Men of Men (10 page)

Confronted with a wheelbarrow for the first time, two of them lifted it bodily and walked away with it and its contents. When Ralph demonstrated the correct use of the vehicle, their wonder and
delight was childlike, and Bazo told them smugly: ‘I promised you many wonders, did I not?’

They were a highly disciplined group of young men, accustomed since childhood firstly to the strict structure of family life in the kraals and then from puberty to the communal training and
teamwork of the fighting regiments.

They were also fiercely competitive, delighting in any challenge to pit their strength or skill against one another.

Zouga, knowing all these things, organized them in four teams of four men, each named after a bird – the Cranes, the Hawks, the Shrikes and the Khorhaans – and each week the team
with the best performance in lashing the gravel was entitled to wear the feathers of their adopted bird in their hair and to a double ration of meat and mealie-meal and
twala
, the African
beer fermented from millet grain. They turned the work into a game.

There were some small adjustments to be made. The Matabele were cattle-men, their whole lives devoted to raising, protecting and enlarging their herds, even if these expansions were often at the
expense of their less warlike neighbours. Their staple diet was beef and
maas
, the calabash-soured milk of the Nguni.

Beef was an expensive item on the diggings, and it was with patent distaste that they sampled the greasy stringy mutton that Zouga provided. However, hard physical labour builds appetites, and
within days they were eating this new diet if not with relish at least without complaint.

Within those same few days the labour was apportioned and each man learned his task.

Jan Cheroot could not be inveigled down into the workings.

‘
Ek
is nie ’n meerkat nie
,’ he told Zouga loftily, reverting to the bastard Dutch of Cape Colony. ‘I am not a mongoose; I do not live in a hole in the
ground.’

Zouga needed a trusted man on the sorting-tables, and that was where Jan Cheroot presided. Squatting like a yellow idol over the glittering piles of washed gravel, the triangular shape of his
face was emphasized by the scraggy little beard on the point of his chin – by the high oriental cheekbones and slanted eyes, each in their spider-web of wrinkles.

He was quick to pick out the soapy sheen of the noble stones in the piles of dross, but there was another pair of eyes sharper and quicker. Traditionally the women made the best sorters, but
little Jordan proved immediately to have an uncanny talent at picking out diamonds, no matter what their size or colour.

The child picked the very first stone from the very first sieveful. It was a minute stone, twenty points, a fifth part of a carat, and the colour was a dark cognac brown, so that Zouga doubted
its integrity. But when be showed it to one of the kopje-wallopers, it was a veritable diamond and the buyer offered him three shillings for it.

After that nobody questioned Jordan, instead a doubtful stone was passed to him for judgement. Within a week he was the Devil’s Own chief sorter.

He sat opposite Jan Cheroot at the low metal table, almost the same size as the Hottentot. He wore a huge sombrero of plaited maize stalks to protect his delicate peachlike skin from the sun,
and he sorted the gravel as though it were a game of which he never tired. Competing with Jan Cheroot avidly, a high-pitched shriek of excitement signalled each discovery, and his neat little hands
flew over the gravel like those of a pianist over the ivory keyboard.

Z
ouga had found a woman to give both Ralph and Jordan their lessons. The wife of a Lutheran preacher, she was a plump-breasted, sweet-faced woman
with iron-grey hair swept up into an enormous bun at the back of her head. Mrs Gander was the only schoolmistress within five hundred miles, and for a few hours each morning she gave a small group
of diggers’ children their reading, writing and arithmetic in the little galvanized-iron church at the back of Market Square.

It was a daily ritual to which Ralph had to be driven by his father’s threats, and to which Jordan hurried with the same enthusiasm as he did to the sorting-table after school was out.
With his angelic looks, and the intense interest in the written word that Aletta had germinated in him, Jordan was instantly Mrs Gander’s darling.

She made no effort to conceal her preference. She called him ‘Jordie-dear’ and gave to him the task of wiping clean the blackboard, which immediately made it an honour for which the
dozen other children in the class would have scratched out his lovely densely-lashed angel eyes.

