat behind his brother on the back of the gaunt bay gelding, holding the smaller child with both arms clasped about his waist. Ralph was silent, stoic, but his body was rigid with controlled emotion, and his eyes, the same clear deep green of his father’s, smouldered with unexpressed grief.

  Jan Cheroot led the bay, and the two boys seemed as frail and forlorn as swallows left on a fence rail long after the others had flown the oncoming winter.

  Zouga stood beside the grave with military bearing, as expressionless as his elder son had been, but behind the handsome mask he was stunned by his own sorrow and pervading sense of guilt.

  He wanted to speak aloud, to tell Aletta that he was sorry, that he knew that he was responsible for this lonely grave so far from her loving family and the beautiful forested mountains of Good Hope which she had loved so dearly. He wanted to ask for forgiveness for sacrificing her to a dream, an impossible grandiose dream. Yet he knew that words were futile and the red earth stopped Aletta’s ears.

  He stooped and with his bare hand dressed the mound where the earth had collapsed at one corner.

  With the first diamond I will buy the headstone, he promised himself silently. The red earth had stained under his fingernails, little half-moons the colour of blood.

  With a supreme effort he overcame his sense of futility, overcame the self-consciousness sufficiently to speak aloud to someone who could not hear.

  ‘I will look after them, my dear,’ he said. ‘That is my last promise to you.’

  ‘Jordie will not eat, Papa.’ Ralph greeted him as he stooped into the tent, and Zouga felt the leap of alarm swamp his sorrow and his guilt. He strode to the cot on which the child lay, facing the canvas wall of the tent with his knees drawn up to his chest.

  Jordan’s skin was burning hot as the sun-scorched rocks that littered the plain outside the tent, and his silken cheeks smeared with tears were flushed a furious fever red.

  By morning Ralph was feverish also, both boys tossing and muttering in delirium, their bodies hot as two little furnaces, the blankets sodden with their sweat and the tent reeking with the carrion stench of fever.

  Ralph fought the fever.

  ‘Ja, just look at him.’ Jan Cheroot paused fondly in the act of sponging down the robust strong-boned body. ‘He takes the sickness like an enemy, and struggles with it.’

  Helping him, kneeling on the opposite side of the cot, Zouga felt the familiar glow of pride surface through his concern as he looked down at him. Already there were little smoky wisps of hair under Ralph’s arms, and a darker explosion of curls at the base of his belly; and his penis was no longer the little wormlike appendage with a childish cap of wrinkled loose skin. His shoulders were squaring and filling with muscle, and his legs were straight and sturdy.

  ‘He will be all right,’ Jan Cheroot repeated, and Ralph thrashed out angrily in his delirium, his features scowling and dark with determination.

  The two men drew the blanket up over him and turned to the other cot.

  Jordan’s long thick lashes fluttered like the wings of a beautiful butterfly, and he whimpered pitifully, unresisting as they stripped and sponged him. His little body was as sweetly formed as his features, but clad still in its puppy-fat so that his buttocks were round as apples and plump as a girl’s; but his limbs were delicately boned and shapely, his feet and hands long and narrow and graceful.

  ‘Mama,’ he whimpered. ‘I want my Mama.’

  The two men nursed the boys, taking turns day and night, everything else neglected or forgotten, an hour snatched here to water and tend the horses, another hour for a hurried journey into the camp to purchase patent medicine from a transport rider or scramble for the few vegetables offered for sale on the farmers’ carts. But diamonds were forgotten, never mentioned in the hot little tent where the struggle for life went on, and the Devil’s Own claims were abandoned and deserted.

  In forty-eight hours Ralph had regained consciousness, in three days he was sitting up unaided and wolfing his food, in six days they could no longer keep him in his cot.

  Jordan rallied briefly on the second day, becoming lucid and demanding his mother fretfully, and then remembered that she was gone, began weeping again and immediately began to sink. His life teetered, the pendulum swinging erratically back and forth, but each time he fell back the presence of death grew stronger in the baking canvas tent, until its stench overpowered the odour of fever.

  The flesh melted from his body, burned away by the fever, and his skin took on a pearly translucent sheen, so that it seemed in that uncertain light of dusk and early dawn that the very outline of the delicate bone structure showed through.

  Jan Cheroot and Zouga nursed him in turns, one sleeping while the other watched – or, when neither could sleep, sitting together, seeking comfort and companionship from each other, trying to discount their helplessness in the face of onrushing death.

  ‘He’s young and strong,’ they told each other. ‘He will be all right also.’

