Men of Men (8 page)

Pickering was not lucky enough to have women working his tables, but the Africans he had were carefully trained, although never trusted.

‘You would never credit what they do with a good stone to try and get away with it. I smile sometimes at what the Duchess would think if she knew that the shiner hanging around her neck
had been up the tail end of a big black Basuto,’ Pickering chuckled. ‘Come, I’ll show you what to look for.’

The wiry little black sorter at the head of the table advertised his superior status by his European finery, embroidered waistcoat and Derby hat, but his feet were bare and he carried his
snuff-horn in the pierced lobe of his ear. He vacated his seat at the table cheerfully, and Neville Pickering took up the scraper and began to sift through the gravel, a few pebbles at a time.

‘There!’ he grunted suddenly. ‘Your first wild diamond, old man! Take a good look at it, and let’s hope it isn’t your last.’

Zouga was surprised. It was not what he had expected, and then his surprise was replaced immediately by disappointment. It was a drab little chip of stone, barely the size of one of the sand
fleas which swarmed in the red dust of the camp.

It lacked the fire and flash that Zouga had expected, and its colour was a dingy yellow: the colour of champagne perhaps, but without that wine’s sparkle.

‘Are you sure?’ Zouga asked. ‘It doesn’t look like a diamond to me. How can you tell?’

‘It’s a splint-chip, probably a piece of a larger stone. It will go ten points, that’s a tenth part of a carat, and we will be lucky to get five shillings for it, but it will
pay the wages of one of my men for a week.’

‘How do you tell the difference between that – and those?’ Zouga indicated the mound of gravel in the centre of the table, still wet from the washing-tub, glistening in a
thousand different shades of red and gold, anthracite black and flesh pinks, the gaudy show of diamondiferous gravel.

‘It’s the soapiness,’ Pickering explained, ‘the soap texture. You will train your eye to it soon, don’t bother about the colour – look for the soap.’ He
took the stone in the teeth of a pair of wooden tweezers and turned it in the sunlight. ‘A diamond is unwettable, it repels water; so in the wet gravel it stands out, and the difference is
that soapy look.’

Neville proffered the stone. ‘There, I tell you what, you keep it as a gift, your first diamond.’

T
hey had been hunting for nearly ten days now, and had gradually moved farther and farther north.

Twice they had sighted quarry, small groups, but each time the quarry had scattered at the first approach.

Zouga was getting desperate. His claims were lying abandoned in the New Rush workings, the level of the surrounding claims would be sinking swiftly, making his more difficult to work and every
day increasing the danger of rock slide. Those claims had already killed five men. Jock Danby had warned him.

He was lying now, belly down, on a tiny rocky kopje fifty miles north of the Vaal river, eighty miles from New Rush, and he was still not certain when he could finish this business and turn
southwards again.

Jan Cheroot and the two boys were farther down the slope with the horses, holding them in a shallow ravine that was choked with scrub thorn. Jordan’s girlish tones carried to where Zouga
sat, blending with the cries of circling birds, and Zouga lowered the binoculars to rest his eyes and to listen to his son’s voice.

He had worried about taking the boy on this rough journey, especially so soon after that bout of camp fever, but there had been no alternative, no safe place to leave him. Once again
Jordan’s stamina had belied his delicate looks. He had ridden hard and kept up well with his brother, at the same time recovering the flesh that the fever had burned from his body; and in the
last days the deathly pallor of his skin had been gilded to velvety peach.

Thinking about Jordan led directly to memories of Aletta, memories still so filled with sorrow and raw guilt that he could not bear them and he lifted the binoculars again and raked the plain,
seeking distraction. He found it with relief.

There was unusual movement far out on the wide plain. Through the lens Zouga picked up a herd of a hundred wildebeest, the ‘wild cattle’ of the Boers. These ungainly animals, with
their mournful Roman noses and scraggly beards, were the clowns of the veld. They chased each other in aimless circles, nose to earth and heels kicking at the sky, then abruptly they ceased this
lunatic cavorting and stood snorting at one another with wild-eyed expressions of amazement.

