Men of Men (12 page)

‘Fifty-eight carats,’ he whispered, and Zouga stared at it with the sour acid of envy in the back of his throat. ‘I bought it yesterday.’

‘How much?’ he asked, hating himself for the weakness.

‘Six thousand pounds!’ said the buyer and carefully refolded the paper, placed the diamond back in the safe, locked the thick iron door, hung the key on his watch chain and glanced
at Zouga’s stones.

‘Forty pounds,’ he said off-handedly.

‘The lot?’ Zouga asked quietly. He had sixteen men to pay and feed and he needed new rope, and he would have to pay the piratical prices of the transport riders for it.

‘The price of pool goods is right down.’ The buyer shrugged. ‘Every digger south of the Vaal is bringing in rubbish like this.’

Zouga refilled the bag and stood up.

‘I made you that price as a favour,’ warned the buyer. ‘If you come back later, it will be thirty pounds.’

‘I’ll take that chance.’ Zouga touched the brim of his hat and strode out into the sunlight.

The second buyer he visited poured the diamonds into the bowl of the diamond balance and then carefully added weights to the other arm until the scale was in balance.

‘You should have stuck to elephant hunting,’ he said, as he wrote down the weights and made his calculations in a leather notebook. ‘The diamond market is flooded. There is a
limit to the number of rich ladies who want to hang baubles round their necks, and here on the Vaal diggings we have mined more stones in a few years than were found in the six thousand years
before that.’

‘They are using them in watch movements, and tools for cutting glass and steel,’ Zouga said quietly.

‘A fad,’ the buyer waved his hands in dismissal. ‘Diamonds are finished. I’ll give you fifty-five pounds for this lot and that’s generous.’

O
ne morning Zouga found Ralph working side by side with Bazo in the bottom of the pit, swinging the pick in rhythm with the Matabele chant. He
stood there watching for a few minutes, saw the shape of mature muscle emerging from the soft flesh of childhood, saw the breadth of shoulder. Ralph’s belly was greyhound slim and the cloth
of his breeches, that were suddenly many sizes too small, strained over neat round buttocks as he stooped to break the point of the pick from the compacted yellow earth.

‘Ralph,’ he called him at last.

‘Yes, Papa.’ His throat was greasy with sweat, and it had cut little runnels down through the dust that coated his upper body, fat glistening drops clung in the little nest of fine
dark curls that had abruptly appeared in the centre of his chest.

‘Put your shirt on,’ Zouga ordered.

‘Why?’ Ralph looked surprised.

‘Because you are an Englishman. By God’s grace and, if necessary, the strength of my right arm you are going to be a gentleman as well.’

So Ralph worked booted and buttoned to the throat beside the naked Matabele, and he earned firstly their respect and then their affection and friendship.

From the first day when they had met in the open veld, the Matabele had been impressed with his horsemanship, and with the marksmanship which had brought down the old eland bull. Now they began
to accept him amongst them, first in the patronizing manner of elder brothers, then gradually on more and more equal terms, until Ralph was competing with them in all they did, their work and their
sport. He was not yet as tall or strong as the Matabele, so he won very seldom; and when he failed or was beaten, he scowled until his face darkened and the heavy brows met above the big nose.

‘A good sportsman knows how to lose graciously,’ Zouga told him.

‘I don’t want to be a sportsman, I don’t want to learn how to lose,’ Ralph replied. ‘I want to learn how to win.’ And he threw himself back at the task with
fiercely renewed determination.

It seemed that his strength grew with each day in the diggings, the puppy fat was burned away, and he made that final spurt to his full height without outstripping his strength. And he learned
how to win.

He began to win the contests with Bazo at lashing gravel, firenziedly filling bucket after huge leather bucket so that the yellow dust flew in choking clouds. He won one of the dangerous races
down the ladderworks from the roadway to the bottom of the pit, scorching his palms on the ropes and swinging out over the drop to pass another man on the reverse side of the ladder, using the pole
of a gantry to cross a deep void between two claims, running across it upright, like a tight-rope walker, without looking at his feet or the hundred-foot drop beneath him. Even Bazo shook his head
and said ‘Haul’ which is an exclamation of deep amazement, and Ralph stood panting in the bottom of the pit, looking up at Bazo, and shouted with triumphant laughter.

