He was young, probably ten years older than Jordan, though he had such a powerful presence, such a sense of maturity and of power seemed to invest him, that he appeared much older.
Yet there was something else about him that seemed to contradict the first appearance. The high colour in his lips and cheeks was not the flush of health and the open air life. It was a shade hectic, and though the skin was unlined, there were the subtle marks of suffering and pain at the corners of his eyes and mouth, while behind that penetrating gaze, that compelling intensity, there was a tragic shadow, a sense of sadness that was perhaps only readily apparent to the uncomplicated view of a child.
For a moment the man and the boy looked into each other’s eyes, and something twisted almost painfully deep in Jordan’s soul, a sweet pang – gratitude, puppy love, compassion, hero-worship – it was all of those and something else for which he would never have words.
Then the man stood; he was tall and big built, over six foot in his riding boots, and Jordan only reached as high as his ribs.
‘Who is your father, Jordan?’ And Jordan was grateful that he did not use the diminutive. The rider nodded at his reply.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I have heard of him. The elephant hunter. Well, then, we had best get you home.’
He stepped up into the stirrup and from the saddle reached down, took Jordan by the arm and swung him up onto the horse’s rump. Jordan sat sideways, and as the horse started forward, he put both arms round the rider’s waist to balance himself.
Jan Cheroot came hurrying from the sorting-table as they trotted into Zouga’s camp, and when the rider reined in, he reached up and lifted Jordan down.
‘He has been in a fight,’ the rider told Jan Cheroot. ‘Put a little iodine on his cuts, and he’ll be all right. The boy has spirit.’
Jan Cheroot was obsequious, almost cringing, far from his usual acerbic and cynical self. He seemed to be rendered speechless by the direct and startling gaze of the big man on the rangy horse. He held Jordan with one hand and with the other lifted the old regimental cap from his head and held it against his chest, nodding in servile agreement with the orders the man gave him.
The rider transferred his steady gaze back to Jordan, and for the first time he smiled.
‘Next time pick on somebody your own size, Jordan,’ he advised, took up the reins and trotted out of the camp without looking back.
‘You know who that was, Jordie?’ Jan Cheroot asked portentously, staring after the rider and not waiting for Jordan’s reply. ‘That’s the big boss of the Diggers’ Committee, that’s the most important man on New Rush, Jordie—’ he paused theatrically, and then announced, ‘That’s Mr Rhodes.’
‘Mr Rhodes.’ Jordan repeated the name to himself, ‘Mr Rhodes.’ It had a heroic sound to it, like some of the poetry that his mother had read to him. He knew that something important had just happened in his life.
Every member of Zouga’s family found his place in the work, almost as though a special niche had been reserved for each of them: Jan Cheroot and Jordan at the sorting-table, the Matabele amadoda in the open diggings, and, naturally there was only one place for Ralph – in the diggings with them.
So they found the stones; they won them from the tiny squares of ground in the depths of the growing pit, and carried them to the surface in the swinging buckets, and carted them out along the rotten crumbling roadways which each day became more dangerous and they washed and sieved them, until at last Jan Cheroot or Jordie could pounce upon them on the sorting-table.
Then in the evening there might be three or four of Zouga’s Matabele workmen waiting under the camel-thorn tree beside Zouga’s tent.
‘Let me see,’ Zouga would grunt, and with a deal of showmanship the man would unknot a scrap of grubby cloth to display a chip of stone or a small transparent crystal.
These were the ‘pick-ups’ from the claims. As the Matabele handled the stuff, shovelling it and emptying the leather buckets, a glitter or shine of a pebble might catch their eye – and there was a reward for a diamond ‘picked-up’ and handed in.
Most of these ‘pick-ups’ were not veritable diamonds, for they took anything that sparkled, or anything pretty and unusually coloured. They brought in agate and quartz, feldspar and rock crystal, jasper and zircons – and once in a while a diamond; and then for each diamond, large or small, clear or discoloured, Zouga would hand over a golden sovereign from his dwindling hoard and add the diamond to the contents of the little chamois leather drawstring bag that he carried buttoned into his breast pocket, and which was under his pillow when he slept at night.