Beyond them Zouga caught a flicker of other movement: until that moment it had been hidden by the dust kicked up by the splayed wildebeest hooves. Carefully he adjusted the bevelled focus ring
of his binoculars, and the heat mirage trembled and melted before his gaze, turning the movement into a serpentine wriggle that seemed to float above the plain on a lake of silver shimmering
water.

‘Ostriches!’ he thought disgustedly. The distant shapes seemed to wriggle like long black tadpoles in the watery wavering mirage of distance. The long-legged birds seemed to float
free of the earth, blooming miraculously in the tortured air above the plain. Zouga tried to count them, but they changed shape and coagulated into a dark wavering mass, their plumed backs
bobbing.

Suddenly Zouga sat up. He dropped the binoculars and polished the lens with the tail of the silk bandanna around his throat, then quickly lifted them to his eyes again. The grotesque dark shapes
had separated, the lumpy wriggling bodies fined down, the elongated legs had assumed normal proportions.

‘Men!’ whispered Zouga, and counted them eagerly, as eagerly as he had ever made a first sighting of the huge ivory-carrying grey bull elephants in the hunting veld. He reached
eleven before another layer of heated air intervened and altered the distant man-shapes to grotesque unsteady monsters once again.

Zouga slung the binoculars over his shoulder and went down the slope with the loose scree rolling under his boots. Jan Cheroot and the boys lay in the bottom of the ravine on their saddle
blankets, their saddles propped behind them as bolsters.

Zouga slid down the bank and landed between them before they had returned from the fairyland that Jan Cheroot had been spinning for them.

‘A good bunch,’ he told Jan Cheroot.

Zouga reached down and withdrew the short Martini-Henry carbine from the leather bucket of Ralph’s saddle. He levered the breech-block down and checked the weapon was empty.

‘We aren’t after springbuck. Don’t you load until either Jan Cheroot or I tell you,’ he ordered sternly.

Jordan was still too little to handle the heavy rifle, but he rode well enough to make the encircling sweep with which they would try to close the net.

‘Remember, Jordie, that you stay close enough to Jan Cheroot to hear what he tells you,’ Zouga told him, glancing up at the sun as he did so.

It was well past noon; he would have to move fairly soon – for if they could not surround the little band of black men at the first attempt, if they did not achieve surprise, then it would
be the old time-consuming business of spooring them down individually. So far attempts at doing so had always been interrupted by the sudden African nightfall.

‘Saddle up,’ Zouga ordered, and they scrambled to their horses.

Zouga swung up onto the bay gelding and glared sternly at Ralph.

‘Now you do what you are told – or I’ll warm your tail feathers for you, young man.’

He swung the horse’s head and pointed it down the ravine, while behind his back Ralph grinned at Jan Cheroot conspiratorially, his face flushed with excitement, and the little Hottentot
closed one eyelid briefly but kept his flat wrinkled oriental features expressionless.

Zouga had chosen the kopje with care; from it a ravine meandered out across the plain in an approximate east to west direction – and he followed it now, slouching in the saddle to keep his
head below the level of the banks and keeping the gelding down to a walk so as not to raise dust.

After half a mile he removed the wide-brimmed hat from his head and raised himself cautiously in the stirrups until his eyes were just above the bank, and he darted a quick glance into the north
and then immediately ducked down again.

‘Station here,’ he told Ralph. ‘And don’t move until I do.’

They moved on down the ravine, while Zouga placed Jan Cheroot and Jordan side by side in a bend of the ravine where the bank had collapsed and formed an easy ramp up which they could launch
their charge.

‘Keep Jordie close,’ Zouga cautioned Jan Cheroot, and swung the gelding around with the saddlery creaking as the animal turned in the narrow gut of the ravine; then Zouga trotted
back until he was in the centre of the waiting line, and there he halted and contained his impatience, glancing up repeatedly at the lowering sun.

There would probably not be another chance for many days, and each day was vital for those untended claims. Zouga jerked the rifle from the leather bucket at his knee, selected a cartridge from
the bandolier around his waist and slipped it into the breech. Then he returned the weapon uncocked to the bucket. It was merely a precaution, but he had no means of knowing what manner of men
those approaching figures were.