Then Ralph learned to use the fighting sticks the hard way – for this was the game the Matabele had played since their first day as herd boys in the veld. Before he mastered the art of the
sticks he had, perforce, to learn how to staunch a bleeding cut in his own scalp inflicted by Bazo’s stick by plugging it with a handful of dust snatched in the midst of the contest.

A week short of his sixteenth birthday, Ralph beat Bazo for the first time. They fought behind the thatched beehive huts that the Matabele had built on the open veld beyond Zouga’s
camp.

It started light-heartedly, Bazo the instructor, hectoring his pupil, executing the weaving steps of the traditional combat with indolent grace like a sleepy black panther, a fighting stick held
in each hand and flourished with studied artistry of movement to form a fluid screen from which a vicious cutting attack could be launched with either hand.

Ralph turned to face him so that they revolved smoothly as a balanced wheel, like a pair of trained dancers, and when they taunted each other Ralph’s repartee was in fluent and colloquial
Matabele. He was stripped to the waistband of his riding breeches, and his torso, which had at Zouga’s orders been so long protected from the sun, was creamy pale; only his arms and the deep
V at his throat were sun dark.

‘I once had a pet baboon,’ Bazo told him. ‘It was an albino baboon, white as the moon, and so stupid it never learned even a simple trick. That baboon reminds me of somebody,
though I cannot think who.’

Ralph smiled with his lips only, exposing square white teeth, but the black brows were joined above his nose. ‘I am only surprised that a Matabele thought he could teach a baboon –
surely it should be the other way around.’

Bazo jumped back and hooted, beginning the
giya –
the challenge dance of the warrior – leaping high and making the kerries sing in the air until they blurred like the wings
of a sunbird in flight.

‘Let us see if your sticks are as quick as your tongue,’ he shouted; and then suddenly he was attacking, the song of the fighting sticks rising to a shriek as he cut for
Ralph’s knee, the shriek ending with a crack like a rifle shot as Ralph caught it on his guard; and instantly Bazo cut with the other hand, for the elbow and – crack – again as
Ralph warded off the blow with his own kerrie.

The sticks clattered against each other in a rising tempo, and the circle of Matabele watchers encouraged them with the deep drawn-out ‘Jee!’ as a stroke was skilfully countered and
turned into a hissing riposte to be countered in its turn.

Bazo broke first, jumping back with a light sheen of sweat turning his muscles to black velvet, his chest swelling and subsiding, his chuckle only slightly hoarse.

There should be a pause now, as the combatants circled each other again, in that stylized shuffling dance, trading light insults, catching breath, stooping to dry their hands in the dust to
improve their grip on the sticks – but, not this time, for as Bazo broke and jumped back and for an instant dropped his right hand, so Ralph went in.

Even the pretence of a smile was gone from Ralph’s mouth. His jaw was clenched, lumps of muscles knotted with determination beneath his ears. Bazo’s right guard had dropped, and his
attention had switched to the audience of Matabele faces, for whose benefit he was already composing the next jibe.

‘Jee!’ They shouted encouragement and warning, and Bazo tried desperately to raise his guard and swivel to face the unexpected attack. He managed a touch of stick against stick, just
enough to cushion the blow, otherwise it would have broken bone. Ralph’s kerrie smashed into the point of his shoulder, and abruptly it was no longer a game.

The blow to Bazo’s shoulder raised a welt as thick as a finger across the muscle, and almost paralysed the arm to the fingertips. So as he caught Ralph’s next cut he felt the kerrie
jerk and turn in his numb fingers, almost breaking his grip, and the shock of it was transferred into the abused muscle so that he grunted involuntarily, a little grunt of agony that seemed only to
goad Ralph.

His sun-dark features were a mask of fighting fury, his eyes cold and green, and little droplets of sweat flew from his long black hair with the force of every blow that he swung.

The Matabele had never seen him like this, but they recognized the killing madness, for they had themselves all been in battle and killed, and it infected them so that they danced and stamped
with excitement and spurred Ralph with their voices.

