Men of Men (6 page)

Despite the night of sleep that he had missed, he felt no fatigue, and his step was so light that he almost ran out along the narrow causeway that intersected the jumble of claims and
workings.

The Devil’s Own were deserted, two forlorn patches of raw yellow earth, neatly squared off and littered with abandoned equipment. Jock Danby’s black workers had gone, for there was
always a desperate shortage of labourers on the diggings. When Jock had not mustered them the previous dawn they had simply wandered away to take daily hire with one of the other diggers.

Most of the mining gear left on the claims seemed worn out, the buckets on the point of bursting and the ropes furry as fat yellow caterpillars. Zouga would not trust them with his own
weight.

Gingerly he climbed down the swaying ladder, his cautious movements alerting the diggers on the neighbouring claims that he was an outsider.

‘Those are Jock Danby’s briefies, man,’ one of them shouted a challenge. ‘You breaking the diggers’ law. That’s private ground. You better clear out –
and bloody quick, at that.’

‘I bought Jock out,’ Zouga shouted back. ‘He left town an hour ago.’

‘How do I know that?’

‘Why don’t you go up to the commissioner’s office?’ Zouga asked. The challenger scowled up at him uncertainly, the level of his claim twenty feet below the Devil’s
Own.

Men had stopped work along the length of the irregular pit, others had lined the causeway high above, and there was an ugly mood on all of them – that was broken by a clear young voice
speaking in the cadence and intonation of a refined English gentleman.

‘Major Ballantyne – that is you, is it not?’ And, peering up at the causeway, Zouga recognized Neville Pickering, his drinking companion from the first day in the London
Hotel.

‘It is indeed, Mr Pickering.’

‘That’s all right, fellows. I’ll vouch for Major Ballantyne. He is the famous elephant hunter, don’t you know?’

Almost immediately they lost interest and turned away to become absorbed once more in their own race to get the buckets of gravelly yellow stuff to the surface.

‘Thank you,’ Zouga called up to the man on the causeway above him.

‘My pleasure, sir.’ Pickering flashed a brilliant smile, touched the brim of his hat and sauntered away, a slim and elegant figure in the press of bearded dust-caked diggers.

Zouga was left alone, as alone in spirit as he had ever been in any of his wanderings across the vast African continent. He had spent almost the last penny he owned on these few square feet of
yellow earth at the bottom of this hot and dusty pit. He had no men to help him work it, no experience, no capital – and he doubted that he would recognize an uncut diamond if he held one in
the palm of his hand.

As suddenly as it had descended upon him, the gambler’s elation, the premonition of good fortune that awaited him here evaporated. He was instantly overwhelmed by his own presumption and
by the enormity of the gamble he was taking.

He had risked it all on claims that so far had not yielded a single good stone, the price of diamonds was plummeting, the ‘pool goods’, small splints of half a carat or less which
formed the vast bulk of stones recovered, were fetching only five shillings each.

It was a wild chance, and his stomach slid sickeningly as he faced the consequences of failure.

The sun was almost directly overhead, burning down into the bottom of the workings; the air around him wavered with the heat and it came up through the leather of his boots to scorch the soles
of his feet. He felt as though he were suffocating, as though he could not bear it another moment, as though he must scramble up out of this loathsome pit to where the air was cooler and
sweeter.

He knew then he was afraid. It was an emotion to which he was not accustomed. He had stood down the charge of a wounded bull elephant, and taken his chance – man to man, steel to steel
– on the frontiers of India and in the wild border wars of the Cape.

He was not accustomed to feeling fear, but the waves of panic rose up out of some dark place in his soul and he fought to control them. The sense of impending disaster crushed down upon him.
Under his feet he could almost feel the sterility of the baking earth, the barren earth which would cripple him at last, and destroy the dream which had been the fuel on which his life had run for
all these years.

Was it all to end here in this hot and hellish pit?

He took a deep breath, and held it for a moment, fighting off the waves of blind panic, and slowly they receded, leaving him feeling weak and shaken as though from a heavy dose of malarial
fever.

He went down on one knee and took a handful of the yellow stuff, sifting it through his fingers, and then examined the residue of dull and worthless pebbles. He let them drop and dusted his hand
against his thigh.

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.’

T
he 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.

A
letta’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.