  And day after day Jordan sank lower, his cheekbones rising up out of his flesh, and his eyes receding into deep cavities the colour of old bruises.

  Exhausted with guilt and sorrow, with helpless worry, Zouga left the tent each dawn before sunrise to be the first at Market Square – perhaps there was a transport rider freshly arrived with medicines in his chests, and certainly there would be Boer farmers with cabbages and onions and, if he was lucky, a few wizened and half-green tomatoes, all of which would be sold half an hour after dawn.

  On the tenth morning, as Zouga hurried back to the tent, he paused for a moment at the entrance, frowning angrily. The falcon statue had been dragged from the tent, and there was a long furrow scraped by its base in the loose dust. It stood now at a careless angle, leaning against the trunk of the scraggy camel-thorn tree that gave meagre shade to the camp.

  The branches of the tree were festooned with black ribbons of dried springbuck meat, with saddlery and trek gear – so that the statue seemed to be part of this litter. There was one of the camp’s brown hens perched on the falcon’s head, and it had dropped a long chalky smear of liquid excrement down the stone figure.

  Still frowning, Zouga ducked into the tent. Jan Cheroot squatted beside Ralph’s cot, and the two of them were deeply involved in a game of five stones, using polished pebbles of agate and quartz for the counters.

  Jordan lay very still and pale, so that Zouga felt a lurch of dismay under his ribs. It was only when he stooped over the cot that he saw the rise and fall of Jordan’s chest and caught the faint whisper of his breathing.

  ‘Did you move the stone falcon?’

  Jan Cheroot grunted without looking up from the shiny stones. ‘It seemed to trouble Jordie. He woke up crying again – and kept calling to it.’

  Zouga would have taken it further, but suddenly it did not seem worth the effort. He was so tired and dispirited. He would bring the statue back into the tent later, he decided.

  ‘There are a few sweet potatoes – nothing else,’ he grunted as he took up the vigil beside Jordan’s cot.

  Jan Cheroot made a stew of dried beans and mutton, and mashed this with the boiled potatoes. It was an unappetizing mess, but that evening, for the first time, Jordan did not roll his head away from the proffered spoon, and after that his recovery was startlingly swift.

  He asked only once more after Aletta, when he and Zouga were alone in the tent.

  ‘Has she gone to heaven, Papa?’

  ‘Yes.’ The certainty in Zouga’s tone seemed to reassure him.

  ‘Will she be one of God’s angels?’

  ‘Yes, Jordie, and from now on she will always be there – watching over you.’

  The child
thought about that seriously and then nodded contentedly, and the next day he seemed strong enough for Zouga to leave him in Ralph’s charge while he and Jan Cheroot went up to the kopje and walked out along No. 6 Roadway to look down on the Devil’s Own claims.

  All the mining equipment, shovels and picks, buckets and ropes, sheave wheels and ladders had been stolen. At the prices the transport riders were charging it would cost a hundred guineas to replace them.

  ‘We will need men,’ Zouga said.

  ‘What will you do when you have them?’ Jan Cheroot asked.

  ‘Dig the stuff out.’

  ‘And then?’ the little Hottentot demanded with a malicious gleam in his dark eyes, his features wrinkled as a sour windfallen apple. ‘What do you then?’ he insisted.

  ‘I intend to find out,’ Zouga replied grimly. ‘We have wasted enough time here already.’

  ‘My dear fellow,’ Neville Pickering gave him that charming smile. ‘I’m delighted that you asked. Had you not, then I should have offered. It’s always a little problematic for a new chum to find his feet,’ he coughed deferentially, and went on quickly, ‘not that you are a new chum, by any means—’

  That was a term usually reserved for the fresh-faced hopefuls newly arrived on the boat from ‘home’. ‘Home’ was England, even those who were colonial born referred to it as ‘home’.

  ‘I’d bet a fiver to a pinch of giraffe dung that you know more about this country than any of us here.’

  ‘African born,’ Zouga admitted, ‘on the Zouga river up north in Khama’s land; accounts for the odd name – Zouga.’

  ‘By Jove, didn’t realize that, I must say!’

  ‘Don’t hold it against me.’ Zouga smiled lightly, but he knew that there were many who would. Home born was vastly superior to colonial born. It was for that reason that he had insisted that Aletta should make the long sea voyage with him when it seemed that her pregnancies would reach full term. Both Ralph and Jordan had been born in the same house in south London, and both had arrived back at Good Hope before they were weaned. They were home born: that was his first gift to them.