Then each Saturday morning, while Jan Cheroot and the two boys gathered around the camp table under the camel-thorn tree beside the tent, Zouga would carefully tip the contents of the leather bag onto a sheet of clean white paper, and they examined and discussed the week’s recovery; and always Zouga tried to cover his disappointment, tried to ignore the nauseating bite of worry in his guts as he looked at the tiny, discoloured and flawed diamonds which the Devil’s Own so reluctantly yielded up.
Then with the chamois bag buttoned into his pocket once again, his riding boots freshly waxed and polished by Ralph, his frayed shirt collar neatly darned and the buttons replaced by Jordan, and the gelding curried to a gloss by Jan Cheroot, Zouga would ride into the settlement, putting on the best face he could muster, smoking a cigar to show how little he really needed the money, and he would hitch the gelding at the door of the first diamond-buyer’s galvanized iron shack.
‘The Devil’s Own.’ The first kopje-walloper was a Hollander, and his accent was difficult to understand, but Zouga’s brave show did not deceive him, and he sucked his teeth and shook his head dismally over Zouga’s offering. ‘The Devil’s Own,’ he repeated. ‘It killed five men, and broke three others. Jocky Danby was lucky to get out at the price you paid him.’
‘What’s your offer?’ Zouga asked quietly, and the buyer prodded the scattering of tiny stones.
‘You want to see a real diamond?’ he asked, and without waiting for Zouga’s reply, swivelled his chair and opened the iron safe on the wall behind his desk.
Reverently he unfolded a square of white paper and displayed the beautiful flashing crystal, almost the size of a ripe acorn.
‘Fifty-eight carats,’ he whispered, and Zouga stared at it with the sour acid of envy in the back of his throat. ‘I bought it yesterday.’
‘How much?’ he asked, hating himself for the weakness.
‘Six thousand pounds!’ said the buyer and carefully refolded the paper, placed the diamond back in the safe, locked the thick iron door, hung the key on his watch chain and glanced at Zouga’s stones.
‘Forty pounds,’ he said off-handedly.
‘The lot?’ Zouga asked quietly. He had sixteen men to pay and feed and he needed new rope, and he would have to pay the piratical prices of the transport riders for it.
‘The price of pool goods is right down.’ The buyer shrugged. ‘Every digger south of the Vaal is bringing in rubbish like this.’
Zouga refilled the bag and stood up.
‘I made you that price as a favour,’ warned the buyer. ‘If you come back later, it will be thirty pounds.’
‘I’ll take that chance.’ Zouga touched the brim of his hat and strode out into the sunlight.
The second buyer he visited poured the diamonds into the bowl of the diamond balance and then carefully added weights to the other arm until the scale was in balance.
‘You should have stuck to elephant hunting,’ he said, as he wrote down the weights and made his calculations in a leather notebook. ‘The diamond market is flooded. There is a limit to the number of rich ladies who want to hang baubles round their necks, and here on the Vaal diggings we have mined more stones in a few years than were found in the six thousand years before that.’
‘They are using them in watch movements, and tools for cutting glass and steel,’ Zouga said quietly.
‘A fad,’ the b
uyer waved his hands in dismissal. ‘Diamonds are finished. I’ll give you fifty-five pounds for this lot and that’s generous.’
One morning Zouga found Ralph working side by side with Bazo in the bottom of the pit, swinging the pick in rhythm with the Matabele chant. He stood there watching for a few minutes, saw the shape of mature muscle emerging from the soft flesh of childhood, saw the breadth of shoulder. Ralph’s belly was greyhound slim and the cloth of his breeches, that were suddenly many sizes too small, strained over neat round buttocks as he stooped to break the point of the pick from the compacted yellow earth.
‘Ralph,’ he called him at last.
‘Yes, Papa.’ His throat was greasy with sweat, and it had cut little runnels down through the dust that coated his upper body, fat glistening drops clung in the little nest of fine dark curls that had abruptly appeared in the centre of his chest.
‘Put your shirt on,’ Zouga ordered.
‘Why?’ Ralph looked surprised.
‘Because you are an Englishman. By God’s grace and, if necessary, the strength of my right arm you are going to be a gentleman as well.’
