Men of Men (16 page)

Then came travelling Jewish pedlars, Scottish missionaries taking God’s injunction ‘Be fruitful’ as their text for the day – riders on commando, collecting slaves and
taking others of the traditional spoils of war in a dusty donga or behind a thorn bush under the inscrutable African sky. The old hunters had passed this way at the century’s turn, and had
paused in their pursuit of the great elephant herds to take on more tender game at closer range.

These were Hendrick Naaiman’s ancestors. He was a Bastaard and proud of it. He had dark gypsy ringlets that dangled to the collar of his tanned buckskin jacket. His teeth were square and
strong and starred with tiny white specks from drinking the lime-rich waters of the Karroo wells since childhood.

His eyes were black as tarpits, and his toffee-coloured skin thickly sown with the darker coin-like scars of smallpox, for his white ancestors had bestowed upon the tribe many of the other
virtues of civilization: gunpowder, alcohol and more than one variety of the pox.

Despite the scarring, Hendrick was a handsome man, tall, broad shouldered, with long powerful legs, flashing black eyes and a sunny smile. He squatted across the fire from Bazo now, with his
wide-brimmed hat still on his head; the ostrich feathers nodded and swirled above the flat crown as he gestured widely, laughing and talking persuasively.

‘Only the ant-bear and the meercat dig in the earth for no reward more than a mouthful of insects.’ Naaiman spoke in fluent Zulu, which was close enough to their own tongue for the
Matabele to follow him readily. ‘Do these hairy white-faced creatures own all the earth and everything upon and beneath it? Are they then some kind of magical creature, some god from the
heavens that they can say to you “I own every stone in the earth, every drop of water in the—”’ Hendrick paused, for he was about to say oceans, but he knew that his
audience had never seen the sea, ‘“ – every drop of water in the rivers and lakes.”’

Hendrick shook his head so that the ringlets danced on his cheeks. ‘I tell you then to see how, when the sun bums away their skin, the red meat that shows through is the same coloured meat
as yours or mine. If you think them gods, then smell their breath in the morning or watch them squatting over the latrine pit. They do it the same way as you or me, my friends.’

The circle of black men listened fascinated, for they had never heard ideas like these expressed aloud.

‘They have guns,’ Bazo pointed out, and Hendrick laughed derisively.

‘Guns,’ he repeated, and patted the Enfield in his own lap. ‘I have a gun, and when you finish your contract you also will have a gun. Then we are gods also, you and me. Then
we own the stones and the rivers also.’

Cunningly Hendrick used ‘we’ and ‘ours’, not ‘me’ and ‘mine’, although he despised these naked black savages as heartily as did any of the other
bigots on New Rush.

Bazo took the stopper from his snuff-horn and poured a little of the fine red powder onto the pink palm of his hand, a palm still riven and scabbed from the rescue in No. 6 Section, and he
closed one nostril with his thumb and with the other sniffed the powder deep, left and right, and then sat back blinking deliciously at the ecstatic tears before passing the snuff-horn on to
Kamuza, his cousin, who sat beside him.

Hendrick Naaiman waited with the patience of a man of old Africa, waited for the snuff-horn to complete the circle and come into his own hands. He took a pinch in each nostril and threw back his
head to sneeze into the fire, then settled into silence again, waiting for Bazo to speak.

The Matabele frowned into the living coals, watching the devils form and fade, the figures and faces of strange men and beasts, the spirits of the flames – and he wished they had counsel
for him.

At last he lifted his gaze to the man across the fire, once again studying the laced velskoen on his feet, the breeches of fine corduroy, the Sheffield-steel knife on his brass-studded belt, the
embroidered waistcoat of beautiful thread and velvet and the flaming silk at his throat.

He was without doubt an important man, and a rogue. Bazo did not trust him. He could almost smell the deceit and cunning upon him.

‘Why does a great chief, a man of worth, like yourself, come to tell us these things?’

‘Bazo, son of Gandang,’ Hendrick intoned, his voice becoming deep and laden with portent, ‘I dreamed a dream last night. I dreamed that under the floor of your hut lie buried
certain stones.’

For a moment the eyes of every Matabele warrior swivelled from Hendrick’s face to the mud-plastered floor at the back of the low, smoky thatched hut, the darkest area of the circular room,
and Hendrick suppressed the smile that crowded his lips.