There was a pair of twins in Mrs Gander’s class. The tough sons of a tough out-of-luck digger from the Australian opal fields, they were a matched pair, with shaven heads to inhibit the
breeding of lice, bare-footed, for their father was working a poor claim on the eastern edge of the diggings, their braces supporting patched canvas breeches over faded and frayed shirts. Henry and
Douglas Stewart made a formidable pair, acting in complete concert, quick with a cruel jibe too soft for Mrs Gander to hear or a crafty jab with the elbow or a tug of the hair too quick for her to
see.

Jordan was natural prey. ‘Jordie-girl’ they christened him, and his soft curls felt good between their fingers, and his tears were enormously satisfying – especially when they
realized that Jordan for some strange reason of pride would not appeal to his big brother for protection.

‘Y
ou tell Goosie-Gander that I’ve a belly ache,’ Ralph instructed Jordan. ‘And that Papa says I am too sick to come to
class.’

‘Where are you going?’ Jordan demanded. ‘What are you going to do?’

‘I’m going to the nest – I think the chicks may be ready.’ Ralph had discovered a lanner falcon’s nest on the top ledge of a rocky kopje five miles out on the Cape
road. He was planning to take the chicks and train them as hunting falcons. Ralph always had exciting plans; it was one of the many reasons why Jordan adored him.

‘Oh, let me come with you. Please, Ralph.’

‘You’re still just a baby, Jordie.’

‘I’m nearly eleven.’

‘You’re only just ten,’ Ralph corrected him loftily, and from experience Jordan knew there was no profit in arguing.

Jordan delivered Ralph’s lie for him in such sweet piping tones and with such a guileless flutter of the long lashes, that it never occurred to Mrs Gander to doubt it, and the Stewart
twins exchanged a quick glance of complete accord.

There was a latrine at the back of the church, a sentry box of corrugated iron, a boxwood seat with an oval cut from it suspended over a galvanized steel bucket. The heat in the tiny room was
ovenlike and the contents of the bucket ripened swiftly. The twins trapped Jordan there in the mid-morning break.

They had hold of an ankle each and were standing on the wooden seat, the hole between them, and Jordan was dangling upside down, clinging desperately to the boxwood seat as they tried to force
his head and shoulders through the opening and into the brimming bucket.

‘Stamp on his fingers,’ Douglas panted. Jordan had offered unexpected opposition. Douglas had a red scratch down his neck, and they had had to pry Jordan’s jaws open to release
their grip on Henry’s thumb. The injuries had changed the mood of the twins. They had started out with laughter, spiteful laughter, but laughter all the same; now they were angry and vicious,
their self-esteem smarting as much as their injuries.

‘Shut up, you little sissy,’ blurted Henry, as he obeyed his brother and brought down his horny heel on Jordan’s white knuckles. Jordan’s shrieks of agony and horror and
terror reverberated in the tiny iron shed as he kicked and fought.

Against their combined strength, Jordan’s wildest efforts were ineffectual. His fingernails scratched white splinters from the wooden seat, and his shrieks mounted hysterically, but his
head was forced down. The stench was suffocating, the disgust choked his throat and strangled his cries.

At the moment that he felt the cold wet filth soaking into his golden curls the door of the shed was wrenched open and Mrs Gander’s motherly bulk filled the opening.

For a moment she stared incredulously, and then she began to swell with outrage. Her right arm, muscled from kneading bread and pounding wet washing, flew out in a round open-handed blow that
knocked both twins flying into a corner of the latrine – and she gathered Jordan up, holding him at arms’ length. With her flushed face wrinkling at the smell of his soaked curls, she
rushed out with him, shouting to her husband to bring a bucket of precious water and a bar of the yellow and blue mottled soap.

Half an hour later Jordan reeked of carbolic soap and his curls were fluffing out again as the sun dried them into a shining halo, and from behind the closed doors of the vestry the yells of
pain emitted by the twins were punctuated by the clap of the Reverend Gander’s Malacca cane walking stick as his wife urged him on to greater endeavour.

A
round the whittled remains of Colesberg kopje had grown up a miniature range of man-made hillocks. These were the tailings from the diamond
cradles, dumped haphazardly on the open ground beyond the settlement. Some of these artificial hills were already twenty feet high, and they formed a wasteland where no tree nor blade of grass
grew. A maze of narrow footpaths laced the area, made by the daily pilgrimage of hundreds of black workers to the pit.