So Ralph worked booted and buttoned to the throat beside the naked Matabele, and he earned firstly their respect and then their affection and friendship.
From the first day when they had met in the open veld, the Matabele had been impressed with his horsemanship, and with the marksmanship which had brought down the old eland bull. Now they began to accept him amongst them, first in the patronizing manner of elder brothers, then gradually on more and more equal terms, until Ralph was competing with them in all they did, their work and their sport. He was not yet as tall or strong as the Matabele, so he won very seldom; and when he failed or was beaten, he scowled until his face darkened and the heavy brows met above the big nose.
‘A good sportsman knows how to lose graciously,’ Zouga told him.
‘I don’t want to be a sportsman, I don’t want to learn how to lose,’ Ralph replied. ‘I want to learn how to win.’ And he threw himself back at the task with fiercely renewed determination.
It seemed that his strength grew with each day in the diggings, the puppy fat was burned away, and he made that final spurt to his full height without outstripping his strength. And he learned how to win.
He began to win the contests with Bazo at lashing gravel, firenziedly filling bucket after huge leather bucket so that the yellow dust flew in choking clouds. He won one of the dangerous races down the ladderworks from the roadway to the bottom of the pit, scorching his palms on the ropes and swinging out over the drop to pass another man on the reverse side of the ladder, using the pole of a gantry to cross a deep void between two claims, running across it upright, like a tight-rope walker, without looking at his feet or the hundred-foot drop beneath him. Even Bazo shook his head and said ‘Haul’ which is an exclamation of deep amazement, and Ralph stood panting in the bottom of the pit, looking up at Bazo, and shouted with triumphant laughter.
Then Ralph learned to use the fighting sticks the hard way – for this was the game the Matabele had played since their first day as herd boys in the veld. Before he mastered the art of the sticks he had, perforce, to learn how to staunch a bleeding cut in his own scalp inflicted by Bazo’s stick by plugging it with a handful of dust snatched in the midst of the contest.
A week short of his sixteenth birthday, Ralph beat Bazo for the first time. They fought behind the thatched beehive huts that the Matabele had built on the open veld beyond Zouga’s camp.
It started light-heartedly, Bazo the instructor, hectoring his pupil, executing the weaving steps of the traditional combat with indolent grace like a sleepy black panther, a fighting stick held in each hand and flourished with studied artistry of movement to form a fluid screen from which a vicious cutting attack could be launched with either hand.
Ralph turned to face him so that they revolved smoothly as a balanced wheel, like a pair of trained dancers, and when they taunted each other Ralph’s repartee was in fluent and colloquial Matabele. He was stripped to the waistband of his riding breeches, and his torso, which had at Zouga’s orders been so long protected from the sun, was creamy pale; only his arms and the deep V at his throat were sun dark.
‘I once had a pet baboon,’ Bazo told him. ‘It was an albino baboon, white as the moon, and so stupid it never learned even a simple trick. That baboon reminds me of somebody, though I cannot think who.’
Ralph smiled with his lips only, exposing square white teeth, but the black brows were joined above his nose. ‘I am only surprised that a Matabele thought he could teach a baboon – surely it should be the other way around.’
Bazo jumped back and hooted, beginning the giya – the challenge dance of the warrior – leaping high and making the kerries sing in the air until they blurred like the wings of a sunbird in flight.
‘Let us see if your sticks are as quick as your tongue,’ he shouted; and then suddenly he was attacking, the song of the fighting sticks rising to a shriek as he cut for Ralph’s knee, the shriek ending with a crack like a rifle shot as Ralph caught it on his guard; and instantly Bazo cut with the other hand, for the elbow and – crack – again as Ralph warded off the blow with his own kerrie.
The sticks clattered against each other in a rising tempo, and the circle of Matabele watchers encouraged them with the deep drawn-out ‘Jee!’ as a stroke was skilfully countered and turned into a hissing riposte to be countered in its turn.
Bazo broke first, jumping back with a light sheen of sweat turning his muscles to black velvet, his chest swelling and subsiding, his chuckle only slightly hoarse.