Treasure was always buried under the floor of the hut, where a man could spread his sleeping-mat over it at night and guard it even in his sleep. It had not been difficult to guess where, the
only question had been whether or not the gang of Matabele had yet learned the value of diamonds and begun gathering their own, as every other gang on the diggings was doing. Those furtive, guilty
glances were his answer, but he let no trace of satisfaction show as he went on quietly.

‘In my dream I saw that you were cheated, that when you took the stones to the white man, Bakela, he gave you a single gold coin with the head of the white queen upon it.’
Hendrick’s broad handsome face darkened with melancholy. ‘My friend, I come to warn you. To save you from being cheated. To tell you that there is a man who will pay you the true value
of your stones, and that you will have a fine new gun, a horse with a saddle, a bag of gold coins; whatever you desire will be yours.’

‘Who is this man?’ Bazo asked cautiously, and Hendrick spread his arms and for the first time smiled.

‘It is me, Hendrick Naaiman, your friend.’

‘How much will you give? How many white queens for these stones?’

Hendrick shrugged. ‘I must see these stones. But one thing I promise, it will be many, many times more than the single coin that Bakela will give you.’

Again Bazo was silent.

‘I have a stone,’ he admitted at last. ‘But I do not know if it has the spirit you seek, for it is a strange stone, like none other we have ever seen.’

‘Let me see it, my old friend,’ Hendrick whispered encouragingly. ‘I will give you the advice of a father to his favourite son.’

Bazo took the snuff-horn and turned it over and over between his fingers, the muscles in his shoulders and arms bulged and subsided and his smooth regular features, knitted now in thought,
seemed to be carved from the wood of the wild ebony.

‘Go,’ he said at last. ‘Return when the moon sets. Come alone, without a gun, without a knife. And know you that one of my brothers will stand always at your back ready to
drive the blade of his assegai out of your breastbone if you so much as think a treacherous thought.’

W
hen Hendrick Naaiman crawled through the low doorway again it was past midnight; the fire had sunk to a puddle of ruddy ash, the smoke swirled
like grey phantoms in the light of the bull’s-eye lantern he carried, and the naked blades of the short broad stabbing spears flickered blue and deadly in the shadows.

He could smell the nervous sweat of the men that wielded those dreadful weapons, and the vulture wings of death seemed to rustle in the dark recesses of the hut. Hendrick knew how close that
dark presence could crowd about him, for frightened men are dangerous men. It was part of his trade, this ever-present threat of death, but he could never accustom himself to it, and he heard the
quaver in his own voice as he greeted Bazo.

The young Matabele sat as he had last seen him, facing the single door of the hut, his back protected by the thick mud wall and his assegai at his side, the shaft ready to his hand.

‘Sit,’ he instructed the Griqua, and Hendrick squatted opposite him.

Bazo nodded to two of his men and they slipped away as silently as hunting leopards to stand guard in the starlight, while two others knelt at Hendrick’s back, their assegais in their
right hand, the points merely inches from his cringing spine.

There was the weird ‘woo woo’ call of a nightjar out in the starlight, clearly the signal for which Bazo waited; one of his Matabele assuring him that they were unobserved. Hendrick
Naaiman nodded in approval, the young Matabele was clever and careful.

Now Bazo lifted into his lap a small cloth-wrapped package on which fresh earth still clung in little yellow balls. He unwrapped it swiftly and, leaning forward across the smouldering fire,
placed the contents in Hendrick’s cupped hands.

The big Griqua sat paralysed like that, his cupped hands before his face, his dark pock-marked features frozen in an expression of disbelief, of utter astonishment. Then his hands began to
tremble slightly; and quickly he placed the huge glittering stone on the hard-packed mud floor as though it had burned his fingers, but his tar-dark eyes seemed to bulge from their deep sockets as
he stared at it still.

Nobody spoke or moved for almost a minute, and then Hendrick shook himself as though he were waking from deep sleep, but his eyes never left that stone.

‘It is too big,’ he whispered in English. ‘It cannot be.’

