The collapse of the roadway had destroyed the value of their claims. They could no longer get the gravel out; their claims were isolated, cut off from ground level, and they were spoiling to place the blame and extract vengeance. That vengeance would be brutal.
Ralph put one hand on the spokes of the wagon wheel, ready to climb up onto the wagon body where the dozen members of the Committee were already waiting.
‘Ralph.’ Zouga stopped him with a hand on his arm. ‘Wait here.’
‘Papa—’ Ralph began to protest quietly, the fear still dark in his eyes.
‘Stay,’ Zouga repeated softly, and vaulted up onto the wagon body lightly.
He nodded briefly to the members of the Committee and then turned to face the mob. He was bare-headed, his beard catching the sunlight and jutting aggressively as he placed his clenched fists on his hips and set his feet easily apart.
‘Gentlemen,’ he said, and his voice carried clearly to the last row of the crowd, ‘my son is only sixteen years old. I am here to answer for him.’
‘If he’s old enough to kill six men, then he’s old enough to face the music himself.’
‘He killed nobody,’ Zouga answered coldly. ‘If you look to place the blame, then put it on the rain. Go down to the pit, and you will see where it undercut the bank.’
‘He started fighting,’ the shaggy-headed accuser bellowed. ‘I saw him use his whip on Mark Sanderson.’
‘There is a fight on one of the causeways every hour of every day,’ Zouga shot at him. ‘I’ve seen you throwing punches out there, and getting your arse whipped at that.’
There was a ripple of laughter, a lightening of the mood, and Zouga took his advantage.
‘In the name of all that’s holy, gentlemen, there is not one of us here who does not protect his rights. My son was doing that, against a man older and stronger than himself, and if he’s guilty for that, then so are all of you.’
They liked that, liked being told they were tough and independent, proud of being hard fighters and hard livers.
‘Are you telling me that one boy with a trek whip brought down the No. 6 causeway all on his own? If so, then I’m proud that boy is my son.’
They laughed again, and on the wagon behind Zouga the tall blond untidily dressed man with the cleft chin and pale blue eyes smiled thoughtfully and murmured to the Committee member beside him.
‘He’s good, Pickling,’ using Neville Pickering’s familiar nickname. ‘He talks as well as he writes, and that’s well enough.’
‘No, gentlemen,’ Zouga changed pace. ‘That causeway was a death-trap, ready to go off before the first gravel bucky went out on it Friday morning. The collapse was nobody’s fault; we had just dug too deep, and there was too much rain.’
Heads were nodding now, their expressions concerned and grave as Zouga went on.
‘We are too deep on the New Rush, and unless we work out a new system of getting the stuff out of our claims, then there are going to be a lot more dead men for us to bury.’
Zouga glanced down as one of the diggers shouldered his way through the crowd and climbed up onto the disselboom of the wagon.
‘Now you pay attention, you bunch of dirt-hounds,’ he yelled.
‘The chair acknowledges Mister Sanderson,’ Neville Pickering murmured sarcastically.
‘Thanking you, Guv.’ The digger lifted his battered Derby hat, finery that he had donned especially for this meeting, then turned and scowled at the crowd. ‘This nipper of Zouga Ballantyne’s is going to be a bad one to mess with, and a good one to have at your side when things get hard.’ Still scowling, he turned and called to Ralph. ‘You come up here, young Ballantyne.’
Still pale and worried, Ralph hung back, but rough hands pushed him forward and hoisted him onto the wagon.
The digger had to reach up to put his arm around Ralph’s shoulder.
‘This boy could have let me drop into the pit like a rotten tomato, and squash the same way when I hit the bottom.’ He made a vaguely obscene squelching sound with his lips to illustrate his own demise. ‘He could have run and left me, but he didn’t.’
‘That’s ’cause he’s young and stupid,’ someone called. ‘If he had any sense he’d have given you a shove, you miserable bastard.’
There was a hubbub of cheers and hooted derision.
‘I’m going to buy this boy a drink,’ announced Sanderson belligerently.
‘That will be some sort of record. You ain’t never bought nobody a drink yet.’
Sanderson ignored them haughtily. ‘Just as soon as he turns eighteen, I’m going to buy him a drink.’
The meeting started to break up in a storm of friendly catcalls and laughter, the diggers streaming away across the square to the canteens.
It was obvious to even the most bloody-minded of them that there wasn’t going to be a lynching, and hardly any of them bothered to wait for the Committee’s verdict. It was more important to get a good place at the bar.
‘Which doesn’t mean we approve of your behaviour, young man,’ Pickering told Ralph severely. ‘This isn’t Bultfontein or Dutoitspan. Here on New Rush we try to set an example to the other diggings. In future, do try and behave like a gentleman. I mean fists are one thing, but whips—’ He raised one eyebrow disdainfully and turned to Zouga. ‘If you have any ideas about how we are going to work the No. 6 area now that the causeway has gone, we’d like to hear them, Major Ballantyne.’
Hendrick Naaiman would have called himself a ‘Bastaard’, and would have used the term with a deep sense of pride. However, the British Foreign Office had found the word awkward, possibly the double ‘A’ in the spelling offended the proper order of official correspondence and treaties, especially if one of those treaties should ever be laid for signature before Queen Victoria. So the nation was now referred to as Griqua, and the land on which New Rush stood was renamed Griqualand West, a definition which made it easier for Whitehall to champion old Nicholaas Waterboer, the Bastaard captain’s claim to the area, over that of the Boer presidents of the backveld republics which also claimed the area as part of their dominions.
It was remarkable how before the discovery of the bright stones nobody, and especially not Great Britain, had shown the slightest interest in this desolate and arid plain, no matter what it was called.
In Hendrick Naaiman’s veins flowed the rich intermingled blood of numerous peoples.
Its basis was that of the Hottentot, the sturdy golden-skinned, dark-eyed people who had met the first Portuguese circumnavigators of the globe when they stepped onto the gleaming white beach sands of Good Hope.
Added to the Hottentot was the blood of the captured yellow bushman girls. Tiny doll-like creatures whose buttery yellow skins and dainty triangular faces with orientally slanted eyes and flattened pug features were only part of their attraction. To a people who regarded a large female posterior as a mark of beauty, the buttocks of the bushmen girls were irresistible, a bountiful double bulge that stood out behind them like the hump of a camel – and in the arid deserts of the Kalahari served the same purpose.
To this blood mixture was added the contribution of outcast Fingo and Pondo tribesmen, fugitives from the wiles of their own cruel chiefs and merciless witchdoctors, and Malayan slaves, escaped from their Dutch burgher masters, who had found their way through the secret passes of the mountains that defended the Cape of Good Hope like the turreted walls of a great castle. They also joined the bands of wandering Griquas on the vast plains of the interior.
This blood mixture was compounded with that of little English girls, orphaned survivors of shipwrecked East India men that had perished on the treacherous rocks scoured by the Agulhas current, and taken to wife at puberty by their darker-skinned rescuers. And there was other northern blood, that of British seamen, pressed into the Royal Navy’s service in the time of Napoleon’s wars and desperate to exchange that harsh duty even for the life of deserter in such a wild and desert land as Southern Africa. Others had fled
into the same wilderness, escaped convicts from the transport ships that had called at Good Hope to reprovision for the long eastern leg of the voyage to Australia and penal settlement of Botany Bay.
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.’
When 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.