There should be a pause now, as the combatants circled each other again, in that stylized shuffling dance, trading light insults, catching breath, stooping to dry their hands in the dust to improve their grip on the sticks – but, not this time, for as Bazo broke and jumped back and for an instant dropped his right hand, so Ralph went in.
Even the pretence of a smile was gone from Ralph’s mouth. His jaw was clenched, lumps of muscles knotted with determination beneath his ears. Bazo’s right guard had dropped, and his attention had switched to the audience of Matabele faces, for whose benefit he was already composing the next jibe.
‘Jee!’ They shouted encouragement and warning, and Bazo tried desperately to raise his guard and swivel to face the unexpected attack. He managed a touch of stick against stick, just enough to cushion the blow, otherwise it would have broken bone. Ralph’s kerrie smashed into the point of his shoulder, and abruptly it was no longer a game.
The blow to Bazo’s shoulder raised a welt as thick as a finger across the muscle, and almost paralysed the arm to the fingertips. So as he caught Ralph’s next cut he felt the kerrie jerk and turn in his numb fingers, almost breaking his grip, and the shock of it was transferred into the abused muscle so that he grunted involuntarily, a little grunt of agony that seemed only to goad Ralph.
His sun-dark features were a mask of fighting fury, his eyes cold and green, and little droplets of sweat flew from his long black hair with the force of every blow that he swung.
The Matabele had never seen him like this, but they recognized the killing madness, for they had themselves all been in battle and killed, and it infected them so that they danced and stamped with excitement and spurred Ralph with their voices.
‘Jee!’ they sang, and Bazo fell back, giving ground to Ralph’s attack as the sticks cracked and rattled. His mouth was wide open now as he gasped for air and his throat was a deep pink cavern. Blood ran in a thin shining slick down behind his ear, spreading over his straining throat and then onto his right shoulder like a mantle. A glancing blow above his eye had not opened the flesh, but had formed a blister of black blood as large as a walnut under the skin. It hung from Bazo’s forehead like some bizarre bloodsucking leech, and still the blows hissed and cracked about him, thick as tropical rain, falling on his guard so that the shock was carried through arm and shoulder and jarred his head upon the thick black col
umn of his neck.
Then another blow went through and the ivory flash of Bazo’s teeth was dulled with a film of blood that snaked down from one nostril into his mouth, and another blow went through, on the line of his thigh, the swelling rising instantaneously, the skin stretched glossy and black, and almost crippled Bazo who was pinned by the injured leg – and Ralph was still attacking, instinctively swinging him against the bad leg so that Bazo was slow and clumsy in the turn, and again one of Ralph’s sticks fluted and thumped into rubbery muscle and Bazo reeled and almost went down, recovering with an immense effort, his counter-stroke loose and lacking power, so that Ralph spurned it aside and used his point.
He drove the end of his right-hand kerrie through Bazo’s guard, using it as though it were a sword rather than a club, and Bazo was not ready for it. With all Ralph’s weight behind it, the kerrie tore into Bazo’s belly muscles, up under the heavy ribcage, and the Matabele doubled over the blow, one kerrie flying from his hand the other dropping to dangle uselessly at his side.
He dropped on his knees, head bowed to expose the back of his neck, the knuckles of his spine standing out between the ridges of hard black muscle.
Ralph’s eyes were fastened on the unprotected neck, and they were glazed over with the same soapy sheen as an uncut diamond, his movements too swift to be anything but instinctive. He threw the kerrie on high and shifted his weight from the back foot to the leading foot, and all his strength flowed into his back and shoulders as he went into the killing stroke.
‘Jee!’ roared the watchers, themselves carried beyond the frontiers of sanity on the hot wave of fighting madness, crowding forward for the death.
Ralph froze like that, right arm high, his entire body arched like a drawn bow, the fallen Matabele at his feet – and then slowly the tension went out of his limbs and he shook his head with the fumbling uncertainty of a man awaking from a nightmare. He looked about him with stunned disbelief, blinking his eyes as though to clear them of that opaque glittering madness, and suddenly his legs were trembling, unable to hold his weight. He sank down in front of Bazo, knelt facing him and put out one arm and wrapped it around the Matabele’s neck, and laid his cheek against Bazo’s.