Then suddenly he was hasty; he snatched up the stone and dipped it and his hand wrist-deep into the calabash of drinking water which stood beside the fire; then, holding it up in the lantern
light, he watched the great stone shed water as though it had been greased, as though it were the feather of a wild goose.

‘By my daughter’s virgin blood,’ he whispered again, and the men watching him stirred darkly into the shadows. His emotions had infected them with restless excitement.

Hendrick reached for the side pocket of his buckskin coat, and immediately the point of the assegai pricked the soft skin behind his ear.

‘Tell him!’ Hendrick blurted, and Bazo shook his head. The prick of steel ceased and Hendrick took from his pocket a shard of curved dark green glass, part of a shattered champagne
bottle discarded in the veld behind one of the grog-shops.

Hendrick set it firmly on the floor of the hut, pressing the sharp points of glass into the clay. Then he closely examined the stone for a moment. One plane of the crystal had sheared through
cleanly, leaving a sharp ridge around the rim, and the curved upper surface fitted neatly into Hendrick’s cupped hand.

He placed the sharp ridge of the stone against the polished dark green curve of the broken bottle, then pressed down with the full strength of his right forearm and began to draw the edge across
the glass. There was a thin abrasive screech that set his big white-starred teeth on edge, and behind the moving edge of the glittering stone a deep white groove appeared in the green glass, the
stone had cut it as a hot knife cuts cheese.

Reverently the Griqua placed the stone in front of him, on the bare floor, and it seemed to be moving as the light played within its limpid depths, turned to magical stars of mauve and green and
flaming crimson.

His voice had dried, his throat cleaved closed, he could barely breathe for iron bands of avarice had bound his chest, but his eyes glittered like a wolf in the firelight.

Hendrick Naaiman knew diamonds as a jockey knows fine horse flesh or a tailor the feel of good tweed cloth between his fingers. Diamonds were his salt, his bread, his very breath, and he knew
that before him on the swept mud floor of this smoky little thatched hut lay something that would one day repose in the treasure house of the palace of some great king.

It was a living legend already: something that only a king could buy, something whose value, when converted to gold pounds or dollars, would stun even a rich man.

‘Has this stone the spirit you seek?’ Bazo asked quietly, and Hendrick swallowed before he could talk.

‘I will give you five hundred gold queens for this stone,’ he answered, and his voice was hoarse, ragged as though he were in pain.

His words struck the dark group of Matabele the way the east wind off the sea strikes the forests of Tzikhama, so that they swayed and rustled with the shock.

‘Five hundred,’ repeated Hendrick Naaiman. ‘Which will buy you fifty guns or many fine cattle.’

‘Give the stone to me,’ Bazo ordered, and when Hendrick hesitated, the assegai pricked him again so that he started violently.

Bazo took the stone and stared at it broodingly, then he sighed.

‘This is a heavy matter,’ he said. ‘I must think on it. Go now and return tomorrow at the same time. I will have an answer for you then.’

Long after the Griqua left, the silence persisted in the darkened hut, broken at last by Kamuza.

‘Five hundred gold pieces,’ he said. ‘I long to see the hills of Matopos again; I long for the sweet milk of my father’s herds again. With five hundred gold queens we
could leave this place.’

‘Do you know what the white men do to people who steal these stones?’ Bazo asked softly.

‘Not their stones. The Bastaard told us—’

‘No matter what the yellow Bastaard told you, you will be a very dead Matabele if the white men catch you.’

‘One man they burned alive in his hut. They say he smelled like a roasting joint of warthog meat,’ one of the others murmured.

‘Another they tied by his heels and dragged behind a galloping horse as far as the river. When they were finished, he no longer looked like a man at all.’

They thought about these atrocities a while, not shocked by them for they had seen men burned alive before. On one of the cattle raids to the east of Matabeleland their own regiment had chased
two hundred Mashona men and women and children into the maze of caves that honeycombed the kopjes above their village.

It would have been a tedious task to hunt them out of the dark belly of the hills, so they had packed every entrance to the underground passages with branches of mopani trees and then put in
fire. At the end some of the Mashona had run out through the flames, living torches of shrieking flame.

‘Fire is a bad way to die,’ said Kamuza, and uncorked his own snuff-horn.

‘And five hundred pieces is a great deal of gold,’ one of his friends answered him across the fire.