‘Jee!’ they sang, and Bazo fell back, giving ground to Ralph’s attack as the sticks cracked and rattled. His mouth was wide open now as he gasped for air and his throat was a
deep pink cavern. Blood ran in a thin shining slick down behind his ear, spreading over his straining throat and then onto his right shoulder like a mantle. A glancing blow above his eye had not
opened the flesh, but had formed a blister of black blood as large as a walnut under the skin. It hung from Bazo’s forehead like some bizarre bloodsucking leech, and still the blows hissed
and cracked about him, thick as tropical rain, falling on his guard so that the shock was carried through arm and shoulder and jarred his head upon the thick black column of his neck.

Then another blow went through and the ivory flash of Bazo’s teeth was dulled with a film of blood that snaked down from one nostril into his mouth, and another blow went through, on the
line of his thigh, the swelling rising instantaneously, the skin stretched glossy and black, and almost crippled Bazo who was pinned by the injured leg – and Ralph was still attacking,
instinctively swinging him against the bad leg so that Bazo was slow and clumsy in the turn, and again one of Ralph’s sticks fluted and thumped into rubbery muscle and Bazo reeled and almost
went down, recovering with an immense effort, his counter-stroke loose and lacking power, so that Ralph spurned it aside and used his point.

He drove the end of his right-hand kerrie through Bazo’s guard, using it as though it were a sword rather than a club, and Bazo was not ready for it. With all Ralph’s weight behind
it, the kerrie tore into Bazo’s belly muscles, up under the heavy ribcage, and the Matabele doubled over the blow, one kerrie flying from his hand the other dropping to dangle uselessly at
his side.

He dropped on his knees, head bowed to expose the back of his neck, the knuckles of his spine standing out between the ridges of hard black muscle.

Ralph’s eyes were fastened on the unprotected neck, and they were glazed over with the same soapy sheen as an uncut diamond, his movements too swift to be anything but instinctive. He
threw the kerrie on high and shifted his weight from the back foot to the leading foot, and all his strength flowed into his back and shoulders as he went into the killing stroke.

‘Jee!’ roared the watchers, themselves carried beyond the frontiers of sanity on the hot wave of fighting madness, crowding forward for the death.

Ralph froze like that, right arm high, his entire body arched like a drawn bow, the fallen Matabele at his feet – and then slowly the tension went out of his limbs and he shook his head
with the fumbling uncertainty of a man awaking from a nightmare. He looked about him with stunned disbelief, blinking his eyes as though to clear them of that opaque glittering madness, and
suddenly his legs were trembling, unable to hold his weight. He sank down in front of Bazo, knelt facing him and put out one arm and wrapped it around the Matabele’s neck, and laid his cheek
against Bazo’s.

‘God,’ he whispered. ‘Oh God -1 nearly killed you.’

Their blood and their sweat mingled, and both of them were pumping for air, their chests heaving, their bodies racked for the precious stuff.

‘Never teach an albino baboon a trick,’ Bazo spoke at last, his voice was husky and unsteady. ‘He might learn it a little too well.’

Then they were dragged to their feet by the laughing, hooting Matabele and carried to the nearest hut.

Ralph drank first from the calabash of gruel – thick bubbling millet beer – and then handed it across to Bazo.

Bazo washed the blood from his mouth and spat it on the ground, then he drank with his head tilted back, a dozen deep swallows before he lowered the gourd and looked at Ralph.

For a moment they were grave, green eyes holding the gaze of smouldering black, and then suddenly they were both laughing, great gusts of shaking uncontrolled laughter, so that the men that
squatted in the circle about them began to chuckle also, and then to laugh with them.

Still laughing, Bazo leaned across and gripped Ralph’s right forearm briefly. ‘I am your man,’ he said, through his laughter, and through the blood in his mouth.

W
hen Zouga stepped off the ladder in the bottom level of the Devil’s Own, the heat was already enough to bring out a dark patch of sweat
between the shoulder blades of his blue flannel shirt. He lifted his hat to mop the dewdrops along his hairline and then paused and frowned quickly.

‘Ralph!’ he snapped, and his son sank the pickhead into the yellow gravel, let it stand like that and then straightened with his hands on his hips.

‘Just what do you think you are doing?’ Zouga demanded.

‘I’ve worked out a new way of doing it,’ Ralph told him. ‘First Bazo’s gang breaks rock, then Wengi comes along behind and—’

‘You know what I’m talking about.’ Zouga cut in impatiently. ‘It’s Monday; you are supposed to be at school.’