Even if their intentions were peaceable, and their ultimate object identical to Zouga’s own, yet they would be armed and nervous, so nervous that they had avoided the road from the north
and were travelling over the open veld. They were in company for defence, and Zouga knew they would have been harassed often along the way, by black men and white: the black men trying to rob and
cheat them of their meagre possessions, the white men of something infinitely more valuable, their right to contract their labour to the highest bidder.

On the day that Zouga thanked Neville Pickering for his tuition and began preparing to work the Devil’s Own claims for his personal account, he had faced the problem that was already
wracking the entire sub-continent.

Only black men could stand the conditions of physical labour in the diggings. Only black men would work for a wage that made the diggings profitable, and even that beggarly wage was many times
more than the Boer farmers of the surrounding backveld republics could afford to pay.

The diamond diggings had denuded the countryside of labourers for five hundred miles around; and the Boers resented that as fiercely as they resented the nest of adventurers and fortune seekers
that the diggings supported.

The diamonds had caused an upheaval in the Boers’ traditional way of life; not only were the miners threatening the supply of cheap labour, which only just allowed a diligent and frugal
farmer to eke out a living for himself and his family from the savage land, but the diggers were doing something else that from the Boer point of view was unforgivable, that went against all their
deeply held beliefs and threatened not just their livelihood but their very physical existence.

The diamond diggers were paying the black tribesmen with
guns.
The Boers had fought the tribes at Blood River and Mosega, they had stood to the laager in ten thousand threatening dawns,
the favourite hour of attack. They had seen the smoke rising from their burning homesteads and crops, they had ridden out on commando on the spoor of their stolen herds, and they had buried the
pale corpses of their children, the blood drained from the frail bodies through the gaping and terrible wounds of the assegai. They had buried them at Weenen – the Place of Weeping –
and at other accursed and abandoned grave sites across the land.

The payment of black men with guns went against every one of their instincts; it flew full in the face of their laws and offended the memories of their dead heroes.

For these reasons Boer commandos from the little backveld republics were sweeping the land and patrolling the lonely roads from the north to try and prevent the tribesmen reaching the diggings
and instead press them to work upon the land.

However, five shillings a week and a musket at the end of a three years’ contract were a lure that brought the tribesmen, on foot, against a hundred hazards, on a journey of hundreds of
miles, daring the commandos and all else, to reach the diggings.

They came in their hundreds, but still not enough of them arrived to fill those hungry diamond pits. In vain Zouga and Jan Cheroot had ridden the workings. Every black man was signed on
contract, and jealously guarded by his employer.

Zouga had told Jan Cheroot, ‘We’ll offer seven shillings and sixpence a week.’

They signed five men that same day at the higher wage, and the next day there were a dozen deserters waiting outside Zouga’s camp, eager for the new coin.

Before Zouga could sign them, Neville Pickering sauntered up. ‘Official visit, old man,’ he murmured apologetically. ‘As a member of the jolly old Diggers’ Committee, I
have to tell you the rate is five shillings not seven and six.’

When Zouga opened his mouth to protest, Pickering smiled easily and held up his hand.

‘No, Major. I’m sorry. It’s five shillings, and not a penny more.’

Zouga was already in no doubt about the sweeping powers of the Diggers’ Committee. An edict from the elected body was enforced firstly by a warning, then a beating, and finally by the full
aggression of the entire community of diggers which could end in a burning or even a lynching.

‘What do I do for a gang, then?’ Zouga demanded.

‘You do what we all do; you go out and find a gang, before another digger or a Boer commando grabs them.’

‘I might have to go as far north as the Shashi river,’ Zouga snapped sarcastically, and Pickering nodded in agreement.

‘Yes, you might.’

Zouga smiled thinly at the memory of his first lesson in digger labour relations, and now he settled his hat firmly and gathered up his reins.

‘All right,’ he muttered, ‘let’s go recruiting!’ And he put his heels into the gelding’s flanks and went lunging up the bank of the ravine onto the open
plain.

The tribesmen were five hundred yards dead ahead, and he counted swiftly: sixteen of them. If he could take them all he could start back for New Rush in tomorrow’s dawn. Sixteen men were
sufficient to work the Devil’s Own, and at that moment they had, for Zouga, the same value as a fifty-carat diamond. They were in single file, moving swiftly, the trotting gait of the
fighting impis of Zulu, no women or children with them.