The shortcut between the Lutheran church and Zouga’s camp followed one of these footpaths, and in the heat-hushed hour of noon, the labourers were still in the workings and the hills were
deserted. The sun directly overhead threw only narrow black strips of shade below the mounds of loose gravel as Jordan hurried along the dusty path, his eyes still red-rimmed with weeping the tears
of humiliation and stinging from the foam of carbolic soap.

‘Hello Jordie-girl.’ Jordan recognized the voice instantly, and it stopped him dead, blinking his swimming eyes in the sunlight, peering up at the summit of one of the gravel mounds
beside the path.

One of the twins stood silhouetted against the pale blue noon sky. His thumbs hooked into his braces, his shaven head thrust forward, his eyes with their thin colourless lashes as vicious as
those of a ferret.

‘You told, Jordie-girlie,’ the twin accused flatly.

‘I never told,’ Jordan denied, his voice squeaking uncertainly.

‘You screamed. That’s the same as telling – and now you are going to scream again, but this time there isn’t going to be anyone to hear you, Jordie-girl.’

Jordan spun around, and in the same movement he was running with all the desperation and speed of a gazelle pursued by a hunting cheetah; but he had not gone a dozen frantic paces when the
second twin slid down the sloping bank, the gravel hissing around his bare feet, full into the narrow pathway ahead of Jordan, his arms spread in welcome, his mouth twisted into a grin of
anticipation.

They had laid the trap with care. They had caught him in a narrow place, where the gravel banks were highest, and behind him the first twin slid adroitly down to block the path, keeping his
balance on the little avalanche of rolling gravel under his bare feet until he hit the level pathway.

‘Jordie-dear,’ called one twin.

‘Jordie-girl,’ echoed the other, and they closed from each side, slowly, tantalizing themselves, so that Henry giggled almost breathlessly.

‘Little girls shouldn’t tell tales.’

‘I’m not a girl,’ whispered Jordan, backing away from him.

‘Then you shouldn’t have curls; only girls have curls.’ Douglas groped in his pocket and brought out a bone-handled clasp knife. He opened the blade with his teeth.

‘We are going to turn you into a boy, Jordie-girl.’

‘Then we are going to teach you not to tell tales.’ Henry brought out his hand from behind his back. He had cut a camel-thorn branch, and stripped the bunches of lacy leaves, but not
the thorns. ‘We are going to do the same to you as old Goosey-Gander did to us. Fifteen cuts each. That’s thirty for you, Jordie-girl.’

Jordan’s gaze fastened on the branch with sickened fascination. It was twice as thick as a man’s thumb, more a club than a cane, and the thorns were half an inch long, each on a
little raised knob of rough black bark. Henry swung it in an experimental cut and it hissed like an adder.

The sound galvanized Jordan, he whirled and flew at the high bank of gravel beside him; it slid treacherously under his feet so that he had to use his hands to claw his way towards the
summit.

Behind him the twins yipped with excitement, like the hunting call of a pack of wild dogs, and they raced after him, scrambling up the soft collapsing bank.

Their weight buried them at each pace above the ankles, so that Jordan, lighter and buoyant with terror, reached the top of the bank ahead of them, and he raced silent and white-faced across the
flattened table of the summit, opening the gap further.

Henry snatched up a stone as he ran, a lump of quartz as big as his own fist, and he used his own momentum to hurl it. It flew an inch past Jordan’s ear, and he flinched and whimpered,
losing his balance, stumbled at the far edge of the dump, and went tumbling down the steep slope.

‘Stop him,’ yipped Douglas, and launched himself over the edge.

At the bottom Jordan rolled to his feet, dusty and wildly dishevelled, his curls bushed out and dangling in his eyes. He wasted a second, glancing about desperately, and then darted away along
the narrow footpath through the gut of the pass between the gravel dumps.

‘Catch him. Don’t let him get away.’ The twins yelled at each other, panting with laughter, like two cats with a mouse, and here on the flat their longer legs quickly narrowed
Jordan’s lead.

He heard their bare feet slapping on hard earth in a broken rhythm close behind him, and he twisted his head back over his shoulder, almost blinded with his own sweat and dancing curls, his
breath sobbing, his skin white as bone china and his huge brimming eyes seeming to fill his whole face.